Page 62 of Sneak Attack

He huffed and grinned at me like I was silly. “Me too. Not the way I wanted to start a family by any means, but he and I do all right.”

“What’s he like?”

“The best. Loud and active and full of questions. Never shuts up when we’re alone in the car and loves dinosaurs and trucks and dogs and anything he can throw or catch.”

“Like his dad and uncle?”

“We’ll see. I’m not like some other dads who push their kids to be a pro athlete or think they will be because they understand the rules of tee ball. In fact, I think a lot of us guys on the team are the opposite. We know the costs, the work and commitment, the sacrifice. It’s a hard road to make it where we are, and you can’t push someone who doesn’t want it or is on the fence about it. Jasper will be his own man, whether sports is in his future or not.”

My eyes stung, and for no damn good reason except I’d been right earlier. “See? I told you you’re a good dad.”

His smile turned soft, more meaningful in a way my nipples pebbled beneath my bra and thank the good Lord as Marley would say I remembered to throw one on before heading this way.

“Back to Selma,” he said, and that smile evaporated along with the lightness in the room and the mess going on inside my body.

Selma. Right.

On cue, his phone lit up and her name appeared. Without taking his eyes off me, Cole reached down and silenced his phone. “She apparently has a lot to say about your run-in with her earlier, too. This is the sixth time she’s called.”

“Don’t you need to take it? Jasper—”

“Is upstairs, tucked into the lower bed of his bunk bed, and probably holding the stuffed giraffe Graham gave him before he went back to school last fall. Jasper’s fine, which means anything Selma needs to talk to me about can wait.”

“Right,” I muttered.

“And this is what you need to know about Selma. Over the last few years, every once in a while, and more often recently, say, in the last few weeks, she’ll get it in her head that if she simply tries a little bit harder, switches up her tactics, I’ll finally commit to her. When Jasper fell down on his bike one day and she’d turned away and missed it, she told me if we’d been living together, it wouldn’t have happened. When I didn’t catch his little hand when he was three, and he touched a still hot stove after I cooked dinner and he got burned—minor burns, mind you—she said the same thing. She’s tried to worm her way into the family pictures I occasionally have taken and sometimes invites herself to our family dinners Mom always makes after home games for us. Trust me, I’ve seen all her plays and so I know for one, her phone calls tonight are all because she’s pissed she saw you, more mad you’re in town, and she knows what that means for her. Which is insane, because she never had a shot to begin with.”

There was a lot to unpack there, mostly a reminder that Selma’s ego knew no bounds, and how vindictive and manipulative she could be. But there were other things. Like… “If she’s never had a chance with you, what does me being in town have to do with anything?”

He laughed, that silly littleyou’re cutelaugh, but it was true. This didn’t mean anything. So, we didn’t hate each other. So, we could talk. Perhaps it’d help me move on once I finally left Marysville…

“Because she knows, as well as you do, that you’re the only woman I’ve ever wanted in that way. The only woman I’ve ever loved.”

CHAPTER21

COLE

Iprobably shouldn’t have dropped the bomb, but the words came so easily, the admission fell from my mouth before I could stop it and I wasn’t even sure I’d wanted to.

There was no point.

If I was going to convince Eden she’d always been mine, and if I had any say, always would be mine, then it was time for us to stop skipping around the issue.

“You can’t mean that,” she whispered, and her face had paled with shock. She shook her head, the braid of hers once again draped over her shoulder giving me very wicked ideas of holding on to it once we moved past all this bullshit between us.

It was all in the past.

But she was herenow.

I slid my feet to the floor where I planted them and sat in the corner of the couch, making sure she was looking directly into my eyes. “I absolutely mean it. One hundred percent, and it doesn’t matter to me if you don’t feel the same now, or maybe won’t admit it. That’s not what this is, but I’m preparing you now, that while you’re here, and while I have the time again, we’re going to get to know each other again. We’re going to learn about each other all over again, and then once you’re ready, I’m going to explore every single inch of you I never got to do before.”

“Cole—”

His name was a rasp on my parched lips. The things he said.

The things he made meimagine.

He scooted closer, like he was afraid I’d flee but the joke was on him. I was frozen to that couch cushion.

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