Those two made every day brighter.
And I loved them both. With every fiber of my being.
Now that it was the offseason, I had a lot of time on my hands.
After I sent the kids off to school, I went surfing, got a workout in, and still had—checks watch—ugh, three more hours before they got home.
I didn’t remember being this bored after the final game was played in past seasons.
That’s because you were busy sleeping your way through Europe for months on end.
Those days were long gone, and truth be told, I didn’t miss them. The stream of meaningless hookups didn’t hold a candle to the intimacy I shared with my wife.
My grin was automatic when thinking about the woman I loved.
And as if the mere thought of her conjured her presence, Arizona burst into our bedroom, where I was folding laundry—I was domestic as fuck these days.
She shut the door, flicked the lock, and turned around. Her eyes were a little wild, her breathing shallow.
I knew what that meant.
This afternoon just got a whole lot more interesting.
“Hell yes.” The words flew from my mouth as I reached behind my head and tugged off my T-shirt.
The fabric obscured my vision for no more than a millisecond, but in that time, Arizona had managed to cross the room. With her only a few inches away, I reached out to snag her around the waist and haul her flush against my body. What I wasn’t expecting was for her to take both hands and shove at my chest with all her might.
I was caught completely off guard as my ass hit the mattress behind me.
Oh, so that’s how she wanted to play today. Fine by me.
Arizona got right up in my face. “Did you tell Austin you’d help him find his father?”
Dirty talk had never been her strong suit, but even she had to know that bringing up the kids in the midst of foreplay was the opposite of sexy.
It struck me that I might have misread this situation.
“Uh, yeah, I did.”
She stepped back suddenly, sheer terror flickering over her features. “Why? Why would you do that?”
“What’s the big deal? The kid wants to know where he comes from.”
Maniacal laughter filled the air as my wife paced the room. “The big deal? You wanna know what the big deal is?” she huffed. “Thebig deal, Levi, is that Austin’s father was a drug-dealing, human-trafficking piece of shit.”
Excuse me, what now?
Arizona’s throat bobbed on a swallow before she rocked my world with her following confession.
“And I killed him.”
Chapter 28
Arizona
WithLevistaringatme with unblinking eyes, the silence stretched on for what felt like days.
That last part just kinda slipped out. I’d fully intended to take it with me to the grave. But the burden of that secret had been chipping away at me for more than a decade, and having confessed, already, I felt lighter.
