Page 45 of Mistaken Identity
“Yeah.” Webber slammed his hand on Gunner’s back so hard that the crack startled the little girl in my arms.
She woke up and looked around in confusion.
She smiled when she saw Gunner. “Hey!”
Gunner visibly swallowed before he said, “Hey.”
She patted my chest and said, “Down!”
I put her down, and she walked right over to Gunner and touched his hand, then hauled ass toward a tree that had flowers growing under it.
Gunner, Audric, and I watched her closely.
She raised her leg to get a better angle on the flowers, and the brick that was surrounding the flower bed slipped, causing her to squeak in surprise.
She didn’t fall, though.
Gunner was there before she could think about falling down, righting her with a large palm across her back.
“She was practically raised by the club,” Audric mused as he watched Lottie bend down and pull a flower out by the root. “I worked, one of them watched her. She has sleepovers all the time. Gunner’s probably the only one that really hasn’t spent all that much time with her, though. He’s pretty standoffish with the kids.”
I watched as Gunner took a seat on the bricks that made up the flower bed and said, “Looks like she doesn’t hold that against him.”
“She wouldn’t,” he agreed. “She’s a really good kid. I think it might break my heart a little bit when she’s not under my roof.”
“But that’s not a super surprise, is it?” I asked. “I think you knew all along that this was never a permanent thing. She loves you. I can tell. But she also loves them all. I think she could take you or leave you as long as someone else from your club is in the room. And you made that possible. You made sure that, in case one of them was the father, that they would all transition over well with her.”
“Should’ve tried harder with Gunner, though,” he admitted. “Just never thought Laney would do that to him of all people.”
I had no answer to that.
“Surely it was the liquor,” I said, but the excuse sounded pitiful, even to my own ears.
“Guess we will never know,” he admitted. “Unless there’s some long-lost diary explaining why she did the things she did.”
“Not that I know of.”
He crossed his arms, and his large, bulky arms brushed against mine.
I didn’t freak out, which had me examining the feeling deeper, but he chose to move away from me anyway despite my not asking him to.
“What do you think that Luciano and Paula will do about this?” I wondered.
“I’m sure they’ll just pivot,” he grumbled. “The only thing that Gunner will have going for him is the fact that his money won’t be tied up in an estate battle like mine.”
“I thought that the court gave you access after the last fight?” I wondered. “To help Lottie get into that fancy preschool.”
“It had to be agreed upon by both of us, and when I finally agreed, the Combs found something wrong with it. So I let the nanny go for no reason,” he grumbled.
“Wasn’t that nanny friends with Gunner?” I asked.
“She was his best friend. I felt fucking awful when I had to let her go after only three months,” he admitted. “But it worked out okay in the end because she was interested in taking a full-time, live-in nanny position with Shasha Semyonov.”
Shasha Semyonov was loosely tied to the Truth Tellers via a marriage through Cutter Clayborne and Shasha’s sister, Milena.
“I heard they had another kid,” I mused.
“They’re up to like ten,” he joked. “They needed the nanny more than I did. Plus, she’s damn good at what she does. She’s not used to only taking care of one kid. Her skills, though not wasted, were definitely underutilized.”
