Unexpected Love (Timid Souls Book 3)

by Melanie Munton

  But after we had both given into our desires, I hadn’t known what to say.

  I was ashamed to say that I panicked and had taken the coward’s way out. I needed to get my head together before I said something to her that I couldn’t take back. I didn’t want to make any promises before I figured out what I wanted.

  Because ever since Vanessa, that was something I was very careful about.

  My heart was not something I would give away very easily anymore.

  My bitch of an ex-wife was truly evil. That wasn’t me being a spiteful asshole; that was the cold, hard truth. Not only had she screwed one of my closest friends, who was also my colleague, shortly after we moved down to D.C. from New York City with Penny, but she was now making my life a living hell as we tried to work out our custody situation with our six-year-old daughter.

  Thinking that Vanessa was the woman I had wanted to spend the rest of my life with was the biggest mistake of my life. One that I was still paying for. But I couldn’t totally regret being with her either because it had given me Penny, the light of my world. She was my whole reason for living, and it was the only thing I would ever be grateful to Vanessa for.

  Her cheating ways hadn’t been the only reason for our divorce but it had certainly been the final nail in the coffin. I had wanted to get out of New York and move somewhere that would allow for a little more stability for Penny. Sure, D.C. was still a city but it was nowhere near as hectic as New York and there were actually real estate opportunities here. Vanessa hadn’t liked the idea from the beginning, had only been concerned about herself and her modeling career. She wasn’t internationally known yet, but she’d definitely had her face plastered on billboards across the country so people often recognized her name.

  And her daughter’s happiness and well-being had taken a back seat to her career.

  Which was why I was seeking sole custody.

  Because it wasn’t just Vanessa’s obsession with success that made her an unfit mother. It was her partying, bed-surfing ways. Modeling was only a fraction of that lifestyle for her. She loved going to the parties she got invited to, rubbing elbows with the rich and glamorous, and living it up with her man of the week.

  That had been the kicker for me. When I’d heard that Vanessa had been having strange men in her house after the divorce—men I didn’t know—and had them around Penny…I lost it. I’d went straight to the judge after that and demanded that I be the sole caretaker of Penny. Vanessa was not only putting Penny in an unstable environment, she was putting her in a dangerous one, too.

  And of course, she was fighting me tooth and nail on it.

  It had nothing to do with her wanting to see Penny and spend more time with her. It was strictly because she knew it was something I wanted and out of spite, she didn’t want to allow me to have it.

  Definitely an unfit mother.

  Hopefully, the matter was going to be resolved soon but I couldn’t relax until the official ruling from the judge.

  This was why the whole thing with Felicity had me so messed up. Vanessa and I had been divorced for over two years, but I still didn’t want to bring a woman around Penny and get her all confused if I wasn’t serious about her. Penny needed a responsible, loving mother figure in her life, but I was afraid of choosing the wrong one again. Whether she’d be wrong for Penny or wrong for me didn’t matter. Wrong was wrong and the last thing I wanted was for Penny to once again get caught in the middle and get hurt.

  But wrong was the last word I would ever use to describe anything that had to do with Felicity. Because everything with her felt very, very right.

  Before I could drown any further in thoughts of the woman of my dreams, my cell phone started buzzing on my office desk. I looked at the ID on the screen and groaned. Speak of the she-devil.

  “Yes?” I answered. Pleasantries between us were as extinct as the dinosaurs.

  “I’m going to need you to keep Penny an extra two days this time,” Vanessa said in her raspy, smoker’s voice.

  The woman’s diet consisted of cigarettes and Ex-lax, and I constantly worried that she wasn’t feeding Penny properly when she watched her. Not to mention the fact that Penny was constantly breathing in second-hand smoke around her. Vanessa had always been self-conscious of her image and since her career had taken off, she was now as skinny as a rail. It sounded awful but I was also worried about her giving Penny some sort of complex. She was only six but I could see Vanessa hammering certain ideas into her head about watching what she ate and I didn’t my daughter to hear that shit.

