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“With Skye?” I continued, frowning. “Or is this little talk meant to reveal some more surprises?”
It was his turn to frown. “Yes, Twila, with Skye. She’s my only child.”
“Just checking,” I answered with a shrug.
“Anyway, when I found out Tamara was pregnant, it felt wrong to just leave. Not to mention the fact that custody battles usually go poorly for the father.”
I nodded. I’d seen too many kids caught in a tug of war between their bickering parents. People didn’t seem to realize that their kids were little humans, not pawns to be used to hurt each other. Most kidnapping cases in the surrounding counties were fathers stealing their daughters away after being denied visitation.
“So, you stayed for the sake of your daughter,” I said slowly. “You know that never ends well, right?”
Dean fixed me with a droll stare. “Something like that. We managed to make it work until Skye was seven.” He stopped talking then, and I wasn’t sure whether I should press him for more information or not.
“Oh,” I managed.
He looked at me and breathed out. “I discovered Tamara was cheating on me with my partner, and that was the beginning of the end.”
“Oh,” I said again, frowning this time.
He nodded. “‘Oh’ is right. We went to marriage counseling, tried other things but...” He shook his head. “Then my brother died.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
“When my brother died, I became the legal guardian of Mason,” Dean explained. “And Mason was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
“Mason was?” I asked, still not sure I fully understood.
Dean nodded. “Tamara didn’t want him. As far as she was concerned, she only wanted one child, and we had Skye. She eventually gave me an ultimatum. Mason or her and our daughter.”
“Oh, my God.” What an awful woman!
Somehow, I managed not to say as much.
Dean’s expression was bleak, and my heart twinged in sympathy. Here I’d thought things with Alton had been difficult. It had taken me a while to get over the heartbreak of our breakup, even though our separation had been relatively clean in the long run. It had been the pressure from his parents that did us in, not any fault of mine or his. Now I realized it could have been so much worse.
“You chose Mason,” I whispered, too horrified to speak at normal volume. How selfish could a woman be to turn away Dean’s nephew?
“It wasn’t that I chose Mason over Skye. It was more that Mason had nowhere else to go. It was either me or foster parents and the system. And I wasn’t going to do that to my brother. I also wasn’t going to do it to Mason.”
“I get it.”
“So, I told my ex as much and that was that.”
“She divorced you?”
He nodded. “And she got full custody of Skye which means Tamara poisoned the well at an early age, as you can imagine. By the time Skye was fourteen, she wanted nothing to do with me.”
“Because Tamara lied to her about you?”
He nodded again. “Tamara convinced Skye thatIwas the one who’d stepped out on her, not the other way around. Then she also convinced Skye that I left the two of them. And, well, unfortunately Skye bought it. And things have never been good between the two of us—you saw her in the restaurant. She can’t stand me.”
Chapter Twelve
Silence fell between us, weighty and unpleasant.
Laughter and good-natured scuffles crept in to fill it. Mason had coaxed Bud into a game of cornhole and didn’t seem to mind that he was having his behind handed to him. If there was any benefit to becoming a monster, it was our enhanced senses. Consequently, Bud was the best at tracking things aside from me. His wolf vision was superb, which meant he could make a killing at darts or cornhole. Sicily was cheering for them both, which made the tight feeling in my gut ease. Mason had turned out alright, despite the hell Dean had gone through to keep him.
A thought occurred to me, and the more I pondered it, the more certain I was. I made a soft humming sound in my throat, a tell that usually meant I’d come up with something. Sicily knew me well enough to call it out when she heard it. Dean’s head turned to me and I realized he’d recognized it too. I shouldn’t have been surprised by that, given how close we’d been years ago, but I still was. He still remembered, even after all these years.
