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I bring the bouquet close and breathe in the lovely floral scent. “They smell amazing.” Jonathan is still sitting at the island, so my gaze flickers to him. “Your dad’s home early.”
“I noticed,” he says dryly.
“He brought me flowers.”
“What a swell guy,” he deadpans.
I smile and thrust the roses toward his nose. “Don’t they smell good?”
He does not humor me and take a whiff. He just shoots me a dead look like I’m annoying the everloving fuck out of him.
It only makes me smile wider.
Pointedly and without dropping my gaze, he uncaps the water I just brought him a moment ago and takes a good long sip.
I turn away from him, smelling my flowers and wandering over to Milo, who is filling a crystal vase at the sink. “Thank you so much for the roses. I love them.”
He puts the vase full of water on the counter, then takes the bouquet from me, but he doesn’t open the tissue paper they’re bundled in so he can put them in the water. Instead, he puts the bouquet on the counter and pushes his hands into the back pockets of my jeans, then leans in to give me a slow, intensely thorough kiss that makes my insides warm and my heart fluttery.
I feel a little dazed when he pulls back and gazes down at me. “Let’s go upstairs.”
My heart soars. “Upstairs?”
He nods, and I can see in the sureness of his gaze he means to get me out of my clothes as soon as we get up there.
“I have sandwiches in the oven,” I say stupidly, but it’s the first thought to pop into my head. “They have to come out in like ten minutes.”
Milo smirks. “I think Jonathan can handle pulling a pan out of the oven.” He takes my hand to pull me around the island and back toward the foyer. Glancing at his son almost as an afterthought as we pass, he tells him casually, “Put her flowers in the vase, too, will you?”
Jonathan does not say a single goddamn word, and although my whole body warms with mild embarrassment at how brazenly Milo is flaunting what he’s about to do, I’m far too excited to care.
Chapter twenty-nine
Milo
Kennedy plays at shyness as I push her into the bedroom and close the door behind us.
I don’t need to turn the light on since it’s still daytime. Clouds obscure the sun, so it’s dreary outside, but still daylight.
Slowly, Kennedy moves backward as I move toward her. It’s a dance, the choreography of a hunt, but she yearns to be captured so she doesn’t work too hard to dance away from me, even in play.
My fault.
I’ve made her worry about slipping away from me if she wandered too far.
I catch her now, cradling her face in one hand and sliding the other into her wild curly hair and cradling her skull. “Come here, you,” I murmur, and she does.
She lets me pull her in, and her arms wrap around me. I kiss her forehead as the distance between us disappears, then the corners of her eyebrows. There’s not an inch of her body I don’t want to kiss, so I even drop one on the tip of her nose and make her smile.
“I know we’ve talked about all this and both explained our reasons, but I want to touch on it one last time before we close this chapter and move on.”
Her smile fades, but she’s not disappointed or frustrated. She’s just giving me the attention I’ve asked for.
“Okay.”
I keep her close, keep my fingers in her hair and my lips touching her skin wherever they can. “I know we’ve had a rough few days. I’m sorry for making it worse instead of better. You put your trust in me, and I let you down.”
“You didn’t—”