  “Why?” I asked in a curt tone.

  “I just booked a show in L.A. and won’t be back until Tuesday,” she responded nonchalantly, like she couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the whereabouts of her daughter.

  This was another reason why I was seeking sole custody. Vanessa would get random jobs and would have to take off unexpectedly, dumping Penny wherever was convenient, which was always with me. Not that I minded because that was exactly what I wanted: Penny living with me, permanently. I didn’t want Penny going on those trips with Vanessa and she didn’t want to have to watch over a little girl the whole time because it would cramp her style. Even if it was her own daughter.

  How I hadn’t seen all these red flags when we had first gotten married, I had no idea.

  She had just hidden them really well.

  “That’s fine,” I told her. “You know that’s what I want anyway.”

  She huffed over the line. “Yes, you’ve made that very clear. Just do me a favor and don’t feed her so much junk food this time.”

  I could feel my blood pressure starting to rise at her indignant tone but I fought to control my temper. “What are you talking about?”

  “Penny told me that you let her have cake and ice cream last time she was over there.”

  “It was her friend’s birthday party, Vanessa.” This was what I constantly had to listen to and it was becoming so tiresome. If I got sole custody and Vanessa only had supervised visits, I wouldn’t have to hear it all the time. “Six-year-olds are allowed to eat cake and ice cream.”

  She made an angry noise into the receiver and I could just picture her signature scowl on her face. It was astounding how such a beautiful woman could be so incredibly ugly. It made me wonder what I ever saw in her. “I don’t want her getting fat, Gabe.”

  I choked out an incredulous laugh. “Are you kidding me? She’s a kid. An active one with a fast metabolism. She burned off those calories in five minutes. She’s going to have body image issues if you don’t quit feeding her that psychobabble bullshit.”

  “I’m trying to protect her from obesity!” she shouted over the line. Another fight, same as always. What a surprise. “Maybe you should be more concerned about your daughter’s health.”

  That’s it. I didn’t even try to contain the volume of my voice this time. “Really, Vanessa? Maybe you should be more concerned about your daughter’s happiness. Or maybe you forgot the time I picked her up crying because her mommy wouldn’t play dolls with her. Or the time she accidentally spilled her Kool-Aid on your new carpet and you went ballistic on her. You’ve got a knack for making her cry, I’ll give you that.”

  “Fuck you,” she spat. “You give her whatever she wants, let her do whatever she wants so she’ll want to stay with you. I’m the one who has to set boundaries and rules. I’m the one who looks like the bad guy because I tell her ‘no.’”

  I shook my head. The woman was so delusional. “Keep telling yourself that. Maybe one day you could even convince yourself that you’re a good mother. What’s one more lie to tell, right?”

  She hung up.

  I sighed and leaned back in my chair. Every conversation with her drained me of energy. Every one of them was vicious and unapologetic.

  That was my ex-wife.

  ##

  At three-thirty that afternoon, I pulled up in front of my daughter’s school to pick her up and felt a lot of the stress and heaviness melt off o
f me as soon as I got a glimpse of that little head of raven hair, standing on the sidewalk next to her teacher. She was getting ready to finish her kindergarten school year, and I couldn’t believe the time had gone by so fast.

  I got out of my car and practically ran over to her. She never failed to make my day better, no matter what kind of shit storm I was dealing with. “Daddy!” she squealed when I finally had her scooped up in my arms.

  “Hey, Peanut!” I said as I kissed the top of her head. “What did you do in school today?”

  She held up a picture with a lot of different squiggly lines on it, but a few shapes looked distinctly like stick figures. “I drew you a pitcher,” she replied, showing me her artwork.

  She could have blown her nose and saved it just to show me she knew how to use a tissue and my heart still would have cracked open. I couldn’t be more proud of my little girl.

