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“Girlfriend?”
She gestures toward my hand. “Or wife. Maybe you’re just not wearing a ring.”
“There’s no wife or girlfriend, Mila. I never wanted to be tied down.”
She flinches at my honesty.
I came back to St. Louis to make sure she could handle raising two boys, and somehow I’m heading back home with three kids and a reluctant woman who is only coming along because she has no other choice.
It isn’t exactly the stuff fairy tales are made of.
Chapter 14
Mila
“You just need to leave it,” he says when I ask for the keys to my car.
“Leave it? I can’t do that.” Not only is it my only means of transportation, but I also can’t depend on him that much. I’m already giving up everything else.
“I have no doubt they’ve tagged your car, Mila. Driving it isn’t safe any longer. We need to leave,” he says, motioning toward an SUV.
“Weren’t you in a truck yesterday?” I mutter, shifting the direction of the suitcase. I can’t really argue about our safety. “My car will get towed if we just leave it here.”
“Stop worrying about your car,” he says, helping Luca with hands on the child’s waist to climb up in the big vehicle. “We wouldn’t be comfortable in the truck, plus it’s a rental.”
That explanation doesn’t make sense. He didn’t have enough time to get his own vehicle here. Besides, I doubt the man drives a huge SUV.
“This thing has TVs,” Jace says, awe in his voice.
Vincent is going to win that kid over quicker than I ever could just with sheer extravagance.
“Satellite also,” Vincent assures him. “But we won’t be in it long.”
I keep Sutton on my hip as I precariously lift the car seat into the vehicle.
“Let me,” Vincent says, forcing me to take a step back because of the size of his body when he steps in to help.
“Have you ever put a car seat in?” I ask.
“How hard could it be?”
I stand back, watching him look at the pictures on the side of the seat.
“Should it really be this complicated?” he mumbles before taking a step back looking irritated.
Is this the moment his demeanor changes and his true colors come out?
“Let me hold her and then you can show me how to do it.”
Instinctively, I take a step back. I know the man isn’t going to run away with my child, but it still seems too soon to trust him with her.
He waits, his emotions under control, until I lift Sutton from my hip and hand her over.
He positions her on his hip the same way I had her on mine, but she looks tinier than she ever has. I want to laugh when her brows scrunch up in confusion. She stares at him, and he looks so far out of his comfort zone it’s comical.
I make quick work of the car seat before making sure the buckles are correct on both boys’ booster seats.
Sutton is still staring at her father, and I have to wonder what kind of relationship they’d have if I hadn’t deprived him of the first two years of her life. I know what I did was wrong. I knew it was wrong when I did it, but you couldn’t have told my stubborn ass anything different when I found out I was pregnant. Vincent had declared that very night at Carlen’s house, long before I climbed those stairs to his room, that he never wanted to be a father. I held on to that tightly, knowing I couldn’t risk him trying to force me to have an abortion.
