Page 99 of The Trouble with Flings

I glance at Jennifer just as she looks over. Her lips curve sweetly, but just as quickly, concern rises in her eyes, as if she just realized I’m talking with her father. I wink, letting her know all is well, and the light in her eyes returns before Dixie says something that draws her attention back to their conversation.

“That’s my girl,” I say before I can check it.

Her father gives me an approving nod. “She’s a fierce one, but her toughness only tells half the story.” He motions for me to follow him down the hall and stops before a picture of Jennifer and her Great Dane lying on the couch sleeping, her lanky arm wrapped around the dog, who’s bigger than she is. “Biscuit?” I ask.

“Yeah. She told you about him?”

“A little bit.”

Jacob shakes his head. “We’re not allowed to bring him up. That dog was her whole world. He slept on her bed and followed her everywhere.” He huffs out a quiet laugh and points out another picture farther down the wall of Jennifer and Biscuit in a blanket fort. She’s got a flashlight on her lap and a book in her hands.

“These don’t really belong on the Wall of Shame, but she’d never allow them to be displayed on their own, so we pretend they’re silly,” he says with a sorrowful lilt to his voice. “She used to build that fort and read to him in it every night.”

“She really loved him,” I say quietly.

“More than you can imagine. When Biscuit got sick, she refused to leave his side. She sat on the floor with him for hours, reading to him, talking to him like he understood every word. When he took a turn for the worse, she told him he didn’t have to be scared.”

Jacob’s jaw tightens, and mine does, too, picturing her brave face while her young heart was breaking.

“She was only fifteen, and she never shed a tear,” he says. “She held it together better than most adults would, but she didn’t come through that loss unscathed. Her grief came out in other ways.”

“Like what?” I ask.

“Anger mostly. She was out for vengeance against the world that had stolen her best friend. She became the most rebellious of my children, and the thing is, it was understandable.” He stares at the picture of Jennifer and Biscuit for a moment before turning a serious look on me. “Like I said, don’t let that armor she wears so well fool you.”

“There’s no danger of that,” I reassure him. “I know all about brave faces. I admire and respect Jen’s strength and her ability to hold everything together, but I hope one day she’ll realize that with me, she doesn’t have to.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

Jennifer

I stare absently out the window as we drive back to the city, tonight’s conversations playing in my head on a frazzling loop. The announcement, the silence, Thane shouting about the baby. My mother’s hand over her heart, and Fitz’s voice, steady and sure, cutting through all of it. I’m crazy about Jennifer, and I love our baby.

He didn’t just walk in there and say all the right things. He listened and tried to waylay their fears, and mine, and in return, my family couldn’t say enough nice things about him. I swear my mother hugged him as long as she hugged me when we said goodbye. I don’t know what went down between him and my father or Jace, much less when he was downstairs with the rest of the guys playing with the kids. But Fitz must have worked more magic, because when they came upstairs, he had Kyleigh on piggyback, a drawing of a race car from Thane that included Fitz standing next to Rush as part of the pit crew, and he and the guys had inside jokes we girls weren’t privy to.

He fit like he was always meant to be a part of us. The thought hunkers down in my chest. I close my eyes against the urge to keep it from burrowing too deep.

“You’re kind of quiet over there, wild girl.” Fitz puts his hand on my thigh. “You okay?”

His touch loosens some of the knots in my chest. “Yeah. I’m okay. I’m glad you were there. Thank you for coming,” I say, but the words feel insufficient. How do you sum up a night like this? How do you thank someone for being everything you didn’t know you needed? “The girls had a lot of questions.”

“I’m not surprised. My family will, too.”

I almost forgot this was our test run.

“What are they worried about?” he asks.

“Everything, but mostly me. How it’ll affect my work and what I’ll do for daycare. How it’s going to work with us.” Anxiety rushes through me as I rattle off a litany of other things they asked about.

Fitz listens patiently, nodding, like it’s all very reasonable.

“Jayla has strong opinions about childbirth and epidurals and parenting. What she’s learned, what she fears, and Dixie was like, Just chill. Babies aren’t that hard to figure out. Feed them, change them, and love them.”

“I like Dixie’s attitude,” he says. “But we’ve got plenty of time to figure it all out, and we’ve got books and family and friends who have already been through this, many more than once. We’re not paving the way. We’re just finding the right path for us and our baby.”

He’s so confident, he makes it sound easy. But what if we don’t? What if we get it wrong? What if I lose myself in the process? Plenty of moms do. “My mother wants to come stay with me after the baby’s born, which is sweet, but my apartment is the size of a large closet. I love my mom, but I’ll lose my mind.”

“I’ll get you a bigger place.”