Page 42 of Peak of Love
“What are you doing here?” Parker barked when Dane showed up on a dreary Sunday morning.
“I told you I’d help with Asher’s things.”
“Who is it, darling?” a woman called from inside the house.
“It’s me, Grace,” Dane answered, pretty sure Parker was about to shut the door on his face.
Grace approached. Her cautiousness told him she’d been informed of what had happened. The disappointment on her face was devastating.
“Hello, Grace. I’m here to help with—”
“We don’t need your help,” Parker said. “And neither does Celina. Despite your… persuasions. Hasn’t she suffered enough?”
What the fucking hell?!He reined in the outburst. Barely.
“Don’t talk about her like that, Parker. She’d kick your ass if she got a whiff of that condescension.”
“You speak for her now?”
“No! Though neither do you!”
“Stop it! You both need to calm down!” Grace interjected, wringing her hands. “Come in or Mrs. Lim will start gawking.”
He didn’t have to be told twice. Dane stepped into the house, his gaze drawn to Parker’s sneer.
“Got something to say, Parker?” Dane demanded.
“Celina doesn’t need a playboy! Don’t look at me like that, young man. I’ve known you since you started chasing skirts in playgrounds. You spent your twenties in gossip rags with a different girl on your arm every weekend!”
“That was years ago,” he piped uselessly. Dane felt his stomach turn to concrete.
“You’re the best uncle and a great friend,” Grace offered. “But… ”
“But what do you know about being a long-term partner?” Parker snapped. And then, to smash a wrecking ball through Dane’s concrete stomach, the man prodded further. “What do you know about being in a child’s life?”
“Nothing,” he admitted, not only because he had never had his own children. His dad wasn’t a model of ideal fatherhood. Dane grew up in a home of sterile indifference run by a disgruntled mother and an absent father. Which is why he spent most of his childhood in the very house he was in right now.
Everything he’d learned about fatherhood he picked up from two men. One was dead, and the other was the very man telling him he didn’t have the chops.
“You have to admit, Dane. You don’t know what it’s like to be there for people who depend on you. You’ve never had to fully commit to anyone, not in this way.”
“That’s too much, Parker. Please stop,” Grace uttered weakly.
“Just because I don’t know how to be a father, it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do anything for them.”
“I’m not talking about dating Celina! You think taking the boys to laser tag is fatherhood? All the money in the world wouldn’t come close to a man willing to sacrifice for his family. To be there through the worst of the worst. What’s the hardest thing you’ve ever had to do for anyone, Dane?”
“I saw him first,” he burst.
Shit, shit, shit.This was never meant to go beyond him and Celina. But he was mad and confused and gutted.
“What do you mean?” Grace asked.
It was too late to back out now. He proceeded gently. Revisiting those first few hours after Asher died might just fucking kill all of them.
“Celina called me from the morgue. Before she called anyone. She… she didn’t want her last view of his face to be of the accident. The thought of identifying Asher and not seeing his face was—” He stopped and cleared his throat. “She asked me to go first and tell her what to expect.”
Grace was sobbing openly now. Parker’s features twisted in agony.
