“The whole unhinged-animal-beast-losing-your-mind thing?”
I laugh at her phrasing, then shake my head. “No, baby, it’s not even close to being normal. But we have a connection?—”
She rolls her eyes.
I lean down, lay a gentle kiss against her lips… or as gentle as I can be in this moment. “Pout, roll your eyes, look at me like I’m crazy, I don’t give a damn. It’s the truth. Apart from anything else, our child means we’llalwaysbe connected. But it’s more than that. That night we spent together…”
“Yeah, it was hot,” she murmurs.
“It was more than hot. You made me forget, Ava, about everything. That’s a miracle in my book.”
“It is… interesting,” she murmurs. “But you can’t just expect me to accept all of this likethat.” She snaps her fingers.
“Let’s go on a date, then,” I tell her. “Slow things down. Try and attempt to be normal. You can bring the little guy, or we cango alone. I’m fine with either. I’ve missed you, Ava. I know you might struggle to believe that, but it’s the truth.” I lean closer and kiss her again. This time, she responds by taking my face in her hands and stroking her tongue against mine. “I’ve missed you so much.”
“I’ve missed you too,” she murmurs, then sighs. “Okay, a date. But it’s conditional, Rafe. Everything with us is conditional until I feel like I’m on steady ground.”
“I thought you were dead,” I murmur, tracing my thumb over her knuckles. “Just having the chance to prove myself is more than I thought I was going to get.”
The look in her eyes is devastating, like she wants to trust me but knows she shouldn’t. I get the strong, unshakable feeling that I’ve never met someone so complex, conflicted, trapped between the dark and the light. The mob world and the civilian one.
For a heart breaking second, I’m struck with clarity, with certainty…
I should leave her alone.
I push the thought away as best as I can, but it lingers, ugly and with too much truth in it. I want her, want to be in my son’s life, but before I returned, she was doing well. She was making the best of it.
She strokes her hand along my face. “What are you thinking?” she murmurs.
“Noth—”
“No more lies, remember?” she cuts in.
I swallow. Dammit, she’s right.
“I was thinking that it might be better for you if I walked out that door and never came back.”
She nods matter-of-factly. “Hmm, it might be. I guess that’s what we’re trying to figure out.” She stands, then offers me her hand. “Do you want to say goodbye to Theo?”
I guess that’s my cue…
She shifts on the spot, biting down, her legs pressed together as she’s trying to fight the aftershocks of the insanity of what we did on this couch. I take her hand, stand, and pull her into a hug.
“I don’t want to say goodbye to either of you, Ava. But yeah, let’s do it.”
She makes a point of distancing herself from me before we walk into the dining room. When Mr. Ward looks at me, it’s like he knows what I just did to his daughter in the next room. Shames pricks me, then another wave of heat hits me as I realize that I’d do it all over again without a second thought.
Mrs. Ward stands and offers me Theo. I take him carefully, still a little afraid I might somehow hurt him just by being close. But when he peels his eyes open and stares up at me, all doubt drains away. I lean down, whispering, “I love you, little man.”
CHAPTER 11
AVA
“Iagreed to the date to get more information,” I tell Theo the next morning as I drive him to Mom and Dad’s house before going to work.
He makes a murmuring noise that sounds suspiciously like,Yeah, right…
Last night was a confusing, beautiful mess. First, there was the fact that my parents’ defenses dropped far more than I knew they planned. They felt the same tugging of emotion as I did when they watched Rafe with Theo. They experienced the same confusion, the same sudden approval.
