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She smiled up at me, those eyes the color of fall leaves shining with a warmth that set them on fire. Her gorgeous face was soft and gentle, and the impact of that look hit me center mass. I felt it through every inch of my body, trailing across my skin before settling low and making my dick hard.
Christ, I was quickly becoming obsessed with this woman.
Lincoln’s warning played over and over in my head, a continuous loop that left me in a near constant state of unsettled, but I couldn’t bring myself to take his advice. The thought that Sawyer might not look at me the way she was just then if she knew the truth, the idea she might take herself and her daughter away from me... I couldn’t handle it. So I kept up the lie, all the while knowing it was only a matter of time before that first domino fell, taking the rest of them with it.
“Mommy? Can we go pway games now?” Renee asked, her voice popping the bubble of heat I hadn’t realized had formed around us.
Sawyer blinked her hazy eyes, clearly just as affected by whatever had been brewing between us as I was. She took a step back, giving her head a shake in an attempt to clear it. And fuck me if knowing she was still so affected by me wasn’t a turn on. “Uh, yeah. Sure, doodle bug.”
With nothing left to pack up, she grabbed her bag and we started out of the booth toward the boardwalk where all the games and rides were clustered.
And I felt ten fucking feet tall as I walked through the crowds with those two girls at my side.
Chapter Eighteen
Sawyer
Monica,Renee, and I stood a good fifteen feet back from the ring toss booth, our arms laden down with stuffed animals of every shape and color. This was only the latest in a whole slew of competitions.
When we’d run into Monica and Sam about an hour earlier, I thought we’d get to enjoy some time with friends, see the sights, maybe grab something to eat, but the rivalry between Trent and Sam reared its ugly head once again.
So far, they’d tried to out-do each other in the bean bag toss, the high striker, throwing baseballs at weighted milk bottles, and sabotaging each other at whack-a-mole.
“Ha! Yes! Suck on that,” Trent crowed when one of his rings circled the top of an empty soda bottle.
“That wasn’t skill. It was luck,” Sam groused.
“Call it whatever you want. I still beat you.” He looked back to the kid manning the booth. “I’ll take the pink panda.”
I let out a sigh. That was our third pink panda so far. He’d tried to claim a goldfish in a bag of water after his win in the potato sack race, but I told him unless he planned on giving the thing a home, he needed to pick something else.
“Mommy, I’m hungwy.”
Monica joined her. “Yeah, I could eat too.”
I looked down at my little girl. The purple unicorn clutched in her arms was nearly as big as she was. “All right, sweetie. I’ll handle it.”
“This game is rigged,” Sam continued to complain. “I want a rematch.”
“Dude, it’s a carnival game. They’reallrigged.”
I cleared my throat and raised my voice. “You do what you have to do, but we’re going to get some dinner.”
The three of us turned and started toward the food tents as Trent spoke up behind us. “Bet I can eat more turkey legs than you.”
“You’re on.”
Oh, for the love of God.
* * *
The cabof Trent’s truck was silent as he pulled up to the curb in front of my house and killed the engine. Renee had been fading before we left the festival, to the point that when she lifted her arms for Trent to pick her up, he hadn’t hesitated.
She’d passed out the moment she was buckled into the car seat and hadn’t stirred once on the way home.
“She’s really out,” he said softly as he twisted in the driver seat to look back at her, a tender dimpled grin on his face.
I copied his position, letting out a laugh at the row of stuffed animals lined up beside her on the back seat. To say Trent had gone overboard would have been like calling the ocean a little wet. “It was an active day. Then she got a little bored watching you and Sam act like children,” I added on a giggle.
