I wriggle my wrist free of his grip. “Apart from the fact my mother is trying to take over, and when I saytake over, I mean she’s trying to turn a sixteenth birthday party into a party for a ten-year-old, complete with Pin the Tail on the freaking Donkey, you’ve gone and invited the entire world to the party! I’ve no idea just how many people are now coming. I’ve no idea exactly how much food we need. I’ve no idea of anything!” I exhale a breath. “It’s too much, King. I think we need to cancel this party.”
He watches me quietly for a moment before saying, “No. That’s not it. What else? And don’t even think about cancelling the party. Meredith has been looking forward to it for months.”
My eyes go wide again. “What do you mean ‘that’s not it’? What else do you think there is?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you.”
“There’s nothing else. I just need you to take over with my mother and make it clear to her that we’re not playing games at this party, that we’re not having party food a child would like, and that she’s not in charge. Can you do that for me?”
His eyes search mine for what feels like the longest time. Like he’s trying hard to get a good read on me in the way he often does. Finally, he says, “I’ll talk with her today.”
I place my hands to his chest and lean into him, relieved. “Thank you.” My husband is good at many things, one of them being handling my mother.
King’s hands slide around my body to rest on my ass and his lips find mine. He kisses me while backing me against the shower tiles. It’s the kind of kiss that lets me know he’s done with our conversation and that he intends on not allowing anything to come between him and what he wants to do to me.
There’s only one problem with that.
I’m not finished talking yet.
I kiss him back, but he clearly senses I’m not fully here for the kiss. Dragging his mouth from mine, he blows out another long breath and looks at me with all his signature frustration. “What else?”
“Travis.”
“Fuck.” He scrubs a hand down his face. “What’s he done now?”
Our fifteen-year-old son is as good at getting himself into trouble at school as our eighteen-year-old son was. Barely a week goes by without a call from Travis’s school reporting yet another incident that King and I have to deal with.
“He and Braxton were kind of involved in a fight at school yesterday.”
“Kind of?”
“You know what those two are like when one of their friends gets himself in a fight. They didn’t instigate it, but because they were involved, they’re being disciplined.” Our son and Devil’s son are best mates and trouble follows them. And since loyalty is so ingrained in them, there’s not one thing that will ever stop them from having a friend’s back.
“Has he been suspended?”
“No. He’s got lunchtime detentions for the next week.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this last night?”
“You came home in a mood, and if I know one thing about parenting with you, it’s not to put you and either of your sons together when you’re both in a mood. Travis spent yesterday afternoon working in the yard after I took his phone off him. He knows to expect a conversation with you over this. And King?” I pause for a moment, finding the right words. “You need to tread carefully with this.”
“No, I need to make it fucking clear that this bullshit has to stop.”
I arch my brows. “Right, so that would have worked on you at fifteen?”
King’s features darken. “What I did at fifteen has nothing to do with this, Lily.”
“I agree, but at least try to think back to how you responded to authority figures at that age. And I think we also need to remember how we got Cade through this kind of stuff.”
“We barely fucking survived Cade.”
“Exactly, which makes me think we need a whole new strategy for Travis.”
King is the kind of man who always has a plan and a next move, but years of parenting have taught him that even when you have all your next moves lined up, there are times those moves are of no consequence. Parenting has taught my husband things that nothing else in the world could ever have taught him.
I watch him now as his mind works through our current dilemma, and I can’t help but fall in love with him a little more. If you’d told me when I gave my heart to him all those years ago that I’d still find reasons to fall even more in love with him almost two decades later, I wouldn’t have believed it possible.
Itispossible to keep falling in love with your soulmate.
