I break off passionately, following up with a dark chuckle. “Goddamn, Sassy, I didn’t mean to give you a lecture there.”
“No,” she says, answering with passion. “I love how much you care. I love that you want to support me. It means so freaking much.”
“Always,” I growl.
She giggles, her eyes shining as though she remembers a joke she heard.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Oh, nothing. I’m just thinking about something Mom used to say after she broke up with Lennie.”
“What?”
She runs her thumb over my knuckles softly, each tiny point of sensation enough to send shivers of belonging up my arm. I’ve never felt something so intimate and real and good and mine. Everything about her burns with the rightness of what we’re doing.
“She used to say that trusting a man is always a mistake. And especially if a man promises you money, he’s going to use you and abuse you. But she’s wrong. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it fits. We’re different, Kaleb, aren’t we?”
“Of course we are.” My voice is borderline feral, my body pulsing with the need to find this Lennie bastard and beat him into a twisted pulp for daring to twist my future mother-in-law’s mind so much. “I would die before I hurt you. I would kill before I let anybody try to hurt you.”
Because I love you, I almost roar, which would be insane.
She would laugh at me.
Yet it’s true.
But…
Natalie, Natalie, her name whispers at the edge of my mind.
And then it’s like my woman has read my mind. “My dad’s cancer came quickly and he left quickly. He passed within a few months.”
She pauses, glancing at me like she’s debating whether or not to go on.
I nod firmly at her.
“I want to hear this.”
Whatever it is, I’ll always want to hear it if it’s my queen speaking and I’ll always be there to give her solace if she allows doubts to creep into her mind, as she will, if doubt slithers into mine.
Not doubt that we belong to each other. There is no uncertainty there.
We both know it, soul deep.
But doubts that we’ll make it out of this without destroying Natalie.
There has to be a way.
“It was so sudden,” she goes on, forking her food before letting her fork drop for a moment. “Mom wrote a poem for his funeral. And in typical Mom fashion, she talked about how it had scorched through his body like a wildfire. It was a little crass, but she wrote it with emotion, starkly, truly, you know?”
I nod, enraptured by her words, learning more about the woman I’ve claimed as mine.
“That’s really how it was. When I went back to school, I sat on my own most of the time. I never was any good at making friends. And then one day Natalie comes traipsing over, a big grin on her face. She tells me she’s broken her doll and if I want to help put it back together again, only, we have to make it fun. So we did. We made a mighty mess of it.”
She giggles, shaking her head as tears glimmer in her eyes, but they’re warm and welcome tears of a happy memory. I can tell by the way her lips arch upward in an adorable smile.
“It turns out the doll belonged to the school bully, a little brat who was always making our lives hell. Natalie had stolen it and this was our revenge for how she always bullied me for sitting by myself. From that day on, we were inseparable. I was seven, Kaleb. I’ve been her best friend for more than half my life.”
“She’s been my daughter for the same time,” I say, nodding. “I know exactly what you mean.”
“I want this. I want everything you’re discussing. But how can we have it when…”
“What if we play a game?” I smirk when she trails off, taking on the same ironic tone I did in her apartment when I spoke to her about coming on the date.
Her lips quirk. She knows exactly what I’m doing. She knows that I’m using this light tone of voice to subtly tell the logical parts of her to ignore all those concerns for now, for the moment, which feels like it’s all that exists anyway.
“When the two of us are together, I feel like nothing else exists,” I tell her. “So let’s pretend nothing does. It’s just me and you, Kelly. For tonight. Tomorrow morning, we’ll deal with everything. We’ll work out how to climb these hills. But all I want to think about tonight is how lucky I am that I get to spend it with you, with my woman, and that you feel the same way.”
My words take a physical effect on her, seeming to make her sit up in her seat, as though she’s being infused with all the potential magic of what we could be.