Braedyn
IHADN’T BEEN STUNNED SILENT MANY TIMES IN MY LIFE. WHEN I accidentally broke a neighbor’s window at age nine. When Vincent told me he didn’t want anything to do with me or my child. When I finally held Owen in my arms. The first time I saw the Pacific Ocean.
And now.
This moment. As a man who looked like some cross between a professor and a biker with mountain-man height and shoulders prowled toward me.
I should’ve been scared. I told my brain as much. Said to reach for the pepper spray in my pocket. To call Yeti.
But I didn’t. I was too busy ogling him.
It wasn’t just his rugged beauty—though he had that in spades. It was something else. An energy that clung to him. The same kind infused into his skin by way of his tattoos. It wasn’t as if he was covered from head to toe, but he had a healthy dose of ink.
Art that ghosted over his forearms and hands led to bare biceps and then gave way to a piece on his chest that stole my breath. I couldn’t help but study the image that pulled taut over toned muscle.
A phoenix.
My mouth went dry as the design on my own rib cage seemed to heat. The man’s phoenix was surrounded by wisps of smoke and ash, and I swore the creature’s eyes glowed as they burned into me.
“What the hell are you doing in my house?”
The barked words had me pulling back to the here and now, regaining some sense of sanity as I heard my little boy’s laugh outside as he played with Yeti. Just because this man had a tattoo similar to mine didn’t make him a friend.
But I wasn’t the only one who heard the words spoken with an edge of anger. Yeti did, too. And she didn’t appreciate them directed at her human.
As I pulled out the pepper spray, Yeti tore up the steps of the cabin and charged in front of me, letting loose a ferocious growl. She didn’t attack the man, just stayed between him and me, but the surprise of it was enough to have him stumbling back a step—stumbling back and losing his towel.
The shock of the sequence of events was enough to have my jaw dropping right along with the terry cloth.
And I suddenly didn’t know where to look.
I didn’t want to take my eyes off him in case he made a move, but I couldn’t look anywhere on his very toned body without flushing to the shade of a tomato.
The man swiped up the towel and covered himself as Yeti bared her teeth. He cursed, backing up another step as a new voice joined the chaos.
“Mom?” Owen asked.
Normally, I’d revel in the fact that my son had called me Mom instead of bro or bruh, but all I could think about was that this situation had just gotten so much worse.
“Why is there a shirtless dude in our new house?” he continued, completely unshaken.