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When Grant reached over to twist his fingers in mine, I felt the hard, cool metal of his wedding ring. My stomach flipped a little, and my cock gave a final twitch.
Grant Brighton was mine, for better or for worse.
“Another shower?” he asked with an eyebrow wiggle that made my breath hitch. “Then sleep. Before long, it’ll be morning, and one of three demanding young women will be waking us up.”
I grinned. So far, marriage to Grant was all for thebetter,I decided as I let him lead me back to the shower.Entirely, wonderfully better.
But when morning came, the demanding woman who woke us was not one of our girls… and things took a decided turn for theworse.
9
GRANT
“What the hell is going on here?”
The angry voice startled me out of a deep slumber, and I cracked my eyes open, squinting against the sunlight streaming through the window.
My first thought was that waking with Brody Kelly’s warm body entwined with mine, his tousled hair fanned out on my pillow, and his adorably sleepy green eyes blinking up at me was one of the highlights of my life, and I wanted to remember that moment forever.
In the next second, my brain processed the familiar voice, and I looked past Brody to the irate woman who’d invaded our bedroom and was currently glaring at us from the doorway.
“Liza?” I croaked. My brain scrambled to put pieces of two seemingly disparate puzzles together.
They didn’t fit.
“You can’t be serious,” she said, moving closer to the bed and peering at Brody like he was a specimen. “Thebabysitter, Grant?”
I instinctively yanked the duvet up to Brody’s shoulders to shield him from her. He tried to pull away, but I tightened my arm around him to hold him exactly where he was—with me.
“Liza, I don’t know what you’re doing here, but get out of my bedroom. Now.”
“You’ve lost your mind.” She addressed her words to me, but her eyes didn’t stray from Brody, and as he stared up at her, I felt him begin to shake.
“I’m sorry, I…” he began in a small voice that twisted my gut. Brody hadnothingto apologize for. Not one damn thing.
I pushed up on one elbow so I was leaning over him, suddenly entirely awake—and angry as hell. “You’re not listening. Get thefuckout of my room, Liza,” I reiterated in a low voice so the girls wouldn’t hear through the open door. “Right the fuck now.”
She peered over me at Brody. “What the heck were you thinking. He looks about twelve years old—”
I leaped over Brody and lunged out of the bed in only my pajama pants, crowding Liza back toward the door and out to the hallway. As soon as she crossed the threshold, I closed the door behind her and locked it.
“We arenotdone talking about this, Grant!” she yelled through the door. “I’ll be waiting for you downstairs.”
My forehead hit the cool wood of the door as I exhaled.
Fuck.
What the hell was Liza doing here? I had expected her to hear about my marriage from one of the girls—that was how I’d heard about her wedding to Elias a few years back, after all—but I hadn’t anticipated that it would lead to an impromptu visit, let alone to her demanding explanations for things that were none of her damn business. She knew the girls adored Brody, she knew I trusted him, and she’d never had an issue with him being in their lives before, so her outrage wasn’t about Brody himself; it had to be about me.
Well, if she’d come to berate me for marrying someone a decade younger than me, she could fuck right off because I didn’t want to hear it. Not after last night. Besides fatherhood, this fake marriage to Brody was the best, mostrealthing in my life, and I’d cling to it as long as he’d let me.
“You okay?” Brody’s voice was soft and unsure. I turned to see him standing awkwardly in the middle of the room.
I moved to him quickly and cupped his face. “I’m fine. But I’m so sorry about that.Christ. I had no idea she was coming. I’ll ask her to leave,” I said impulsively.
Brody’s raised eyebrow said he knew as well as I did that I was lying. I’d never tell my daughters their mother wasn’t allowed in their own home.
But still. There needed to be rules.