  “See, here’s me and here’s you and here’s Gingerbread,” she said, pointing to a brown blob that definitely had something akin to a tail coming out of it.

  “Who’s Gingerbread?” I asked but I already had an idea.

  Her head whipped up to flash me a bright smile that was missing one of her front teeth. She lost it last week and had been amazed when the Tooth Fairy visited her overnight. “It’s my horsie! She’s real pretty and has a long black tail and is big enough that I can ride her.”

  Penny and her horses.

  It didn’t escape my notice that Vanessa was not in the picture.

  I looked over at her teacher, Ms. Henderson, and smiled. She was probably in her early thirties and constantly flashed her bare ring finger at me, like after this whole year of conversations with her I wouldn’t have noticed it by now. She was pretty and I got along with her, but I had no interest whatsoever.

  All of my attentions lately had been devoted to a short blonde and only her.

  Ms. Henderson extended the rest of Penny’s school papers to me, which I quickly took before her hand could linger on my arm. She often did that. “Any problems today?” I asked her.

  She offered a soft, almost sad, smile and I knew what she was thinking. “No issues, no,” she responded. “She colored a lot by herself but she enjoyed it.”

  My chest tightened at hearing that. Penny didn’t have a lot of friends at school and it absolutely broke my heart. Ever since Vanessa and I divorced, she had become a more sedate kid, not quite as outgoing as she once was. It was the worst whenever I picked her up from Vanessa’s. It usually took me a couple of days to get my Penny back and then she would start smiling again and talking more.

  The teachers at school always told me that Penny was pretty reserved around the other kids, not talking a whole lot and staying by herself most of the time at recess. The kid whose birthday party I told Vanessa about earlier I think only invited Penny out of obligation more than anything else because he was in her class. She was a bright, wonderful kid. I just didn’t think that other kids always knew how to handle her when she was quiet and somewhat closed off.

  I felt overwhelming guilt about the situation because I knew that it was mine and Vanessa’s fault for whatever was going on with her.

  But I was sure Vanessa didn’t care and probably hadn’t even noticed the changes in her daughter.

  “Okay, thanks,” I told Ms. Henderson. “See you tomorrow,” I called over my shoulder as I headed back to the car before she tried to spark up a conversation.

  I took Penny’s backpack off, placed her in her booster seat, and a minute later was off to our soon-to-be-ex-apartment. The place had only been temporary until I could get our new house built and designed. Now, it was mostly completed and we were going to be moving in a matter of weeks.

  I couldn’t wait to finally feel settled somewhere.

  It would be a welcome transition.

  I cooked us a healthy dinner of grilled chicken and asparagus, rice, baby carrots, and fruit for dessert. And because she’d been a good girl and had eaten all of her vegetables, I let Penny have a Popsicle afterwards. Take that, Vanessa.

  I worked on the living room couch while Penny watched Minions for the twelve thousandth time this month, but I didn’t mind. Her constant giggles throughout the whole movie were music to my ears, so she could watch it as much as her little heart desired if I got to see that happy smile on her face.

  Our bedtime ritual went the same as always with giving her a bath, combing her hair and brushing her teeth, followed by her attempts to prolong having to actually go to bed like most children her age often did.

  “Read me a story, Daddy. Please?”

  Yeah, she had me wrapped around her little finger and she knew it. But I still set boundaries and established rules, despite what Vanessa wanted to believe.

  “Okay, but just one and then you have to go to sleep.”

  She nodded her agreement and lay back in bed with an excited smile on her face. She looked like both me and Vanessa. She had her mother’s jet black hair but my nose and hazel eyes. She was my little angel.

  “Which one do you want me to read?”

  She looked down at her nightstand where her favorite books were kept and pointed to the one I read pretty much every other night. “That one.”

