Chapter 32
Cormac
Igrab my laptop to tweak Monday’s quiz. Concentrating is impossible, smelling Scarlett’s sweet skin lying eleven inches from me. I have eleven inches for her.
When she starts to snore, I look over at her and see the book has flopped onto her chest. The nightgown shifted, and I see a nipple.
Damn it…
I have to get out of here. Frustrated, I get up and just face the bed for a few seconds. She twists restlessly in the sheets. I remember that war in my body, fighting to sleep while your brain juggles mountains of information you need to memorize and regurgitate in seconds.
For the rest of your life.
A tiny half-sigh, half-whimper breaks from her throat. But right now this second, she’s content. Because of me. Because I married and protected her.
Fuck. That makes me feel good, but I’m anything but content. I whisper, “I don’t think I’ll survive this.”
I tried a relationship once. Ana and I were a disaster together. The pregnancy was an accident. I turned off my emotions since then.
But the part of me that’s been dead for years, the part that wants softness, connection, and warmth, stirs like an animal waking. And that scares me more than withdrawal ever did.
Another rustle lifts my gaze at the bed. She’s turned over, curled deeper into the blankets. And fuck, she’s snagged my pillow and buried her face in the damn thing.
This nearly kills me.
My voice comes out rough. “Sleep, little Ford.”
Her breath shifts again, almost like she heard me.
I turn away suddenly, almost violently, needing space. My vision blurs for a second as I leave the bedroom and shut the door. What the hell was I thinking? Normally, you bring home a wife, and she sleeps in your bed.
That’s canon.
Only… Someone like me and what I’m battling, what I’m hiding, makes that a stick of dynamite.
Outside in the hallway, I knock the back of my head into the wall hard enough to hurt. My pulse is still a fucking war drum. My big hands, tattooed and deadly, but also capable of healing, shake harder than they should.
I scrub both palms over my face, wondering what the hell I do now. This is what happens when you make a major life decision in an hour.
It’s not every day that kind of decision makes a woman like Scarlett Ford my wife. Puts her in my bed. My sheets will never smell the same. And I’m losing my mind. This is already too much. She is already too much.
My eyes throb from the pressure behind them. Is it emotion or exhaustion? I can’t tell. I’ve survived detox and withdrawal in a hospital gown and then in a cell that never felt warm enough.
I lived through the violence of my own body betraying me, punishing me until I begged for death.
But this? This slow, quiet unraveling? It’s a different kind of hell, and I’m not ready to want something this badly again.
I’m also not ready to turn it down.
The second her knees buckled from being sick, something inside me cracked. I don’t think I’d moved that fast since working in an emergency department. I gathered her hair, steadied her shoulders, and touched her with a tenderness I thought was stripped out of me years ago.
I press a fist to my mouth and breathe through it. She’s too young to be touched by the ugliness I bring to the table in this fake relationship.
She had the nerve to stand naked under a towel like I was worthy of such an angel. All I saw was a promise of the exact same heat she delivered the night we slept together. And that mouth around my cock last week.
She was unafraid to ask for what she wanted. Even from me, a broken man. That’s a kind of sweet poison that nothing in the world prepares you for.
Christ. I can still smell her out here in the hall. Spicy shampoo and the sweet perfume that clings to her skin burrowed straight into the base of my spine.
I told her that there would be no intimacy, and she curled into my bed, pouting and disappointed. Fuck. What do I do with that?
I drag in a breath that feels like broken glass and head down the hall to the spare room that holds my biggest secret.
I don’t know how to tell her about James Patrick. Then I have to explain how he came into this world. That his mother, who’s married to my twin brother, currently has sole custody of my child because I was a pathetic addict who didn’t want him.
My thumb hesitates over the keypad, and then I type in the four-digit code, J.P.’s birthday. I wasn’t there that day, and that’s the part of the story I can’t get past.
The lock disengages with a muted click that guts me every time. I push open the door and step into the soft glow of a night-light shaped like a rocket ship. The room smells faintly of new furniture and fresh paint.
It sits silent and unused. And that feels like a slam against my skull.
In the dark, I stand perfectly still, gripping the edge of a gray lacquered dresser until my knuckles go pale.
This is the room I created for my son. This will be his space. And it’s waiting for him. Waiting for me to be ready to bring him here. Yesterday, that seemed easier. Now it will be with a wife in my bed who doesn’t know he exists yet.
And each day I wait to tell her, it gets harder.
I stare down at the crib against the far wall with its smooth white slats and a fitted navy sheet featuring gold constellations. Above it hangs a framed watercolor of a fox wearing a little crown.
In the top drawer, brand-new pajamas are folded neatly. In another, tiny socks are rolled into cute, soft, colorful balls. A lavender baby blanket sits in a basket on the shelf, waiting to smell like him one day.
