Yep. Heard enough. Don’t need to stay here. Not my drama.
Won’t make it my drama.
Learned a long time ago that no good comes of telling Emma anything Chandler’s done that makes him look like anything less than a god.
She doesn’t want to hear it from me. She doesn’t like it when we don’t get along. She loves us both, even if we can’t stand each other, and she insists they don’t have secrets so she knows it all anyway.
And you know what?
I’m glad it sounds like Chandler found a way to fix the café’s money problems.
Glad to know he’ll give her the family and the life she wants, and that they’re starting the married part of their life without his business in debt.
At least, not the kind that’ll get the shop shut down imminently.
He’s what she wants.
I do an abrupt about-face, intending to head to my room the long way so I don’t have to see Chandler—or so he doesn’t have to see me—but instead, I almost run over a woman who’s standing there holding up a hand like she was about to tap me on the shoulder.
She leaps back with a shrieked “Ack!” then puts her hand to her heart. “Sweet baby Jesus in heaven, you scared the ever-lovin’ shit out of me.”
“I get that reaction a lot.”
She giggles, and recognition hits me.
Saw her this morning. One of the kids’ moms.
And now she’s looking me up and down like she’s considering having a snack.
Specifically, a Theo one-night-stand snack.
“You were out there buildin’ all those sandcastles with my son this mornin’,” she says in a thick Southern accent.
I nod, angling toward my escape. “Kid at heart. That’s me.”
“I just wanted to say thank you. My Elijah doesn’t have a daddy in his life, or any good menfolk to set the kind of example you want good menfolk to set, so that was incredibly special to me.”
“My pleasure.” Any other night, I’d stay and chat. But not tonight.
“I’ve been thinking all day that you just seem so darn familiar. You ever been to Goat’s Tit, Alabama?”
My whole body flushes hot, and I wish I could rip off my shirt and fan myself with it. This is the only part of the side hustle that ever makes me squirm. And it shouldn’t. They shouldn’t recognize me.
Guess my tats are distinctive.
Or my voice.
“Haven’t had the pleasure,” I say.
“You sure?”
“Never been to Alabama at all. But if I ever do, I’m starting with a town calledGoat’s Tit.”
A hand claps down hard on my shoulder, and it’s not hers.
It’s the second half of what I was hoping to avoid the minute I realized this woman wanted to talk.
“Ol’ Theo here’s never left the state of Colorado until this week,” Chandler says. “Parole conditions.”
