“Tell her you’re sorry,” he snarls. “Now.”
“What the fuck?” Derrick cries, his voice wavering, cracking with the onset of tears. “There were five of us, man…”
Trent shakes him firmly. “Now.”
Derrick tugs his gaze to me, his eyes watery, as his other two so-called friends abandon him.
“I’m sorry,” he whines. “Okay? Shit. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”
I know why he said it. He’s a bully and he hates himself, and the only way he can forget how much he hates himself for a few paltry moments is to make other people feel like that.
“Whatever,” I snap.
Trent stares at me with a message in his intense forest eyes.
Do you accept his apology?
I stare back at him, part of me wanting to tell him no. Part of me wants to tell my man to hurt this bully worse than he already has, to break his bones and shatter his nose. But then Trent would go to jail, and I don’t that.
I want what we’re building together.
A family, a future, a home.
I nod and Trent tosses him away. Derrick stumbles over his feet and sits down with a tangled cry. He leaps up, wiping snot and blood across his face as he races down the street.
“Fuck, I almost lost control there,” Trent says as I walk across the lawn.
“But you didn’t,” I say firmly. “I was so scared. You let them hit you.”
“I need to be with you,” he says, voice quivering with intensity. “If I just attacked him and fucked them up – worse than that little lesson I just taught them – I’d be risking that.”
My fingers twitch with the need to reach up and touch his face.
I almost do, my body screaming at me to do it, do it now, touch my man and make sure he’s okay.
But then Angie pulls up outside the house, waving at us, a radiant smile on her face.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Trent
“It was so, so, so amazing,” Angie says, waving her hands like she can’t stand the thought of keeping them still with so much excitement bursting out of her.
We sit in the living room, with Angie on the armchair and Tessa and me on the couch… with the middle seat left free, which is a damn hard thing to do when all I want is to reach across and grab her after what just happened with those high school fuck-heads.
They were idiots for bullying my woman in front of me.
I’ve had harder sparring sessions than that dozens of times in the SEALs.
“I know it’s just a TV advertisement, but everyone was so nice, so friendly. The director was this lovely woman named Gail. I don’t know if she was joking, but she said I had what it takes to be a real actor. Can you believe that?”
“Yes,” Tessa and I say at the same time, with the same passionate certainty in our voices.
Angela giggles, looking between us.
I smirk and say, “You’re incredibly talented, Angela. It doesn’t surprise me in the least. This is just the first step on a very bright and wonderful journey. I know it.”
She looks between us again, the same way Tessa’s mother did when we told her. There must be something about Tessa and me that roars out what we’re doing, even if we’ve made the effort to sit separately, even if we haven’t looked at each other since we all sat down.
I can’t look at her, because then I’ll study the way that summer dress hugs her body, the way it highlights the curvaceous form of her, and it might drive me wild. Even with my daughter sitting right there, I can’t stop the love and lust-tipped arrows from soaring across at me, captivating me, enthralling me as only my woman can.
“Why are you sitting like that?” Angela asks, leaning forward and placing her elbows on her knees.
She’s got a look in her eyes I recognize well from when she was a kid, a perceptive precocious look that misses nothing. It’s the same look she got when she asked me once if I’d ever loved – truly loved – her mother.
I wanted to tell her, yes, but I couldn’t lie to her.
Even if I’d wanted to, she would’ve seen straight through it with her perceptive precocious gaze.
“Like what?” Tessa murmurs.
Angela laughs, shaking her head. “I don’t know. Like you want to sit as far away from each other as possible while also sitting as close together as you can get. I know that makes no sense. But that’s how you’re sitting.”
I sigh and run a hand through my hair, not sure where to begin, how to begin.
Caitlin made it easy for us by guessing and immediately approving, but my daughter just stares, waiting for one of us to speak.
“Well?” she snaps. “What the heck is going on here?”
“Tessa and I are together,” I say.
Angela leaps to her feet. Something in my chest cracks when I see the way she paces up and down the room, her hands clasped in front of her. She looks exactly the same as when I told her that her mother and I were separating.
Even if she was a child then, she looks that way now, as though she can’t quite believe that reality would contort so cruelly like this.
Guilt shivers and shatters in my chest, and suddenly I know that she’s not going to approve, that the very idea she could approve was a sick joke.
“Angie,” Tess says, a sob turning my daughter’s name into a plea.
Angela spins on us, striding over to the couch and standing over us.
“Explain,” she says, her voice clipped and filled with tension. “From the beginning. When did this start? How far back does this go?”
“The day I returned,” I say.
“What?” Angela cries, the same way Caitlin did… the same way most people likely will when we explain the fate-fueled clashing that brought
