“I want toho-eda baby.” Eva giggled.
“You are too little,” Addy told her.
Cash peeked over at me.
Both flustered but filled with this reverence I could feel him trying to keep hidden.
“I think we’d better not plan on holding any babies today,” I finally said when I pried myself away from the force of his stare.
It was difficult to do with the man sitting in the driver’s seat. A beast taking up the entire thing. Those muscled arms covered in ink stretched out as he gripped the steering wheel, wearing a plain white tee and jeans and a cap on his head.
The glimmering rays of light striking against him through the window made him look like some glorious, fallen angel.
“We don’t know them, so we can’t go in there making assumptions or asking things that aren’t our place,” I continued, trying to prepare my children.
“It is your place.” Cash’s voice was stony.
I whipped my attention back that way, confusion bounding through me like a new thread being woven into my being.
I was having a hard time making sense of the change. It was as if when Cash had made that commitment to me two days ago, something had been unleashed in him.
Something forbidden unlatched.
He glanced my way before he turned back to the road. “It is your place if your place is with me. They’re my family.”
My heart thundered at my ribs, and I inhaled as deeply as I could, trying not to look too earnestly into what he meant.
At what he was implying.
Cash’s jaw clenched like he couldn’t believe what he said, either, and I forced myself to turn my attention back out the windshield.
A few minutes later, the road opened up as we got to the bottom of the mountain and hit the valley into the small town of Moonlit Ridge.
Cash slowed more as we came upon a nightclub that was in an old church. A club called Kane’s, which was named after the owner whose house we were going to today.
My nerves scattered as Cash made the left and began to follow along a lane on the far side of the club parking lot before it turned into a narrow drive bracketed by lush, leafy trees. We wound through until we hit a big clearing.
A two-story white house was in the distance. A rambling lawn fronted it, and more shade trees hedged it in protection.
My stomach tightened when I saw a bunch of cars parked in the circular drive out front.
A discord of my children’s voices began to resonate from the back.
“Is this it? Cool house, Mr. Cash!” Colin peeped. “I bet it’s got stairs because the roof is really tall. Did you know I had stairs at my old house? But I like your house the best so that’s okay if it doesn’t have any.”
“Are we here? This is where Maci lives?” Addy asked.
“I want topway.Wet’s go,GwumpyGiant!” Eva pushed at the straps of her car seat.
All while I was pummeled with a million things.
Gratitude that Cash would bring us here. That he would introduce me and my children to the people who had come to mean the most to him. That he had agreed. That he’d given me basically everything when I had nothing to offer in return.
It was all mixed with a deep-seated grief at what all of this represented.
The fact that I was asking Cash to take my babies on if I no longer had the capacity to do it.
The truth that these people would be the ones my children would come to know if something were to befall me, while I knew absolutely nothing about them.
