The bitch liked cookies.
I’m talking, the bigger and gooier, the better.
Hell, for her birthday last year, I’d purchased her a cookie of the month membership that lasted two years, and they sent her cookies from all around the world. She fuckin’ went over the moon when she got the cookies once a month and always made sure to bring the damn box over and open them up with me around.
Which, I’d like to add, watching a woman that you wanted to fuck eat cookies was a goddamn tragedy when you couldn’t fuck her.
I…
My phone rang, and I pulled it out of my pocket, answering it without a single thought to the date that was fuming mad in front of me.
“Yo,” Shine said.
I grinned at the interruption. “Sup?”
“Just drove by The Bag for some takeout, and I looked over to check out your bike out of habit. Someone’s sitting on it outside.”
I felt a flash of irritation surge through me.
After the day I’d had, the last fuckin’ thing I wanted to deal with was some asshole touching my bike. Let alone sitting on it.
Nobody touched my bike. Not some random asshole. Not my kids. Not my brothers. Nobody.
I stood up and said, “Gotta go. Someone’s fucking with my bike.”
“Who?” Blakely sounded outraged on my behalf.
I ignored her as she asked me to wait, and instead, headed out the door toward where my bike was backed up to the front window of the restaurant.
I stood up and marched toward the door, ready to do battle.
Only, when I got to the door, it wasn’t who I expected to be sitting on my bike.
It was Sophia, and she was straddling it backward, looking in on the huge plate-glass window with a massive smile on her face.
Upon hearing my feet crunch in the gravel outside the front door, she whipped her head around and stared at me with an O expression on her mouth.
Like, oh, shit. I’ve been caught. Whoops.
I grinned at her, and her body seemed to relax.
“I had to see it,” she explained.
I walked toward her, my day finally right upon seeing her.
“Yeah?” I asked. “What was it that you needed to witness?”
“I had to witness it,” she said, shrugging. “I mean, it was fate that brought me here tonight. I didn’t know this was where you were bringing her. I thought you were going somewhere out of town. I… when I saw you, I just knew that I had to stay and watch. I’m… you…”
She didn’t finish.
But then again, she didn’t fuckin’ have to.
Before I knew it, I was standing in front of her, and she was standing beside my bike, one hand on the seat holding her steady, and the other around her bag of takeout.
That’s when I just… snapped.
One second, I was standing beside her, and the next, I had her face in my hands and my lips on hers.
The moment our mouths touched, it felt like the fuckin’ world exploded around me.
She tasted like lemonade and chocolate.
She felt like everything I never knew I wanted.
Like everything I wished I’d had throughout twenty-two years of marriage.
I devoured her mouth, pulling her in so close that the bag of food in her hands crinkled against my leg.
SOPHIA
It never failed.
Blakely literally had to ruin everything.
My day.
My shits.
My life.
My fucking kisses.
“What the hell?” Blakely cried out, interrupting the best kiss I’d ever had in my life.
Haggard roughly broke the kiss off, and I knew that was it.
He wasn’t going to ever touch me again.
I wouldn’t be able to make ‘this’ happen between us, because his moral compass was too strong.
I was, quite literally, unfucked.
Which freakin’ sucked.
I watched his broad back move away.
I watched as he moved back into the building in which he’d come from not too long ago.
I watched as my entire world walked away, leaving me floundering in a sea of unknown.
CHAPTER 14
I want someone who will look at me the same way I look at a piece of carrot cake.
-Sophia to Haggard
HAGGARD
I knew after that moment in the parking lot that the rest of my life was going to become really fucking hard.
As in, every fucking time I saw her, I would have to relive that kiss.
I would have to continuously remember how it felt to have her in my arms, while never being able to touch her again.
Except, she’d stayed away.
I hadn’t seen her in a solid two weeks, and it was really fucking pissing me off.
“Where’s Sophia?” I pointedly asked Clem.
Clem, always so intuitive, stared at me. “Why?”
I ground my molars together, not willing to give her an answer.
Her thinking, and her knowing, were two different things.
I couldn’t do it.
Not with who she was to my good friend, and not with how hard it was that he was hanging on.
I’d seen him over the last two weeks, and each time I saw him, he looked worse and fucking worse.