Page 78 of Last Comes Fate

Sofia turned to Xavier. “But you two aren’t married.”

Xavier shrugged, darted a quick look at me, then looked back at her. “No, babe. We’re not.”

Sofia’s face scrunched as she looked between us. “Well, I’m pretty great. And I’m a bastard too.”

My jaw dropped, and I slapped my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing out loud.

Xavier’s scowl quivered. “No,” he told her. “You are absolutelynota bastard. Don’t ever let anyone call you that.”

Sofia just mirrored his scowl back at him. “My teacher says you can turn mean words pretty with your actions. Like when Sissy Chapman called me a potato forehead, but I just grinned and made a song about it, and then everyone in my class wanted to be potato foreheads too.” Sofia grinned at me. “Remember that, Mama?”

I grinned at her. “I do, baby. You made potato foreheads super cute.”

“I did.” Sofia reached across the counter to grab her daddy’s hand. “We can make being a bastardawesome, Dad. We can be bastards together!”

The doorbell rang again, leaving no room for Xavier to argue.

His expression darkened, but he wasn’t able to keep a completely straight face while Sofia started singing a song about “Bastard Babes” to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

“Better see who your next admirer is, then,” he grumbled.

Because I didn’t want his good mood to vanish, I gave him a cheeky grin that, to my delight, made his own emerge all over again. Then I dashed for the door and opened it.

My stomach dropped when I saw who was standing there.

“Adam?”

Adam Klein, in a pair of nicely cut navy pants, a checked shirt, and a brown corduroy jacket that cast him somewhere between Brooklyn hipster and son of a British noblewoman, stood on my doorstep awkwardly holding a bouquet of flowers. He shifted uneasily back and forth on his toes as he looked over my shoulder, obviously expecting a tall, anger-prone duke behind me.

Which meant he had come here thinking he might see Xavier.

Which made me wonder why he had come at all, given the explicit threats he’d been given to stay out of my life.

“Hi,” I said uneasily. “Um…don’t take this the wrong way, but what in God’s name are you doing here?”After I explicitly told you to stay away from me and mine.

I looked behind him. I don’t know what I expected to see, but maybe a cavalcade? Some sort of support? Police or bobbies orsomething?

“I tried to call,” he said. “But you’ve, um, blocked my number. I think. Or else you changed it.”

I didn’t respond. Yes, I’d blocked his number. He didn’t need the confirmation.

“I’m…” he sighed, then pulled off his ever-present driver’s cap to rub a hand through his brown hair. “Look, I came to tell you that someone contacted me recently, trying to find out where you lived. They wanted me to deliver something to you. A letter. Offered me a lot of money to do it, too.”

The hairs on the back of my neck flew up. “A…letter?”

“Yeah.” Adam frowned. “I don’t know who they were. It was a blocked number too. This was a few weeks ago, but I don’t know. Something about it seemed really off, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind.” He glanced around me again. “You haven’t gotten anything weird in the mail, have you?”

I paused, unsure of what I should say. I didn’t trust Adam so far as I could throw him, but I couldn’t think of any way this conversation could be a set up. And if he did know something about the odd letters, I wanted him to talk to Derek, not me.

“Actually, yes,” I said. “There have been a few odd things. Hold on a second.”

I dashed back inside to grab a paper and pen, waving at Xavier and Sofia before jogging back to the door.

“This is the number of a detective friend looking into them for us,” I said as I scribbled Derek’s name and number onto the paper, then handed it to Adam. “He’s working with a PI Xavier hired to look into this stuff. Would you mind giving him a call? Since I, um, don’t have your number anymore.”

If Adam was surprised by that revelation, he didn’t show it. “Sure. Yeah, no problem. Are you…okay?”

If his concern was fake, he was a really good actor.

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