by Ava Storm
I hesitated, chewing on the inside of my lip as I mulled it over. I’d never let any man into the home I’d built with Madelyn. It felt like a huge step. “You’d have to leave after,” I warned. “She wakes up in the night. She doesn’t cry or anything, but I can hear her chattering. And if I can hear her...”
“Whatever it takes.”
That night, I text him at 8:30. She’s asleep. Then I waited impatiently on the living room couch for his knock at the door. I felt effervescent with anticipation. It had been two days since I’d last felt his hands on me, and I couldn’t wait much longer.
He texted me far sooner than I would have expected. I’m here. And then there was a light tap at the door.
“How’d you get here so fast?” I asked, opening it.
“Genius, remember.” He wrapped his arms around me and walked me backward toward the bedroom. We both hesitated as we passed Madelyn’s.
“This is a first for me,” I whispered as we closed my bedroom door behind us. Ford wasted no time pulling my shirt off.
“Don’t tell me you’re a virgin,” he said into my throat.
“No, but I’ve never let anyone over when Madelyn was home.”
“Did your ex-husband sleep in the hall?” He pulled me closer to the bed and sat down, trapping me between his knees.
I froze, wondering how I could have been so stupid. I’d completely forgotten I was supposed to be recently divorced.
He looked up at me, sensing the shift. “What’s wrong?”
“N-nothing. I just don’t like to talk about Alex.”
“Me either.” He pressed his lips against my stomach. “Let’s don’t.”
I was going to slip one day. The knowledge was a cold spot in the warm bed. I was laying across his chest, tracing the line of his jaw with my finger, wondering what my words would sound like in the dark.
You’re Madelyn’s father.
“What are you thinking?” He captured my hand and looked down at me curiously.
“That you should go,” I said honestly. I didn’t want him to, but I didn’t want to risk us falling asleep. And I didn’t want to let him go, but I didn’t want to drive him away either. It was an impossible situation.
He studied me, as though he knew my words had a deeper layer of meaning. “What’s wrong?”
I laid my cheek against his chest, turning my head away so he couldn’t see my eyes. “I think I like this too much.”
His chest vibrated with a low rumble of laughter. “And that’s a problem?”
“Not yet, but it will be if it gets any worse. Or better. You know what I mean. You’re not just a guy at a bar anymore. You’re my boss. And I’m not just a girl at a bar anymore, I’m a mom.”
“It’s complicated,” he admitted, twirling the ends of my hair in his fingers. “But we knew that when we started. If it’s about the office, I can find you an executive assistant position at another company.”
I considered it. It would mean uprooting Madelyn from daycare, but maybe— “No,” I said finally. “The real obstacle is that I’m a mom.”
And you’re a dad.
We were silent for a long time. Then I felt him take a deep breath. “That doesn’t have to be an obstacle, Paige. I’m not some kid eating ogre.”
“The bar isn’t that low,” I murmured. “I don’t want to bring someone around Madelyn unless I think it’s going to be something long term.”
“And you don’t think I will be?”
His voice had a strange timbre to it, like I’d offended him. I propped my chin up in my hand to see his face. He looked back at me impassively. “I think,” I said cautiously, “that you’re used to a completely different lifestyle. Caviar and Broadway, not SpaghettiOs and Nickelodeon. You spend your summer on yachts. We go to the zoo.”
“And there’s no middle ground?”
“I didn’t know you wanted there to be.”
We stared at each other. “What if I did?”
My heart flipped. “Then...so would I.”
“Okay then,” he leaned down to kiss me, like we were sealing a bargain.
I couldn’t say no one warned me. Amanda and Shelly were united in their agreement that what I was doing was a very bad idea.
“Stupid,” Shelly said.
“Cruel and unusual,” Amanda said.
“I will tell him,” I said. But I just couldn’t find the words. I was afraid to aim a blowtorch at what was just starting to heat up. I introduced him to Madelyn on Sunday morning. We were going for a picnic at Loyola Beach, and he met us there.
