“Will Mia be annoyed?” I asked as we walked through the front door.
“Annoyed? About what?” He set the keys down on the small table by the door.
I stripped off my jacket and hung it in the front closet. My shoes came next. Slash still hadn’t managed the art of the untidy tidiness. Where the house looked lived in but wasn’t a mess.
“Annoyed that we basically moved in for a hot minute and then we’ll be moving out,” I said.
“That won’t annoy her. No skin off her back.”
“Does the house just stay empty until someone close to the Blue Angels needs it?”
“Pretty much,” he said. He sat on the couch and groaned. “Fuck, I’m tired.”
“Me too.” I took the spot next to him and leaned into his shoulder.
“No wise cracks about me being old?”
“If I joke about you being old because you’re exhausted, then I’m basically calling myself old for being exhausted.”
“You’re growing a baby.” His hand slid into the waist band of my pants and rested on my lower belly. “You have a reason to be tired. Not to mention the last week and a half of insane work you just put in.”
“I loved every minute of being back in a commercial kitchen,” I said with a happy smile. “I can’t wait until I have my bakery back. I can’t wait to open to the public again.”
“You’ll be doing that?” Slash asked.
“What’s that mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. I just assumed you’d have your hands full with the catering business. On top of running a bakery…that’s a lot on your plate.”
“I can afford to hire patisserie chefs to oversee the bakery. Imogene’s wedding changed everything. Jazz and Brielle can handle the planning, organizing and customer relations. I didn’t think I’d enjoy creating and making wedding cakes, but I actually love it. So, I’m just going to do more of what I love and let other people handle the rest.”
“You’re sexy when you’re in boss mode.”
For the next couple of hours, I sat next to Slash on the couch as I went through my email. We had so many catering requests, I knew I’d have to sit down with Brielle and Jazz in person to handle them and choose which jobs we wanted to take on. The three of us hadn’t ironed out a permanent work schedule yet. Instead, we’d been flying by the seat of our pants just trying to plug holes and get Imogene’s wedding done without anything going wrong.
But now there were things we had to deal with while trying to juggle our personal lives. Jazz’s mother was unwell, and she needed time to sort that out. My pregnancy was in full swing, and I wanted to expand the business in a way that allowed me to grow it without compromising the vision of creativity and quality.
I realized I was overwhelmed and clam-shelled my computer. “I think I hit my wall.”
“Bed?”
“Yes.”
“No alarms tomorrow?”
“No alarms.”
“Thank Christ,” he muttered.
We locked up the house and then padded into the bedroom. Slash had already taken off his leather cut and hung it in the closet when we got home. He removed his wallet and cell phone from his jeans and set them on the nightstand next to his pistol.
“It’s Sunday,” I said. “Tomorrow is garbage day. I forgot to put out the bin.”
“I’ll take care of it.” He cocked his head to the side. “This is sounding pretty fucking domestic.”
“Yeah. Scared yet?” I teased.
“Nah.”
“What if I find a flying insect in the house and ask you to kill it? Is that too domestic for you?”
“I think I can handle it.” He kissed me quickly and then he marched toward the front door. “Damn it.”
“What?”
“I have to put my boots back on.”
“Maybe we should invest in a pair of flip-flops for you, for occasions such as this.”
“Flip-flops?”
“No? How about Crocs.”
“Do I look like the type of man who wears Crocs?”
“They’re comfortable and easy to slip on.”
“Yeah, never gonna happen,” he muttered, but he spoiled his faux surly attitude with a smile. He pulled on his boots but didn’t lace them up. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
The front door closed, and I headed to the bathroom. I was in the middle of brushing my teeth when I heard the buzz of a phone. I wandered into the bedroom, toothbrush still in my mouth, to check my cell.
It wasn’t mine.
Slash’s phone was on the other nightstand, and it was lit up with an incoming call. It was ten-thirty at night, and I wondered who it might be.
