But, he was probably hurting horribly.
And, ultimately, if he’d wanted me to act like I knew him, he would’ve introduced himself as an old friend and not as ‘Josiah Paldecki, nice to meet you.’
God, the feel of his hand around my own still burned. I felt like it was seared onto my skin.
“So you’re looking into expanding up here?”
We were still finishing up the entrees and conversation was still flowing amongst the men. There was one man to the side of me that separated Liner and me. The expanse between us was excruciating.
I wanted to be next to him. I wanted to feel his heat up against my own.
I wanted to be in bed with him, while simultaneously being exactly where I was.
My mind was running a million miles an hour, and I couldn’t figure out which I wanted more.
Him to sit next to me, or him to be holding me while we basked in the peace and quiet of my home.
The idea of having to separate, though, to drive separate vehicles while I went to pick up Linnie and him being in his own vehicle? Well, that sounded like the most awful kind of torture.
And God, Linnie was going to be so excited.
Speaking of, I looked at my watch and grimaced.
I was cutting it close too. I had less than a half hour to get back to the office and then get to the school pick-up.
Our lunch had gone way, wayyyy over.
We had gone way over the original estimate of about an hour and were now already approaching two and a half hours. And no end in sight.
I looked at my watch again and knew that I’d have to leave.
I stood up and smiled at my boss. “If I don’t go now, I’m not going to be able to make it to the school pick-up. I’m sorry for cutting it short.”
I started to pull out my wallet from my purse, but a big, massive hand stopped me.
I knew it was Liner’s, and my heart started to pound as I met those eyes. “I’m paying.”
I barely refrained from rolling my eyes and saying, “You’re paying whether I want you to pay or not, apparently.”
Instead, I smiled at him. “Okay.”
I felt like a lovesick fool.
I was deliciously sore. Overly happy. And I wanted to cry.
Happy tears, but tears nonetheless.
“Do you need a ride?” he asked softly, reluctantly allowing his hand to slip from mine.
The man that was between us was sitting back in his seat to allow Liner to reach over him, and the look on his face, as if he could tell that there was something going on between us, was enough to have me blushing.
I didn’t know the lineman all that well.
I did know that they were all big, hulking alpha men that didn’t miss a single thing.
Especially something so obvious as what Liner and I had.
“Umm, I just called an Uber,” I admitted.
Liner’s face darkened. “Cancel it. I’ll take you.”
I opened my mouth to deny him, but the man’s face between us had me biting my tongue.
He looked amused by the situation and clearly thought that I wouldn’t be winning the argument.
“Okay,” I admitted defeat. “But you can come back after.”
He was already shaking his head. “No can do. I have to go to a couple of other area offices while I’m down.”
Those words made my heart sink.
He did?
“Okay,” I said as I pushed my chair back farther and skirted around it.
Liner stood as well and tossed three crisp hundred-dollar bills on the table.
“I’ll see y’all tomorrow,” he said as he did the same with his own chair. “And please, take your time with lunch. I know we haven’t had time to finish all the courses.”
Some of them had just ordered dessert at Liner’s urging.
I hadn’t because I’d been too nervous to eat.
Not because of the time—I knew that I’d get to the school in time to pick Linnie up—but because of the man that I was all too aware of two seats down from mine. Watching my every move.
“If you don’t mind, I have to stop at a satellite office before we head all the way to the office,” Liner said sweetly, betraying nothing.
I nodded my head and swallowed hard. “Sure. As long as you don’t mind me getting my kiddo first.”
Liner shrugged as if he could care less. “Of course.”
That was when we made it far enough away that the table behind us wouldn’t hear.
“I just about died during that lunch,” he said softly as he held the door open for me.
I laughed softly as I brushed past him on the way out the door. “You have no idea.”
Chapter 22
Triscuits are what I imagine a scarecrow would taste like.
-Liner to his father
Liner
To say that Linnie was happy to see me in the truck would be an understatement.
Instead of getting in the back door which was held open for her by the teachers, she crawled through the front door, and inside the cab of the truck, only to crawl straight over her mother and throw herself at me.
“Liner!”
The teachers started laughing with delight, then closed the back door with a wave. “Y’all have a good one!”
With that, we were informed to move up so we could get Linnie settled into her car seat. Which we did after about eight more hugs.
“Did you bring Monster?” were the first words out of her mouth once she’d gotten settled in.
I shook my head as I maneuvered around other parked cars to head out to the road that would lead us away from the school.
“No,” I answered. “I left him with Castiel. Remember him?”
I watched her nod her head in the rearview mirror, and I grinned at the look of disappointment that was on her face at hearing those words.
It was like I’d forgotten to bring her best friend.
“Would you like to go to that cupcake store that I saw on the way here to pick you up?” I asked, hoping bribery would take that sad look off her face.
Linnie’s eyes lit up and she started nodding immediately. Sadness forgotten.
