Page 65 of Written with Regret (The Regret Duet 1)
“Then do you love her? Because tonight you called her babe. That’s what Jacob calls me sometimes.”
I blinked “Okay, first of all, I need Jacob’s last name because toddler Rico Suave and I are going to have a long talk.”
“Who’s Rico Sway-vay?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. Listen, I don’t want you worrying about me and Hadley. I like her just fine.” This included her body. Her hands. Her lips. Her… Son of a bitch. I had to get my shit under control when it came to that woman.
“Are you friends?”
Shit. I had no idea how to answer that. Things had been going well with me and Hadley; we were casual and courteous with each other. Despite the urge to rip her clothes off, I wasn’t sure that would categorize us as friends.
But Rosalee didn’t need to know any of that.
“Yeah. Hadley’s my friend.”
She suddenly sat up and crisscrossed her legs. “Oh, good. Then can you invite her to my awards thing at school? She told me she had to work. But if you ask her, I bet she’ll come. She always looks at you like this.” She folded her hands in front of her chest and stared dreamily into the distance while batting her eyelashes. “I think she likes you.”
It shouldn’t have mattered. After all, my kid was four. She was hardly qualified in deciphering human emotions attached to expressions. But tell that to the spike of my pulse like fucking Jacob on the playground.
“She looks at me like that?”
“Yep. When you look at your computer, she looks at you. And when you look at her, she looks at me. And then, when you both look at each other, her cheeks get pink and she looks down at the table and smiles. Jacob told me at snack that she probably loves you.”
My jaw slacked open. “You were talking to Jacob about me and Hadley?”
She gave me a duh side-eye that did not bode well for me during her teenage years and replied, “He’s a love expert, Daddy.”
Fuck. I was going to have to find a way to convince Jacob’s parents to have his lips surgically removed—or at the very least pay for his tuition at the preschool across town.
I toyed with the replica of my mother’s heart necklace around her neck. “What if we make a deal? You stop worrying about how Daddy and Hadley look at each other and I’ll invite her to the awards ceremony.”
“Yessssss!” she hissed, all but diving off the side of the bed.
Clearly, our conversation was done and she was off to other caffeine-induced shenanigans. But as I stared up at her ceiling, my mind drifted back to Hadley and the way she’d breathed my name while stroking the curve of my jaw.
It was the most ridiculous, asinine, and flat-out idiotic thing that had ever passed through my head. But dammit…
I should have kissed her.HADLEYI held my palm less than an inch away from my face. “He was this close.”
“You were freaking out about Rosalee bleeding. He was trying to calm you down. I think you’re reading into this a tad,” Beth said before squirting water into her mouth like a professional soccer player while sitting on the other end of my couch.
I’d texted her that it was an emergency when I was on my way home. She’d arrived covered in sweat, straight from the gym, but I had to give it to her. She’d nearly beat me to my house.
“I’m not reading into anything.”
“He still won’t even leave you alone with the kid, but now, you think he’s trying to get in your pants?”
“I didn’t say anything about my pants. I just said he was looking at me like he wanted to kiss me. And then possibly eat me like a snack.”
She arched an eyebrow. “I know you’ve been out of the business for a while, but that usually requires no pants.”
I sighed. “I’m serious, Beth. There was something there tonight. And not just on my side of the equation. He was feeling something. I know he was. I should have kissed him.”
“You should not have kissed him.”
“I should have. God, why didn’t I kiss him?”
She leaned back against the cushion and gaped at me. “Jesus, what are you thinking right now?”
“He was two seconds away from doing it himself. I could have sped the process up for both of us.”
“Are you listening to yourself? Because this is insane. And the fact that you wasted my time by calling me over here instead of telling me to meet you at the loony bin, where you so obviously need to be, is just rude.”
I stared off into the distance, a chill pebbling my skin as I thought about his hard body. “It was like a magical bathroom. He walked in there and brought this whole ocean of calm with him. Which is funny because Caven is usually the storm. But then he hugged me. It was so sweet and so real.”
