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“Perfectly,” Megan said with a sly smile as she took her seat.
Our lawyer cleared his throat. “Yes, well, if we could start this meeting, we should be able to come to an agreement to satisfy everyone soon enough without involving a judge.”
Love Bug wiggled down as the two lawyers started conversing. It was boring jargon for me, so I knew it was even worse for her. My princess would rather have been at school or at home playing with all her little farm animals that she and Grier had adopted. The girls loved their mini babies and treated them like pets instead of livestock. Now Jagger and I both had vegetarian daughters and had to deal with occasional meltdowns when the rest of us refused to stop eating meat.
The first time Love Bug cried because I ate steak in front of her, I’d nearly thrown out all the beef in the fridge, along with anything else not plant-based. But I needed the protein for football, and I had to lay down the rule that my princess couldn’t dictate what Daddy ate just because she didn’t want to eat something. After I explained that I needed meat to keep my muscles strong so no one would hurt me when I played football, she’d stopped sobbing and agreed that I could have all the meat I wanted—as long as I didn’t eat Millie or Henrietta.
I watched Love Bug walk over to the boy and just look at him for a long moment before she held out her hand. “Hi. I’m Remi.”
She’d begun using her legal name once she started school because she hadn’t thought it was cool that other people would call her Love Bug. That was a family-only name—or so she’d informed me the first time I’d asked her about it.
“I know who you are,” the boy muttered, folding his arms behind him without shaking her hand. “You’re the girl who stole my daddy. Now I don’t have one.”
I sucked in a sharp breath at the same time the lawyers started arguing about the importance of a DNA test. Megan threw in her two cents, and Vi made a snide comment back, but I heard none of it, because my attention was hyperfocused on the two kids across the room.
“I didn’t steal him. He’s mine,” Love Bug said, putting her hands on her hips like her momma tended to do when she got worked up.
“No, he’s not,” Luca argued. “He’s mine. My mommy said he’s only my daddy, not yours. You and your mom stole him, and that’s why he doesn’t live with us. He’s not your real daddy.”
“He is my real daddy!” Love Bug shouted. “He’s mine, and you can’t have him!”
The boy took two steps closer to her, getting in her personal space. “Your real daddy is dead. My daddy took his place because your mom is a daddy thief.”
“Take that back!”
“Make me!”
I was on my feet and rounding the table, already knowing what was coming. The scream of pain had the others in the room tuning in to the real issue at hand. Love Bug had drawn back and punched Luca right in the face. The kid stumbled back onto his ass, and Love Bug finished tackling him to the floor, where she began beating the living hell out of him.
Bending, I lifted my tiny hellcat off the boy. She made a little hissing sound as I pulled her away. “He’s my real daddy. Mine! You’re a liar. Liar. Liar!”
Turning her in my arms, I hugged her to my chest, and she began to sob. “You’re my real daddy. Only you. N-no one else. Y-you’re mine.” She hiccupped and buried her face against my chest. “I only want you for a daddy. Y-you’re the b-b-best daddy. I-I don’t care about Mommy’s first husband. You, Daddy. Only you!”
I swallowed the lump in my throat as I rubbed her back soothingly. The truth of Love Bug’s biological father had never been something we’d kept from her. Vi and I had told her from the time she could understand about mommies and daddies that her mommy had been married before, and that was when she’d gotten pregnant. When Love Bug’s daddy died, he sent me to take care of his two angels. Over the last year or so, she’d asked a few more questions, but every time we gave her the truth, she would shrug it off and tell me I was the only daddy who mattered.
But I’d tried to instill in her the understanding that Remington mattered too. He was the reason she existed. Without him, I wouldn’t have my love bug. I might not have had Violet either. The man was a fucking saint before his death because he’d given me the second chance at the life I needed.
“Oh my God!” Megan’s shrill voice filled the room. “Your little rabid brat broke Luca’s nose.”
“Here, let me wipe that,” I heard Vi say and glanced down to find her using tissues to mop up the boy’s face. “Ah, poor little guy. Sorry about that. She has a temper. Apparently rage is a learned behavior as well as an inherited one. I guess letting her watch Luca play every Sunday is a bad influence.”
“She’s a menace!”
“Yeah, well, so are you, but there’s not much we can do about that.” Vi folded the tissues carefully. “You know what, I think we can cancel the court-ordered DNA sample. This should be more than enough to do the test.”
Megan let out another high-pitched shriek and lunged for Vi. Holding Love Bug tighter, I moved in front of the woman who’d had a hand in ruining my life, in order to protect the woman who was my everything. Keeping my back to Megan, I felt her punch slam against my shoulder before adjusting my daughter and guiding Violet to the other side of the conference table, getting both my girls out of the range of danger.
“You can’t do this!” Megan screamed. “You keep fucking everything up.”
“Language!” I barked, covering one of Love Bug’s ears as she pressed the other one into my chest.
“Oh, shut up, you idiot. All of this would have worked if you had just accepted that Luca is yours.”
“But he’s not, is he?” I asked, cocking my head in the direction of the still-sobbing kid on the floor. She hadn’t even tried to soothe him yet. Part of me felt sorry for the boy, but after all the shit he’d said to Love Bug, I couldn’t muster up too much sympathy for the little asshole.
“Of course he’s not! He’s only six and a half. I fucked every guy I could find who looked like you, but none of them had your eyes, and popping a tiny hole in their condoms wasn’t easy. I tried to tear the one you used the night we were together, but it was too durable. I had to suck the doctor’s cock to get him to write me that fake positive test and keep playing along until I could get you to fuck me again and actually get pregnant. When you wouldn’t touch me, I had to pretend to have a miscarriage.”
Everything inside me went white-hot with rage for an instant before my body turned ice-cold. I went numb on the inside as I looked at her. I was so pissed I didn’t even correct her about cursing in front of my daughter. She was breathing hard, her eyes wild to the point of being manic. The reality of what she’d confessed hadn’t hit her yet, but it was echoing in my head.
