Playing With Temptation (Hollow Point #5)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

I was not fleeing.

I was not fleeing.

Life would be better in Georgia. Lucas would make friends—he was smart and outgoing, and wouldn’t have any problems. Ten was the perfect age.

He’d make new friends before the dreaded middle school started.

So it had to be now. Before the cliques started, friend circles formed, and it would be tougher to break in.

I was not fleeing.

Lucas would have his grandma close. We’d have Sunday dinners—make traditions. I’d get to see my mom more than twice a year.

This was good.

This was the way it should’ve been. I should’ve done this a long time ago, right around the time Lucas’s dad noped out of being a dad. When he told me it was him or the baby, and if I chose the baby, he would have no part of parenthood or support, and if I wanted the baby, I didn’t get to keep him.

No question, no hesitation, I chose the baby.

Exit Mark. Enter Lucas.

I was not fleeing.

I was going home.

I was giving my son a better life.

A backyard—something he’d never had.

“Thirty-minute warning,” I told Lucas as I drove through Jesup.

Bittersweet memories flooded as I glanced in my rearview mirror to make sure Lucas heard me.

The very first high school football game my mom let me go to had been right here in Jesup—Liberty County Panthers against Wayne County Yellow Jackets.

Game one of the junior varsity season. It was the one and only JV game Jase Turner had played in before he’d been moved up to varsity, and I’d have to wait another year until I was in high school to watch him play again.

My first crush.

My first love.

My first kiss.

My first everything.

“Dude, Mom, I’m right in the middle of an epic battle,” Lucas protested.

“Dude, Son, you’re already three hours over your limit.”

The last thing someone would accuse me of is being a strict parent.

It wasn’t like my kid was feral; I had rules, just not very many of them.

And since the majority of the time Lucas followed those to the letter, I was lax on everything else.

Except screen time. He had one hour a day on his tablet.

No phone. And after dinner and homework he was allowed to watch TV until bedtime on the weekdays.

However, on the weekends, the TV stayed off.

Music was a different story; he could have the radio on or listen to my vinyl whenever he wanted. This meant my kid had exceptional taste in music. He was like me—no favorite genre, it was all about the lyrics.

“Do you think Gigi made her world’s best carrot cake?”

“I think your Gigi knows you’re a growing boy and is excited to see you so, yes, she made you a welcome home carrot cake, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a pan of lasagna in the oven.”

Mark might not have been happy to learn I was pregnant, but once my mother had gotten over the shock that her twenty-five-year-old unmarried daughter was pregnant, she’d been ecstatic to become a grandmother.

Her shock had nothing to do with disappointment or failed expectations or judgment.

It was simply shock that her daughter who had once upon a time ruthlessly planned, made a pros-and-cons list before any big decision, and overthought pretty much everything, had seen a plus sign on a test and made an instant decision.

No list, no planning, no analyzing every possible outcome.

Since then, motherhood had broken me of over-planning my life.

“Score,” Lucas shouted from the backseat. “Gigi’s lasagna is my favorite.”

No, it wasn’t. Food was his favorite.

It was like the day he’d turned double digits, his stomach became bottomless.

“Do you think Gigi will let me make pancakes in the morning?” He continued to prattle on about food but my attention went to another important landmark of my youth.

The Jesup Drive-In.

The very location of my first kiss. Well, the actual location was in the truck bed of Jase’s dad’s old Chevy, but we’d been parked at the drive-in—tailgate facing the screen, snuggling on a pile of unzipped sleeping bags under a sheet.

In the years since we’d broken up, I’d had the occasion to wonder what my life would’ve been like if we’d stayed together.

Not so much in the beginning. I’d been a deer-in-the-headlights freshman at the University of Florida struggling to find my way in my new reality when we’d officially broken up. And I’d still had Jase in my life, as a friend.

At some point during my senior year of high school, the first year he’d been away at college, we were still dating but our relationship had shifted from boyfriend-girlfriend to best friends.

But all of that changed when I came home for the summer before my senior year of college.

Jase had graduated and moved home to go to the police academy.

He was taking the next step to realize his dream of becoming a police officer.

I was in the middle of a crisis and was considering changing my major.

Those were my over-thinking years and at the time, I’d felt like my world was spiraling and I didn’t know how to course correct.

It was bad timing when I saw him at a local bar. He looked…beautiful. He also had his arm around a stunning blonde. A reminder of a simpler time. A reminder that at one time I’d felt like the luckiest girl in the world to be with Jase. He’d been everything.

That blonde had tarnished the memory in a way I couldn’t see past. It wasn’t rational, it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t even nice, but after that, I’d ended the friendship.

Not officially, organically, slowly, allowing more time to grow between calls, taking longer to return his calls, until eventually, there was nothing between us.

It was the year that followed when I began the what-if game, which had turned into regret. I’d lost my first love, but more than that, I’d lost a great friend.

“Mom!”

“Sorry, what?”

“Pancakes?”

Right breakfast, because… food.

