Page 5 of Tender
“I’m gonna let you go, okay?” Miles said with a wink.
Juno bit his lower lip and nodded.
“Call me later if you get the chance?”
“You know I will, babes. I love you so much. Talk soon.”
The screen went dead and Miles pressed both hands over his face before pulling his processor off again and settling back into the comforting, easy silence of the totally empty house.
CHAPTER TWO
EMMETT
“Tellme where we fucked up as parents.”
Emmett looked up from his desk, his glasses perched low on his nose because he was now at the age he needed readers. It was something he was steadfastly ignoring in spite of the fact that he had at least twelve pairs floating around his house. He dropped his pen and set his elbows on the desk, pressing his chin against his curled fists.
“What has the little queen done now?”
“Well, this is all probably because we started calling her little queen when she was a baby,” Cosimo said. He shuffled in the room and flopped into his chair. From the way the tip of his nose and sides of his ears were pink, Emmett realized they were probably going to have to move up their timeline.
Work had been getting to Cosimo for a while now, and Emmett could feel the tension starting to crack. He felt it at night whenever Cosimo was home early enough to climb into bed with him, and he felt it in the mornings with his lack of kisses and touching.
It was affecting him too.
Lately, their relationship had settled into something like roommates who fucked, and when they did more than that,it was heavily weighted in Cosimo’s favor. Which, Emmett understood why it was that way. He understood his husband couldn’t give him the sweet tenderness he craved, but it was starting to get to him.
He was ready to revisit bringing in a third once more, and he didn’t think his husband was going to object.
“I’m pretty sure calling our child little queen has nothing to do with her behavior lately. Hell, we could have called her Empress and let her rule the house like a tiny dictator, and I don’t think she’d be any different.” That wasn’t a compliment, unfortunately.
He loved his daughter. He just didn’tlikeher very much.
No, that was being kind. He didn’t like her at all. The pair of them had plenty of friends with spoiled children who hadn’t turned out to be complete monsters. He wasn’t sure if they’d gone wrong with her, or of she’d just been born this way.
It was something he was fighting like hell to accept, and his husband was fighting like hell to ignore.
Cosimo rubbed at his eyes and sighed tiredly. “She just called me screaming her head off because her driver’s license is suspended. Again.”
Once again, Emmett was unsurprised. “Parking tickets?”
“Parking tickets, speeding tickets, and apparently, she’s gotten a DUI which is the reason for the suspension. She called her boyfriend—what’s that fool’s name?”
“John? Jason?” Emmett struggled to recall. He was a CrossFit trainer and he’d had lunch with them once. Both Emmett and Cosimo had been left distinctly unimpressed.
“Whatever. He bailed her out after her DUI, and then she never showed up to court. There’s a bench warrant for her, and she’s asking us to go down and pay the fines so she doesn’t have to turn herself in.”
Emmett snorted. “Yeah, that’s a big, fat no.”
Cosimo raised a brow, and Emmett knew he deserved it. For far too long, he caved to her demands, and he knew that had contributed to her sense of entitlement. He realized his mistake, but too late, and after years of using every technique in the book to get her to behave, nothing was working.
He desperately wanted to give up again, but he knew that would only make things worse.
Besides, Selene wasn’t living off their money entirely. The apartment was in her name, and her bank account was loaded with a trust fund thanks to his parents dying young and leaving behind a small fortune to the three surviving grandchildren.
She’d run out of cash eventually, but if they cut her off, she wouldn’t be destitute. Unless, of course, she kept up her tropical island vacations. But Selene was always the kid who had to learn the hard way.
“She also invited us to lunch to meet her boyfriend again,” Cosimo said, and his gaze cut to the side.
