Page 45 of A Reluctant Boy Toy
What did that mean? My heart sped up.
How could I be thirty-nine years old and not know what that meant?
I’d enjoyed being married, so why hadn’tIfound someone when Serena hadn’t wasted any time?
Oh God, oh God…
There’s really something different about me, isn’t there?
We finished our walk in record time, so I put Hades and Persephone in their kennel and went inside the RV with Morrigan to sleep off the booze.
Sleep didn’t come.
I checked my phone and found a bunch of new pictures. Artemis—pale and perfect—with little rosebud lips and a shock of downy hair that Taggart probably believed looked just like his. I didn’t tell him it would likely get rubbed off or fall out and then come in a totally different shade a few weeks later.Let him have the fantasy.
Artemis Kivi Wilder. Wonder where they got the name Kivi? It was cute, but I’d never seen it before. Maybe they’d mistyped Kiki or Kiwi?
Despite being happy that I could spend more time here with Sebastian and Molly, my chest truly ached from wanting to hold the new baby. It had been so long since I’d had a child in my arms. When Sadie was born, I’d been so scared. I felt young and dumb. Completely unequal to the task of keeping that tiny perfect human alive.
But babies are funny in that they have the purifying power of a five-alarm fire. Everything unimportant and unnecessary burned away around my daughter, and all that was left was this inescapable desire to protect and nurture and love her with everything I had until the day I died.
I still felt the same, though I never imagined I’d get cut off like this. I stretched my hand out and it met Morrigan’s velvety soft ear. She nuzzled closer in her sleep.
Before my last deployment, I’d been a happy, handsome man. Whenever I was home, I made pancakes and drove kids to pediatrician appointments and preschool and dance. At night, after making love with my wife, I reveled in the fact that my whole family was asleep under one roof. Life was complete in ways I didn’t learn to appreciate until much later.
Family days were halcyon days, the memories summer-scented, like sun-dried linens and the fragrance of newly mown grass. I’d have given anything to go back, but I was a monster now, and monsters needed to live alone.
Except…
Sebastian didn’t think I was a monster. He wanted to be friends with me. And Sebastian definitely needed looking after because his mother was a piece of work.
God knew there were far worse monsters in the world than me.
I set an alarm in case Morrigan didn’t wake me and drifted off thinking about the scenes Hades and Persephone were filming the following day.
Was I their PA now that they were going to be internet personalities? Was I their emotional support biped?
If I was, I needed to stop drinking so much.
My eyelid drooped until I couldn’t keep my eye open any longer.
Sleep claimed me.
* * *
The fog hadn’t burnedoff yet when I woke. It hung thick in the unmoving air. I got the animals up, fed and watered, and then loaded them into the van to head for the staging area. They were supposed to film a scene with two of the werewolf boys, but I didn’t know if they could do it until they had better visibility.
On the way, I noticed the golf cart was missing from Sebastian’s RV, but Molly stood on the porch on the phone speaking urgently with someone. I guessed Sebastian was on the receiving end of the call.
In the clearing, more people milled around than I’d ever seen before. Pulling as close as I could get to the pen, I had to slow twice to ask folks to move out of my way. People seemed to be huddling in groups of three and four, entirely focused on their phones.
It was unnaturally quiet when I got out of the van.
Deacon strode over to me, his expression tightly guarded. “You were with Sebastian Keye last night, weren’t you? Is he at your place now?”
“No. I walked him home around one. Why?”
“How’d he seem?”
