Page 28 of Same Rogue
Gina’s smile was back, and her eyes were so full of tears, Bridger couldn’t look at her for more than a second at a time. Crying women broke something inside of him.
“I’m the reason you can’t have grandbabies,” he uttered thickly.
“Yeah, you are,” Gina said without skipping a beat.
Fuck, his chest hurt so badly.
“You haven’t had any, so we have no one to spoil.”
He frowned and dragged his gaze to her. “What?”
“You are the one keeping us from having grandbabies by not settling down and having babies,” Gina said.
It didn’t compute. “But…I meant from Amelia. She was your daughter.”
“And she always will be. And to us, to our hearts, you will always be our son-in-law, even if you remarry and have official in-laws, it won’t change the way we feel. We will still be asking to meet your mate and babysit your babies if you ever have them. We’re going to want to go to their sports, and their awards ceremonies. Kindergarten graduation. We want to be there taking pictures when they’re all dressed up for the school dances. You’re what we have left of Amelia, Bridger, and you have paid such a beautiful homage to our daughter by the way you have lived your life, and kept her memory safe, and come to see us and stayed in our lives. You pay her homage by loving her still, and I bet you will always carry love for her. But she wouldn’t want you to live your life alone. She wouldn’t. You know she wouldn’t.”
“I don’t even know if this woman wants kids. It’s new,” he said. “I’m going to pick wrong. She’s nothing like Amelia.”
“Does she like you back?” Matt asked.
He nodded. “I think she does.”
“Does she want to spend time with you?” Matt asked.
Bridger remembered the text Kit had just sent him, asking him to go to a late dinner with her tonight. “Yes.”
“More than I can say about my wife,” Matt joked, and Gina smacked him playfully on the arm.
“Then I think step one is you spend time with her and figure things out. Figure out how you feel.”
“And then what?”
“And if you keep liking her more and more, well, we would like to meet her,” Gina said. “We’ve talked about this over the years and hoped you would be able to move on someday. You’re the kid we have left, Bridger. We still want to be a part of your life.”
Fuck.
Bridger’s eyes were burning.
He swallowed a lump in his throat and shook his head as he tried to figure out what to say. “I thought I was going to come here and tell you this, and you would be upset.”
“No. We’re happy for you. Really,” Gina said, and he could hear the truth in her voice. “It’s been ten years, Bridger. We’ve paused life long enough while we were healing up. It’s time to get on with it. We’re trying to find our way through figuring that part out too.”
“I’m sorry,” Bridger said again. “It’s my fault.”
“You couldn’t have known she was doing that. You couldn’t have known, Bridger,” Gina said thickly.
“She was trying to be Turned into a werewolf because of me.”
“Foryou. She was misguided. Never once did I hear you ask her to Turn for you. Never once,” Matt reiterated. “I heard you shut down every conversation about it and remind her that you loved her just as she was. Human. You had no way of knowing she had tracked down a werewolf to Turn her. None of us had a guess. I wish she wouldn’t have done it. Hell, I wish the Turnhad taken and she was a werewolf right along with you, but she wasn’t meant for it. That’s not on you. You would’ve never been okay with her doing that. I know you, Bridger. Her death isn’t on you, and we won’t hear anything else about that. It’s guilt you are placing on yourself to make yourself suffer more, but it isn’t yours to take. That’s not your fault, Bridger. It’s not. You taking her decision upon yourself isn’t fair to Amelia’s memory. She engaged in an act of love that didn’t work out. The decision was hers. Not yours.”
And he didn’t know why, but something loosened inside of Bridger that had been so tightly wound all these years. There was an enormous wave of relief at having this frank conversation with her parents. It was as if Gina and Matt were releasing him from the shackles he had placed himself into.
They were giving him the key to free himself.
Bridger nodded and tried to speak past the thickness in his throat. He had to try twice. “Okay.”
Chapter Nine
