Page 60 of From the Embers
There was literally only one answer. Drying my cheeks, I tipped my head back to look up at him. “You’re incredible.”
“I don’t know about all that. I just committed us to not sleeping without pants all the time. I have regrets already.”
“I’m serious, Eason. The way you handled that… It can’t be easy for you to talk about Rob after everything that’s happened, but what you just gave Asher… I can’t say thank you enough.”
He pressed a soft kiss to my forehead. “Not one good thing will ever come from him knowing how much I hate his father. Right now, he trusts me, so he talks to me. If he knew, he’d feel like he had to choose sides. I’m not putting that shit on him. Rob and I were best friends. None of the kids need to know why that ended after he died.”
And what if Luna was Rob’s daughter?
What if we had to tell them that their father had an affair with Jessica?
What then?
I said none of that though. Those were problems for a different day when Eason was finally ready to learn the truth. He’d get there, and it wasn’t my place to rush him.
“Like I said, you’re incredible.”
He inched down the bed, bringing us eye to eye, a playful smile tipping his lips. “Good. Keep that in mind, because you know I’m totally getting them a cat, right?”
I let out a sigh, but it was strictly for show. A cat wasn’t high on my to-do list, but it wasn’t too low, either. “I feared as much.”
BREE
Exhausted wasn’t a strong enough word for the week I’d had. Being that it was past nine p.m. on a Sunday and I was just getting home from the office should have said it all.
However, the ringing of my cell phone from a number at Prism was the icing on the cake.
With a sigh, I pressed the answer button on the screen on my dash. “I am turning into my driveway now. You have thirty seconds before I lapse into a coma for the next hundred years.”
“They arrested him.” Paul, the new head of Prism’s accounting department, said through the speakers of my car.
This was good news, but it didn’t exactly solve my problems. “Did he happen to have a briefcase with one-point-seven million dollars with him?”
“That would be a no.”
“Of course not.”
The thing about the IRS is they are quite possibly the most hated entity in the US, and after experiencing the audit process, I thought that hatred was more than fair. But when it came to discovering that your former head of finance had been embezzling company funds for over three years, they were surprisingly helpful. The tax bill they’d slapped me with? Not so fun.
Between hiring an outside company to do an internal audit, finding someone to replace Doug, the State’s newest inmate, and then spending the entire weekend with the police while they gathered evidence to build a case against him, I was beat.
Unfortunately, my working overtime meant Eason was working overtime, which meant Evelyn had to be brought in so he could go to his gigs and work some more. It was a vicious circle of overtime for all of us. This also meant that, since our date a week ago, I had not seen him for more than a few minutes each morning.
Damn, it was hard to be a working single mom trying to find time to have sex with a working single dad while all three children were in the house twenty-four-seven. And we lived on the same property, so I couldn’t imagine how hard it would have been if he’d lived across town like a normal relationship.
Something had to give.
We’d told the girls about our new relationship status—not that they understood. But Eason and I weren’t shy about holding hands or the occasional peck on the lips. Anything more and we’d sneak into the pantry while the kids were preoccupied. I lived for those stolen moments when I got to lose myself in his arms. I’d almost mastered the ability to tune out “Baby Shark” playing on the other side of the door too.
I pulled into the garage and put the car into park. “Do you have anything else for me?”
“No. With Doug gone and the audit officially closed, it should be smooth sailings from here on out.”
“Don’t say that. You’ll jinx us.”
He chuckled. “Okay, fine. We’re in a holding pattern until the next disaster. Is that better?”
“Much. Now I need to go. Keep me in the loop if you hear anything else.”
“Sure thing.”
“Bye.” I hung up and cut the engine. After collecting my briefcase and three travel mugs that had been riding back and forth with me to work all weekend, I headed inside. “Sorry, I’m late,” I called out to Evelyn as I walked into the kitchen.
