Page 115 of Mr. Infuriating

“Those are brilliant ideas. I’ll have to remember that this summer when the kids stay with me for weeks at a time.”

“Is it hard to go from every other weekend during the school year to all the time in the summer?”

“I have them Wednesday evenings, too,” I offered like that somehow made the situation better. “But, no. What’s hard is going from having them all the time to them being gone again. That sucks.”

“I can’t even imagine,” she replied wistfully.

I cocked my head. “What about you? How do you handle it when Jake goes to his dad’s?”

“Oh, he doesn’t. Troy relinquished his parental rights.”

My blood pressure spiked when I roared, “He did what?”

Her shoulders went to her ears, then dropped in defeat.

“His girlfriend is like twenty-one. I don’t think she’s ready for kids. And this way he pays the least amount of child support the courts would allow.”

“That’s not how child support works.”

She shook her head.

“It doesn’t matter; I gladly took the deal. I’d rather do this by myself than let him have any opportunity to hurt my son.”

I stared at her in awe. She was even more amazing than I’d realized. If anyone deserved the fairytale, it was her.

But I wasn’t Prince Charming. Far from it. I was old and salty, and set in my ways.Mr. Infuriating, she’d called me.

There were probably a lot of people, especially my ex-wife, who’d agree with her.

She must have mistook the way I was staring at her to mean something else, because her flirty side resurfaced.

“I need to take a shower.” She put her hand on my forearm. “Care to join me? I haven’t shown you how much I appreciate the cheesecake.”

My cock jumped up and down, screaming, “Hell yes!”

“Sweetheart, there’s nothing I’d like more than to join you in the shower; I’ve revisited the memory of the last time we were together in there more than once. But…”

I’m a fucking moron.

That’s the only explanation for how I continued.

“If we hooked up again, it wouldn’t be fair to either of us.”

She pulled her hand away and glanced down at the table.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not what you’re looking for. You’d only end up disappointed, and then I’d be left feeling bad that I hurt you.”

Oh, and apparently, I’m a liar in addition to a moron.

Because I wasn’t so sure she was the one who’d end up hurt in the end.

Chapter Forty-Five

Gretchen

I’d made such a fool of myself the night before, there wasn’t a chance in hell I was showing my face around Gabe Saturday morning.

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