Page 27 of Their Forever Daddy

That was a twist he hadn’t seen coming. And he still wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about it. Not because Edie was a woman, but because she obviously still held a part of Jesse’s heart in her hands. A heart he’d previously thought belonged entirely to him.

It was an… unsettling realization.

“All right, little outlaw,” he said, drawing her attention back to him. “What do you want to do now? Go back inside and try again with Edie, or call it a night and head back to wherever you’re staying?”

“Well, considering both those options require going back up to the house, I suppose I’ll give it another shot with Edie.”

“You’re staying here?” Jealousy twisted his stomach, and he just barely managed not to snarl.

“Seemed like the fastest way to get her to listen,” Jesse said with a shrug.

“Stubborn little brat,” he murmured, lowering his head to capture her lips with his. Some of the knots in his stomach loosened when she surrendered immediately, opening for him the way she always had. No matter what kind of history Lost River held, Jesse Walker was still his. Nothing had changed.

Nothing.

When they broke apart, he popped the trunk on the rental car and grabbed his duffel, slinging it over his shoulder as he gave the old farmhouse a critical look. “It’s not exactly The Waldorf, but I suppose it’ll do for a few nights.”

And when Jesse smiled at him, tears of gratitude filling her eyes, he knew he would have agreed to stay anywhere she’d asked. There was no doubt he was wrapped around her adorable little finger. “Thank you, Daddy.”

Hand in hand, they made their way back up the front walk toward the house. “Daddy?” Jesse asked, her voice soft and hesitant, as if she were scared to voice whatever question she was about to ask.

“Yes, baby?”

“How did you know Edie was ‘the one who got away’?”

Stopping on the porch, he turned toward her, letting the corner of his lip pull up in a smirk. “You know you can’t hide anything from your Daddy, little outlaw.”

The look she sent him was nothing short of withering. “Yes, but how did you know?”

He paused, weighing the truth vs a convenient lie. But lies were how they’d gotten here in the first place, and he couldn’t very well demand honesty from her if he wasn’t willing to give it in return. “It was in your eyes.”

“My eyes?”

“Yes. When you talk about Edie, you get a very specific kind of look in your eyes.”

Her nose scrunched up as she considered what he’d said. “What kind of look?”

“It’s a look I previously thought was just for me.” He forced himself to smile past the jealousy clawing at his throat. “That’s when I knew you were still in love with her.”

Chapter 11

Edie

* * *

She’s the one who got away.

Those words rang in her ears as Edie climbed the stairs to her room and shut the door behind her, panic beating at her chest like a frantic bird trying to escape its cage.

He was wrong. He had to be wrong. Just because Jesse was here on some weird campaign to ‘make things right’, it didn’t mean anything. It didn’t mean anything.

Maybe if she repeated it enough times, she’d actually believe it.

Pacing her bedroom floor, Edie rubbed at the ache in her chest as if she could massage away the heartache. On her fourth pass by the dresser, she banged her knee into an open drawer and let out a string of words strong enough to make a sailor blush.

Glaring at the drawer, which she would swear had been closed before, she crouched down to push it shut again. But the corner of something caught her eye, and she moved one of her ratty old t-shirts out of the way. Her breath hitched as she reached for the polaroid.

Memories, as clear as the picture in her hand, flooded her mind. Earlier that summer, they’d found one of those old cameras at a thrift shop, the kind that spit out a picture as soon as you took it. She’d spent half the summer snapping pictures of Jesse in one pose or another, usually at her babygirl’s direction.

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