All I could do was hope that Nick got his head out of his ass. And if he didn’t get his shit together on his own, I had no problem with helping speed that process along by making sure my moron of a brother-in-law saw the light before everything blew up in his face.
3
Pierce
“I don’t want meatloaf for dinner. Your meatloaf smells like dog poop.”
I looked down at my six-year-old son and arched my brow. He stood next to the cart with his little arms crossed over his chest and scowled murderously.
“My meatloaf doesn’t smell like dog poop.”
He scrunched his nose up like he’d gotten a whiff of shit just then. “Yeah it does.”
“It does not, and you’re being rude, Eli.”
“It smells just like Titan’s farts.”
I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from laughing at that particular declaration, even though it was funny as hell—and maybe slightly true. I wasn’t the best cook in the world. If I were being honest, I was pretty damn bad at it, and a lot of what I cooked ended up making the house smell an awful lot like it did every time our gassy dog got into the garbage—a weekly occurrence no matter how hard I’d tried to break him of the habit.
“All right. What about spaghetti?”
I couldn’t really blame him when his lips scrunched up and his face pinched like he’d just sucked on a lemon. That was one of the only meals, other than meatloaf, that I could cook. Sadly, I couldn’t make either of them well, which was why I’d taken that stupid cooking class last week.
My son’s head fell back dramatically, the groan emanating from his chest sounding like it belonged to a wounded animal. “I’m gonna starve!”
Oh, for Christ’s sake.
I wanted to turn to all the people giving me the side-eye in the grocery store aisle and tell them I did not starve my kid, but from the looks on their faces, they wouldn’t have believed me anyway, so I figured why bother?
Reaching up, I pinched the bridge of my nose, feeling an all too familiar dull throb start behind my left eye. It was the beginning of a regularly occurring tension headache that came with the realization that I was failing as a father. If Constance were still here, she’d know what to do. She was the best mother. She’d been born for it, so the fact she was no longer here was the worst kind of cosmic joke. The second she learned she was pregnant with our son, some instinct deep inside of her clicked on. She knew exactly what to do. I still didn’t have a clue. I tried, God knows I tried constantly, but it seemed like I just couldn’t stop fucking up.
I feared that if she were able to see me now, she’d be disappointed in the man she’d been married to. Each night I went to bed, I asked the higher powers for only one thing: Please don’t let me screw my son up. Please don’t let me ruin him for life.
“Fine,” I said on an agitated huff as I tried to pull in a calming breath so I didn’t lose it in the middle of the grocery store. “Then what do you want to eat?”
“Mac and cheese with hot dogs,” he answered automatically.
“We’ve already had that for dinner twice this week. Pick something else.”
He got that hard look of determination on his face that always sent a sharp pang through my chest. He looked so much like his mother when he made that face. When Constance was in the mood to dig her heels in and stand her ground, she always looked so goddamn adorable, I’d feel myself melt right before caving and giving her what she wanted.
Eli had the same effect. “All right. Let’s go,” I relented, feeling just a bit more of my power burn away. I couldn’t help myself when I saw my wife in my boy’s eyes. I was utterly helpless. Christ, I was bad at this parenting gig.
My son’s little hand latched onto the cart, walking alongside of it as I pushed us toward the aisle that contained the boxes of the powdered mac and cheese he loved so damn much.
I guided us around the corner and jerked to an immediate stop when I caught sight of the woman standing halfway down the aisle.
Marin Grey. One of the most beautiful women I’d ever laid eyes on, and the bane of my existence.
My chest tightened at just the sight of her. It was panic, brought on by my body’s incomprehensible reaction to her. It was the exact same thing I felt the very first time I laid eyes on her and every time after that.
I could still remember like it was yesterday, walking into my mother’s kitchen and seeing her standing there. At the time, it had been three years since I’d lost Constance. I was no longer buried under the grief of that excruciating loss, but I still missed her every goddamn day, and the last thing on my mind was putting myself back on the market. I didn’t want or need another woman, and I wasn’t sure I ever would. Eli was all I cared or thought about. I had to take care of him, protect him from the harsh, ugly world he’d been born into. It was just me and him, and I was more than okay with that.
Then my eyes locked with this sexy goddess across the room, and it felt like someone had taken a sledge hammer to my chest.
I couldn’t make myself look away. I didn’t know who she was or what she was doing there, but I couldn’t seem to bring myself to care. A basic instinct reared up inside me, one word bouncing around in my brain as I stared at the bombshell of a woman.
Want.
It was all I could think, all I could feel. Something about her brought out the caveman in me, and that scared the hell out of me, filling me with dread.
Then my mother introduced her as my little brother’s girlfriend and it was as if a bucket of ice water had been dumped on the fire burning wild and out of control in my gut.
Frank was my blood, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t see him for exactly what he was. The man was a worthless waste of space, a goddamn leech that sucked as much as he could from those around him, be it money, time, or patience. Hell, the self-centered asshole would take the marrow from your bones if he could. He was an entitled little prick who expected shit to be handed to him for no other reason than he simply existed, and he went into a rage any time things didn’t go his way.
In just the handful of seconds I’d been staring at that woman, it had been obvious she was too good for my little brother. It was a fact I knew down to my bones. She deserved better.
However, knowing that didn’t matter. With just a handful of words, it became clear that the only woman I’d been drawn to since my wife died was off limits in a profound and very permanent way. I might not have liked Frank all that much, but there were still lines even I wouldn’t cross, and fawning over your brother’s woman was a huge, glaring NO.
The way my body responded to her just then as she danced around the aisle to whatever was playing in the earbuds she had stuffed into her ears was so intense, so visceral, that I felt my muscles tighten and my jaw clench. I shouldn’t feel this way, and the fact that I couldn’t make myself stop, that I had all the self-control of a hormonal teenager being led around by his dick, pissed me the hell off.
As irrational as it was, I found myself in a bad mood whenever she was around. The tempest of emotions I was forced to tamp down in her presence caused physical pain. I didn’t want to want any woman, not when I needed to focus solely on Eli, and certainly not this woman. It was a headache I didn’t have the time or inclination to deal with. That was why, over the past few years, I’d done my best to keep my distance, and on the few occasions it couldn’t be helped, I’d found myself taking that bad mood out on her.