Griffin (Ruthless MC 3)

“I know we have to get married in order for you to receive the CEO position,” she continues, interrupting my fear tornado. “But O2 deserves parents who aren’t chaotic. We can’t change the past. But we need to figure out how to move forward past all the hurt, without triggering each other and playing mind-games.”

Oh, she’s not trying to break up. The fear recedes. A little bit. And an idea occurs to me. “It all comes down to that New Year’s Eve. That’s what destroyed us. So how about we go back to that morning, and we agree to meet up in six years, not six hours. Actually, about two months shy of six years…”

She shifts in my arms. “I don’t understand.”

“You said it yourself,” I answer. “We can’t change the past. So why don’t we rewrite it?

“Red, let’s pretend we’re back in that cabin…” I turn her over in my arms and clasps my hands around both of hers. “Meet me in six years. Not at my place in Nashville. But at an altar in Vegas. We’ll get married. You’ll be my Dream Wife and a Dream Mother to our children, and I’ll work like hell to not only be a Dream Dad, but also a Dream Husband. We’ll be the parents we never had. And we’ll…”

I cup her face. “We’ll trust each other. We’ll trust each other from now on? How does that sound?”

“How does that sound?” she repeats, her voice a little off-kilter.

I can see all the doubts and fears swirling in her eyes. And I wonder if I should back off like a decent, non-fucked up human being. Give her some room and space. Tell her everything—not just the stuff she needed to hear to stop hating me.

But then she says, “Okay.”

Her face breaks out into that wicked grin I missed so much, and she tells me like I told her before our first shot at re I’ll take my chances.”

She’ll take her chances. This woman—she’s teasing me. She’s challenging me.

She’s laughing at me as I put her underneath me and punish her for that—but nothing else.

We’ve wiped the slate clean and agreed, whatever future we have, it’s going to be together.

CHAPTER 35

O2

O2 is pretty sure her dad and mom don’t hate each other anymore.

Mom let her stay overnight with her grandmas. And when Grandma Whitney drops her off, her parents are nowhere to be seen, but there’s loud heavy metal music blasting.

“What in the world?” Grandma Whitney asks.

They find O2’s parents lying on the floor together in the rec room, holding hands and looking up at the ceiling.

“What are you doing?” Grandma Whitney asks them over the music.

“Listening,” Mom shouts back. “Want to join us?”

Grandma Whitney says, “No thank you.” In that way grown-ups do when you ask them to come outside and play in the mud.

O2 loves playing in the mud after a Kentucky rain, but in this case, she has to agree.

“I don’t like this music!” she yells over the singer screaming about love.

“You should!” her dad yells back.

Then her parents fall out laughing for reasons O2 doesn’t understand.

And when she leaves them in the room to listen to their weird music, they’re still holding hands.

More clues they might not hate each other pile up over the coming days.

The next day, Dad decides he does do breakfast after all.

And when he gets up from the table to drive O2 to school, he kisses her mom. Right on the mouth!

And there’s more kissing where that came from. They kiss that morning and then again that night when Dad gets home from work. And sometimes they kiss instead of saying hi when they pass each other in the house.

And when O2 says, “Ew!” they just laugh and give each other more kisses.

That’s another clue that maybe they don’t hate each other like they used to when O2 and her mom first came to Las Vegas.

Her parents start hugging a lot too. Sometimes, when her mom’s cooking, her dad comes into the kitchen just to wrap his arms around her waist and watch her make dinner with his chin on her shoulder. And sometimes when O2 comes downstairs to get a glass of water, they’re sitting on the couch in the entertainment room, hugged up together, and just talking instead of watching TV.

Her mom and dad barely spoke to each other before, but now they’re always talking, even after dinner when they could be watching TV or playing on their iPads.

“Why do you two have to talk so much?” O2 complains when her mom says she has to finish her conversation with Dad before they can all watch the new Little Pony movie on Netflix.

Dad just laughs. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

And that’s when O2 decides to ask them flat out, “Do you two not hate each other now?”