Page 16 of Mistaken Identity
She definitely had a valid reason for not giving that first class seat up. It wasn’t like I was going to help her. And though I was sure the flight attendants would help as they could, it wasn’t like they could hand-feed her peanuts.
Cakes sat down next to me, shoving his backpack underneath the seat before going back into the aisle to deal with his carry-on.
I noticed that Creole didn’t hurry him along, and he took twice as long as I had.
I narrowed my eyes at the bane of my existence again, then said, “Cutting it a little close, aren’t you?”
“No,” he grumbled. “Why spend any more time on this plane than I have to? I paid for first class. I’m guaranteed a seat and usually I never have issues with the overhead storage. But even if I did have issues, the flight attendants are more than willing to find space for my bag for me.”
“But then you’d have to figure out how to get your bag from way the fuck back there,” I pointed out. “While everyone and their brother is standing up in the aisle champing at the bit to get out of the damn plane.”
“Well, just sayin’, but their issue doesn’t make one on my end.” He shrugged. “No Lottie?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t think it’d be the greatest thing in the world to bring a two-year-old on a plane for the first time when she’s having ear issues.”
“Still getting ear infections?” he asked. “Man, that’s rough. I had to have multiple surgeries on mine.” His dimple popped as he half-heartedly grinned at me, reminding me of Lottie’s dimple.
I frowned. “What did you have wrong with your ears?”
“Started with chronic ear infections.” He sighed. “Then it turned into damaged eardrums. It was a whole shitshow, and a lot of it was due to my mom and dad’s negligence. If they’d taken me the moment that they saw I had an issue, all would’ve been well. I would’ve just had tubes in my ears and been done with it. But since they neglected to take me until it was really bad, I had a lot of other issues I had to deal with on top of that. But your girl should be fine. You get her to the doctor in plenty of time. They’ll just put tubes in her ears, and she’ll be right as rain.”
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and typed in “are ear infections hereditary?”
I had a theory.
It was a crazy one, but it was one that I knew to be most likely a very real possibility.
Laney had slept with one of my brothers.
Not my blood brothers, but my heart brothers.
The Truth Tellers MC brotherhood was something out of this world, and I counted them just as much of a brother as my own sibling—even if she had been gone from this world for a really long time.
Anyway, the night that I remembered her coming home, she’d stayed at the club longer than me.
I’d come home because I had an early job outside of the city the next morning, and had to be up by three. She’d stayed behind because she’d been having fun.
All of the club had been.
Every last one of them had been drunk off their asses when I’d left, and had been heading straight toward sloshed.
Most of the old ladies and the rest of the attendees had been, too.
Everyone but Laney.
I’d made sure that she switched to water halfway through the night because I wanted to make sure she could get home safely.
She was more than sober when she came home, too, because I remembered waking up when she walked through the door.
We didn’t sleep in the same room, never had since we’d gotten married.
But she always made sure to let me know when she arrived or left so I didn’t worry.
She’d gotten home that night and woken me up to tell me that she was home and had said that she’d had a great time after I left.
Usually, that meant that she’d found a dick to scratch her itch.
At the time, I’d been drunk on sleep, and hadn’t really thought about the fact that she’d been at a club party when she’d made the comment.