On the way, I was so nervous that Madelyn seemed to pick up on it. Unusually docile, she held my hand as we looked for a good spot to spread out our blanket. We chose a spot close to the waterline, and she began filling her plastic bucket with heavy wet sand.
I closed my eyes, burying my toes in the sand that was still slightly cool from the night before and letting the breeze blow through my hair. I still couldn’t decide whether this was a dream come true or a nightmare.
A trowel of sand landed on my foot. Madelyn was tired of the bucket. I opened my eyes and smiled at her as she began the laborious process of burying my leg. Every once in a while, I’d push my toes through her carefully arranged sand, and she’d shriek in indignation.
I was laughing when Ford’s shadow fell over us.
“Hi,” Madelyn said, glancing up at him briefly.
“Hi,” he said. He had a cardboard box balanced in one hand that didn’t have a lid.
“Hi,” Madelyn said with more interest, spotting it.
He squatted down beside me, and I breathed in the scent of warm chocolate chunk cookies. “They don’t open until noon,” I said.
“I pulled some strings.”
“Well, Madelyn is very impressed.”
She was already toddling over, her plastic trowel forgotten beside my foot. She steadied herself by grabbing hold of his arm, then reached in for the biggest cookie.
Before she could take it, I broke it in half. “That’s enough sugar for babies,” I said.
“I wasn’t sure if cookies were the right move,” he said, settling down beside me. “But I wanted to make a good first impression.”
“Cookies are always the right move.” I popped the other half of hers in my mouth. “When she was born, I swore I’d never let her eat sugar. Or meat. That went out the window pretty quickly.”
“So what’s the protocol here?” Ford asked when Madelyn returned to burying me. “Am I allowed to kiss you hello?”
My stomach fluttered pleasantly. “Yes, but you better act fast. Madelyn’s about to read last rites.”
When I’d invited him to meet us, I expected him to only stay a few hours. I figured he’d watch Madelyn play, then make an excuse to head home. But Ford surprised me. I spent most of my time sitting alone on the blanket while he and Madelyn played in the surf. Then, when she was so worn out that she had to be carried home, he was the one who picked her up.
“I’ve got it,” I said unconvincingly as I shook out the blanket and shouldered our beach bag.
Ford snorted.
It felt so wonderfully strange to walk beside him as he carried Madelyn. Her head was slumped against his shoulder, her arms dangling at her sides. People smiled at us as they passed us. Several women looked at me enviously. I smiled back at them, enjoying the happy family fantasy more than I wanted to admit to myself.
Back at the apartment, Ford waited in the living room while I put her down for her nap. Then we got in the shower and took a long, soapy time getting the sand off of us.
Afterward, we collapsed in my bed with our hair still wet. “God, I need a nap,” he said, closing his eyes.
I checked the time. “We still have at least another hour before she wakes up.”
His hand moved to my stomach and I rolled against him, but in the end, we both fell asleep. We woke up to the sound of Madelyn calling from her crib.
“Mamama,” she demanded. “Mamama!”
Disoriented, I rolled out of his grip and got her up. I expected Ford to be in the living room, putting his shoes on when I brought her out, but instead, he was looking through our brochures.
“I’m starving,” he explained. “All I’ve eaten today are cookies.”
Madelyn rushed over to grab them from him. She settled on an Indian place. We looked at each other and shrugged.
“I’m good with Indian. Can she handle it?”
“She likes the rice,” I said.
After Indian and an evening of Nickelodeon, I put Madelyn to bed. Ford was in the kitchen cleaning up when I pulled her door closed.
“So how’d it go?” he asked, drying off the dishes.
“You tell me.”
He leaned against the counter and looked over at me seriously. “I thought it was great.”
Those tiny pricks behind my eyes had me looking away for a moment. “This is like, every single weekend,” I said warningly. “Once in a while I can ask Amanda or Shelly to watch her for an evening, but otherwise, this is it. This is what we do. This is where I see myself for the next five years.”