  Halfway into the story, she was passed out and I was tiptoeing out of the room so as not to wake her, ensuring that her nightlight was on and shining brightly before I left. It didn’t take me long to fall asleep that night either, with thoughts of a sexy little blonde with blue eyes and a sweetheart face swirling around in my head.

  After I dropped off Penny at school the next morning, I decided that I would take a few more boxes over to the new house before work. I figured moving might be a little less stressful if I took over a little at a time.

  I parked in the side driveway instead of in front of the garage because it was closer to the back door which was right beside my office. I dropped the boxes on the floor and took in the disorganized mess of the room. Boxes were scattered everywhere and stacks of files were strewn about. I decided not to even touch it until I had more patience and was about to walk back out the door when I heard noises coming from the dining room area.

  The only person who had a key and had permission to be here when I wasn’t was Felicity and my heart jumped at the possibility that it was her. That I was going to see her after days of having nothing but the memory of our afternoon together to satisfy me. I wasn’t disappointed when I entered the dining room and saw her crouched down underneath the table, her ass pointing right up at me.

  She was in a pencil skirt.

  And it molded perfectly to that ass of hers.

  Damn.

  “Felicity?”

  ##

  Chapter Four

  Felicity

  I jumped at the sound of his voice and hit my head on the underside of the table. Great. Now I looked like an idiot in front of him. I scrambled out from underneath it and quickly stood up to face him, brushing off my clothes in the process. I probably looked flustered and nervous in his presence, but it was only because I was.

  “Hi, Gabe. I didn’t realize you would be here.”

  I could feel the tension thickening between us and I wasn’t sure if it was out of uncertainty or lust. On my end at least, I knew exactly what was making my fingers itch to reach out and rip that suit off his body.

  “I was just dropping off a few more boxes for the office,” he said and looked around the room with an appraising eye. “Everything okay?”

  I nodded, avoiding eye contact with him. I wasn’t sure what standard protocol dictated in this situation. Whenever you had your first encounter with a guy after you’d screwed him once rough and hard on a bathroom sink.

  “Yeah. They delivered the wrong rug in here and I was just replacin’ it with the right one,” I told him. “I knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on work today if I didn’t fix it.” I laughed at myself which made him laugh in turn, easing a little bit of that tension in the air.

  “Do you need any help?
” he asked.

  I shook my head as I took stock of the room, figuring out how I was going to make my exit. “No, I’m done. I was actually gettin’ ready to leave. Thanks, though.”

  I couldn’t help it, I had to look up at him. I had to have those hazel eyes locked on mine for just a second before I left him.

  That was a mistake.

  As soon as I did, I was pinned in his gaze, mesmerized by the way his jaw clenched and his nostrils flared as he looked me up and down. I actually became breathless at seeing the lust on his face, the intent in his eyes, that desire I knew he was trying to contain.

  “Enough of this,” he blurted out.

  Then he was on me.

  Mouth fused to mine, lips sealed against mine, tongue exploring with purpose. Having his mouth back on me was sweet relief and our resounding moans were proof of it. His hands were on my shoulders as he backed me up to the dining table and pushed me down until I was spread out on it. He looked down at me with hooded eyes, the look of a man who had his woman right where he wanted her. He pursed his lips as he ran his hand down the length of my body, briefly stopping to knead each breast before he lowered it to the hem of my skirt, pushing it up my thighs.

  “Once wasn’t enough, Felicity,” he whispered as he watched the material slide up my legs.

  I lifted my hips so he could get it up to my waist, my eyes tracking his expression when he took in the black silk underwear I had on. He cupped my mound with his large hand. “I need more of this.”

  My hand covered his as I guided it past the waistband of my panties until his fingers grazed the soft flesh of my sex. Our eyes didn’t stray from one another as we rubbed my folds together. “I’m not stoppin’ you,” I said in a low voice.

  Using his other hand, he pulled my blouse free of my skirt and began to push it up my chest until my bra was exposed to him. “No, you sure as hell aren’t. Because you need this too, don’t you?”