Easton

“An eleven-year-old history,” Romeo said. “I’m just pointing that out there. You must have gotten her knocked up not long after Carla’s death.”

“Taylor’s already done the math,” Axton said.

“How is she dealing?”

“Okay. She hasn’t threatened to leave me. She said it’s hard, but at the same time, you can’t live in the past. We’ll see.”

“I don’t want to be the cause of you and Taylor falling out.”

“You won’t be. If things ever end between us, it will all be on Taylor,” Axton said.

“You’re not going to take any of the blame?” Romeo asked.

“Nope. I’m in love with my woman. I have been for a long time, and if she can’t see that, and she wants what happened years ago to get in the way of that, it’s on her, not me. I’m just a man trying to make this all work.” Axton shrugged. “I don’t want to talk about me. I want to talk about you and what is going on with you.”

Easton moved to the edge of his desk. “Her name’s Scarlett.”

“Do you have a last name?” Karson asked.

“No, I don’t know her last name. If she told me, I’ve forgotten it.”

“Classy,” Romeo said.

“We met at the camp. The one I was sent on after Carla’s death. I tried to stay by myself, to not make any connections, and well, Scarlett was very determined to help me be a distraction. Not for sex.” He looked at his friends’ smirking faces. “It wasn’t like that.”

“It had to have been like that at some point for little Easton to come about.”

“We did end up having sex, but it wasn’t straight away. It was a slow burn.”

“A couple of weeks isn’t a slow burn,” Axton said.

“It was for us. Twenty-four hours a day in each other’s company. She was so fucking hot. She’s gotten more beautiful, but I can still remember her smile. The way she laughed. I don’t know how she did it, but she got me to have fun. She got me to forget all about Carla and the life that was waiting for me back at home.”

“It didn’t last? You didn’t think to bring her home?” Karson asked.

“My father had killed my last girlfriend, and she’d been pregnant with my kid. Scarlett hadn’t told me anything of her life. I talked about Carla and you guys, but I didn’t tell her anything else. I didn’t want it to interfere with my time there. By the end of camp and it was time to go home, I knew I had to end things. We were going to college, and we were going to be taking over the Four Kings. I didn’t have room in my life for a woman. Not for Scarlett. She didn’t belong in our world. I couldn’t be responsible for the loss of her smiles. So I ended it. I did it harshly, so she knew without a doubt not to come look for me. I already had blood on my hands. I couldn’t add hers.”

“What makes you think you’d have hurt her?” Karson asked.

“Carla.”

His friends groaned.

“You’re not responsible for what happened to her,” Romeo said.

“I’m not? You really think I’m innocent?”

“I didn’t say you were innocent.”

“If I wasn’t so damn stupid in trying to win a fucking bet about popping her cherry and getting her to fall for me, I wouldn’t have knocked her up. My dad wouldn’t have seen her as a threat, and I wouldn’t have been wanting to run away from it all. Carla’s death is very much my fault. I didn’t kill her, but I signed her death sentence the moment I made the bet.” Easton sighed.

“My name’s Scarlett Knight.”

Easton looked past his friends to see Scarlett standing in the doorway. She knew the truth already about what happened to his ex-girlfriend.

Scarlett wore a pair of jeans and a plain white shirt. She looked amazing, calm, put together. Her blonde hair was bound on top of her head, with strands falling down all around her.

Yesterday she had looked beautiful, today even more so.

“Scar,” he said, getting to his feet.

She had her arms folded across her stomach, and he saw the wedding band on her finger.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“You gave the impression you wanted to talk after what you saw.”

“You mean my son? How did you find me?”

“You described yourself as one of the Four Kings. This company is called that, so it wasn’t hard to guess.”

“All this time you knew where I was.”

“All this time I was busy raising my son. It had nothing to do with finding you.”

“He’s mine.”

“Do you want to go there, with how you ended everything? I’m not here to pick a fight with you, and especially not in front of your friends.”

Easton looked at his friends, who were watching the interaction. They were all fucking nosy bastards. “Axton, Karson, Romeo, this is Scarlett. Scarlett, this is everyone.”