Page 98 of Rent Free

I nearly dropped my head on the spot between his shoulder blades as he said, “I think that you might need to go, Sage.”

“I’m not hurting anyone,” she argued.

I looked over to see Maven waving her hand at me wildly.

I backed up and went back into the restaurant, breathing a sigh of relief when Maven caught up to me. “I hate her.”

“I hate her, too,” I grumbled. “When did y’all get here?”

“We were in the bathroom. We came from Dallas, and I was dying.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s good. I’m glad that you were here. I can’t deal with her. She makes me nervous when I have Forest.”

More than nervous. As if there was a bomb waiting to go off when she was around.

“I guess you’re lucky that you didn’t run into her before now.” She looked past me out the window. “What’re the odds that she shows up at this Chick-Fil-A?”

“That’s what I thought!” I agreed.

I glanced over to see Auden walking back inside, Sage storming off through the parking lot to her car—a new car I hadn’t seen before.

Auden walked up to me and snatched Forest from my arms, bending over and blowing raspberries into his neck.

“Stop! Stop! Unca Daddy!” he cried.

That was new, too.

Last week, Forest consistently started to call Atlas Daddy instead of ‘peas offer.’

The next day, he’d called Auden Uncle Daddy, and we’d all had a good laugh.

From then on, that’d been what Auden had been referred to.

I was so focused on Auden, Maven, and Forest, that I didn’t see the woman coming up behind me until she was all the way past me.

“Oh, isn’t this rich?” Emory said as she came into the middle of all of us. “Just one big happy family with a stolen child.”

Forest, with his scared little eyes, all but disappeared into Auden’s solid frame.

Anger at the way Forest reacted upon being faced with his mother had me fuming.

“What the fuck?” Emory sneered. “Let me see him!”

Auden turned so that his body was shielding Forest, obviously seeing what I saw.

Maven stepped in front of Auden, blocking both with her angry form, leaving me to move around the two to head toward Forest.

“Let me have him,” I said softly. “Can you help deal with that?”

I knew that Atlas wouldn’t agree with my entertaining her in any way, and Auden was a whole lot more competent seeing as he was a police officer—and in uniform at that.

“Thanks,” he murmured, handing Forest over.

Forest transferred his hold to my neck and buried his face under my hair.

I was so very angry.

I was getting angrier by the second when Emory argued with Auden, saying she had every right to see her child and that we’d stolen him from her.

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