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A week later, Billy, Steven, and Laynie pulled onto the highway out of Midland and headed toward New Mexico.
Steven glanced back at Laynie, who watched out the truck windows, worriedly biting her lip as she clutched her stuffed cat, Whiskers, to her chest. Hart had given her the cat three days ago at her mom’s funeral, and she hadn’t let go of it since.
The last week had been a difficult one for all of them. While Laynie seemed to be okay with him and Billy, she was still fairly shy. Two nights ago, they’d changed hotel rooms so that they were in a suite with two bedrooms, so she could transition to living with them. She’d had night terrors each night since, but so far, Steven had been able to calm her and get her back to sleep.
Except for those vulnerable moments in the middle of the night when nightmares scared her, Laynie had turned out to be pretty stoic about all this. She hadn’t cried at her moms’ funerals. He was concerned. It certainly wasn’t healthy for a seven year old to bottle up her emotional turmoil. He needed to see if there was a good family therapist in Terravista for her to talk to.
“Is Whiskers excited about getting to see Billy’s ranch?” Steven asked her.
She nodded thoughtfully and leaned down to listen to the imaginary conversation from the stuffed cat. “Yes, but he’s going to miss Hart.”
Steven gave her a sad smile. “I know, but remind him that we’ll be going back to see Hart when his little brother or sister is born.”
It had seemed cruel to tear her away from everything she’d known in her life without at least a return date for her to look forward to. They were doing everything they could to make this transition easier. It just wasn’t going to be easy in general.
“Hey, Laynie,” Billy said from the driver’s seat. “I don’t think I mentioned it, but not only do I have horses on the ranch, but there are cats for Whiskers to be friends with that live in the barn.”
“Really?” Her eyes lit up. “Ones that really purr and meow and everything?”
Billy laughed. “Yeah, all the things that real cats do.”
“What are their names?”
Billy flushed red with a glance toward Steven. “Well, let me see if I can remember. There’s Cat. He’s a big old orange tom-cat.”
Steven snorted. “Original,” he mocked under his breath.
“Hush, you.” Billy winked and grabbed Steven’s leg high up on his thigh.
They hadn’t had sex since Laynie had moved in, and his body was missing the stimulation, so his cock jumped at Billy’s touch.
Laynie asked, “What are the other ones named?”
Billy cleared his throat. “We have another boy who’s missing part of his ear that we call Scar.”
“Ooh,” Laynie moaned in empathy. “Does his ear still hurt?”
“No, munchkin,” Billy said. “It happened a long time ago. I doubt he even notices it any more. Then we have two girls...Momma and Little Bit. Little Bit is the youngest of the bunch. She’s still a kitten...about four months old and if you’re gentle with her, she will love on you as long as you want to.”
“That sounds nice.” Laynie laid her head against the truck door, her eyes beginning to droop as she settled into the rhythm of the road.
“She’s falling asleep,” Steven whispered to Billy.
“That’s probably good. The poor thing is exhausted.”
“Yeah.” Steven sighed, wondering how he was going to handle this parenting thing. A week of watching Maria corral five kids plus the one she was incubating had made him feel supremely under-qualified.
“Hey.” Billy tightened his hand on Steven’s thigh to get his attention. “You’re going to be great at this. He...heck, you already are great at this.”
Steven laughed lightly. They’d both been working to clean up their language since they now had a young ears listening all the time. That was probably one of the hardest things they’d had to do so far.
“Thanks,” Steven said with a shake of his head. “I don’t know how I could have managed any of this without you the last few weeks. I couldn’t do this without you.”
“Luckily, you won’t have to. I’m not going anywhere, Steven. Everything’s going to be fine. Just have a little bit of faith.”
Steven bit the inside of his cheek. Growing up in his house, faith had been used in a very different type of connotation. As a result, he didn’t have great feelings toward the word. But that just brought to mind his parents. He still hadn’t told them anything...about his life-threatening injury, Billy, getting out of the Air Force, and now the fact he had a daughter.
He wondered how long he could put of the inevitable. One of those things would send them through the roof. All of them combined? Yeah, it was not going to be a pleasant conversation.
***
THREE HOURS LATER, Steven had fallen asleep in the passenger seat and was drooling a bit. Billy shouldn’t find that so dam...darned attractive, but he did. Hel...heck, everything Steven did was attractive.
“Daddy?” a small, little voice came from the backseat.
Since Laynie had two moms, she never even questioned calling Steven Daddy. She just did it, but he had thought Steven was going to start bawling when she did it for the first time. He had admittedly teared up a bit, too.
“Hey, munchkin,” he whispered. “I didn’t know you’d woken up. Your daddy is asleep. What’s up?”
“I need to go potty.”
“Oh, okay.” Billy glanced down at the GPS. “We’re just about fifteen minutes from the next town. Can you wait that long?”
“Um...I guess so.” Her voice shook a tiny bit.
Laynie sat in her booster seat directly behind him, so he couldn’t see her very well. He flipped the mirror down and checked her, meeting her wary eyes in the mirror. While she’d warmed up to Steven pretty easily, she really didn’t seem to know what to make of him or how he fit into her life now. He didn’t blame her for the confusion. He wasn’t exactly sure about that part himself.
“I’ll hurry as fast as I can, okay?”
“Thank you.”
“No problem. Are you getting hungry, too? We could get some food. Maybe some pizza?”
She nodded vigorously and leaned down to listen to Whiskers. Then she looked up, her eyes shimmering with excitement. “We want cheese,” she said with a big grin.
