Page 21 of This Wild Heart

“Not yet.”

“Then why do you look like that?”

“You might want to check your phone.”

Anya dug into her purse and pulled it out, her face losing color as she scrolled.

“Shit,” she breathed. “Emmett tried to call me four times.” Her eyes pinched shut. “So did Isabel. What happened?”

I arched an eyebrow, handing her the phone across the small table. Her eyes widened when she saw the articles.

“Awesome. Excellent.”

“Think your parents would see something like that before we can tell them?”

Her gaze snapped up to mine, and once again, the vivid blue knocked the breath from my lungs just a little. “Oh, fuck a duck,” she whispered.

“What?”

“Violet. She has a news alert on my name.” Anya dropped her head in her hands. “I’m screwed.”

There was yelling coming from the other room, Aiden’s deep voice the only one I could discern between him and Anya and Isabel. I sat on the couch in the family room with a glass of water in my hand, taking a self-conscious sip while I tried to decipher what was being said.

Violet, as Anya predicted, had seen the articles. She’d also, as expected, broke the news to Aiden and Isabel Hennessy just before the car dropped us off at their gorgeous home tucked back in the trees on Mercer Island.

It took a lot for someone to truly intimidate me, but the sight of Aiden Hennessy standing by his front door, a gently lined face and his temples peppered with gray, did the fucking trick. I felt my stomach drop into my feet at the look on his face. With massive arms crossed over a broad chest and his eyes locked on mine as I held the door open for Anya, I swear my balls shriveled up to the size of a dime.

“He won’t hurt you,” Anya promised me, clearly sensing my pause before we approached the house. It was nice of her to say, but it also felt like utter bullshit because I was fairly certain if looks could kill, I would’ve been dead the moment I exited the car.

Aiden must have heard her because he merely raised an eyebrow. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, gingersnap.”

Behind him was his wife, tall and striking, with long dark hair and deep blue eyes, watching me with a touch less open hostility but far more worry. “Come inside, you two. Anya, we need a word.”

Anya turned to me. “Do you mind letting me talk to them?”

I pushed my tongue into my cheek and shook my head. “Not sure your dad wants me in that room anyway.”

She still hadn’t regained the color in her face that she lost on the plane. In fact, my wife sorta looked like she might pass the fuck out.

“You okay?” I asked her quietly, my hand hovering at the small of her back.

In her hand, she gripped the Gatorade. “I think so.”

Isabel watched us approach, her eyes shifting between her stepdaughter’s face and my own. God, it felt like being watched by a watchdog, ready to rip my throat out if I moved wrong.

I’d never given a whole lot of thought to meeting my future in-laws, mainly because I never intended to get married. But if I had, I likely wouldn’t have been excluded from their entire conversation about why we’d gotten married in the first place.

I stared down at the ring on my hand, spinning it absently. It was a little too big. I’d need to take it off for practice. In the beginning, I’d only been focused on football. Relationships, especially serious ones, weren’t even on my radar. Marriage could come later. Much later. Or at least that was what I used to think.

Except it never came. And when my dad got sick, I didn’t want it to come. The thought of finding someone, anyone, felt like a dark, crawling fear that I didn’t really want to see realized.

In the possibility of a relationship, all I could see now was Sheila picking the suit my dad would be buried in. Choosing his headstone. Deciding on a coffin.

No fucking thank you.

But now I found myself with a ring on my finger and a wife and in-laws and a great, big story I was going to try to sell in hopes that all of this wouldn’t be a giant waste.

From the corner of the room, I heard the squeak of a shoe on the wood floor. Dark, tangled hair and one blue eye like her mother’s popped around the corner.

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