Wilde Fire (Forever Wilde 3)

“It’s too much change all at once, Seth. How can you expect a girl her age to understand her parents divorcing? She doesn’t even have any friends yet, for god’s sake, and you’re going to put her through this?” she’d railed.

“First of all, I promised you five years. I said I’d stay long enough for you to stay at home with her in the early years to give her a strong start, Jolie. You agreed when it was time for her to begin school, you’d go back to work, and we’d separate. Secondly, she absolutely has friends and you know it. She has her very best friend, Cody, as well as at least four other kids who’ve been begging her to play for the last two months. I never see her alone at school, and I swing by there all the time to check up on her.”

Jolie had narrowed her eyes at me and crossed her arms in front of her chest.

I said the last but most important thing in answer to her tirade. “And don’t call us ‘her parents’ like I’m her father. I’m not. My brother Ross is her father. I am her uncle. This is exactly why I kept fighting you when you said you wanted me to be her daddy. I never wanted her to get the wrong idea about you and me.”

“Your parents aren’t going to be happy,” she’d warned.

And she was right. I’d wanted to wait until the initial paperwork was filed before telling them, but now it was time.

Later that night I went up to the main house to talk to them alone, I was torn up with nerves. For some reason, when it came to Jolie and Tisha, my parents had always had the ability to turn my words around and make me feel like shit even though otherwise they were the nicest people around.

“Hey, Sheriff,” my mom said with a big smile. I had to admit to getting a kick out of how proud she was of me. Being able to parade around her hometown as the mother of the sheriff had made her feathers puff up pretty significantly. It was kind of cute.

“Hey, Mom. How are you? Sorry I haven’t been up here in a few days. Work’s been nuts.”

“I heard about the vandalism in town outside the hardware store. Did they find out who did it?”

Mom led me through to the kitchen where Dad sat at the kitchen table with a cup of decaf coffee. He gestured to the mug and raised his eyebrow in offer.

“I’ll fix it. You stay there,” I said. “No. There’s surveillance video, so we know it was a bunch of kids, but we haven’t been able to identify who yet. I think some of the stores are going to need to upgrade their video equipment if they expect to actually be able to identify criminals with it.”

I helped myself to the coffee maker before joining them at the table. “We’re also doing some of the prep work now for the Hobie Hootenanny festival. I didn’t realize what a big deal it was. When I was growing up, it was just a summer weekend you could get away with hanging out at the lake without your parents realizing how late you were staying up,” I said with a wink at my mom.

“As if we didn’t know what you were up to. Hobie is tiny. That’s partly why we wanted you two to bring Tisha here to grow up. Let her have a whole town looking out for her like you did. It’s nice knowing your neighbors. Not like that place you lived in St. Paul.”

She’d hated the little rental house we’d had in South St. Paul, but it had a backyard with a little play set for Tisha, and it had been only fifteen minutes from the precinct where I worked. It was a good thirty minutes from my parents’ place in Edina, but I hadn’t been able to afford anything nicer on my cop’s salary at the time. Once my parents decided to move back to Hobie after my dad bought out the Hobie office of the insurance company where he worked, I knew it wouldn’t be long before we’d move back with Tish, whether I liked it or not.

Despite how hard it would be to live here without Otto, I knew it would be a good place for Tisha to grow up and for Jolie to get a fresh start. In a tiny town like Hobie, it would be easier for her to support herself and be able to get to and from Tisha without long commutes or traffic. Plus, she’d have my extended family and me to help as much as she needed.

Okay, fine. Maybe I agreed to move back because I hoped like hell Otto would leave the navy and come home. And we could finally, somehow miraculously, be together.