“Yes!” she practically squealed. “Yes, yes, yes, yes!”
I looked over at the woman on my right. “Do you think that means she wants a cupcake?”
Theo’s lips twitched. “She’s been begging me for weeks to go there, but seriously, that place is hopping in the afternoons. There’s a line out the door. I keep telling her I’ll take her when it’s not busy, but that place stays busy. I’ve never passed by it without there being a line.”
I saw what she meant five minutes later when I pulled into the parking lot. There wasn’t a single parking space anywhere, causing me to park in the Lowe’s parking lot that was three down from the cupcake place.
“Wow,” I said as I took all the people in. “This better be the best damn—darn—cupcake in all the land for this kind of line!”
Linnie, after being let out of the vehicle by Theo, walked up to me and put her tiny hand into my own.
My heart gave a little squeeze, and a wave of sadness washed over me.
I hadn’t really given myself enough time to ever think about the fact that I couldn’t have kids. But knowing what I was missing now? What it felt like to have a child that was half Theo’s so trusting that she’d grab my hand instead of her mother’s? Well, that was just a nail in the coffin that I could never pull back out.
I loved my dad.
The moment that he’d woken up from surgery and been ‘himself’ again, he’d cried. He’d cried big, hulking tears and apologized to me over and over again. He did that for an entire month until finally I pulled him to the side and explained that I’d forgiven him.
But right now? I was mad at him all over again.
It wasn’t fair.
I wanted kids…and I wanted kids with Theo.
And I’d
never have them.
That saddened me more than I would ever be willing to admit.
“Oh, I got to take a bite of Jessica’s cupcake at lunch a couple of days ago,” Linnie chattered. “It was so good. And it was five days old. She found it in her mom’s car in a plastic bag. Her mom told her not to eat it because it was so old, but Jessica brought it to school anyway. Her mom was wrong. It wasn’t bad.”
I looked down at the little cherub holding my hand and decided that I’d need to give her a lesson in why five days was too long to go to be able to safely eat something that’d been left in the car.
Gross.
“Ummmm,” I said. “How about you don’t do that anymore.”
Theo started to giggle softly at my side, then could no longer contain it and started laughing in full.
I watched her laugh and felt the sadness from earlier start to dissipate.
Between her and Linnie…I had all that I would ever need.
I was certain of that.
***
“Any idea why your brother would say that he needed Tara or you?” I asked.
Theo shook her head.
“No,” she said quietly, trying to keep her voice down so she didn’t wake Linnie who’d just gone to sleep—finally—after her major sugar rush from this afternoon. “I have no idea…but I’m going to find out.”
My phone rang in my pocket and I grinned at it.
“Maybe you won’t be needing to find out at all,” I said as I pressed the green phone icon on my phone. “Hello?”
“So I found out what it was,” my private investigator said. “When you called, something niggled at my brain, and I started doing some digging. Had a friend help me.”
I frowned. “Okay, so what was it?”
“It’s actually kind of funny when you think about it,” he said. “The mother left both girls her fortune. If one twin died, it went to the other twin. Passed down through the generations of females. The boys and husband were excluded from anything that the mother left. The little niggle that I remembered was reading an article in the newspaper about twenty-five years ago. A millionaire’s wife died and left her fortune to her two girls. Two girls that were too young to take care of the estate. Father had to go to court to get appointed guardianship of their estate, and the court denied him. Assigned a lawyer in town as their appointed guardians. Last I ever heard of it until today.”
My brain was racing with all the implications of what he’d just told me.
“Your girl has about five hundred and ninety million to her name,” he continued.
I wondered if Theo had been aware of her money—which I highly doubted—and if she understood the implications of it all. Which was even more unlikely.
“Thanks, man,” I said. “And did you find anything about the dad?”
“I thought he might leave to go bail out the kid, but he didn’t,” he answered. “Been watching his house for about three hours now, and not a single thing has happened. A couple of the people that work on the estate have come and gone, but ultimately he’s still holed up all alone.”
I sighed. “If that changes, please let me know.”
He grunted out an affirmative and then hung up, causing me to drop my hand from my face and toss the phone onto the couch cushion between me and Theo.
Theo was leaning against the arm of the couch, a cup of coffee in one hand and a rather large blueberry muffin in the other, staring blankly at the television screen.
“You hear any of that?” I asked her.
She turned to study me. “Most all of it. He talks really loud.”
She looked sick to her stomach, which caused me to pull her into my arms, coffee, muffin and all. She immediately shifted so that she could place both items on the coffee table before turning fully in my arms, her hands smoothing up my chest to come to a halt on my shoulders.
“I’m so sorry about your sister, baby.” I pressed my lips to her head. “My guess is that your father latched onto the one kid he knew he could control.” I blew out a frustrated breath. “The PI is going to do a little digging into this situation, but I think that you’ve just found your reason for being treated like absolute dirt for your entire life.”
Her body stilled, and her beautiful blue eyes turned up to catch mine.
