“Lucian, we’ll be in the kitchen,” she called out to her son.
Regina looped her arm around Tessie’s waist, but before they could get to the kitchen, Cassidy came rushing down the first three or four steps on the stairs. She still had the Coke and baby monitor, but she’d changed out of her normal clothes.
Into a little black party dress.
It was probably the only dress that Cassidy owned, and it was as out of place as Regina’s original rhinestone and red decor. Cassidy took the rest of the stair steps slowly as if posing. A pose no doubt meant for Lucian. Who wasn’t even noticing her.
Regina noted the direction of Cassidy’s posing attention. She looked at Lucian, too. “Go for it,” Regina said, winking at Cassidy. “He needs a woman who can get that phone unglued from his ear.”
Regina started walking but stopped again. This time, she looked at Eve. “And Lawson needs you.”
With that total shell-shocker, Regina smiled and got moving again toward the kitchen. She nearly made it there, too, but this time the interruption came from Lucian. He came barreling into the house, definitely not doing any posing, and he seemed to take in the entire room with a sweeping glance.
However, his glance was slightly more than a glance when he noticed Tessie.
Lucian usually had a poker face. That wasn’t the case now though. He had likely noticed the resemblance between Tessie and his brother, and he was piecing this all together.
“Shit,” Lucian grumbled.
Okay, he hadn’t liked what he’d pieced. But Eve hoped that he held on to his tongue until she could tell Tessie in private. And this time she would do it as soon as Regina and Lucian left. No more secrets.
“Don’t curse around Tessie,” Regina scolded Lucian, and she put her hands over Tessie’s ears.
Cassidy quit trying to get Lucian’s attention, probably because she could see the poop-storm that was about to come right at them. Eve shook her head at Lucian. So did Cassidy.
And his mother added a warning head shake, as well.
But Lucian might not have noticed them because he was staring at Tessie. “Have you seen it yet?” Lucian asked her. “Does your mother know?”
All right. Those weren’t questions that Eve had expected. Judging from their openmouthed stares, neither had Regina or Cassidy. Tessie didn’t seem nearly as surprised though.
“I found out a few minutes ago,” Tessie answered, only adding to Eve, Cassidy and Regina’s confusion.
“What’s going on?” Eve demanded first of Tessie and then of Lucian.
It was Lucian who did something to give her an answer. He came closer, lifting his phone so she could see the screen. At first, Eve had no idea what she was seeing, and she took the phone from him for a closer look.
And she got one all right.
Despite her no-swearing rule, Eve didn’t even try to silence the response that came out of her mouth. “Shit.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
LAWSON STARED AT the bottle of whiskey in his bottom-right desk drawer. Usually the only time he felt the overwhelming need for a shot was after a nightmare about Brett. But apparently fatherhood was having the same soul-sucking effect.
Well, the fears of fatherhood, anyway.
Tessie needed help, and he didn’t know how to fix it. Hell, he didn’t know how to fix himself or his tangled relationship with Eve. And now that tangle included their daughter.
Daughter.
At least the word wasn’t sticking in his throat though there were still plenty of sticking points in his head. Not because he didn’t love Tessie.
He did.
That had been a weird sort of realization that a DNA connection could produce such a strong feeling of love. Stronger than anything else he’d ever felt, and that’s why he was scared spitless. If he screwed this up, there’d be no coming back from it.
But how did he not screw up? Lawson still didn’t have a clue, which was the reason he was staring at a whiskey bottle in the middle of the day. Ditto for it being the reason he’d been avoiding Eve and Tessie. He was hoping a fix would come to him before he had to see them again.
Cursing, he kicked the drawer shut and opened the bottom-left one. No whiskey here, but it was a torment of a different kind.
A manila envelope.
Unlike the bottle of whiskey, it wasn’t in plain sight. Years ago, shortly after he’d gotten this office at the Granger Ranch, he’d made sure there were plenty of layers of paperwork and supplies on top of the envelope. Lawson hadn’t wanted to risk seeing it when he was rummaging for a paper clip. That’s why it was puzzling as to why he felt the need to see it now.
There was no label on the envelope, but over the past eighteen years, he’d given it a mental label. Usually with the word shit on it. Shit to forget. Shit you should toss. Shit you should never open. And the most often used one—shit and more shit.
Evidently, he had a somewhat limited vocabulary when it came to such things.
Despite the mental label-warning he’d once given the envelope, Lawson opened it now, and he dumped out the two small gift boxes on his desk. They were still tied up shut with the ribbon that’d once been white. It was now more the color of piss—which was probably some kind of metaphor for his life.
He didn’t open the gifts. No need. His superpower was the unwanted ability to see what was in both. Gifts that he’d intended to give to Eve at the ill-fated Sadie Hawkins dance so that she would have, well, choices about where they were to go from there. She’d never gotten them, though, because where they’d gone from there was precisely nowhere. They’d broken up, and the gifts had gone in an envelope and eventually shoved into a bottom drawer.
According to what Cassidy had told him, Eve had hung on to an unused memento from that night, too. A dress that she’d intended to wear. And also according to Cassidy, Eve had been planning on telling him something.
Welcome to the club.
Lawson had rehearsed a thing or two he’d been going to say, as well. Things that he’d added to his shit-to-forget pile. Of course, he’d never forget them.
He was still staring at the two boxes when the sound of his phone ringing shot through the room. Lawson made a grunt of surprise that he hoped no one else in the house had heard, and he quickly raked the boxes back in the envelope. He shoved it in the drawer before he even looked at his phone screen.
Lucian.
Too bad he couldn’t add his big brother to an actual shit-to-forget box, but since this call could be about their mother, Lawson answered it instead of doing what he usually did when he got a call from Lucian—let it go to voice mail.
“Have you heard?” Lucian asked right off.
“Is this a game of twenty questions?” The stab at sarcasm was a knee-jerk reaction, but Lawson quickly ditched it. “Did something happen to Mom?”
“Not Mom. She’s at the house, resting. The trouble’s with Tessie.”