I went to his phone and stared down at the screen.
Millie.
Who the hell was Millie?
Why was a woman calling Slash?
All rational thought and resistance to curiosity went out my brain. I picked up the phone and pulled the toothbrush from my mouth. “Hello?”
There was a pause on the other end of the line and then, “Hi. I’m trying to get hold of Slash.”
Her voice was like whiskey and lemonade, sultry, with a thick Southern drawl.
My heart drummed hard in my chest.
“He stepped out for a moment,” I said. “I can tell him you called.”
“Oh, thanks, sugar. I’d appreciate that. Nothing urgent. I just wanted to call and say hi.”
At ten-thirty at night? Yeah, right, Vixen. I know this game.
I hung up the phone and set it aside, my heart racing.
Slash has another woman, in another town.
Oh, God, what have I done? I let this man into my life, into my bed, into my heart…
Was he really cheating on me? There was no way in hell he was planning a life with me, talking about buying a home and settling down in one place, getting my name inked on him, but that somehow he had another woman in another city…
Unless he was one of those men that fucked around and said whatever a woman wanted to hear. He’d been so damn perfect from the very beginning. Of course there was another shoe to drop.
The front door opened, and he called out, “Well, we’ve got a bit of a problem.”
No shit, we have a bit of a problem.
“We’ve got raccoons,” Slash said as he came to the doorway of the bedroom. His frown was immediate. “What’s wrong?”
I met his gaze. “Millie called.”
Slash went still.
“She wants you to call her. Nothing urgent, she said.”
A flash of pain crossed his face. “So, you spoke to her.”
“Who is she, Slash?” I asked. “Because my mind is going to that obvious place and it’s really dark, but my stupid heart doesn’t want to listen. Is she…do you have another woman? Have you been lying to me this entire time?”
He didn’t move. He was frozen, except for the rapid rise and fall of his chest. With a deep breath, he finally said, “Millie’s my mother-in-law.”
It was like someone had pushed me off the top of the Empire State Building and I was falling in slow motion. I knew I’d hit the ground at some point, and when I did it would be instantaneous death…but in that moment, everything seemed to stop in time. My breath, my heartbeat, even my mind went blank. I just couldn’t process what he had said.
“Mother-in-law?” I whispered. “That means—oh God. You’re married.”
He finally came to me and sank down to his knees in front of me. I tried to move, I tried to get up off the bed, but his arms and body blocked me.
“I’m not married,” he said, his tone bleak. “I’m a widower, Brooklyn.”
The hits just kept coming. It was a punch to my heart and stomach at the same time. I suddenly couldn’t breathe.
“Woman, look at me,” he whispered.
I shook my head, fighting tears, but they fell anyway. Slash had been married before.
He’d lost his wife, and he’d kept it a secret.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you—why did you keep this from me?”
“I’ll tell you now. I’ll tell you everything.”
“Not of your own free will. But because she called. And now you’re backed into a corner.”
He pushed up off the ground and loomed over me. Slash stared down at me for a second and then he removed his shirt.
“Stop,” I said. “You can’t—you won’t make this better with sex. That’s what you do, right? Every time I ask a question about your tattoos or your past, you distract me with sex and sweetness.”
His eyes were dull as he pointed to the heart clock tattoo. “This was the time they died.”
“They?”
“My wife…” He clenched his jaw. “And my daughter.”
He’d had a child.
A daughter.
My hands instinctively went to my belly in a protective gesture.
“I didn’t tell you to keep it from you,” he said, his voice grave, like he’d swallowed glass and he was choking on his own blood. “I didn’t tell you because I can barely think about it without—”
“I want to know it all,” I said softly. “Everything about your life before me. I need to know. I deserve to know.”
He was silent for a long moment, but finally, he nodded. “My wi—Hazel was driving to visit her mother,” he said. “I was supposed to go with her, but at the last minute some club shit I had to take care of came up. I was part of the Coeur d’Alene club chapter at the time. I told Hazel I’d meet up with her in a few days.”
