“Caught up?” I squeaked.
His shoulders shook as he dragged me into his chest. “Babe, I’ve been falling in love with you for months. It’s not exactly a secret. Tomlinson threatened to fire me over it last week.”
My heart came to a screeching halt. And not because Heath was going to get fired for being with me.
But because Heath had been falling in love—with me.
For months.
Plural.
Misreading my reaction, he stroked up and down my back. “Don’t worry, babe. I assured him we weren’t sleeping together. Which, technically, we aren’t, considering you sleep with Tessa every night and I sleep across the hall.” He winked. “But, with that said, I should probably reevaluate my career choices sooner rather than later. At this point, I got one foot in the grave with you.”
“Death isn’t romantic,” I informed him because it was either cry or be a smartass.
He laughed and kissed the top of my head. “It is when I’m ninety years old and doing it after spending fifty-plus years with you.”
Oh. My. God. I could not handle this conversation. Like, at all. I was in love with Heath, unquestionably. But I was struggling to see why he was falling for me. My redeeming qualities at the moment were spending his money to buy my daughter, who coincidentally wasn’t even mine, Christmas presents all while he spent his days making sure my current husband didn’t kill me or, worse, him.
I cleared the lump from my throat and said, “I think I need that reindeer bacon now.”
He squeezed me tight and murmured, “Okay, babe. Whatever you need.”
But what he failed to see was that I really needed a time machine so I could go back in time and track him down before all of this mess started. But I didn’t figure he had one handy or he would have already used it to do the same.
“Pass the red paper,” I said to Clare as we sat on the living room floor, wrapping presents.
The house was dark, Tessa was asleep upstairs, and Roman and Elisabeth had called it a night after they’d dumped an entire toy store of flawlessly wrapped gifts under the tree. And that was on top of the half of a toy store I’d already bought, which were definitely not flawlessly wrapped. Clare had keeled over laughing when I’d wrapped the first one and used only one piece of tape. But Tessa was a kid. I was banking on the fact that she didn’t give a damn how they looked as long as there was something pink and glittery inside.
“I feel like we need to donate half of this stuff,” she replied, passing both the tape and the wrapping paper.
I cocked an eyebrow and picked up the twenty-seventh, yet somehow different, baby doll I’d wrapped that evening. “Only half?”
She giggled, cutting into one of the boxes strewn across the floor and pulled out a small, black, velvet box. “What’s this?”
I shrugged. “No clue. Open it up and see.”
Her cheeks pinked as she smiled, peeking up at me through her lashes, a flirty shimmer of excitement dancing in her eyes. “Right. You don’t know.”
But I honestly didn’t. I figured it had to have been something of Roman’s that had gotten mixed in with our stuff.
I peered over the mountain of presents as she pried the top up.
I’d barely made out the glint of a diamond before it went sailing across the room, slamming into the wall before dropping to the floor.
“No!” she shrieked, but she was already searching through the brown packing paper until she found another box. “No,” she whispered, slapping a hand over her mouth and staring down like she’d seen a ghost.
“Talk,” I ordered, shooting to my feet and then closing in on her.
“He knows where we are,” she breathed, her wild gaze bouncing to me then back to the box in her hand.
There was no need for her to explain who the “he” was.
Molten lava surged in my veins as I snatched it from her hand and pulled the top open.
A tiny, gold bracelet with a heart charm that read Daddy’s girl sat within, but that was all I could observe before it was suddenly gone from my hand.
“No!” she yelled, racing to the front door and yanking it wide. “He does not get to do this.”
I marched after her just as she sent it flying through the chilly night air. The sensor lights flashed on, illuminating the darkness.
“Fuck you!” she screamed manically.
I hooked her around the waist, but she frantically spun, racing past me through the living room to the first box she’d opened. She snatched it off the floor then, rushing back to the door and hurling it out to join the bracelet. A guttural, “No!” tore from her throat as she watched it sail through the air.
“Clare,” I called cautiously. I braced for her to fall apart and prepared myself for another breakdown the likes of when she’d checked out on me after the DNA results. “Come here, babe,” I urged, staring at her back.