“No, that’s ridiculous,” Gabe said.
Addison rolled her eyes.
“Just don’t smile at Caleb or Austin.” Gabe paused. “Or Corey. Just in case.”
“Just in case of what?”
“He breaks up with Melissa. Or realizes that you’re hotter and sassier than Melissa.”
Addison couldn’t help but be amused. “You’ve met Melissa?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know how we compare?”
He braced his hand on the table and leaned closer. “Because you’re hotter and sassier than all other women.”
She laughed. “Well, that is absolutely not true.”
“To me it is.”
So cheesy. Yet that made her go a little soft in spite of herself. She’d missed him, and he hadn’t been pressing her to give a relationship a chance, which was what she’d thought she’d wanted. But when he’d honored her wishes, she’d started wishing he’d push, just a little. She and Gabe had been hotter than hell together. They’d said all kinds of dirty, fun, naughty things to each other. But they hadn’t really been sweet and romantic. Not verbally, anyway. His buying her a rose from a street vendor had been sweet and romantic. She supposed bringing him the I LOVE NY shirt had been sweet. And hell, just the way he touched her and looked at her had been sweet and romantic, she now realized.
“Then maybe I should stop smiling at you,” she said softly.
He reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “No. Anything but that.”
Lord, Gabe had melted her panties with a look, he’d made her feel like the sexiest woman in the world with a look, he’d told her I’d like to bend you over this table right now with just a look. But the look in his eyes now . . . that one was downright dangerous. Because it was filled with affection and possessiveness and a desire that seemed so much more than sexual.
“Okay, everybody! Let’s talk about the family get-together this month!” Bea called, saving Addison from responding to all of that stuff from Gabe.
Which was great, because she was pretty sure her response would be something along the lines of Take me now and never let me go. Those last four words being the problem, of course.
She swallowed and turned away, somehow making her way back to her chair.
“We were thinking that this time it might be fun to have a family game night,” Bea said. “We can choose a variety of games and have multiple tables going. Some of the games will work great for a mix of age groups, or we can pair some of the older kids with the younger, or we can do teams. But I think there’s a way to make it fun for everyone.”
Addison leaned over to Caleb. “What’s going on?”
“Once a month our meeting involves the kids, too,” he explained. “We all get together and have a potluck and get a chance to know the kids we all talk about all the time.”
Oh . . . crap.
Or maybe it was good. She would now have the chance to meet Cooper, but without admitting to Gabe that she wanted to meet Cooper. Because that might be too much to confess right now. Before she actually met the kid. Or figured out if she was just horny and into all things Gabe or if she really did want to meet Cooper.
What if the moment she saw him, she was reminded that one child was more than enough and that she wasn’t sure she was always doing a bang-up job with the one she had? Should she be letting Stella sleep in her bed once in a while? Should she have a chore chart? Was Addison cuddly enough? Was Stella independent because that was Stella . . . or had Addison pushed her daughter away inadvertently?
She glanced over at Gabe, who was frowning at the way she was leaning toward Caleb. In spite of her swirling emotions, she rolled her eyes at him. He simply lifted a brow.
That single arched brow made her nipples tingle. Wow. So she was officially horny and into all things Gabe. That was good to know.
So why had she been reading about alligators?
She looked around the rest of the group. This wasn’t just a chance to meet Cooper. This was All The Kids. Did she want to bring Stella and introduce her to everyone? Did she really need to know their kids?
But the answer was clear immediately: yes. She did want to get to know the kids they’d all talked about over the last three weeks. And her daughter was amazing. She’d love coming and meeting new friends and playing games.
And, of course, that meant Stella would meet Cooper. And Addison would meet Cooper. And Gabe would meet Stella. And somehow that felt really . . . dangerous. And complicated. And tempting.
Yes, tempting.
“You and Stella will be here, right?” Bea asked Addison.
She realized that everyone else had already committed while she’d been lost in thought, again wondering what Gabe’s son looked like and what made him laugh and if he ate broccoli and if he was up a million times at night before he finally fell asleep.
“I, um . . .” She looked at Gabe. Like a freaking paper clip to a magnet. “I’m not sure.”
“Oh, you have to,” Roxanne said. “We so want to meet her.”
Everyone else chimed in with their agreement. Even Lindsey said, “These get-togethers are really a lot of fun.”
Addison finally nodded. “Yeah, okay, we’ll be there.”
The enthusiasm from the group warmed her. Until she saw Gabe’s very pleased look.
Well, hell. . What had she done?
Addison was killing him.
He’d been good. He’d been laid-back. He’d decided to just let the support-group meetings be the time he saw her. For now. But it was killing him slowly.
Every time he walked into the community center, he homed in on her like he was a missile. And it took everything in him to keep from stalking over to her, throwing her over his shoulder, and finding the nearest firm surface.
He missed her to his bones. He’d never felt like that about a woman before, and yeah, it was killing him.
“Hey, Corey, I don’t mind staying late tonight and helping clean up,” Gabe heard Addison say. “I have the sitter for a couple more hours. You head on home.”
“I appreciate it, Addison,” Corey told her. “Thanks.”
“No problem. Happy to help.”
