Chapter 21
kelsey
For one horrifying moment, the world hung suspended. I sat frozen on Teddy’s lap like some kind of pornographic statue, still feeling him twitching inside me.
And standing in the doorway—mere feet from us—their expressions morphing from excitement to identical masks of horror were our adult daughters.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God!” Addie’s hands flew up to cover her face.
Sky made a sound like a wounded animal and spun toward the wall. “My eyes! My sweet, innocent eyes!”
The spell broke. I scrambled off Teddy’s lap with all the grace of a baby giraffe learning to walk, nearly kneeing him in a very unfortunate location in the process. He caught me before I could face-plant, shielding me with his body while simultaneously trying to get his jeans up.
“What the hell are y’all doing here?” Teddy shouted, his face a shade of red I’d never seen before.
“Not looking!” Addie shrieked, already backing toward the door. “We are absolutely not looking at whatever that was. We’re leaving, we’re so sorry—so, so sorry!”
“That’s our dad and our mom!” Sky wailed, stumbling out after her sister. “Why are there no clothes? Where are everybody’s clothes?”
The door slammed shut behind them hard enough to rattle the windows.
For approximately three seconds, the cabin was utterly silent except for our ragged breathing and the now almost cartoonish sounds of “White Christmas” still playing on the TV.
“Merry Christmas, girls,” I muttered under my breath, scrambling to find the T-shirt I’d tossed off my body without a care in the world.
Back when I was carefree, and my biggest concern was whether we ate all the casserole, not whether my children—who were supposed to be in Texas—would be popping in unexpectedly. “Maybe call ahead next time.”
I turned back to find Teddy tugging his zipper up and trying very hard not to laugh.
“Don’t even think about it,” I warned, fighting the persistent tug at the corner of my lips.
“Right. Sorry. This is serious,” he managed in a strained voice, the corners of his eyes crinkling.
“Theodore Riggs—”
He doubled over, his entire body convulsing with laughter so hard no sound came out at first. Just this silent, shaking thing that made him look like he was choking.
“Stop,” I gasped, locating the T-shirt and tugging it over my head even as my own laughter bubbled up. “This isn’t funny. Our daughters just—they saw—”
“Your face,” he wheezed, tears streaming down his cheeks. “When the door opened—you looked like you’d been caught robbing a bank.”
“I was naked!” I shrieked, smacking his arm. “On your lap! Mid-orgasm! What face was I supposed to make?”
That set him off again, and this time I couldn’t help it—I dissolved into hysterical laughter right along with him.
“Sky called them her sweet, innocent eyes,” I choked out between giggles. “Oh my God.”
“Same girl who, at sixteen, thought we wouldn’t find out she was watching Game of Thrones because she logged in through her laptop and not the TV. Ain’t nothing innocent about that one.”
We collapsed against each other, laughing so hard we could barely breathe. Every time we’d start to calm down, one of us would repeat something the girls had said, and we’d be off again.
Eventually, we managed to pull ourselves together enough to get fully dressed, my pants-free lifestyle ending almost as abruptly as it had begun.
Once we were both presentable—or as presentable as two people could be after being walked in on mid-orgasm by their adult children—we opened the front door to find our daughters huddled together like refugees in a war zone.
“It’s safe,” Teddy announced dryly. “We’re decent.”
“Are you sure?” Sky asked through her hands. “Do you have clothes on? All the clothes? Like, not just pants, but shirts, too? Because I just saw your—”
I cut her off. “Skylar Jade Riggs, do not finish that sentence and get in here before you both freeze. And next time, maybe knock first?”
“Next time, maybe lock the door,” she retorted with a raised brow. “Or I dunno, keep your clothes on outside the bedroom?”
“Wasn’t exactly expecting company,” Teddy gritted out before raking a hand over his face.
Addie stomped the snow off her boots before brushing past us with a shudder. “There are some things a child should never have to witness, and her parents ‘celebrating Christmas’ is definitely one of them.”
“Was actually more of a sitting on Santa’s lap type thing,” Teddy began before I elbowed him hard in the ribs.
“Not helping,” I hissed, then turned to our daughters. “What are you two even doing here?”
“We were worried!” Sky burst out, still refusing to make direct eye contact, so it appeared she was yelling at the coffee table. “Mom, you sent that text—”
“What text?” Teddy asked, and my stomach dropped.
Addie pulled out her phone, scrolling before reading aloud: “Ahem, ‘Your dad’s built a life here. He’s the president of the Colorado chapter. We can’t just pretend that doesn’t change everything. We’re not the same people anymore, and I’m just not sure there’s room for—’”
She looked up. “And then nothing. You just stopped mid-sentence.”
