Page 125 of Recipe for Rivals

“He’s dying to meet you.”

Nova’s phone started ringing, and she looked down. “Shoot. It’s Carter. I kind of need to talk to him.”

“Go ahead.”

She gave me a grateful smile and, to my surprise, answered it right there. “Hey, thanks for calling me back.”

The phone was so loud I could hear Carter talking. I tried not to listen, but he made it hard not to. “We need to go over a few things.”

“Agreed,” Nova said. “Like Kristen. Ben has been worried your new baby will replace him, and I need to know it won’t.”

Woah. New baby?

“That’s ridiculous,” Carter said, but even then, the man wasn’t an idiot. Surely he could see why his kid was concerned.

“If you proceed with a wedding, I need to be consulted before you tell the kids.”

“You’ll do the same for me?” he asked.

She hesitated. “They live with me, Carter. They’ll know if I’m getting married, and I would obviously plan a wedding around their schedule. You can’t really pretend it’s the same thing.”

He sighed. “What else?”

“We’ll do calls on Sundays. Standing appointment. We need structure and order if this is going to work long term”

“Fine.”

She exhaled silently, like a weight had been lifted from her chest. I reached across the console and took her hand. “That’s it.”

“Okay.” He cleared his throat. “I’ve given it some thought, and I will…uh…raise your child support payments by five hundred a month, okay? I think we’ve always been good at negotiating terms and coming to an understanding. We don’t need to get the law involved.”

She looked out the window, eyes hard, and clutched my hand. “That makes me think it should probably be much higher.”

“You live in Texas, Noves. You can’t really expect to need the same amount of money you’d need here.”

“We can revisit this later?—”

“Fine. Eight hundred.”

She smiled. “Okay. Eight hundred.”

“And you won’t go to the cops.”

“No, I won’t.”

Did he not know her? She wouldn’t drag him through the mud for the sake of her children alone. Carter never knew what he’d had.

“I need to go,” she said. “We can nail down a time for Sunday calls later.”

“Okay. Bye, Nova.”

“Bye.” She hung up and released a breath. “I didn’t expect that.”

“The money?”

“I’m pretty sure he hid a lot of his money offshore somewhere during our settlement. I don’t know. It was all a blur.” She looked at me. “But he used the same excuse then.We’re good at compromise, so we should just handle it on our own.”

“Should you take it to the police?”

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