“My sister means nothing to me. No more than a bug that hit my windshield and splattered all over it.” she whispered. “What worries me is that I’m going to have to go back.”
As much as I hated to admit it, the only person that could figure this all out for sure was her. In the end, she was the part-controller of all that money.
If this was ever going to end and that father of hers was ever going to pay, it had to come from Theo.
“Theo, baby,” I said softly. “I’m a millionaire in my own right. We could live here. We could continue to live our lives the way it was always supposed to be lived. Quiet and peaceful.”
She looked down at her hands. “You wouldn’t take me as a coward for taking that road?”
I immediately started shaking my head. “No. I think that you’re brave and courageous, selfless and kind. I think that you’ve lived a very hard life, and you can’t win a battle you didn’t know that you were fighting for your life in. I think that you’ve given it your all, and that you’ve finally been given all the pieces of the puzzle that will help you move on with your life, but still know why everyone in your family did what they did. If I was being a hundred percent honest? I think you should leave it alone. I think that you should stay here, and we should live our life.”
“What about your family?” she asked. “What about your club brothers? Your job? Your life there?”
I shrugged. “I’d miss the absolute hell out of everyone but…I love you, Theo. I’ve gone months without you, and I know which one that I can stomach living without more…and that’s not you. It’ll never be you.”
Her eyes closed, and her hand went to her chest to rub over her heart as if it was hurting her. Hurting her because of me being hurt.
“Baby, listen,” I ordered. “I’ll be okay.”
Chapter 23
I only do butt stuff at the gym.
-T-shirt
Theo
I had no doubt that he could.
But I now knew what a loving family felt like. I’d seen how Liner had been treated by his club brothers. Had seen them come around and shoot the shit with him just because they were in the neighborhood. And I didn’t want him to have to live without that for the rest of his life.
But then his mouth was on mine, and I no longer was thinking about the future or the past.
I was thinking about the here and the now.
The way his mouth felt on mine.
The way his hands were running down my shirt, urgently seeking the hem so he could push it up and over my head in one swift, suave move.
My hands did their own thing, going to his face and his beard, stroking it as I slowly started to grind myself down onto him.
“We need to take this to the bedroom,” I said. “Linnie went to bed, but there’s no way of knowing if she’ll actually stay there after all those cupcakes and muffins she devoured.”
Linnie had been right.
The place that she’d been begging to go was a massive bakery.
There were muffins, cupcakes, cakes, scones. Anything you could ever want was there in that one perfect shop.
And though the wait in line was thirty minutes long, it was well and truly worth it.
Liner didn’t waste time scooping me up off the couch and taking me to my bedroom.
Nor did he waste time closing the door and locking it.
“You set the alarm, right?” I asked as he laid me down on the bed.
He nodded his head and reached for his shirt and grinned and hunched his back, curving it to allow the shirt to slip free more easily.
“Yes,” he answered as he reached for my jeans. “I
did.”
I licked my lips and watched as he unbuttoned them, then slowly shimmied them off my hips.
His eyes were so intense that it was almost hard to keep my eyes on his, but I managed it through sheer force of will.
That, and I had a feeling if I let his gaze go, I’d never get it back again. Mostly because he was watching me with so much intensity, as if he was trying to convey his every thought and feeling that had crossed his mind while we were apart, that I knew he was having trouble holding my gaze, too.
“I missed you,” he said simply.
I felt tears start to gather in my eyes and the familiar burn behind them that indicated that I was only seconds away from letting them fall.
But I managed to hold onto them somehow, and he gave me a sad smile.
“I spent every night dreaming of this,” he said. “Every single night.”
That was when the first tear fell.
“I’d lie awake at night, wondering if you were feeling the same way, too,” he rasped, his voice like sandpaper. “I’d think, if I could just make it through tonight, I could wake up and forget all about you while I buried myself in work.”
I swallowed hard as another tear fell.
“But it never worked that way. I’d lie awake for hours thinking. Wondering if you were okay. Hoping that your daughter would keep you busy enough that you weren’t going through the same thing as me.” He pressed a kiss to the inside of my thigh, his beard tickling my skin as he did. “I’m so glad that I don’t have to pretend to be okay anymore.”
A third tear fell.
But before I could get into full-on crying mode, his mouth descended, and I no longer had eye contact with him.
My eyes closed and a fresh set of tears fell, but those were the last as he pushed my legs wide and then carefully dropped his head so that he could take one long swipe of my slit with his tongue.
I shivered as a chill shot straight down my spine.
And the moment his tongue touched my clit?
That shiver went to a full-blown—oh my God, what was that?—feeling.
My legs started to close on their own volition, and Liner caught them before they could slam closed on his head.
He started to chuckle as he caught them with both hands, then slammed them back down onto the bed, this time much wider than I ever would’ve given him on my own.
Snitches Get Stitches (The Bear Bottom Guardians MC Book 8) Page 18