He nodded. “Got it.”
“Can you—” I wasn’t sure how to ask. “Can you see yourself being happy doing this? I mean, not for the next five years, but for as long as we want this to last?”
Ford hung the dish towel on the oven and crossed his arms, considering me. “You’re really careful not to talk about anything as though it’ll be long term. Do you think I’m in this just for casual sex?”
I shrugged helplessly and looked away. “Maybe. I’m not mad if you are. Casual sex with you is great. I just need to know one way or another.”
Ford crossed the kitchen in two steps and turned my face back to him. “If I wanted casual sex, I wouldn’t have fired Melanie Greenwell. I want you.”
“I’m a package deal,” I said, trying to make him understand how important that was. “And she’ll always come first. If the plane is going down and we only have one oxygen mask, she gets it.”
Ford snorted. “As if Kai would let the plane take off without the appropriate number of oxygen masks on board.”
“You know what I mean though, right?” I looked up at him searchingly.
“Yes, I know what you mean.” He smoothed his hand over my hair and then held my face between his hands. “I understand. I’m not scared off by the fact you’d let me asphyxiate in mid-air. I like seeing you be a mom. I like Madelyn.”
Tell him.
But then his mouth came down on mine, and the moment was so perfect that I couldn’t.
I didn’t.
I should have.
28
Ford
I meant what I’d said. I liked seeing Paige be a mom. I liked Madelyn. It scared me how much I liked the whole scene. It was changing me, and people were starting to notice.
“Hi Papa Ford,” Griffin said when we all met at the bar for our weekly tradition. We were doing it on Thursdays nights regularly now because I spent Friday nights at Paige’s apartment.
“Screw you.” I said genially and ordered a beer. It was hard to get under my skin lately. Griffin opened his mouth to try again, but Kai cut him off.
“The SOME fundraiser dinner is coming up,” he said. “We bought a table. Eight people. We can each invite one person. Decide soon so I can send their names in.”
“Business or pleasure?” Jameson asked.
“Both, in Ford’s case,” Griffin ribbed.
We went to the So Others Might Eat fundraising dinner every year. The tables cost fifteen thousand dollars. I’d taken Georgia the first three years and various business partners for the last two. It was a good cause—something I wanted to share with Paige.
Kai sighed when I told him. “You have to find her a new position, Ford. Even if it’s another area of the company. It’s not a good look for Blip.”
“I will,” I promised. “I’ll introduce her to people at the dinner. It’ll be a good networking event.”
Paige was doubtful. “I don’t know, Ford. I don’t have anything to wear.”
We were at Millenium Park with Madelyn. It was a warm summer day. Millenium Park was always busy, but something was nagging at me as I looked around at the other groups.
“I’ll get you a dress,” I said without thinking.
She rolled her eyes. “No, Richard Gere, you won’t.”
I looked back at her. “Paige, I don’t know if you know this, but I’m very wealthy.”
“I don’t know if you know this,” she mimicked, “but I don’t go places where I can’t afford the dress code.”
“I don’t know if you know this, but...” I said, and then trailed off, distracted. There was a weird number of balloons—that was what was bothering me. It would have set Shelly off.
“But what?” Paige prompted.
“Is it Father’s Day?” I asked abruptly. I mentally flipped through the weekends. Third weekend of June. That lined up.
Paige looked caught off guard. “Yes, I guess it is.”
“Alex didn’t want to see Madelyn?”
Her eyes darted to the side. I frowned. Something was off.
“What is the custody arrangement anyway? You said there are no weekends off. Is he completely out of her life?”
“Ford, stop,” Paige said, still looking away. “I don’t like to talk about it.”
“Dadada,” Madelyn said, as though she knew what we were talking about.
Paige frowned at her. “No dadada.”
“Dadada!”