“See ya, Gabe!” Corey lifted his hand.
“Have a good one,” Gabe called to the other man.
Gabe continued to stack chairs as Addison crossed to the refreshment table and started putting the cookies into a plastic container.
Caleb, Corey, and he always stayed after and put the community center back together. Austin, Dana, and Lindsey showed up early to arrange the chairs and start the coffee. Roxanne, Bea, and Ashley took turns bringing the cookies. Only Lexi, the youngest member and the one with the fewest resources and two jobs to juggle, didn’t have a specific task. From time to time she did, however, bring in leftover brownies from the restaurant where she worked, and she often lingered after meetings, helping clean up. But everyone knew that was because Caleb was there.
Tonight, however, Caleb had ducked out right away. Gabe had thought that strange, but now that Addison had dismissed Corey, too, Gabe thought perhaps she’d had something to do with getting rid of her new BFF.
Gabe picked up the stack of chairs, returning them to the storage closet. He knew that his jealousy over Caleb’s flirting with Addison was ridiculous. For one, he knew his friend had a hard time reeling in the flirting. It was just Caleb. He’d been a huge playboy before the courts had given him custody of Shay just a year ago, and he sometimes fell back into old habits, forgetting that he now came with a diaper bag and a collection of stuffed cats—Shay’s favorite thing in the whole world. For another, Caleb knew about Gabe’s feelings for Addison and was just giving him a hard time.
Still, seeing another man grinning at her, making her laugh, and complimenting her made Gabe feel uncharacteristically possessive. And, after giving Caleb a firm no in front of everyone, he realized that he didn’t care who knew it.
The door bumped shut behind Corey, leaving Gabe and Addis
on alone. Neither said anything as they continued to clean up the room. But finally the chairs were all put away, the cookies were stored, and there was nothing to keep them there.
Except wanting to stay.
He stopped in the middle of the room, about ten feet from where she stood by the table. She slowly turned to face him. Gabe tucked his hands in his back pockets and told himself to take it easy. Maybe she’d just felt the need to pitch in for the group. Maybe it had nothing to do with him.
But he knew better.
“Did you decide what you’re going to do about Cooper and the swamp-boat tour?” she asked.
Okay, he hadn’t been expecting that. He shook his head. “Not for sure.”
“He’s still into the alligators, though?”
She was asking about his kid. Gabe wasn’t sure why, but that made his chest feel warm. “He is. When Coop gets into something, he’s all in. At least for a while.”
She nodded but said nothing.
“Does Stella do that? Go all in on stuff?” he asked. He wanted to know about her daughter. He did. He didn’t care if it was pushy. She could choose not to tell him. But he wasn’t going to pretend he wasn’t curious about—or completely captivated by—what Addison’s daughter was like.
Addison took a deep breath. “She’s into art and books,” she told him. “But she always has been. She draws and paints and colors and loves clay.” Addison smiled. “She wants to take a pottery class.”
Gabe felt his mouth ease into a smile. “That sounds cool.”
“She’s young for it,” Addison said. Then frowned slightly. “I think. I don’t really know. I need to call around and see, I guess.”
“So not just a hunk of clay at home, then, huh?”
“She’s a doer,” Addison said. “She knows they use pottery wheels and kilns. She would start with clay and stuff at home, but she’d eventually want to really do it. Literally get her hands dirty with it. I indulge things like that—classes and such—because . . . ,” Addison trailed off, and Gabe had to resist the urge to take a step closer.
“Because why?”
“Because I was never like that,” she said. “I was pretty content to read and imagine and pretend about things.” She seemed to be thinking over what she’d just said and what she was about to. “My dad was a big proponent of learning from your mistakes and dealing with the consequences, and after seeing my sister go without her bike for an entire summer because she crashed it doing some obstacle-course thing and then had to save up her allowance to fix it, and seeing her miss a family trip to the zoo because she’d eaten an entire bag of candy that morning and gotten really sick, and seeing him give her cat away to a guy he worked with because my sister went camping with some friends and didn’t arrange for anyone to take care of the cat, I guess I got . . . careful.” She frowned. “Really careful.”
Gabe felt his gut tighten with a mix of emotions. Addison was sharing something really personal about her past with him. She’d never done that before. And it was something kind of heartbreaking. Especially when he saw that look of realization, sadness, and worry on her face.
“He sounds like a hard-ass,” Gabe said. He didn’t want to insult her father, and probably wouldn’t get any brownie points with her for doing so, but damn.
She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. Though, in fairness to him, he made all of this really clear to us. The expectations were carefully outlined. I think he would have helped her with her bike if she hadn’t been screwing around. And the zoo thing—he would have postponed the trip if she’d been actually sick, but since it was self-inflicted, he wanted to show her that choices have consequences.”
“I’m sure being sick all day was a pretty bad consequence that taught her something,” Gabe said with a frown. Yes, his mother and brother sometimes thought he was too permissive with Cooper, but damn, they were talking about kids here. Even adults screwed up sometimes. Kids certainly did. They needed some slack, didn’t they?
