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“Keep your room, Alaina,” he said as he pulled the truck up to the front of the house. “There’s no...there’s no need to rush things, or make declarations or anything like that.”
“Except the no sleeping with other people.”
“Yeah, except for that,” he said.
“And if I came to your room tonight?”
“I wouldn’t kick you out.”
“Well, good.” And something still felt distant, and it still didn’t feel quite like enough, but maybe she just had to listen to Gus. Listen to what he’d said about the fact that sometimes things were just going to be uncomfortable. She didn’t believe they had to be forever. But maybe she couldn’t solve it all right now. And that thought made it feel like a huge weight had been shifted from her shoulders. Because there was just so much going on. She was having a baby, they were having a baby, they’d gotten married. They’d had sex for the first time, and they were trying to navigate what all that meant. Maybe there really was no way to fix it. Maybe there really was no way to satisfy all of their wants. And maybe it was just going to be difficult.
But she could rest in that. She could take it one day at a time. One moment at a time.
Sitting in his unsolvable problems and finding a way to be grounded without picking at all the mysteries there.
And he made her feel settled, even while he changed her.
Because he was there, to put that hand on the back of her neck and make her feel like it was all okay.
Because she worried about a lot of things. And she’d been left by people she loved. But he didn’t make her worry about that. She worried about certain things, but not that. Not with him.
“Come on. Let’s get that coffee.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
GUSWASCOMPLETELYDISTRACTED.He knew what he was supposed to be doing—finishing up the woodwork inside the cabin. But it was identical to the cabin that he’d just slept in with Alaina, and that was all he could think of.
Her hands. Her body. Her mouth.
He hadn’t showered, because he still wanted to smell her on his skin.
And all he could think was having her in his arms again.
And this was...this was the problem. Right here. He was supposed to be less involved than this.
And he was not doing a very good job of that. No, he wasn’t.
The other thing he should be doing was itemizing his update for the town hall. And getting his financial report together, so that he could report the expenditures to the other families—who functioned as a board. This kind of thing had been natural for Gus for years. Back when he and Denver and Daughtry King, Sawyer Garrett and Fia Sullivan had first sat down with a plan to get this place back to its former glory and beyond, they’d laid out the parameters for how it would run. From the town hall meetings, to the ways that they would pool their resources.
And it had been running great in the near fifteen years since.
So great that Gus didn’t even have to think about getting all this together usually.
But town hall wasn’t just a couple of days, and he was...
He barely knew which way was up as far as the whole world went, much less a sheet of financials.
He walked out of the cabin, down the path that led to the main paddock.
The place was looking amazing. He’d done this. And he knew he should feel some sense of pride, but instead it just felt like...not enough. Like he was trying to atone for something, and there just wasn’t a way to atone for what you were. That was the problem. He just felt exhausted all of a sudden, because no matter how many people he took care of, no matter how much of this he tried to... No matter how hard he tried to make all this right... To make himself right... He just didn’t know if it was possible.
“We have our first sign-ups.”
He turned, and saw Brody standing there. He was holding a printout in his hand. “We’ve got an autistic child who just got adopted from foster care. He’s missed out on a lot of therapy he should’ve had. It’s been a real difficult run. And his new family wants to try this.”
And something in Gus’s chest went still.
“That’s... great.”