Paige looked like she might cry. Instantly, I felt like a dick. “It’s his loss, Paige.” I covered her hand with mine and wrapped my free arm around Madelyn. No wonder she’d been so adamant about making sure I was really in this. Madelyn had already had one person disappear on her. For a moment, I felt the weight of that responsibility heavily on my shoulders. If I wasn’t careful, I’d wind up a father figure. And then…
And then…
My mind provided a run of scenes that should have been harrowing. Instead, they were appealing. An endless parade of playgrounds, evenings of Nickelodeon, and nights with Paige.
The weight disappeared. “Let me buy you a dress, Paige. Or wear jeans and sneakers, I don’t care. I want you at this dinner.”
She smiled tremulously. “Okay.”
Either as a favor or an insult, Kai set her up with a personal shopper. Shelly and Amanda went with her, and I spent the afternoon with Madelyn by myself for the first time. Optimistically, I took her to a paint-your-own-pottery cafe. She painted every piece she could get a brush on. It was a fucking disaster.
“Of course Kai has a personal shopper,” Paige said when she got back and found us in front of Paw Patrol sharing a can of cold SpaghettiOs. “No wonder he always looks like he just stepped off a runway.”
I raised my eyebrows. “You have a thing for my brother now? Remember who bought the damn dress.”
“No,” she rolled her eyes. “Kai is too put together. He looks like someone who plays a CEO on TV. You’re more...rugged.” She dropped a kiss on Madelyn’s forehead, and then brushed her lips over mine. “Why did you buy a bag of pottery? Aren’t they supposed to fire it for you first?”
“Ask Madelyn,” I said.
“Dadada,” Madelyn murmured, transfixed by the adventures of Chase and Rocky.
“No dadada,” Paige said. She took the heavy garment bag back to the bedroom and I heard the closet door slide open.
“Don’t I get to see it?” I called back.
“Yes, next Saturday night.” She came back down the hall to shake another bag at me. I recognized the name of a high-end lingerie boutique, and a slow smile spread across my face.
“I’m not waiting until next week to see that,” I warned.
“You don’t have to,” she promised.
A week later, Amanda came over to watch Madelyn for the evening. She answered the door when I got there and let me in.
“Paige is still gett
ing ready, but you can hang out with us.”
Madelyn was playing with Duplos on the living room rug. She bashed two of them together and trilled, “Dadada!”
Amanda looked at me wide eyed.
“It’s just her latest word,” I said, ruffling Madelyn’s hair on my way to the armchair.
Paige came down the hallway then, looking harassed. “No dadada,” she said severely to Madelyn. She smiled at me. “You look decent.”
“You’ll do,” I responded, trying not to smile too widely back. Kai’s personal shopper had outdone himself. She was wearing a black sheath dress that fit her like a glove, strappy gold heels, and gold earrings that brought out the bronze glints in her dark auburn hair.
“Fine, I’ll say it,” Amanda rolled her eyes. “You both look great.”
In the car on the way to the event, I slid my hand up her thigh. “Are you wearing anything under this?”
“Are you asking for professional or personal reasons, Mr. Cavanaugh?” Paige asked coyly.
I ran my hand up her side. “Both.”
With a glance to make sure the partition was completely closed between us and the driver, she pushed up against me. “Why don’t you find out?”
My hand dove into the silk neckline that kept slipping invitingly around the swell of her cleavage. The answer was no. I groaned as I filled my hand with her warm flesh. Her nipple hardened under my palm. She moaned as I pushed her back across the long seat and plunged my hand between her legs. Nothing there either, and she was ready for me.
I pushed her dress roughly up around her waist and fumbled at my belt. Paige looked at me through heavy lidded eyes. Her hair was an auburn mass, spilled out across the seat. “Do we have time?”
“We’ll make it,” I said briefly, and texted the driver to take the long way.
I pulled Paige into my lap and leaned up to kiss her.
“No way, you’ll ruin my lipstick,” she said with a smirk.
I growled and lifted her hips slightly, then pulled her back down, impaling her on my cock.
“Jesus, fuck, you feel good,” I said through gritted teeth as she threw her head back and started to ride me.