“You got it. Just a few more minutes.”
She wiggled in her booster seat like she really had to go. He hoped she made it.
As they slowed to the lowered speed limit coming into town, Steven shifted and then sat up straight. Wiping his mouth, he glanced back to check on Laynie. “You okay?”
She nodded. “Yeah. I need to potty. Then, Billy said we could get some pizza.”
Steven glanced over at him with a raised eyebrow. “He did, huh? Look at you two, making plans behind my back. That sounds good.” He glanced around the small town. “Where are we?”
“Artesia. Only a couple more hours and we’ll be home.”
“Home.” Steven gave him a wide, guileless grin. “I like the sound of that.”
And just like that, Billy’s stomach erupted in butterflies. Who even knew that was a real thing? But having Steven call his ranch home? Yeah, that was pretty much perfect.
He grabbed hold of Steven’s hand and raised it to kiss the back of it.
“Daddy?”
“Yes?” Steven turned slightly to check on Laynie.
“Are you and Billy married?”
For a moment, Steven’s eyes widened in surprise, but he didn’t meet Billy’s gaze as he shook his head at his daughter. “No, we’re friends. Why?”
Billy glanced up in his mirror to see Laynie. “Well, Hart and I are friends, but his mommy says we can’t sleep in the same bed because we aren’t married. But you and Billy sleep in the same bed...”
Billy bit his lip as he tried to figure out how in the world Steven would answer this one.
“Um...yeah...we do. But that was because we were in a hotel room, and there were only two beds. I thought it would be weird for one of us to sleep with you. Since Billy and I have known one another longer, we’ve been friends longer... It just made sense, you know?”
“Okay.”
Steven clutched at his hand when she gave her breezy answer. His hand was actually sweaty. Poor guy was terrified of messing this all up.
“What kind of pizza do you want?” she asked, fully ready to move onto another subject.
Steven let out a relieved laugh.
Billy wasn’t sure how to take that. It only made sense that discussing where the two of them were going wasn’t something Steven would be comfortable with yet. Hel...heck, the guy had just accepted that he could have a male lover. It was too early, but Billy had to have faith that it would happen.
“I was thinking about anchovies,” Steven said.
For a long moment, Laynie was quiet. Then she whispered, “I don’t know what those are.”
Steven winked at her. “Tiny fish.”
“Eww, really?” she asked, sounding thoroughly disgusted.
Billy glanced at her in the mirror just as she leaned down to Whiskers.
“Whiskers says he’d like to try that. Can he have a piece of your fish pizza, Daddy?”
Billy busted out laughing. “You’re going to have to teach your daughter about your sense of humor,” he said under his breath as he pulled into the parking lot of the pizza place. He couldn’t wait to see how Steven managed to wiggle his way out of ordering anchovy pizza.
Inside, they quickly found a diversion from the pizza dilemma. Steven pulled Laynie to a halt outside the public restroom of the surprisingly crowded restaurant with a desperate glance at Billy. “I can’t let her go in there by herself, can I?” He glanced at the women’s restroom and then toward the door to the men’s.
“Um, Steven, I don’t think you have a choice. They won’t let you go into the women’s restroom with her, and she doesn’t need to be in the men’s.” He glanced around the restaurant filled with families. “I think it will be okay. The place is filled with families.”
Laynie had seriously begun to dance a jig in place as she tugged at Steven’s hand. “Please, Daddy, I have to go.”
“Okay.” He leaned down to her. “But I will be right here. If you need any help or someone tries to touch you, I want you to scream as loud as you can, okay?”
Her eyes widened fractionally. “Like ‘stranger danger’?”
“Exactly like that.” Then he squeezed her shoulder and turned her toward the restroom.
When the door closed behind her, Steven slumped against the wall next to Billy. “How do single dads do this? If we weren’t eating lunch, she would have had to go to the bathroom at a truck stop.” He visibly shuddered. “How do I keep her from getting hurt or kidnapped? Oh, god, how do I keep her safe?”
“Breathe, Steven. She’s okay. She’s going to be okay. She’s a smart, little girl, and you’ll teach her to watch for creepy strangers or people who might seem nice, but aren’t. You’ll...” He shook his head. “No. We’ll figure it out. And if you have a bad feeling about a situation, you listen to that instinct and can take her someplace else that feels safer.”
Steven nodded. “You’re right. I’m overreacting.” He rubbed at his chest. “God, a bullet didn’t kill me, but being a dad just might.”
Billy chuckled. “Well, the good news is that you’ll be all ready for her teenage years. You have the over-dramatic act mastered.”
“Hey!” Steven stilled and considered it. He took a deep breath and then laughed. “You may be right. The things they don’t tell you about becoming a parent. Not that I got much warning, but hel...heck, Billy, this is so much harder than I thought it would be.”
“I think it just feels that way because you were thrown into the deep end with no prep. You’re doing great, Steven. Overall, she’s a happy, well-adjusted little girl who already loves you. And I know you love her. It’s all going to work out.”
Steven glanced around quickly to make sure no one was paying them any attention, and he buzzed a kiss over the corner of Billy’s mouth. “Thanks. You always tell me just what I need to hear.”
Stunned at the public display of affection, his heart felt like it was going to pound out of his chest. “I’m telling you that, because it’s the truth.”
In this moment, waiting outside the restrooms of a small-town pizza restaurant, life was just about as perfect as Billy could remember it ever being.