Page 140 of Golden Ruin

I kiss her cheek this time. “You missed a device. I tracked Jax’s tablet.”

“Shit,” she laughs, swiping tears from her cheeks when we separate.

I close and lock the door behind me, looking around the cabin.

“He’s asleep,” she says, knowing my thoughts are on Jax. “He has no idea what’s going on. All he knows is he and Mommy are spending a few days at the lake.”

I bring her back to me, hugging her around her shoulders. “You did the right thing. I saw the paparazzi swarming the house. He didn’t need to see that.”

Lex nods. “Shit’s so fucked up.”

She blots away more tears with her sleeve, and I take her hand, leading her toward the couch to talk. We sit close, and she falls into me when I lean back, laying on my chest as we stare at the fire. There’s so much to talk about, but I need a minute, and apparently, she does too.

“I need to know you’re okay,” are the first words to leave my mouth, rubbing her back while we relax into the moment.

“I’m better now.”

That’s an honest answer. One that doesn’t dismiss the trauma today brought with it.

My thoughts are on her father again, and I need to clear my name, need her to know I didn’t betray her trust. Not even when we were apart and thought our past was it for us.

“I didn’t tell her.”

The only sound in the room is the crackling of embers as the logs shift.

“I know.”

That wasn’t the answer I expected, so my hand goes still on her back. “How?”

She shrugs and wraps her arms further around me. “At first, I fell for it,” she admits. “I told myself the only way Tiffany could’ve known something like that was if you told her, shared one of the stupidest moments from my past. But then, I just… came to my senses.”

My brow gathers. “What do you mean?”

She thinks for a moment. “The hard part was believing you were to blame. The easy part was reminding myself that you wouldn’t have done that. Not even while we were apart. So… I knew there had to be another way.”

I sit with that for a moment, setting aside the speech I rehearsed on the plane, the words I laid out to plead my case alongside the screenshot Joss sent over. But she already knows.

Shit.

I’m speechless.

“Unless this was your way of soft-launching a confession,” she teases, peering up at me.

I laugh when she cracks a smile but pause to kiss her forehead.

How the hell did I get so lucky? Landing a girl who’s a fucking knockout on the outside, and just as beautiful on the inside?

“No, this definitely isn’t that,” I say, somehow feeling settled despite the day’s chaos. “I came here prepared to have to convince you, but I guess I had Joss look into it for nothing.”

“It wasn’t for nothing. Maybe you needed to know how it happened.”

She isn’t wrong. I need to get to the bottom of anything that wounds her this deeply. So, she’s right. I don’t regret recruiting Joss.

“Tiffany hired an investigator.”

Lexi scoffs, shaking her head.

“All she knew about your dad is that our breakup had something to do with a situation regarding him. Turns out he mentioned a few things about it on Facebook back when it happened.”