Chapter 30
What a high. Life was starting to really feel like a sunny, bright, optimistic daydream, instead of the dark and ominous heavy cloud it had felt like for years. I wasn’t stupid enough to doubt that the shift had something to do with Travis and Elliot coming into our lives.
Even though I was a million percent against attributing anything good happening in my life to a man, out of spite from my past, I couldn’t deny it though.
Trav and Eli were just too damn—perfect to deny.
Last week we officially moved in with Travis.
We packed up a few boxes of things from my rental and stopped off at the furniture store and bought new beds for the kids to match their new rooms. I moved on autopilot, with tears in my eyes, threatening to fall and ruin my eyeliner, as I struggled to keep myself composed.
One look from either of my kids, their happy-go-lucky smiles and excited squeals of delight as we decorated their bedrooms, silenced all of my spite.
Erased all of my doubts about Travis and Eli.
Watching Eli carry boxes of his own into the house, a sheepish look on his face as he hung clothes up in the massive closet in the primary bedroom, that did something else to me too.
Somehow, Travis had perfected a home for all of us, without even knowing we were the ones he would share it with. But now that we were, it was hard to ignore how perfect it was for all of us.
But my anxiety was high as I blew my bangs back from my face, trying not to mess up my subtle and soft makeup look as I mixed yet another pie dough together.
The first one I made ripped, and the apple pie filling exploded out of it in the oven. Which just would not do, given that Travis’s parents were coming over for dinner, to meet me and the kids, and it had to be perfect.
“Mmh,” Eli hummed, leaning over the pie explosion, “This looks delicious.”
I huffed with a snort, “It looks like a volcano.”
“I bet it tastes delicious.” He pushed, and I cracked a smile, already tracking his motive even as his warm hands danced over my hips as he pressed his body against mine, leaning as far as possible to get near the pie-splosion cooling on the windowsill.
I tried desperately to ignore how I was wearing a thin cotton bathrobe under my apron, desperate not to mess my outfit up while baking before Mr. and Mrs. Hayes arrived.
It meant there wasn’t much fabric between his warm hands and my flushed skin. But I had other things on my plate to handle, and I couldn’t give in to my body’s need for a quickie to settle my nerves.
Besides, even though I knew Eli was teasing me with his touch, he was really after something else entirely.
He was hungry.
He was always hungry.
“Go for it.” I shrugged.
He rubbed his hands together like a fool and then took a large forkful of the concoction and ate it without hardly chewing it.
“Hey!” A shrill cry echoed from the loft railing overlooking the living space where the kids’ rooms were. “Mom said no snacks!” Emmie cried with outrage.
“If you hurry, I’ll save you a bite.” Eli tossed over his shoulder as he took another large forkful.
Her little feet echoed across the hardwood floor as she flew down the stairs.
My little girl could out eat any of the boys in the house, and she sure tried to most days.
“God,” Eli groaned, “This is nearly as good as your pu—”
“I’m here!” Emmie cried, silencing the indecent thing Eli was about to say, and I shook my head with a chuckle. “Gimmie, gimmie, gimmie!” She pushed a step stool over and dug a fork into the pie.
“Careful, darling.” Elliot composed himself in time to hold her long brown curls back before they fell into the sticky apple filling. “Can’t mess up the hair your mama spent so much time on.”
“Mmh,” Emmie groaned with a satisfied little smirk on her chipmunk-filled cheeks as she looked at me. “Your pies are my favorite. But don’t tell Grammie.”
Eli laughed and leaned on the counter with the fork in his hands, “Your pies are my favorite too.” He winked at me over Emmie’s head. “Cream pies, to be exact.”
I pushed so hard on the dough with the roller it almost broke again, and I glared at him.
“Cream pies?” Toby’s innocent little voice popped up out of where and I jumped, “Like chocolate cream?”
“Exactly like that.” Travis droned on with a pointed glare Eli’s way as he followed my youngest in from the backyard. They both wore flannel shirts and jeans, covered in mud and dirt.
“You’re both a wreck.” I deadpanned, glancing at the clock on the stove. “Your parents are going to be here in twenty minutes. What on earth were you doing out there?”
“Splitting logs!” Toby piped up excitedly, “With axes.”
My hands froze, and I turned to Travis, “You gave my four-year-old an axe?”
Travis glared at me defiantly as Eli chuckled and lifted a complaining Emmie from the stool, scooping one last fork of apple into her mouth.