My chest pulls tight, and my toes curl against the plush area rug shaped like a cloud.
It feels so soft under my feet. A bookshelf is filled with the same books I remembered reading to Sophie in my Seattle apartment on her parents’ date nights—years before J.P.
came into our lives. I said no to a lot of women so I could have my own little date night with a child who meant the world to me. Who was as part of me as J.P. is.
Yet, when it was my turn to be a dad, I fell apart.
A wooden train set arranged in a perfect circle sits in the corner. Stuffed animals line the top of the bookshelves, and I can’t wait for J.P. to be old enough to give them names.
A wolf, a lion cub, and a teddy bear are toys I bought online one night when I really wanted a whiskey. I reach for that bear now. The soft fur smells like my cologne because I sit in here and cling to it.
Tonight, I feel something in my throat go hot and unbearable. My legs give out, and I’m kneeling on the floor.
Addiction lives in my bloodstream like a snake coiled under the surface waiting to strike. And wanting Scarlett, needing her, feels exactly the same because I know it can consume me.
Would it be terrible to be consumed by love? What if craving a person isn’t really the same thing, and I’ve just convinced myself that anything that feels good is bad?
Scarlett’s bare legs lie under a soft nightgown and can slide across my sheets and tangle with mine right now. She doesn’t understand what she’s doing to me. She doesn’t understand that one touch could trigger a side of me she’s not prepared for.
This condo used to be my escape. Now she’s my wife and living here with me, because I couldn’t bear to have her face insurmountable difficulties when I have the means to help.
That means I have to face what I can’t have.
God, I need some sleep. I can’t think straight. I rest my back against the crib, and my fingers tighten around the bear.
I should tell her about my son. The little boy who was born when I was in rehab. Ana had him alone. Okay, not alone. Darragh was there. He even delivered my kid! They didn’t call me. Didn’t want me anywhere near him or them.
They weren’t wrong. At the time.
What kind of woman will want a man who didn’t want his own kid?
My breathing goes ragged. I scrub a hand over my face, but it doesn’t stop the spiral.
If Scarlett sees the truth about who I am, not the polished professor version, not the man who jumped from a cab when she was hurt and then put her up in a hotel when she had nowhere to go, then gave her what she needed one night in a hotel room, not that man, but the addict, the deadbeat dad…
She’ll hate me, and she should.
I need to get my emotions under control and focus.
Phone in hand, I unlock it with shaking fingers to look at hundreds of photos. My nightly ritual. That I now have to hide.
Ana sends me nearly every photo she takes of our son. I don’t think Darragh even knows how often she does it, unless he’s auditing her phone. I chuckle, picturing him asking the Bratva underboss to see her phone.
But these photos mean the world to me. J.P.
in a dinosaur onesie. Splashing in the bath.
Gnawing on a spoon. The one that makes me laugh is him sucking on his whole fist. And the one that rips my heart out is my son asleep on Darragh’s chest, one tiny hand gripping his shirt.
A photo that he probably didn’t even know Ana took.
These photos are not to make me feel terrible. They are showing me that my son is okay.
And I’m glad, because I’m not okay. Not yet.
If I do this right, if I keep myself clean and hold on to this teaching position, one day this room won’t be empty. If I get my life together, J.P. will sleep here. Maybe one day I’ll deserve that. That hits me like gravity.
I get to my feet and take to the rocker in the corner where I often imagine sitting with him in my lap. Reading him the books from the shelf. Whispering stories about space and wolves and brave little foxes.
Then the picture sharpens, and Scarlett appears in the doorway with a cup of tea, watching us, smiling. And me asking her to stay. Forever.
I smile at the thought, then shake my head.
Nah, that’s reckless, impulsive, and selfish.
My pulse finally slows, and the noise in my head fades. And that’s when the phone vibrates, wrecking my calm. Only one person texts me this late. I pull out my mobile and frown at the screen.
Dr. Davis Harrow wants another fucking kill.
I stare at the room. Everything in here is why I shouldn’t be doing that anymore. I have my focus now. Teaching and getting my son.
And maybe keeping Scarlett, too.
Maybe the marriage won’t be temporary. If she can stomach who I really am.
Another buzz.
Harrow: Need to see you.
Me: Tomorrow.
Harrow: Gotta be tonight.
Me: I said TOMORROW.
Then, because the threat needs to be understood:
Me: Unless you want that body dropped on your doorstep.
It makes me feel good to say no. That I have the control to do so.
Yet, if I go back to my bedroom, I might do something I shouldn’t. Something just to feel good. Just to make this pain go away. I grip the rocker’s armrests.
Tonight, I’ll sleep in this chair. I need distance between Scarlett and me.
Sharing a bed with her is something I’ll think about tomorrow.
Just like another famous Scarlett once said…