“You know Gigi loves cooking with you.”

Satisfied his food cravings would be fulfilled for the next eighteen or so hours, he went back to the tablet he was going to lose as soon as we pulled into my mother’s driveway. In an effort to stop thinking about things best left in the past, I went through my mental to-do list.

Movers. Unpacking. Grocery store run that was going to break the bank. Target for new bedding for Lucas. The mall for back-to-school clothes. Soccer sign-ups.

I had one week to set up our new house before school started.

I was not fleeing.

I was moving home to give my boy a better life.

“Bless, child.” My mom watched Lucas carry his second helping to the table.

“What? I’m a growing boy.” Lucas told her the God’s honest truth.

My mother beamed a smile at her grandson that helped ease some of the lingering doubt I was still harboring about this move.

Guilt, really.

I brought Lucas home from the hospital to my one-bedroom apartment. When he was two, we moved into a two-bedroom condo in a nice area of Tallahassee and stayed. Not only because moving sucked, but it was in a good school district and close to…

Stop.

Don’t go there, Rainy.

I’m home. We’re home. Nice house with a backyard and a third bedroom I could use as an office instead of the nook off the kitchen I’d taken over in the condo, forcing my kid to eat all his meals at the breakfast bar on a stool.

“Are you excited to meet all your new friends next week?” my mom asked.

“I guess,” Lucas mumbled.

And the guilt was back in full force.

“Since when does my grandson speak with marbles in his mouth?” My mom gently chided. “New school. New friends. New adventure.”

I wasn’t sure if my mom was trying to convince me or Lucas.

Barbara Cross had a way with innuendo. She was also a strong, lively woman who had raised me by herself without missing a step. I’d never caught the barest hint that she was struggling. Nor had I fully understood how hard it was being a single mother because my mom had made it look easy.

“That’s what Mom said,” Lucas told his Gigi without mumbling.

My mom’s gaze slid to mine, and she lifted one brow as if to say, See? “Of course she did.” Yep, she was trying to convince both of us. “Do you need help unloading the moving truck?”

My back was already aching just thinking of unloading all of our household belongings. Thankfully, the new house was a one-story.

“Nope. I think we’re good.”

“You sure? I could call Allen.”

Allen was my mother’s ‘companion’ as she called him.

A better way to describe him would be to call him her boyfriend.

They’d been seeing each other for nearly a decade.

They were committed and totally in love, but both of them were happy living separately.

And marriage was completely out of the question.

For my mom, it had to do with the way my father had left us.

For Allen, it had to do with his late wife.

At first, I didn’t like Allen’s reasons, but the more I got to know him and came to understand that the love he’d always carry for his first love didn’t take away from what he gave my mother, I let it go.

“Please don’t bother Allen. The movers will help bring everything inside.”

It was the unpacking of the boxes that would be a bummer.

“Carl’s single,” she told me.

Carl was Allen’s eldest son. He was a good-looking guy with a wicked sense of humor. He was also my mother’s boyfriend’s son, and I was never, ever going there. Not to mention, I didn’t have time to date.

“Mom,” I warned.

“What? You’re a beautiful thirty-five-year-old woman. You should be dating.”

“My mom dates,” Lucas put in.

Um…what?

Simultaneously, my mom and I looked at Lucas.

“She does?”

“No, I don’t,” my mom and I said at the same time.

“Yeah, I heard her talking to Aunt Zoe. His name is Bob. I never met him, but I think they go out on dates.”

Bob?

B.O.B.

Battery-operated boyfriend.

I felt my face flame molten hot while at the same time my heart shattered at the mention of my best friend.

“Bob?” my mom queried. “When did you start seeing him?”

Oh, about nine months after Lucas was born and my sex drive came back on station, but the thought of getting involved with a penis attached to a walking, talking, real man was never going to happen.

“Finish up so you can get some carrot cake.”

My attempt to move the conversation from Bob to something that wouldn’t potentially scar my son for life was thwarted by my dog-with-a-bone mother.

“You didn’t tell me about him.”

Holy horseradish!

“Mom, please drop it,” I groaned.

My mom took me in, and I knew by the way her expression gentled she wrongly assumed I wanted a topic change because Lucas had mentioned Zoe.

It wasn’t that I didn’t miss my best friend every second of every day, because I did.

The hole she left in my heart the day she died would never again be filled.

But right then, I was more concerned about my mother and son discussing my vibrator—thankfully neither of them understood that’s what they were talking about.

“I’ve got ice cream to go with that carrot cake,” she told Lucas, but her sad smile was aimed my way.

“Righteous!” Lucas said around a mouthful of pasta.

Righteous.

My kid was funny and I knew my mom was thinking about Zoe and the tragic end to her beautiful life when she didn’t correct Lucas for talking with his mouth full.

That was my mom—caring, compassionate, a good listener, hardworking, and she could be funny.

This was what I was giving Lucas.

This was what we needed.

I was not fleeing.

I was coming home.