Page 25 of No First Kisses

“Because you guys are slobs and my house is my sanctuary.” I raise the back end of the trailer, locking one side of it in place while Ian gets the other side. “Plus, I don’t like any of you enough to let you come over to my house.”

Besides that, none of them were Poppy. She deserved to be there, to see it, before anyone else.

“How’s Poppy really doing?” Dom walks up with a case of beer in his hands. “Sorry I’m late. Emma was sick. The end of this pregnancy is driving her crazy. I just dropped her off with the others at your place so that they could rest.”

“She’s in shock, I think.” I nod toward the back of the truck, where Dom proceeds to put the beer he brought. “Parker and the girls were planning on taking her out of the house for mani-pedis while we get the moving done. I don’t want her to try and overexert herself lifting anything. Believe me, she would absolutely be here if she thought she’d get away with it.”

“I can’t believe she’s pregnant.” Remy watches me with confusion in his eyes, and I can practically see the wheels turning. “I was trying to do the math on it. Have you two been secretly dating this entire time? Or did it start when we were all up at Sebago?”

I nod, not giving him a clear answer. No one understands the connection we have, and I don’t really expect them to. Just over four months before, we spent the week at a lake house together on Sebago Lake. Chloe’s brother, Kevin, was thought to be dead at the time. Part of his will had been a trip for all of us to the lake. So when the group of us went, Poppy was there. She was always there when I needed her. If I were completely honest with myself, being there changed everything. Instead of being able to walk away or just watch her from a distance, Poppy was there, in my space, with the smell of her shampoo on my pillow every single morning. I was a goner after the first night of her body wrapped around mine when she didn’t realize she was doing it. Every single day since then, I’ve craved her more than anything else in the entire world, and it’s only gotten worse as the days go by.

Ignoring the men who continue to babble about my love life, I walk to the front of the truck and get in. Once I close the door, I can breathe. I can focus on what I’m doing. After a few seconds of silence, I start the engine and all of a sudden there is nothing but the growl of the exhaust drowning out everything. With it goes the sound of my friends betting on when Poppy might smarten up and leave me.

Why can’t they see that she’s pure torture. The best kind, but still.

The passenger door opening takes me by surprise, and Ian gets in before I can tell him not to.

“Great.” He slams the door harder than he needs to. “We’re all alone. Do you wanna tell me what in the hell you were thinking?” If he had even an ounce of anger in his voice, I would have reached over the center console and punched him in the face. “You got her pregnant?”

But he doesn’t.

“I didn’t go out and plan on getting her pregnant.” Putting the truck into gear, I start down the road before anyone else can get in the truck with us. “It happened.”

“At Sebago,” Ian adds on. “From what Chloe told me, Poppy’s already twenty weeks along. That means it happened when we were going through Kevin’s bucket list.”

I swallow the memory of that trip and the panicked meeting that Ian and I had after they rescued a redhead from drowning.

“She died because of me, Ian.”

“You keep saying that. You keep refusing to believe in a relationship with the woman you still love because of something in your past. But you still don’t want to talk about it, do you?”

With a sigh, I looked at the man I trusted with my life. With my secrets. Hell, I trusted him with my mental health. But I didn’t know if I could trust him with the darkest truth I had.

“Is it enough for me to tell you that I’m not just assuming responsibility for something that happened? It really is my fault that Poppy took that bullet.”

Ian stared at me from his seat on the lake, in the reclining chair that he’d dragged off the deck and next to the shore. He’d done it in an attempt to keep our conversation a secret.

“Yeah.” Ian finally nodded. “It is. But one day, you’re going to have to talk about it. You’re going to have to open up. Because if you don’t, it’s going to devour you.”

“It’s already done that.” I closed my eyes and thought about that night. The night I lost everything. “Did you know that she wasn’t even eighteen at the time?”

Ian nodded but didn’t say a word.

“Yeah. I’d just gotten my date for boot camp, and we were on our way to celebrate with our families. I took a shortcut through the alley next to Paddy’s, and out of nowhere, there he was. With a gun pointed right at me, or so I thought. He didn’t want money or anything else. He was there to take her from me. To hurt me.”

Ian didn’t interrupt, which is probably why I had the courage to keep going.

“I held her in my arms while she died, and I’ll never forget the blood pooling around her. When I finally pulled my shit together and started CPR—which I’d learned because she insisted it was a skill I needed before I left home—I didn’t even call 9-1-1 first. I watched the life leave her eyes, and I swore right there that if she lived… I’d do anything in my power to make sure she never hurt like that again. And if I was the reason once, I’ll be the reason again. I meant it. What I said before. I’ll eat a bullet before I let her get hurt because of me.”

“What’s changed, Logan?” Ian brings me out of the memory within a memory, and I can’t breathe with the realization that I’m sitting in front of my house. While he was talking, and while I was lost in a memory, I drove here.

His words echo the same ones that Poppy told me the night before last. When she let me hold her and our baby.

“Nothing.” That one word is the worst thing I’ve ever said. It was the admission that I don’t deserve her, and I never will.

Tapping on my window gives me the excuse not to continue the conversation with Ian, and I turn to find Dean Blake, Poppy’s father, staring at me through the glass.

“I brought the boys.” He nods over his shoulder, where the other members of his motorcycle club are gathered, along with both my brothers and Poppy’s. “Let’s get this unloaded so my girl doesn’t have a reason to complain when she gets here.”

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