Addison nodded. “I know it sounds harsh. But, like, the cat thing . . . all she had to do was ask one of us to take care of it. In fact, I did take care of it while she was gone. But that wasn’t the point. She hadn’t asked me to. She didn’t take that responsibility. And my dad had made it clear that if she was going to have a pet, she was going to have to take care of it.”
Gabe took a breath. “Yeah, I get it. The cat needed her to be responsible. It just seems . . . overly hard on a kid.”
Addison’s frown deepened. “Sometimes I worry that I’m too hard on Stella.”
Okay, that surprised him. Addison seemed totally confident in everything she did with her daughter.
“Really?”
Addison nodded. “I push her to be independent, to think through her choices, to learn from her mistakes. But then . . .”
She trailed off, and Gabe held his breath, hoping she’d go on but not wanting to push.
“I definitely indulge her interests,” Addison said.
Gabe blew out his breath.
“When she wants to try something new, I probably even go overboard a little. Because I’m almost envious of her sometimes,” Addison went on. “She’s completely fearless. She wants to try everything and do everything and, while pottery isn’t exactly dangerous, I want her to know that it’s okay to get in there and try things even if they don’t work out.” She looked up at Gabe. “But I think it’s good to teach consequences, too.”
He nodded. “Of course. But she’s five. And . . . I think a lot of times consequences kind of teach themselves. You touch something hot and it burns you. You stay up too late, you’re tired the next day. You eat too much candy, you feel sick.”
Addison just looked at him for a long moment, a bunch of emotions in her eyes all at once. “Alligators very rarely attack people, but it does happen.”
Gabe blinked at her. “Okay.”
“I’m just saying that Cooper’s not wrong to be a little fearful of that.”
“True.” Gabe just watched her. He didn’t know what was going on exactly, but he could be patient. Probably.
“Did you know that alligators will sometimes balance sticks and twigs on their heads in an attempt to lure birds that are building nests?”
Gabe wanted to smile. Or hug her. He didn’t know where this was going, but yeah, he was going to wait it out. “I didn’t.”
“That’s kind of amazing, right?” she asked.
He’d never given alligators this much thought in his life. “I guess it is.”
“And there’s a guy who told a story about trying to capture an alligator that was on a golf course. He kept trying to catch it with a snare, but the alligator would run from him. But he didn’t run away from other people nearby. The guy finally realized the alligator recognized his shirt. When he took off the shirt, the alligator quit running from him, and he was able to capture it and rerelease it elsewhere.”
Okay, that was mildly interesting. But even more so was the fact that Addison even knew about it.
“And female alligators are really protective of their babies,” she said.
“Ad?” Gabe said huskily.
She wet her lips, seeming almost nervous. “Yeah?”
“You’ve been reading about alligators?”
She nodded.
“Why?”
“I, um . . . after you said Cooper was so interested in them, I was wondering what was so fascinating.”
She’d been reading about alligators because of Cooper.
Gabe couldn’t have named the emotion that rocked through him with that exactly, but it made him want to cheer and fist-pump and strip her down and push her up against the wall. He took a step forward. “And you’ve found some things.”
She nodded again. “Yeah. And the thing is—those things don’t mean I absolutely want to see an alligator in the wild, or touch one, but I can’t deny that I’m a little curious in spite of the teeth and the scales and the whole could-kill-me-if-they-wanted-to thing.”
He
took another step forward, his heart suddenly pounding. They weren’t talking about swamp boats and alligators now. “You’re interested in spite of the scary stuff,” he said.
“The scary stuff is still there, though,” she said, her eyes widening as he took yet another step, narrowing the space between them.
“But it might be worth a trip out onto the bayou,” Gabe said, taking the final step that put him right in front of her.
She swallowed. Then, thank God, nodded. “Yeah, it might be worth a trip just to see how it turns out in person.”
She was willing to try. With him. Holy hell, he hadn’t realized how much he needed to hear her say that. He reached up, put a hand on the back of her neck, and pulled her forward. She came willingly, flattening her hands on his chest but definitely not pushing him away. She looked up at him.
“You wanna get on my swamp boat for a tour, Ad?” he asked, his voice gruff.
One corner of her mouth lifted. “I do. In spite of myself.”
Yes. Yes, yes, yes. “Thank you,” he said.
The sincerity and intensity in his tone made her eyes widen. “Really?”
“Fuck yes,” he said solemnly. “I promise I’ll take care of you.”
She blew out a breath. “I’m not very good about not being careful,” she said, almost as if she was warning him. “I think about all of the what-ifs ahead of time. And sometimes I talk myself out of stuff entirely.”
“I’ve actually got a lot of experience with someone who’s overly careful about everything,” he told her, breathing in deeply of her scent and the feel of her against him again. He felt a strange sense of relief and want ripple through him at the same time.
“And you indulge him,” she said softly.
“I do. Because I always want the people who trust me to know that I’ll take care of them and that I’ll do whatever I can to keep them safe and that with me they can be who they are without fear.”
She pressed her lips together.
“And I think you’re going to be fine,” he told her. “Because you indulge a risk taker and let her spread her wings and tell her that even if things don’t work out, everything will be okay.”
Going Down Easy (Boys of the Big Easy) Page 11
