Bea wrinkles her nose at me.
“What? Have I leftover lunch on my face?” I ask.
“No, it’s just—I forgot for a minute what your day job actually is.”
And that as well—that has me smiling too. “Am I not handsome enough that you’d believe me a top-tier movie star even if we’d never met?”
“Gross,” Eddie mutters while he and Charlie fiddle with a panel beneath the customer service counter in this fake bank room.
Bea sputters out a laugh. “You know you look a lot like him?”
“But better for the parts of Mom that I have in me.”
“Also,” Bea continues, “that’s not the teller drawer. You’re on the wrong side of the counter.”
Both boys whip their heads up at her.
“Bloody hell,” Charlie whispers.
“Don’t saybloody hellin front of Dad’s girlfriend.”
I freeze.
Girlfriend?
Bea is certainly not my?—
Oh, bloody hell indeed.
Beaismy girlfriend.
Not officially, of course.
But what else do you call a woman with whom you obsess over every waking moment when you’re not together, whose schedule you arrange your own around in the hopes of seeing her, and whom you occasionally enjoy in-person or phone sex with?
She’s smiling at the boys, though I’m incapable of that expression at the moment. “You can say anything you want in front of me, provided you’re not using it to call me names,” she says to the boys. “And really, a goodbloody hellis way better thanfuck this shit. It’s like proper cussing. I like it.”
They shoot her matching grins as they dash around the counter to the other side.
“She’s bloody right!” Charlie crows.
“Bloody nailed it,” Eddie agrees.
“Simon,” Bea says softly, intertwining her fingers with mine.
I realize I’m swaying on my feet, eyes wide, my normal smile unable to form on my lips.
I shake my head, but it doesn’t quite clear the stun I’m feeling at my boys calling Bea my girlfriend.
Will they become attached?
Will they expect that I marry her?
Why the bloody hell am I not having an instant panic attack at that thought?
“Simon,” Bea says again, this time in that tone that has my cock sitting up and taking notice. “They’re going to live here for the next five years?—”
“Six,” I correct absently. “We held them back a year before kindergarten.”
