Because there wasn’t a single circumstance in my mind that made this situation okay.
“Momma,” the hushed, slight voice continued on in a whisper, all kinds of endearing manners as she lured Shea from sleep. “Wake up, Momma.” Excitement infiltrated her tone, and with it, she ticked up the volume, just a notch. “Sunshine is way, way, way up high in the sky. Is pancake time.”
Roused, the mattress shifted under Shea as she moved, her bedhead popping up just an inch from her pillow, the perplexity of her movements telling me she was just as disoriented as I’d been thirty seconds ago.
I felt it when the sharpened spikes of coherency caused her to stiffen and stifle whatever freaked-out reaction her good nature made her inclined to have.
Shea slipped discretely out of my hold before she whispered a quiet, “Okay, baby. I’m coming.”
Guilt saturated the mote-laden haze stretching through the wedges of morning light, like pillars of salt tossed haphazardly into her room. Shea’s guilt. My guilt.
It was suffocating.
I don’t have time for distractions.
Never had that sentiment been more glaring than now.
Lying on my side—because really, I was barely allowing myself to breathe, let alone move—I watched Shea awkwardly clutch the sheet to her chest and rummage around on the ground. She did her best to slink into a robe to cover herself, discomfort so thick in the air I couldn’t discern if it was hers or mine.
Standing up, she tied the belt around her waist, all that gorgeous hair swishing down her back, teasing me with the memory of just how incredible it’d felt fisted in my hands last night. She leaned down and scooped her daughter into her arms, hitched her onto her hip.
Kallie.
Her daughter’s name was Kallie.
Barefoot, Shea shuffled across the carpeted floor, those long legs exposed beneath the short, satiny white robe, her little girl hugging her neck. Contentment gentled across the small, round face when she peered back at me with wide, curious brown eyes.
Caramel.
Just like her mother’s.
No fear in them.
Just a soft interest as she met my discomfited gaze.
Shea pressed a kiss to her temple and brushed back the overabundant curls from the child’s forehead. Something about it felt apologetic and frantic, like she couldn’t believe she let her daughter find her this way.
Kallie just clung tighter, little fingers pulsing in her mother’s neck where she held on, her curious stare locked on me.
My chest screamed some unknown emotion. The guilt clotting off the airflow to my lungs was in an outright brawl with the affection that kept trying to find those cracks surrounding my heart, looking for a way in to corrupt and confuse.
Fuck. Couldn’t afford feeling this way.
Was feeling it last night under Shea’s touch, beneath her eyes, that seemed to see and understand far too much. Like she got me. In a way no one else ever would. Even when she didn’t have one fucking inkling who I really was. I felt it strong in the possessiveness that swelled through me with another man having just the audacity to touch her, socked with the protectiveness of it when he made the mistake of hurting her.
Truth was, I’d been feeling it all along. It’s what had kept calling me back. What’d gotten me into this fucked-up situation today.
It was hard to resist when you’d experienced little affection in your life. Sure, I loved. My brothers. The guys. But this emotion was something else entirely, something I doubted I even had the capacity to feel. Hailey had come the closest and she had nothing on what I was feeling for Shea. It wasn’t even in the same spectrum, just pasty pastels of muted emotion up against the vibrancy of Shea…intense reds and bold blues, blinding white, the deepest black.
Light and dark and simple and profound.
More.
More.