I watched as Teddy’s expression went from amused to carefully neutral in the span of a heartbeat. The kind of neutral that meant he was working very hard to keep whatever he was feeling off his face.
“I was texting them back this morning, when you were on the phone with your mom,” I explained with a wince.
That half-formed text, sent in a moment of panic before I understood what the president patch really meant.
Before Teddy had made it abundantly clear that nothing—not the club, not the distance, not our own spectacular capacity for self-destruction—mattered more than us.
“It wasn’t—I didn’t even mean to send it. I was spiraling, but we… we worked it out.”
“Clearly,” Sky said, gesturing vaguely at the couch with a traumatized expression, “Thoroughly. On the furniture. Where people sit.”
“My couch. I can use it how I want,” Teddy said, earning a disgusted groan from the girls.
“Gross, Dad,” Addie muttered before narrowing her eyes at both of us. “Seriously, we tried calling and texting y’all like a hundred times, and when no one answered, we thought you two must have gotten into some massive fight.”
“So naturally,” Teddy said, crossing his arms, “you decided to drive five hundred miles from Lubbock. Makes sense.”
“About that,” she started, then stopped, clearly trying to figure out how to explain. She and Sky exchanged a look that put me on high alert immediately. I recognized that guilty expression—it was the same one they’d worn after spilling a bottle of red nail polish on the living room carpet.
Something wasn’t adding up. I’d sent that text hours ago, right before Teddy distracted me with his declaration of love and invitation to move in. They would have had to have left Lubbock the second they received it.
“Wait. Did all the special orders get delivered?” I asked, my internal mom-manager mode kicking in despite everything.
“Kels, there are folks still stranded out at DIA,” Teddy said, staring at me like that was supposed to mean something. “Even if the girls miraculously found a flight on Christmas Eve, I-70’s shut down at the Eisenhower Tunnel.”
I raised my shoulder in a half-shrug, trying and failing to make the connection in my sex-addled brain. “Not sure what the airport has to do with customers in Lubbock getting their orders.”
“Because the girls weren’t in Lubbock,” he said gently, his eyes tracking between our daughters and me. “It’s a nine-hour drive in good weather. 50, along with damn near everything else south of Summit County, is shut down; they’d have made it as far as Pueblo before having to turn around.”
Sky suddenly became very interested in the tree, and Addie’s face went through several expressions—panic, calculation, resignation—before she straightened her shoulders. “Okay, fine. We haven’t been in Texas.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” Teddy replied dryly. “Care to tell us where you actually were?”
“We’ve been here,” Addie admitted with a heavy sigh. “In Summit Ridge.”
The words hung in the air for a moment while I tried to make sense of them. “You’ve been... what?”
“We got in the day before you did,” Sky added, wincing. “We’ve been staying at the ski resort.”
“The ski resort,” I repeated slowly, feeling like I was still several steps behind in a conversation I should have been helping Teddy lead.
Addie nodded. “We just—we had this plan, and we thought if we could get you and Dad in the same place for a few days, you could reconnect. Really reconnect—”
“Mission fucking accomplished,” Teddy muttered, sidestepping me before I could elbow him in the ribs again. “You commandeer a snowplow as part of your little con, too, Addie Grace?”
“No, a Sno-Cat!” Sky answered, her face lighting up with the glee of someone who—according to her—’had the tea.’
“You what?” I exclaimed, already mentally working out if Teddy’s connections would be enough to keep our daughters out of jail for auto theft or whatever the hell a Sno-Cat would be classified as.
“Cal gave us a ride on his Sno-Cat,” Sky said, then shot a pointed look at her sister. “From the resort. He was very concerned about Addie’s safety.”
Addie made a show of adjusting her glasses to hide the red creeping into her cheeks. “He was being polite. He works there; it’s his job to—”
“Yeah, I didn’t see him offering to let any other guests take a ride on his Sno-Cat.” Sky waggled her eyebrows suggestively, just in case no one in the room understood the euphemism. “And on Christmas Eve afternoon, when I’m sure he had about a million other things to do.”
“Shut up,” Addie hissed. “He’s just a stoner ski bum.”
“A cute stoner ski bum, though,” Sky continued, undeterred. “He’s, like, this blond mountain god type with really good bone structure—like Chris Hemsworth playing Thor if he gave up Asgaard for snowboarding. And I think he’s in love with our little Addie Waddie.”