Page 12 of Long Road Home

Now, I was still in my suit, the jacket flung over the backseat in my SUV, and my hands were wrapped around the steering wheel.

It was almost nine o’clock in the morning as I pulled up to Tillie’s. The boy I saw yesterday was in the driveway, dribbling a basketball and wearing bright blue Beats-looking type headphones on his head. He wove the ball between his legs and pretended to shoot it above the garage door where it’d slam against the wood siding before jumping for a rebound.

The kid was good. Moved smoothly, confidently. Had no idea how old he was, but the graceful way he moved the ball around, fancy footwork included, grabbed hold of me. I couldn’t pull my eyes off him. It was several shots later when he snagged the faux-rebound, tucked the ball under his arm and turned. He slid the headphones off his head to the back of his neck and looked directly at me staring at him from my Escalade—like he knew I’d been there all along.

Damn. He was a good-looking kid. I searched him for a hint of Destiny but couldn’t find much. He was her kid. Wasn’t he?

He stared at me, biting his lip. I couldn’t exactly peel out of there without looking like some creepy stalker so with his eyes still on me, I hauled my ass out of my SUV and shut the door.

“You’re good,” I said, walking up to him. As I got closer, his shoulders went back, and his chin lifted.

“I’m okay.” His chin quivered as he spoke and then that lip went back into his teeth like he was trying not to cry.

I ignored it. Not to be a dick, but the kid had spent the day at his great-grandmother’s funeral the day before. Apparently he knew her.

“Your mom inside?”

Mom. I’d rolled that word inside my brain for hours last night. Destiny was amom.It sparked a thousand thoughts, a hundred memories of talking to her about kids we’d have. It meant she’d been with other men. Not that I was a saint. But Destiny had been mine. I was her first. And she’d made me work for it for well over a year before she gave me that. At one point when my thoughts had drifted to how many men she’d been with since me…I’d fought the urge to slam my fist into a wall.

He swept the ball to his stomach and hugged it. “Yeah.”

He stepped away from me and there was something about the movement, quick, almost scared that grabbed my attention. “I didn’t catch your name yesterday, but I saw you. Do you remember? My name’s Jordan.”

“I know,” he repeated and shuffled his feet and looked at the house.

Oh-kay. He clearly wasn’t up for introducing himself. Maybe Destiny drove home the idea of not talking to strangers. I pointed my thumb at the door. “Mind if I go in? I need to talk to your mom.”

My throat clogged at that word again. Fucking hell. Ten years ago she walked away from me. I had no right to know anything about her life.

I lifted my hand. “We’ll talk later, yeah?”

He studied me for a bit before pushing the headphones back to the top of his head. “Whatever,” he said and turned back to the garage door.

It was difficult to pull my eyes off him. Something about him was so familiar. I shook it off and headed to the house. The ball once again was bounced on the asphalt driveway, and the sound of his footsteps followed me to the front door where I entered without knocking.

It was instinct. I’d given up knocking on this door when I was seventeen years old and even when I started hanging with Tillie, she only allowed me to do it once before scolding me for treating myself like a guest and not like someone who belonged.

I didn’t even think about it until I shut the door behind me and that voice, that beautiful, feminine voice I’d dreamed about for years filtered through the hallway. It was deeper now, stronger…but no less sexy.

“Wash your hands and get cleaned up, kiddo, breakfast is almost done.”

She shouted it over the hiss and pop of grease, bacon based on the smells.

My body locked and in the corner of my eye, I saw herkiddo.

Her son was dribbling, weaving and bobbing, tossing the ball between his legs like he’d been born with a ball in his hand.

“Hey kiddo! Breakfast is almost ready. Go wash up,” Destiny called again.

Her voice rang through the air in that lyrical way she always had. It took me a minute to stop myself from slamming my fist through the wall at how she could sound so fucking happy when I was a tangled ball of anger and frustration.

“It’s Jordan,” I clipped out. My jaw was so hard from holding back everything I was feeling I ached down my neck to my tense shoulders. I rolled them fruitlessly. Nothing would take away the stress in my shoulders until I gave Destiny a piece of my mind.

The air went electric as I announced myself. The bacon still popped but something thunked to the wood floor.

Then footsteps.

And then she was there. Destiny stood at the mouth of the kitchen, end of the hallway. Small white towel wrapped in her hands, her jaw slack. Her gaze flicked to the front windows off to my side and back. “What are you doing here? How’d you know we were here?”

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