Page 148 of Stolen Kiss

I opened the door. “Mom. What are you doing here?”

She looked up and smiled at me. My mom was half my size, but she could be intimidating when she wanted to be. I was looking at a woman who’d once headed the entire Pierce Johnson Capital and made it look easy.

Now she filled her time with her charity work and her granddaughter.

“Can’t I come and visit my son and granddaughter?”

“You can, but a heads up would have been nice.”

She pulled back and took me in, her sharp gray eyes glinting under the light. It was funny how quickly she could make me feel like a troubling teenager all over again.

“Oh, you have someone over, don’t you?”

I wouldn’t exactly say Emilia was over, seeing as how much I wished she would just move in.

“Something like that.”

“Well, it must be serious enough if you’ve introduced her to Elodie already.”

“Mom, maybe you should leave and come back another time.”

I wasn’t ready to share Emilia with the world. I wasn’t ready to share her with my mom. I wasn’t ready to share her, period.

Before my mom could say anything, Emilia walked out with Elodie in her arms. “Jensen?”

My mom and I both turned to her then.

“Who’s this?”

I cleared my throat. “Emilia, this is my mom. Eloise Pierce. Mom, I want you to meet Emilia Adler.”

Mom turned to me, her eyes widening in shock. “Emilia Adler?”

I didn’t know why, but something about her voice gave me pause. I never told her about my suspicion about Emilia. Hell, I never even mentioned Emilia to her. The name shouldn’t have meant anything to her. Yet she was looking at me as if I had betrayed her somehow.

“Yes, Emilia.”

She moved close to me. “Jensen, do you know who this woman is to Elodie?”

“I do,” I said, slowly. “Question is, how do you know?”

“After you told me what you’ve decided to do, I hired someone to look for her. What is she doing here? And why is she holding Elodie?”

I glanced back at Emilia, and I knew she heard us from the expression on her face. I couldn’t tell if she was mad or if she was getting ready to run. I ran my fingers through my hair.

When I spoke, I made sure both women heard me. “She’s here because I want her to be here. She’s here because she’s Elodie’s mother, and Elodie wants her to be here.”

“But does she want to be here?”

“I do,” Emilia answered my mom before I could. She walked further into the room. She let Elodie down, and Elodie ran to her grandma, smiling, oblivious to the tension in the room.

Emilia walked up to me and I grabbed her hand, squeezing it in comfort, a move my mom didn’t miss.

“I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t know when you kids have gotten close. I know it’s not up to me to judge, but you can’t blame me for feeling protective.”

“You don’t have to protect us from Emilia,” I defended, and wasn’t that the truth? Out of all the people in this world, Emilia was the last person I needed protection from. The look in my mom’s gray eyes told me she didn’t think I was thinking clearly, but for the first time in a long time, I was.

All those years of letting Emilia slip through my fingers, of going through the motion of life and not really feeling it… this was the first time I’d felt alive.

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