But reality always came calling, and eventually, he nudged her off of him. She complied with a sigh, rolling onto the bed as he got rid of the condom. When she realized that her glasses had steamed up, she couldn’t help but laugh.
“Do I want to know why you’re laughing?” He lay down next to her and wrapped his arms around her.
“I was laughing because that was the most ridiculous sexual encounter I’ve ever had.” She poked him in between his furrowed brows, and couldn’t help but laugh again.
“If by ridiculous you mean fucking amazing, then I agree,” he said as he grabbed her ass. “If I were ten years younger, I’d do it all over again.”
She released a heavy sigh. “I guess I could endure it a second time…”
That earned her a smack on her ass, which made her squeak and then burst out laughing. He looked rather like a bear now, instead of a rumpled lion. Definitely a carnivore, she thought to herself, and quite liable to eat her up in one gulp if she weren’t careful.
They cuddled for a while longer before Kat got up, mostly because she needed to take a shower. Gavin sighed as he let her rise, and then he sighed again when she made a point to bend down in front of him to pick up her discarded bra.
“Go take a shower, otherwise I’m hauling you back into this bed,” he growled.
She winked at him over her shoulder. “Promises, promises.”
After she took a quick shower, she went into the kitchen to find Gavin stirring something. She sniffed the air, then wrinkled her nose. “Are you making ramen?”
“Yep.” He flipped off the burner knob and doused the noodles and water with the sodium-packet flavor packets. “I made you some, too. Gourmet and all.”
It was so stupid, but her heart fluttered at the gesture. The man was making her a heart attack in a bowl, and she was getting gooey feelings over it? She wanted to slap her own forehead. Hadn’t she just told herself she wasn’t going to do this? And look what had happened. She’d had the best sex of her life and was about to profess her undying love because Gavin had made her chicken-flavored ramen noodles.
She stilled at the word love floating through her mind. She refused to think she was in love with him. Infatuation? Yes. Desire? Absolutely. But love? She couldn’t. She wouldn’t.
But as he kissed her and made her laugh the rest of the evening, his hands roaming everywhere, she knew her arguments against the idea of loving Gavin Danvers were flimsy at best. And that was what scared her the most: that she’d given her heart to him without even putting up a fight in the first place.
Chapter Twelve
“Dad, I can’t wake up Mom. Please come home.”
Gavin had been at work when Emma had called him after finding Teagan unconscious on the bathroom floor. As he’d left work, he’d called 911 and prayed to every deity he could think of that his wife wasn’t already dead.
“I’ll be there as fast as I can. Can you go to the front door and make sure to open it if the police get there before me?”
He didn’t want to think about how calm his seven-year-old daughter was in the face of this trauma, or how he had to ask her to be there to let the paramedics in to help Teagan. He didn’t think about anything as he drove home. Anger roiled through him with such intensity that at a stoplight, he had to lay his forehead on the steering wheel to catch his breath.
How could she do this? he couldn’t stop thinking. It was the mantra running through his mind when he arrived home to see an ambulance with its lights flashing out front and a fire truck not far behind. It was the thought that wouldn’t leave him when he found Emma in the living room, waiting for him. They were the words he couldn’t shake as he watched the paramedics take Teagan out of the house on a stretcher after they’d told him she was alive but needed to have her stomach pumped.
Gavin didn’t like to leave Teagan alone with Emma, but she’d been doing better lately, so he’d given in when she’d told him to stop hovering. He’d gone to work like it was any other day. But that had all ended when Teagan had decided she’d prefer to take a bottle of painkillers in her suicide attempt, leaving her own daughter to find her.
Gavin had kept those memories at bay recently, but Teagan had called him this morning to talk to Emma. Everything had come rushing back, and as he worked at River’s Bend today, all he could see was Teagan’s lifeless body on that stretcher, and the wide eyes of his daughter, who’d never been the same since.
He knew, logically, he shouldn’t blame Teagan for what she’d done. She was ill. But anger still roiled in his gut anyway, and today it came back in a flood of resentment and fury. Not so much for himself, but for Emma. How could a mother do that to her own daughter?
He leaned against the wall behind the vineyard’s main building, closing his eyes. He tried to get himself in check, but he could hear Teagan’s voice teasing his senses. I hope you guys are doing okay, she’d said in that voice he’d gotten to know better than his own. I miss you. Both of you. But I’m doing better now.
He was glad she was doing better, but it was too late to feel anything but an exhausted kind of gratitude. Teagan was no longer his wife, and until she was really better, she wasn’t a mother, either. She loved Emma—he knew that—but her absence still hurt them both.
The worst part of it was the feeling
