Considering I hadn’t slept at all, he didn’t need to tell me twice. I looked back for Seth before walking out the front doors, but found him entrenched in a conversation with John and Beth. I could tell from their body language, Seth wasn’t getting out of there anytime soon.
I let Grandpa and Doc take me home, and I fell into the bed in their guest room without even taking off my scrubs.
When I awoke sometime later, I was under the covers with a man attached to my back.
Oh, and I was buck naked.
“What the hell?” I mumbled, turning over.
Seth Walker was buck naked too and had been spooning the hell out of me for lord only knew how long.
“Hey, beautiful,” I said with a smile, reaching out to run my fingers through his hair. His eyes opened and looked so sad, all the memories of the previous night and subsequent morning came rushing back. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry about Hal.”
“No, I’m the one who’s so sorry. I should have seen it. I should have known.”
“Baby, how in the world could you have known?”
“All the clues were there. I just didn’t want to see it. I thought it was John, but then he had an alibi. I thought it was John, Otto.”
His eyes filled and began to spill over. I thumbed them off before leaning in and kissing his lips softly. He let me kiss him for a little while, our mouths moving slowly together while our bodies moved closer to intertwine naturally. My hand landed on his warm back, and I moved it up and down to feel the swell of his bare ass and the dip of his lower spine.
“I’m sorry,” I breathed into his mouth. “I tried to keep him from being found out. I didn’t want him to get in trouble.”
The tears came faster now. “That’s why I’m so fucking pissed at you,” he groaned, ducking his head under my chin and sniffling. “Why? Why did you do that?”
“He was scared and confused, Seth. He’s too young to realize the consequences of his actions. You know what it’s like in the justice system sometimes. What if he got a bad deal? What if he got a super-strict judge? What if he got some juvie time and met up with some bad apples?”
“He’s not your responsibility. Why do you always feel like you need to give everyone the benefit of the doubt? You did the same thing by not ratting out that bastard who set the fire on the Poseyville.”
That one was easy.
I pulled him off me so that I could look at him. “Because the one time in my life I didn’t give someone the benefit of the doubt, you were gone for ten fucking years. If I’d trusted my instincts and given you the benefit of the doubt back then, I would have come to fucking Minnesota and found out what the hell was going on.”
“And what difference would that have made?” he asked, clearly overwhelmed and exhausted.
I grinned. “We could have had ourselves a real interesting threesome marriage and diaper duty would have been much easier with six hands instead of four.”
He smacked my chest, but a small smile appeared on his gorgeous lips. I considered that a win.
“Seth, when I thought it was John who did this, I realized you’d feel responsible for Beth and the kids. You’d add four more mouths to feed to your already full plate of responsibility. I couldn’t let that happen. So when I found out it was Hal instead of John, I’d already accepted my fate. Plus, I knew there couldn’t be enough evidence for more than the lightest of arson crimes which, honestly, is only a maximum two-year sentence. It wasn’t like I took his spot in the electric chair or anything.”
Walker’s eyes narrowed at me. “Can we make an agreement no more taking the fall for people in my own damned jurisdiction?”
I thought about how many people I loved in his jurisdiction… Grandpa, Doc, Sassy, West, Nico, Pippa, Cal, Tisha… “Mm, nope. Sorry. Can’t make that promise.”
He rolled over on top of me and I felt his soft cock press against mine, instantly making it not quite so soft.
“How about a moratorium on guilty pleas for like… six months?”
I put my index finger to my chin for a moment before reluctantly agreeing. “Fine, but only if you tell your family to stop setting my shit on fire.”
The look on Walker’s face was priceless. Shock, outrage, and then finally a reluctant smile when he realized I was trying to lighten the moment.
“You’re a great man, Otto Wilde,” he said before leaning down to kiss me. I noticed his cock was now the opposite of soft.
I wiggled my hips back and forth to tease him a little.