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His mouth hovered over mine, and all I wanted was for him to kiss me.
“Fine for me to pretend like I’m filling you with my baby?” he murmured, and I swore I felt his lips catching on mine as he spoke, but all my senses felt jumbled together. Like he’d put them in a wash of desire and turned on the spin cycle.
“Blaze,” I whimpered.
“Fuck, you’re going to be the end of me,” he murmured gruffly.
“Daddy!”
We both jumped apart and swung our heads in different directions—Blaze toward his daughter and me, toward the Friendship lighthouse in the distance. What almost just happened was about as obvious as the headlight when it beamed through the dark to passing ships at sea. I could only hope it wasn’t obvious to Paisley because she was a child.
“Did you collect all your shells?”
I heard Blaze ask as Paisley’s run over the rocks slowed.
“Yes, is Harper okay?”
I winced and faced them. “I’m fine,” I said with a smile.
She scowled. “Then why was Daddy’s head so close to yours? You didn’t look okay. You looked in pain.”
Gosh, kids were too perceptive for their own good.
“I’m fine, I promise. Not in pain—”
“She just had something caught in her eye, pumpkin,” Blaze jumped in, rescuing me with a harmless lie. “You know it hurts a little when something flies into your eye, so I was just trying to find it to get it out.”
“Ohh,” Paisley drew out the word, clearly buying Blaze’s excuse. “I have all these shells. Do you think I should get more?”
She held out her shirt where she’d flipped up the hem to turn it into a faux basket. Inside, there were almost a dozen conch shells of various sizes.
“I think that’s good, pumpkin,” Blaze answered before I could, letting me get away with just a nod of agreement. “What do you say we head back to the house?”
“And put out all the shells?”
“Exactly,” he said, and as Paisley scampered ahead, his gaze found mine and all I could think was how was I going to survive the next couple of hours when it felt like I was burning up inside.
How was I going to survive this wildfire in my soul? And more importantly, what was going to be left of me once it was extinguished?
Chapter 22
Blaze
“And then we cleaned the shells really good and put them out in the field for the other bees,” Pais rambled enthusiastically, hardly pausing to take a breath as she finished regaling Lou with what she’d done all day.
“Thanks for this,” I said to Wade, walking shoulder-to-shoulder with him, behind Lou and my daughter, to his SUV.
“Of course. We really missed our night with her last week,” Wade said, sliding me a look, wondering why I was thanking him for this weekly tradition that had been going on long before today. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” I exhaled. “Just need to get my head in the right space for this week.”
We had another court appearance on Thursday. This time, Angela would be the one questioned, and I’d have to sit there and listen to her weave lie on top of lie about how she loved her sister and loves her niece and just wants to honor Megan’s wishes—to have their family raise her daughter and not the man who fathered her.
Devereaux had already run the whole script for her once. Thursday, it would be the same message, but this time, from the horse’s mouth.
I knew everything she was going to say, and it was still going to rip me open again, especially when she hammered on the point that this was what her dead sister wanted; that if Megan had wanted me to be a part of Paisley’s life, she wouldn’t have kept her existence hidden from me. Every time she said it, it buried the stake deeper into my chest.
You don’t deserve her.