“Go wash the apple off your face while Mama yells at Trav.” Eli joked, and Emmie grinned, grabbing Toby’s hand and pulling him from the kitchen.
“C’mon Tobe, let’s get dressed. There are some things we shouldn’t see.” She said.
Travis held my stare with a powerful intensity that always tried to make my knees weak and my back cave under the pressure of it.
Most of the time it did, but the idea of Toby swinging an axe—my Toby, the boy who racked up ER visits like reward points at the coffee shop—left me riddled with anxiety and pent-up frustrations from the whole pressure filled day.
“Answer me.” I glared at him with one eyebrow raised. “What good could come from giving him a weapon! He’s a baby! With a perpetual addiction to jackass-ery.”
Travis unbuttoned his flannel slowly and methodically before taking it off and tossing it over the bar top chair at the island. I clenched my jaw the second his massive, manly chest was on display for me because I could not let my traitorous body distract me from the conversation at hand.
He gave Toby an axe, for fuck’s sake!
“He’s a boy.” Travis growled back in that smooth way that didn’t push me down with his dominance, but caressed me with it like it was trying to take something off my hands. “He’s a boy who needs to learn boy things.”
“He’s—” I opened my mouth, and Travis tilted his head to the side, watching me as he stalked to the sink and washed the mud and dirt off his hands. “It’s dangerous.”
He dried his hands off with a towel and turned to face me again, “I was with him the whole time.”
“Travis.” I sighed.
“Do you not trust me to take care of him? To keep him safe?” He asked, and the vulnerability was clear as day in his gruff voice. “If you don’t, then what’s the point?”
Shit.
“I do!” I argued, getting worked up even more as shame burned on my cheeks for even making him think I doubted him. Fuck. “I don’t trust him,” I hissed in a whisper. “You know how he can be.”
“He’s a little boy, babe.” Eli offered, standing in solidarity next to Travis against the counter with his arms crossed. “You have to let him risk stuff from time to time. And you have to trust us to keep him safe.”
My shoulders deflated, and tears burned behind my eyes. I hated knowing they were disappointed in me and my reaction to the situation. I hated that I made Travis doubt how I felt about his place in the kids' lives.
I turned and lifted the pie dough into the pan, waiting for my replacement pie. “Never mind. I’m sorry.” Words I perfected in another life, bubbled out before I could stop them.
I felt like my skin was going to rip from my flesh with each second that they stared at me, scrutinizing and analyzing me as I once again let my own bullshit past cloud my present.
My nose prickled with the tears I refused to let fall as I started scooping filling into the pie, and then I felt Travis move.
I didn’t have to turn around to see him; he didn’t make a sound for as big as he was, but I felt him coming to me.
I felt Travis’s energy engulf me as he came up behind me, the warmth of his skin breaking through the thin fabric of my bathrobe seconds before his scent surrounded me.
Masculinity shouldn’t smell so fucking good, but from Travis it did.
I could taste his testosterone, and my body heated, softening and causing my needy and traitorous inner feminine urges to react to his proximity.
My thighs clenched, and I barely stifled a moan when my bare thighs rubbed together against my bare pussy under the robe.
He hadn’t even touched me, yet my body was getting wet, preparing itself to let him in.
It felt like the three of us had been together for lifetimes, wordlessly learning each other in the mere weeks that we’d blurred lines.
“Don’t,” I whispered, closing my eyes as my hands shook, holding the spoonful of filling over the pie like I was too scared to move.
Too scared to breathe. Because if I did, then I’d fold and beg for him to reset my frazzled brain and needy body.
The way they could make my entire world stop spinning out of control, with just their touch—it was scary.
“Don’t what?” he murmured as he dipped his face to the soft skin of my neck and let his breath warm the skin and cause goose bumps in its wake. “Don’t take care of you?”
I whimpered almost silently as my body melted from just the mere mention of him tempting me with relief. The heat of his naked chest burned my back when I leaned into him, tilting my head to expose my neck to his lips.
Vulnerable.
Offering myself to him.
Desperate for what he could give me if I just let him.
“You’ve been a ball of nerves since I told you my parents were coming over for dinner.” He spoke against my neck, and his beard teased my skin, but he didn’t actually give me what I wanted.
I wanted his touch.
His lips.
His kiss.
His bite.
His power.
I wanted to submit to it.
I needed to get out of my head.