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“Of course I do.” She rests her arms on my shoulders and plays with my hair. “I want that love. I want the babies. I want grey hair and rocking chairs. All that boring stuff. Don’t you?”
I grunt out a laugh and avoid the question. I’m not ready to answer that just yet.
“Kids are anything but boring, sweet girl.”
Her smile falters, and fuck if I don’t regret not answering.
“Speaking of.” She sighs. “You have a couple of them that are patiently waiting for their daddy to get home.”
“Poppy—”
“Hand me my dress?” She gives me a weak smile. “Or what’s left of it, I guess.”
I give in and hand it to her. No sense in trying to backtrack now, especially since she’s right. I do have two kids at Momma’s house, and I haven’t seen them all day. Even though I don’t want to leave Poppy, and I definitely don’t want to leave her like this, Idowant to see my kids.
She slips off my rapidly deflating cock and tucks part of her dress between her thighs and covers the front of her with the rest. Holding it up with one hand, she takes my hat off with the other.
“Keep it.”
“I’m not keeping your hat. Don’t be silly.”
But I just stare at her because I don’t want it. I want to see her in it. I want to see if she’ll wear it around the ranch while she works or if I’ll come over and catch her wearin’ it around her house.
She sighs and pops it back on her head. “Fine. But it looks better on you.”
“Not a chance, sweetheart.”
Before I can tell her good night, she’s out of the truck and shuttin’ the door, effectively ending our conversation and date. It went really fuckin’ well until it didn’t. I always seem to do that — ruin perfectly good things. But like Poppy said, I’m a grumpy asshole. And I guess that tends to come with the territory.
I just wish it didn’t hurt her in the process.
It feelsweird to sit down and tell the kids we’re giving this a go when we left things not so great last night. But we agreed to tell them, and I don’t want to take a step back, even if that might be the healthier thing to do. Instead, I’m going full steam ahead here.
“This seems serious,” Jolene says, looking back and forth between me and her daddy.
We’re at Rhett’s place, and both kids are sitting on the living room couch while we stand in front of them. I didn’t want to do it like we were having some sort of committee hearing, but Rhett didn’t know how else to do it. So here we are.
Jolene’s comment makes Wade nervous, and his little eyes anxiously look over at his sister.
“It is serious,” Rhett says, all gruff and crossing his arms. What in the world is he doing? Suddenly, it’s like he’s having the birds and the bees talk to two teenagers.
I nudge him and give him a look, trying to tell him to lighten the fuck up.
“Okay, it’s notthatserious.”
He bends down to their level, and thankful he’s done so, I follow. I plop down on my butt and scoot closer to both of them, smiling hopefully. I’m so nervous. I’m terrified they’re going to freak out, and then Rhett will have no choice but to break things off. And then how fucking awkward will that be? I’ll have to move. There is no way in hell that we break up and I can just go back to normal like nothing happened. No way. Ha ha. No, sir.
“What’s goin’ on?” Wade asks, pulling his comfort blanket up to his nose. He loves the smell of that dirty old thing. But I had something similar, so I can’t really judge.
“So, you guys like Poppy, right?”
Jolene and Wade both nod.
“She takes me to see my cow,” Jolene says, giggling like it’s a secret she isn’t supposed to tell.
“And she helped me learn how to spell things,” Wade adds. “And my hair is purple!”
Rhett laughs, that soft, quiet laugh he reserves for them. It’s one I got to hear so many times when I was staying here while I recovered. It’s a laugh that’s full of love and wonder, like he can’t believe how lucky he is that these two kids are his.