He ran a hand through his tangled salt-and-pepper hair and then spoke as though he’d already cried every tear a man could cry, “She was T-boned at an intersection by a semi that ran a red light. Our three-year-old daughter was in the back seat. Her name was Daisy.”
“Daisy,” I whispered, my heart cracking open.
“The driver was drunk. He died in the crash. His rig clipped a light pole and turned over on its side and caught fire while he was passed out. He took everything from me, but he paid with his life.”
“Oh my God. This is why you never freaked out. This is why you want to be in the delivery room. This is why when I have my hormonal breakdowns, they don’t faze you. You’ve done all of this before.”
“Yeah. I have.”
I breathed deeply, trying to wrap my head around everything he was saying. “You’ve done this before,” I repeated. It needed repeating. I swallowed. “What did you…what happened…after?”
“The club was there for me, but I couldn’t stay in town. Everything reminded me of them. I went on the road, and I’ve been there ever since.”
He turned around and showed me his back. “I had a hazel tree inked onto my back when she became my Old Lady, and then when Daisy came along—”
“You had Daisy flowers tattooed on you,” I finished for him.
“Yeah. The tire swing, too.”
His tattoos made sense now, but only because I knew his story. A child’s tire swing hanging from the tree. An hourglass that held no sand because his wife and daughter’s time had run out.
The Grim Reaper, the harbinger of death.
“Is that why you stayed?” I asked him, tracing the ink on his shoulder blade. “When you found out I was pregnant?”
He hung his head. “I stayed, because for the first time in fifteen years I wanted someone that was worth staying for. I had the chance for some Goddamn happiness.”
I pressed my chest to his back and draped my arms around him.
“Were you ever going to tell me?” I asked softly.
“At some point, yeah. I just…”
“What?”
“Wanted more time with you. With us. Without all that other shit.”
“All that other shit,” I repeated. “You mean life?”
“I mean death.”
We fell silent.
I wanted to ask about her. What she was like, how’d they met. Instead, I asked, “So you still keep in touch with Millie?”
“On my way home from Idaho, I stopped off in Nebraska to visit her. I didn’t want her to be alone on the anniversary of her daughter’s death.”
My throat was tight with pain, and I released him from my clasp. “You should’ve told me the truth.”
“I should’ve?” He turned to stare at me. “I should’ve told you I was going to visit my dead wife’s mother?”
I flinched like he’d sucker-punched me. “That’s not fair. You don’t get to assume you know how I would’ve reacted if you’d told me.”
“Fuck, Brooklyn. I didn’t want to open up about any of this so soon.”
“You think I want to talk about it? You think I want to talk about the fact that you loved another woman enough to marry her and have a child with her? And that you kept it from me?”
“I didn’t—I wasn’t ready to share it with you.”
“You weren’t ready to share the most important thing about your past with me? This is a big deal, Slash. I told you about my mom leaving. I told you about my dad dying. I told you about why that building is so damn important to me. I opened up, I was vulnerable and you gave me nothing.”
“Bullshit.” He rose. “I gave you everything I have. I stayed, didn’t I?”
“Oh, fuck you,” I seethed, empathy and compassion melting away to reveal anger and hurt. “I made it very clear you didn’t have to stay. Now I know why you did. This was about your second chance at having a family, wasn’t it? Do you even love me, Slash? Or do you love that I remind you of her?”
His face went chalk white, like my words had pierced beneath the veneer of armor he wore.
“Are you still in love with her?” I asked quietly. “Because I won’t compete with a memory. I deserve more than that.”
We stared at one another. Slash, bare chested, with the story of his life inked on his skin; me, sitting on the bed, growing our child in my body. Our future was unclear but barreling toward us anyway.
Slash picked up his shirt and threw it on. He grabbed his keys and marched to the door. Without a word, he left.
And I curled into a ball and cried.