I left the message on read and swivelled in my seat to face Ivy in the back. “What do you want to do, little bug?”
“Can we see Lili?”
Of course she wanted to see her friend, and as much as I wanted to lock myself away with my girl, I didn’t mind. It was nice that her life with me wasn’t lonely anymore. “I don’t know where she is. You wanna text Mateo and ask him?”
Ivy’s sweet face lit up. Texting on my phone made her feel like a grown up, even if the collection of words she tapped out made little sense.
I passed her my phone. She poked at the screen, tongue caught between her teeth, while I steered the car towards the outskirts of town. A few minutes later, Mateo’s reply flashed up on the dashboard in front of me.
Mateo:em has her at the mc. Ill be there in a bit xx
The kisses were for Ivy, not for me, but it made me grin anyway. The first few years I’d known Mateo, I’d taken him at face value. Ferocious. Moody. Dangerous. But Ivy had seen something else in him from the start, and I’d learned long ago that my kid was rarely wrong.
Case in point, she didn’t care for the first face we saw when I pulled into the compound car park.
Bear. The mechanic that had followed River O’Brian from the burned-down garage in Porth Luck. He kinda smiled at her from time to time, and she always hid behind my legs. Call me overprotective, but it made me hate him.
“Daddy?” Ivy tried to pry my knuckles open. “Can we go find Lili now?”
I stopped glaring at Bear’s retreating back and focused on my kid. She was tiny. I wanted to pick her up, but she was getting less keen on that as the years rolled by, especially around Liliana. Physically, their six-year age gap wasn’t that noticeable, but Liliana wasolder. Her dad didn’t carry her around and so Ivy didn’t want that either.
It was the only bad thing about their cute friendship. Bad forme, at least, and my cranky heart.
We found Liliana and Embry by the outdoor kitchen Cam had finished building a while back. Mateo had painted the brick walls an off-white colour, leaving a blank canvas for Liliana. That kid was mad talented and she’d created a mystical forest scene across the wide expanse, but she’d sectioned off spaces and left them for her favourite people to fill in, painting them only with the colours she’d decided belonged to them.
Mine was lilac, a choice I suspected had more to do with Ivy’s new favourite colour than mine.
Folk’s, nestled between Rubi’s hot pink and Saint’s forest green, was the same moon blue as his eyes. As Ivy danced away from me to reunite with her BFF, the small segment of painted bricks was all I could see.
He kissed me.
All week long, I’d pushed it out of my mind, too focused on getting my daughter back. But now that I had her and she’d pretty much ditched me for Liliana, the rush of that night barrelled into me like a freight train. As if his mouth on mine had been a punch to the gut, not a featherlight brush of lips. Despite the paint fumes tainting the air, his ocean breeze scent surrounded me. His gentle Norfolk accent. The dry heat of his palm wrapped around my jaw.
He’d never told me what he was testing. If we’d passed or failed. And I hadn’t seen him since. In between chasing Lauren around, I’d been away on the wagons, and Folk had been wherever he went when he wasn’t here. Our paths hadn’t crossed at all, and now the stars had aligned—for now—in the little world I’d built around Ivy, I realised how much that bugged me. I wanted to see him, if only to convince myself that nothing had changed between us when, in fact,everythinghad, and I didn’t need to see him to know that.
“Hey.”
I blinked to find Embry peering up at me from the ground. He was leaning against a finished patch of wall, legs stretched out in front of him, no shoes on his socked feet. His hair was as dark as Ivy’s was light, his glittery blue gaze six times as curious. Embry was the club’s chaplain. It was his job to assess my emotional state, and he was too good at it for me to look him in the eye for long.
Knees cracking, I crouched down and bumped his extended fist. “Hey yourself.”
“Everything okay?”
I nodded and checked in with Ivy. She was already elbow deep in paint, another jumper destroyed, but I’d learned my lesson the hard way since she’d started school and I had a stash of spares at home. Who cared if she got paint in her hair? I’d wash it out.
“It’s nice to see you both,” Embry pressed. “Where’ve you been sleeping while she’s been gone?”
“Why are you asking me that?”
“I came to see you last night. You weren’t home.”
“You need something from me?”
“Only to know you’re okay.” Embry rolled a mint around his mouth. “Which I see you arenow, but if you’re having trouble sleeping, you can talk to me about it.”
“That’s more likely to put you to sleep than me.”
“Everything puts me to sleep these days, man.”
