Page 21 of Undeniable

I hope so.

“Cute kid, wasn’t she?” He took another pull from the bottle and I excused myself to grab another from the fridge, hoping it would be enough to put him off the subject. It wasn’t a question and he already knew the answer.

“Bet she’s really something now.” His voice drifted in after me. “You had a real thing for her back then…”

Oh, shit.

“Yeah, she’s…something.” It was all I could get out. I popped the cap off two bottles and walked them back into the living room, handing one to him.

Lucy sauntered into the room, finally calm, purring as she hopped up into Dad’s lap. She didn’t take to new people, but she’d always loved Dad. He had a gentle heart, something the tiny cat could easily sense, and she rewarded him by stretching up to boop his nose with her own.

“Your devil cat loves me.” He chuckled as he hooked a finger under Lucy’s chin and scratched, rewarded by an astonishing purr that threatened to rattle the cat’s bones.

“What does that say about you?” I asked, flopping down in the big chair across from him.

“Touché.”

We fell silent for a moment, the calm before the storm. I braced for impact, knowing he’d hit me with the full battery of questions as soon as he’d finished loading them up. I could see him mentally sorting through them.

“So…almost thirty years later, you finally going to man up and ask her out?”

I choked on the swallow, slamming a fist over my mouth to keep from spraying it all over the room.

“About time the two of you admitted it to yourselves.” He continued like my input wasn’t required at all, like this was a foregone conclusion.

“Fuck, no,” I finally sputtered and he gave me the arched eyebrow that saidWatch your mouth. “Maybe if I want Steve to rip off my balls and shove them down my throat.”

“Spent most of your life without a woman,” he observed casually, something that was painfully obvious. “Whatever that was you were doing with Jess–that didn’t count.”

It sure hadn’t counted. We’d been married for all of two years in our thirties, an arrangement we agreed upon because it meant a better housing allowance. We’d tried on the whole couple thing, but it hadn’t been a good fit. She’d gotten needy and clingy after we decided to cross the line from roommates to friends with benefits, but apparently she had several friends with whom she shared those benefits.

“She still keeps in touch with your ma sometimes.”

That mademyeyebrows hitch upward. I hadn’t spoken to Jess since the day our divorce was finalized.

“Sounds like she’s been married a few times since. None of them seemed to take real well.”

That didn’t particularly surprise me, because Jess was beautiful. She had always been a flirt and men had been powerless to resist her, a blessing until it was a curse.

“We didn’t keep in touch.” It came out a little more harshly than I’d intended. It made me sound angry. “We didn’t have enough in common then and there’s nothing now.”

“True…sometimes people come together at the wrong time in their lives.”

That felt like a weird, vague insinuation of something negative.

“Seems to me you’ve managed to keep up with what Madelyn’s been up to with some regularity.”

How the hell do you know that, old man?

He was right. I’d had to pretend pretty hard when I’d run into Madelyn at the coffee shop that I hadn’t known exactly what she’d been up to.My jaw must have dropped open, because it was obvious to both of us that my words weren’t working, and his mouth hooked up on one side. “Before her folks moved, her ma was always asking after you. Your ma was always very free when it came to sharing information about you with Mrs. VanBuren.” He paused for a moment, winding up to take me out with what I knew was the big gun. “Madelyn wrote to us after you were hurt and your ma wrote back. Two of them been keeping up a correspondence going on eight years now, I expect.”

The room was so quiet, I could hear the soft wheeze of Lucy’s breaths as she slept draped over Dad’s thigh.

Madelyn had been writing to my parents for eight years because…why?

Dad let me sit for a while and absorb the full brunt of that nuclear bomb.

Conversation was weird after that. He’d finally figured out I didn’t want to talk about Madelyn, so we talked about work and planned for me to visit him the next weekend to help with winterizing the house.

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