Page 53 of Bad & Bossy

Either way, I made a note to book her Camry for a full service.

I pulled into her driveway, the quaint little house sitting like a Lego amongst the rest of the identical homes. A few houses back, my driver parked on the side of the road, waiting for me to finish dropping her off so he could take me to collect my Maybach from the liquor store.

“You sure you’ll be okay to get your car?” she asked, her fingers hesitant on the buckle of her seatbelt.

I nodded. “I’d have someone pick it up for me if I wasn’t.”

“Promise me you’ll call your sponsor if you feel even the slightest inkling to go inside.”

I chuckled. “I’ll call her if I need to. If I did every time I felt the tiniest little want, Dana, she’d never be off the phone with me.”

The joke didn’t quite land. Her lips pursed into a fine line, more worry than amusement coating her features. “Cole.”

“I’ll call her if I need to,” I repeated.

It took her a moment, but she finally nodded and pushed the door open. I followed her out, locking the car behind me, and placed the keys into her waiting hands.

I walked her to the front door, not quite ready to let her go just yet, and before she could wrap her fingers around the handle I had her face in my hands, her lips on mine. One last kiss, one last moment before we had to go back to the monotony of our day-to-day lives. I could steal as many moments as I wanted at work, but after last night, none of those would even come close to feeling as real as the last twelve hours had. I wanted this part to last.

She chuckled against my lips, her demeanor calming. “I’m still not going to date you,” she breathed, the grin across her cheeks feeling far too mischievous for her own good.

“Keep telling yourself that baby.”

The sound of the latch coming undone made us both jump, and as we turned, the door slowly opened.

There stood a woman a couple of inches taller than Dana, her shoulder-length brown hair wild and her eyes bloodshot. But that wasn’t what stood out. It was the little bundle in her arms.

The smiling, eager little boy giggled the second he saw his mother. Bald head and green eyes, chubby but smaller than Brody. Something about him made the emptiness in my chest ache, made me want to reach out and take him from who I could only assume to be Vee.

I couldn’t take my goddamn eyes off of him.

Chapter 18

Dana

For days, I couldn’t stop worrying about that moment.

Cole had looked at my son in awe—he hadn’t been able to take his eyes off of him in the few seconds it took for me to grab Drew from Vee and shuffle inside the house, saying a quick goodbye to him. I wasn’t even sure he’d said it back to me, and it had taken far too long for his form to walk back down the driveway and be collected by his driver.

The longer I waited to tell him the worse it would be. I needed to keep reminding myself of that. I needed to tell him, needed to air it out and just come clean, but with the confirmation of his issues and the near-relapse of last night, I couldn’t find the guts to get the words out. It was one thing for him to see the photo of a newborn Drew wrapped tightly in the hospital-issued blanket back at Lottie’s, but seeing him in person, in all his little Cole-like glory, only made the possibility of Cole putting the pieces together that much more likely.

And I was running out of time.

I’d been keeping a close eye on Cole at work, going out of my way to check on him in the one place I knew he’d likely be tempted the most. I couldn’t imagine running a goddamn brewery and not being able to touch an ounce of the stock we kept in the massive campus. But every time I’d seen him he’d been fine, smelling of cologne as opposed to booze. I could tell he was trying harder than usual, could see it in the little bags under his eyes, could feel the stress in his touch, but he was doing well. He’d even texted me that he went to his AA meeting.

“Do you need me to watch Drew today?” Vee asked, coming around the corner with towel-wrapped hair and pajamas covering her thin frame.

A knock at the door cut me off before I could answer her.

Drew squirmed in my arms at the sound, his hands locked solidly around his bottle, and I gave Vee a sympathetic look that said, can you answer that please?

It was only when my brain decided that it wished the person on the other side of the door was Cole that I wanted to take that look back. But Vee was already wrapping her hand around the knob and I didn’t have time to move Drew before the door was opening. Although I felt a drop in my gut when it I saw that it wasn’t Cole, I was still happy, all the same.

“You’re not Dana,” Lottie said, her brows nearly touching from confusion before she noticed me on the couch behind Vee.

Vee stepped to the side, shooting me a dirty look as Lottie stepped through the doorway. “Did you not tell anyone I was here?”

I shrugged. “I told Cole.”

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