by Gamet, Amy
“Why are we even with this guy?”
“Who, Sloan?”
“No, the other strange man you hunted down then brought with us back to Chicago.”
Joanne turned around. “He’s helping us, and I, for one, am very glad he’s here.”
April bobbed her head. “Yeah, I could tell when you two were talking.”
So, that’s what the attitude was about. She’d overheard their conversation. The very last thing Jo wanted to do was talk about her love life with her eleven-year-old daughter, but apparently she needed to do it anyway. “Are you upset about something you overheard?”
April rolled her eyes and looked out her window. “Forget it.”
Sloan finished loading wood and they drove to their campsite. “I’m just going to level out the camper,” he said.
“Can I come?” asked Lucas, bounding up from the back of the RV.
“Sure thing, sport.”
Jo considered getting out, too, just to avoid a run-in with April, but didn’t act fast enough.
“So what was he, like, your boyfriend? This is the guy you told me about.”
Shit. There was no way around this mess. She needed to go straight through. “Yes.”
“Is he still?”
“Of course not.”
“But you wanted to marry him instead of Dad. Because that’s no big deal,” she added sarcastically. “I’m sure everybody’s mom married their second choice of a husband.”
She hesitated, unsure of exactly where this was going and suddenly feeling like she was walking through a minefield. “It’s complicated, April.”
“Doesn’t seem complicated to me. You had very strong feelings for him when you were young. I totally get that, because I’m young and I have strong feelings, too.”
“So, that’s what this is about. I was not eleven at the time, young lady. Sloan and I didn’t start dating until we were fifteen.”
“Which is, like, a whole thousand days older than I am, so a totally different situation. Right. I couldn’t possibly understand real feelings a thousand days before you did. Oh, wait! Yes, I could, because I’m not a little kid anymore.”
Joanne rolled her eyes. “I am so not up for this right now.”
“Well, I’m sorry if my timing isn’t convenient, Mother.”
The patronizing tone in her daughter’s voice had Jo spinning around and pointing her finger. “Look, me falling in love at fifteen is not the same thing as you professing your love to a complete stranger on Instagram!”
“He is not a stranger!” She held up her phone.
Jo grabbed the device. “Absolutely ridiculous.” She scrolled through the applications.
“Give that back!”
“Did you already install it? Who am I kidding, it was the first thing you did, right?” She shook her head, irritation with herself far greater than her annoyance with her child. She should have realized April would go right back to her conversation at the first opportunity.
There it was, the familiar icon winking back at her, and with a frustrated jab, she deleted it. “You just lost your phone.”
“Mom!”
Sloan pulled open his door. “All set.”
She kept yelling at April. “Clearly, you can’t be trusted. I’m so freaking angry right now.”
“What’s the matter?”
Jo hopped out of the camper, desperately needing to get away from her daughter before she exploded. Lucas was arranging logs in the fire pit, Christmas music already playing on a small boom box, and she turned on Sloan. “You realize it’s, like, thirty-five degrees out here? Isn’t it a little cold for a fire?”
“Almost forty.” He smiled. “You watched me load the firewood. What did you think I was going to do with it?”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
Lucas whined, “Can’t we please, Mom? Sloan says we can make s’mores.”
Just like camp! The boy was so excited, and some part of her resented that Sloan was mister fun and games, while she was the fun ender, afraid for their lives. “Fine. Sure. Whatever.”
Sloan touched her back, and she jerked away.
He furrowed his brow. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Just go ahead and make your fire.” He crossed to Lucas and instructed him on how to stack the logs so the fire would get plenty of oxygen. David would have made the fire himself or been such a perfectionist about how it should be done that the activity would barely have been fun for Lucas. But Sloan had a way with the boy that clearly said he understood children, and the difference between him and the man she’d married was like salt pressed deep into a festering wound.
She turned away, needing space but unable to go back into the camper without another run-in with April. “I’m going for a walk.”
“Wait.” Sloan handed Lucas a lighter and showed him where to light the fire, earning the boy a pat on the back and a proud smile. “Great job, kid. Grab the marshmallows out of the back of the camper.”
Joanne barely resisted the urge to scream. Sloan jogged to her. “I’ll come with you.”
“I don’t want you to come with me. I want to be alone.”
“What happened? Did I miss something?”
She huffed. “April and I were fighting, then you’re out here with your father-of-the-year routine, and I’m about to lose my shit.”
“What? You’re mad at me? What did I do?”
“God, just leave me alone.”
“Lucas,” he called. “We’re going for a walk. Keep an eye on the fire.”
“What part of leave me alone did you not understand?”
He put his hand on her back and guided her away from their campsite. “If you’re pissed at me, I’d like to know why.”
“I told you why!”
“Because I’m being nice to your kids?”
“Yes. And the s’mores, and the fire-making lessons.”
“That makes no sense at all.”
“It makes perfect sense.” She swatted his hand off her back. “And stop touching me.”
It was her fight with April that had set her off, her insecurities as a parent that had really gotten her going. But how could she make him understand? She pushed the words past the knot that had appeared in her throat. “David would never do that.”
