He would never put Violet in that kind of a position, or his own child.
He would do what he needed to do to make it right. He would do what he needed to do.
“I’m going to marry her,” Wolf said. “I’m not going to make this difficult for her. I swear it. My father was no kind of man. I know that we suffered a bit from that in this family. But I’m a better man than that. I’m not perfect. Obviously. But I care about her. I care about what people think about our kid. I’m going to do the right thing. You can count on that.”
Connor stood up and shook his hand. “Good for you.”
“I don’t offer my hand to men doing the bare minimum,” Kate said, giving him an evil eye.
“Fair enough,” Wolf said.
Eli just nodded at him. And he had a feeling getting a woman pregnant out of wedlock was just not something Eli could be cool with. He had that same bearing about him that Sawyer had. He believed in right and wrong, and he believed it was all black-and-white. Connor, on the other hand, had seen some shit. He’d been through things. Not that Eli hadn’t, but it was different.
He wrapped things up with his cousins and headed toward the door. Connor caught him on the porch.
“You’re doing the right thing,” Connor said.
“I know.”
“Life is complicated,” Connor said. “You lost your girlfriend, and I know you loved her a lot. Believe me, Wolf, I feel that. I loved Jessie. I loved her so much. And I had to learn how to feel again. How to want something new. How to accept that my life was different, and how to want that life, and let me tell you, there is nothing easy about that. I’m not going to tell you that everything is going to be okay. Because I don’t know. But I will tell you that you can have something different than what you think. You can have a different life than the one you’ve decided to have. This is evidence of that.”
“Yeah, life kind of made the decision for me.”
“So life is only going to make a certain amount of those decisions for you. And the rest is up to you.”
“I decided to marry her.”
“Bare minimum,” Connor said.
And he realized his cousin was a little more rigid than he had maybe thought before.
“I’ll be good to her,” he said.
“You better be. Or the whole trio of us will hunt you down and kick your ass.”
“Don’t worry. I have a feeling my own brother will do it.”
He walked back to his truck, and when he reached the driver’s-side door, he stopped. Because he realized he was going to have to do a lot of thinking about what being good to someone else even meant. And he hadn’t thought in a long time. Even longer since he’d felt.
And he didn’t quite know what he was going to do with that.
“I’MGOINGTOleave for a while,” she said.
“What happened?”
She was standing behind the counter, using it as a shield, and she had invited Clara to come down to the bakery. Because it seemed like a neutral place to talk. It was closed, so no customers would walk in, and her parents were occupied. Also, if she went to Clara’s house, then Alex would overhear. It wasn’t like Clara wasn’t going to tell Alex; it was just that she couldn’t stand to be a part of it.
“I took the test.”
“Oh,” Clara said.
“You already knew.”
“What are you going to do?” Clara asked.
“Well...” She picked at an imaginary sticky spot on the counter. “He wants to get married.”
“That’s stupid,” Clara said. “You can’t get married just because you’re having a baby.”