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This time the gasp I held back slips out and I slap my hand over my mouth, my eyes going wide. I shake my head and she looks at me with kindness in her eyes.
“I understand best friends more than you can imagine, Megan. I’m the same way with Lee, well, minus the whole falling in love part. ” She smiles, the kindness still there, but this time there’s something else in her beautiful green eyes. Something that I’m not sure I want to hear. “I see the way he looks at you. ”
I shake my head and she returns my denial with a bigger smile and another nod.
“Oh, I see it. And I see the way that you look at him when you don’t think anyone is paying attention. You two have been dancing around it for almost a year now, Megan. ”
“All you see is two people that happened to have shared one night of drunken sex and that’s it,” I fume, finally finding my voice.
“Bullshit. ” She moves, sliding her legs off the cushion and adjusting her sleeping son while turning to look at me. “You’re afraid. I didn’t get it. Not until you explained all of that just now. I thought you were playing games, but now I get it. ”
“Get what?” I ask impatiently.
“The fear. ”
I look at her. My eyes blinking a few times while my breathing comes in quick bursts.
“You lost your husband and honey, I feel you. I hate that you lost that and although I will never understand what you feel physically, I do know what the thought of a life without my husband would feel like. But you didn’t die with Jack and I know he would want you to move on. Do you think he would want Molly to be alone too? You lost your husband, but baby, she lost her father. ”
Her words wash over me like someone had just thrown an ice bucket over my head. Then as they replay in my mind I feel the blow just as hard as if it was physically thrown.
“Please leave. ”
Her eyes widen and a soft gasp comes out of her full lips.
“Now. ”
“Megan,” she starts.
“No. ” I shake my head and will the tears back. “I’m going to go get ready to go get my daughter from school. When I come back out here, please be gone. ”
I get up from the couch and walk on wooden legs to my bedroom, her words slamming around in my head.
I know I’m being unfair to Dani. She doesn’t know how hard the slap of those words hit.
You lost your husband, but baby, she lost her father.
You lost your husband, but baby, she lost her father.
She lost her father.
I stop at the mirror in my bathroom and look at my pale skinned face reflecting back at me.
She lost her father.
I take a deep breath.
You lost your husband.
I squeeze my eyes closed and clamp them tight.
She lost her father.
My pulse speeds up and my skin goes from ice cold to burning hot.
You lost your husband.
My fingers dig into the counter at my hips and I feel one lone tear sneak past my tightly closed lids.
She lost her father.
I open my eyes, look back at my face and feel nothing but rage. Picking up the closest item I can, my hairbrush, I rear my arm back and hurl it at the mirror. When the brush strikes the surface, the mirror splinters and I turn just as the pieces shatter from the force of my throw.
I did lose my husband and when he took his dying breath, I lost every single piece of the only person that ever loved me.
But she’s wrong. It isn’t the fear from losing Jack that keeps me from opening up. It isn’t that I don’t want to fill the loneliness that I have lived with every day since Jack left—until that night in Liam’s arms. No, the part that I struggle with and have struggled with every day since, is the feelings that he brought back into my cold life are so much more powerful than what I ever felt before. Even with Jack. The images of Liam—Liam and me, Molly and us—that had filtered through my mind while I slept in his arms, they scared me. I loved my husband, but I was never in love with my husband, and the feelings that Liam Beckett created in my gut have been a burning guilt of that fact since I snuck out of his bed before the sun came up.
She lost her father.
God, if she even knew.
I HIT SAVE ON THE document I’ve been working on for the past few hours and turn to smile at my daughter, her eyes still tired since she just woke up.
“Can I go play with Mr. Axel again?”
I smile, reach up and hold her soft cheek in my palm. She smiles bigger, her dark brown eyes sparkle with happiness.
“Please,” she whispers loudly.
“Little bird, I think Mr. Axel has other things to do than play with your adorable self. ”
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Her smile grows and I wait to see what her brilliant little five-year-old mind comes up with.
“He told me the other day I was the prettiest princess in the whole world and I could come have tea parties with him all the time!”
Something about the image of Axel Reid telling my daughter she could come over and have a tea party was just so ludicrous that I burst out laughing, causing Molly to join in and laugh as well. That’s my daughter, always smiling and always laughing, even if she is clueless to why.
“Molly, Mrs. Izzy watched you the other night for mommy while I got some work done. I don’t think it would be nice for me to ask her to watch you when I don’t have anything to do for work right now. ”
“Sure you do,” she states in the most adorable voice and points to my computer.
“Sure I do what?”
She smiles brightly, “Have work to do. I saw you working just now. ”
Well, I can’t very well argue with that.
“Molly, I always have work to do, but that’s why I have a schedule so that I can have tons of little bird time and still make my deadlines. ”
“Deadline doesn’t sound like a fun word. ” Her nose scrunches up and she sticks her tongue out.
“Deadline is Mommy’s least favorite word in the whole world. I like peas more than I like deadlines. ”
Molly grabs her tiny stomach and throws her head back to giggle. And giggle loud. Her blonde ringlets jumping up and down with the force of her hilarity.
“But you hate peas, mommy!” she giggles even harder.
“I know, little bird,” I smile and tap her nose.
She doesn’t say anything else but just continues to look at me with a big smile.
I smile back.
Waiting
.
“So . . . Can I go see Mr. Axel?”
And there it was.
“How about this? How about I call Mrs. Izzy and see if maybe she is free for a few hours and I’ll work those nasty pea deadlines I hate so much. But, Mr. Axel might be at work, okay baby?”
She nods her head, those beautiful ringlets dancing again, jumps off my lap and runs back to her room. I can hear her moving around and the sounds of her making what I’m sure will be a huge mess, echoing down the hall. With a deep sigh, I pick up the phone and call the Reid house to see if my darling daughter can spend some time with the two people she has adopted as hers.
Growing up without grandparents myself I know what it’s like to want that familiar closeness, so it shouldn’t be a shock to me that she’s grown so close to them. Axel and Izzy Reid have treated Molly like she’s their blood grandchild since before Dani’s wedding. If it isn’t Molly asking to go spend time with them, it’s them calling to see if I need some time to work. It’s been a blessing I’m happy to have in my life, but it still feels weird to rely on someone else when it comes to Molly.
But I also wasn’t lying when I said that deadlines are something that I hate more than peas, and I hate peas a lot. A whole hell of a lot. With my newest novel due to my publisher in just weeks, it’s something that has been stressing me out and affecting my writing. A bad combination for an author. Maybe Molly knows what I need more than I do.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved writing. When I was growing up, I used writing as a way to escape. Now, as an adult, it’s much the same—but now I also write for pleasure and not just for companionship.
I published my first book when Jack was deployed the first time. I never, not in a million years, expected my first romance novel to be a success, but here I am five years later with multiple bestseller titles. Writing kept me from being pulled under by the grief I felt when Jack died. It kept me warm when the loneliness became too much to handle. It was, in a sense, the therapy that I needed to begin to heal.