“Touch you?”
Heat crept into her cheeks. “No. The way you helped Lucas make a fire. He wouldn’t do that.” He said nothing, the steady rhythm of their footfalls the only sound. “He wasn’t good with the kids. He was easily frustrated, and when he got frustrated, he got mean.”
“To you, too?”
“Sometimes. Not like my dad did.”
“What happened in the camper just now?”
She blew out air. “Which part? The part where she overheard our conversation or the part where she installed Instagram on her new phone?”
He winced. “I thought that might happen.”
“It’s my own fault. I wasn’t watching her phone as much as I should. By the time I found the conversation, things had gone too far. They’re talking about meeting up. They call themselves boyfriend and girlfriend.”
A chill went through her and she instinctively moved closer to Sloan, her elbow brushing his as they walked. “Then I came outside, and you were running a Boy Scout meeting for my son, and I felt like a bad parent.”
“You’re not a bad parent.”
“I need you to do something for me.” She stopped walking and he faced her.
“Anything.”
“Don’t be nice to them, Sloan. It isn’t fair.” What she was asking might not be fair, either, but if she was going to make it through the next part of this journey, she needed to lay some ground rules. “They just lost their father, shitty though he may have been. I need you to back off.”
“How is it unfair to be kind to them?”
“It will just make it harder when you leave. Did you see the way Lucas was looking at you back there?”
“We were just makin
g a fire.”
“No, you were creating a relationship with a vulnerable kid who’s so desperate for paternal affection I could cry.”
He lifted his hand and touched her cheek. “Jesus, Jo. Why the hell did you stay with this guy?”
She pulled back as if she’d been slapped. “I didn’t. We were separated just over a year.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“What difference does it make?” She turned away, walking in the opposite direction.
“Don’t walk away from me. Talk to me, Buckley.”
She spun around. “What do you want me to say? That I spent my entire adult life with a man I didn’t love? That marrying him was the biggest mistake of my life? That he was more like my father than I could ever have imagined? Fine. I said it. Now stop rubbing my nose in it. Stop asking me questions I don’t want to answer. Stop asking me for details, and for God’s sake, don’t ask me why I stayed with him. You weren’t even there.”
“I should have been.”
She was breathing heavily, her bottom lip trembling. They stared at each other in the dim light, a cold breeze blowing softly between them. So much time, so many mistakes. But there was heat in his stare, and desire swirled to life in her belly. It was as if, by admitting the truth to him and to herself, she’d knocked down the barrier she’d been fortifying against him.
Sloan.
She ached with a visceral need for this man and was struck by how different her desire for him had become over time. She was a grown woman now. Experience, heartache, and loneliness had left their marks. She understood passion in a way she hadn’t back then. She longed to feel the weight of him between her hips, holding her down. To taste the salt on his gleaming skin, to smell his spicy scent as he took control of her body.
He closed the distance between them, his hand slowly moving to grip the swell of her hip, and her breath hitched as blood rushed to her most sensitive places.
She wanted him to kiss her, but he didn’t move, those damn eyes fixed on hers. She knew instinctively what he needed, and she lifted her hand to his chest, the puffy nylon of his jacket separating her from what she really wanted to touch. Slowly, she slid her fingers to his warm neck, lightly trailing her nails up and into the softness of his hair.
His head came down and he kissed her, his mouth at once familiar and new, the taste of him exactly as she’d remembered. She pressed her chest against his as his arms came around her, holding her tightly in place as she opened her mouth to his.
I came back for you, Buckley.
Words couldn’t change the past, but they could soothe the wound left in its wake. All these years she’d thought he didn’t love her; now she was in his arms. She fitted herself more tightly against him, desire and need demanding more.
A growl came from deep in his chest, a primal sound she recognized from their youth, and her breath came fast and hard. He trailed kisses down the column of her neck and nuzzled her ear, a sensation she hadn’t felt since the last time they’d made love so long before.
She wanted all of this man, and she wanted him now. Her conscience nagged at her to think of the children, and she could have wept for the loss of freedom that came with motherhood in that instant.
Kisses would have to do.
She unzipped his coat and slipped her hands inside, the heat of his body on her hands like slipping beneath the covers of a lover’s bed. He did the same, their jackets open to each other and the sensitive flesh of her nipples raking over the hardness of his chest through their clothes.
He turned them around, a tree pressing into her back as he continued his assault on her good judgment. One hand slipped beneath her shirt to cup her breast through her bra, and she lifted her leg around him.
“Jesus, Jo,” he ground out against her, his hardness pressing into her heat. She reveled in the feel of him, the hem of her coat up high and the bark of the tree digging into her back.
“Mom?”
They jumped apart. Lucas stood some fifteen feet away, his brows crumpled together and an accusing stare shooting from his mother to Sloan and back again.
13
Every bone in Sloan’s body told him to talk to the boy, but Joanne had asked him to keep his distance, so he lay in his makeshift bed listening to Lucas toss and turn long after the others were asleep.
She’d spoken privately to Lucas right when they returned, but from the forlorn glances the boy kept throwing in Sloan’s direction, the talk had done little to ease his pain. It had to be hard to see his mom kissing Sloan so soon after his father’s death, even if they were separated. David was barely cold in the ground, and it occurred to Sloan he might be a bastard for doing what he’d done.
That didn’t make him sorry for kissing her, Lucas’s feelings and sheer bastard-hood aside. Hell, he’d wanted to do a lot more than kiss her, his body remembering every nuance of hers and longing to see if making love to her was as good as he remembered. If her kids hadn’t been nearby, he would have taken her right against that tree and found out but good.
He punched his pillow and rolled over, the image of Joanne spread open to him in the woods doing nothing for his insomnia. The dog stood and resettled with his head on Sloan’s knee.
Sloan had been intending to help Jo and send her on her way, but now he knew it wouldn’t be so simple. They clearly had unfinished business, at least in bed. He thought of the eager way she pressed herself against him from hip to mouth and shuddered. The chemistry between them had always been off the charts, but now it was on fire.
His phone vibrated from the floor beside his bed, and he picked it up, a text message from Moto visible on the home screen and the light from the device illuminating the space.
FOUND TWO ACCOUNTS AT A BANK IN CHICAGO. BOTH CLEANED OUT ON FRIDAY.
He frowned, typing back, REGAN WAS ALREADY DEAD. GET BANK VIDEO.
“Why were you kissing my mom?”
Lucas was sitting upright in his bed just a few feet away.
So much for not talking.
He put down his phone. “Because I like her.” He debated how much he should share, briefly considering ending the conversation there and going back to bed. But no matter what Joanne had asked him to do, he couldn’t just ignore a kid’s questions—especially one who was clearly in pain. “It upset you to see that, huh?”
“Does that mean you love her?”
“People kiss for different reasons.”
“She didn’t kiss my dad.”
Hmm. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t want to hear more about that. “Not at all?”
“No. If you don’t love her, you shouldn’t kiss her, because she might get confused.”
One side of Sloan’s mouth slid into a smile. “Confused?”
“Yeah. Girls think kissing means you love them. It happened to me with Laney Bastian in second grade.”
“What grade are you in now?”
“Third.”
“That was a long time ago then.”
“Yeah, but still. You’ve got to be careful.”
“I’ll remember that.”
Lucas was quiet for a minute. “I saw my dad kiss his secretary once, but don’t tell my mom because she might get sad.”
“You didn’t tell her?”
“Dad said kissing is complicated.”
“Did they still live together then, your mom and dad?”
“Yeah.”
Even in the darkened camper, Sloan could see the strain on the little boy’s face. “I’ll bet that was hard for you.”
Lucas nodded. Sloan looked to the tiny kitchenette. For every crisis, there was a food that could help. “You hungry? I could go for a snack.” Lucas hopped out of bed, beating Sloan to the cupboard. After finding a bag of chocolate chip cookies, he poured two glasses of milk, careful not to turn on any lights that might disturb April, and they returned to their beds with their food, eating quietly.
After a minute, Lucas spoke around a mouthful of cookies. “She’s no
t bad.”
“Who?”
“My mom. She’s nice, and she makes good brownies.”
Sloan had no idea where this was going. “Good brownies are important.”
“So if you want to love her, you can. Then you can kiss, and she can make you brownies whenever you want.”
Sloan nearly choked. He finished chewing and forced down his food. “Is that what love is about? Kissing and making brownies?”
“You’d have to take out the trash, because that’s what the guy does.”
“I like to cook. Can I be the cook?”
“Sure. She burns stuff sometimes, so I don’t think she’ll mind.” Lucas drained his milk and looked around for a place to put the glass.
“Here.” Sloan held out his hand and returned the glass to the kitchen. “Get some sleep, knucklehead.” He turned to go back to his own bed, when a flash of light outside the window caught his eye. Instinctively, he dropped into a squat, leaving just enough of himself exposed to peer out the tiny window, but it was too dark to see anything. He thought of the night vision goggles and weapons he’d packed in the storage area of the camper, which could be accessed from the master bedroom. “Lucas, stay in your bed. Don’t get up, okay? I’ll be back in a minute.”
14
Joanne awoke to a rustling noise behind her head and sat up, trying to get her bearings.
The camper.
The missing money.
David’s death.
The kiss she’d shared with Sloan.
Oh, God.
More rustling, and she turned, looking at the sleeping Fiona curled up beside her before leaning over the side of the bed to see where the noise was coming from.
Sloan sat up at the same time. “Sorry I woke you. I need to find my night vision goggles.”
He went back into the storage cabinet hidden behind her bed, her eyes focusing on the dark shape outlined by the light vinyl flooring. She gasped. “Is that a gun?”
“Yeah. I saw something outside. I want to check it out.”
Fear shot adrenaline into her bloodstream. “Is somebody out there?”
“I don’t know yet.” He huffed. “I packed my gear so I’d have easy access. How much stuff did you put in here after that?”
