Belonging like that wasn’t for him anymore. His body had made damn sure of that.
Even if the truth of it was threatening to crush him, bit by bit.
“Stop bein’ so fuckin’ dramatic,” he muttered. After a quick trip to the bathroom across the hall for a nice, long dance with his toothbrush, Declan slipped back into his room. Swapping his jeans and T-shirt for a pair of sweatpants, he drew back the covers and lay in the middle of the bed, staring up at the ceiling. They might as well get acquainted, he figured, since they’d likely be best friends by the end of the night. The depth of the sleep he’d gotten today at the hospital had been a surprise, although, maybe with the way his blood sugar had crashed, it shouldn’t have been. But then he’d woken to Tess’s hand on his shoulder, her brown eyes like whiskey in a crystal tumbler, glinting in the light, and Christ, it had felt startlingly good not to surface back to reality alone.
Maybe it was because he was alone now, or perhaps it was a byproduct of his exhaustion, but whatever the reason, he found himself wondering what she was doing. Was she settling her son into bed for the night? Doing the dishes? Binge watching Netflix? Was she an Orange is the New Black kind of woman, or—no, probably Mindhunter, knowing her tenacity. And when she’d done the dishes, had she taken off the wedding ring he’d placed on her finger, just hours before, as he’d promised to have her and hold her? When she’d fit against his touch, her cheek warm and soft in his palm?
Declan looked down at his own hand, the weight of his wedding band suddenly very present on his finger as he thought of the woman who’d put it there.
And in that moment, Tess Michaelson became that much more dangerous, because Dec hadn’t just married her.
He liked her.
9
Tess was running late. Which was pretty much the lead-in for any and every given day of her life (helllllooooo, she was singlehandedly single-parenting an almost-ten-month-old who was teething like a frickin’ pirhana. Between the drool stains and the lack of quality sleep, of course she was always late). Except this day just so happened to be the first day of Declan’s trial, and she was supposed to pick him up in twenty minutes.
Where were her fucking pants?
“Ah!” she cried, snatching a pair of mostly clean capris from the laundry basket at the foot of her bed. Jackson was playing happily in the ExerSaucer that Aunt Natalie and Uncle Jonah had gifted him—Tess could’ve kissed both of her friends/fellow attendings on the mouth for purchasing an item that kept Jackson both contained and occupied—and she shot him a smile as she yanked on her pants and went to work on her hair. Halfway through her brush-to-ponytail routine, her cell phone rang, and crap, maybe Declan needed something.
Her heart kicked involuntarily, although, whether it was at the thought that he might need something or the thought of the man himself, she couldn’t be sure. They’d traded two calls and a dozen or so texts in the week since they’d left the courthouse, all of them perfunctory. He hadn’t seemed to have warmed to the idea of the trial, but he’d given over all the information Tess had needed to get him added to her insurance, along with doing all the pre-trial tests and scans Dr. Gupta needed to get him started today. He’d said he was feeling okay every time she’d asked, and Connor and Harlow had both confirmed that he’d seemed well when Tess had (not so) casually dropped the query into their conversations. Declan had moved into a rental apartment after only one night with the couple, though, and shit, what if he was having another crash? What if he was having cold feet? What if—
“Hello?” she said as she whipped the phone to her ear, concern turning the word breathless.
“Well, this is a surprise. I was fully expecting you to send me to voicemail, as usual.”
Her mother’s voice hit her like a box of bricks, and she mentally kicked herself in the shins for being so distracted and rushed that she hadn’t checked her caller ID. “Mom. This is actually not a good time.”
“Of course it isn’t, dear. With you, it never is.” Not that a little thing like Tess’s assertion was going to slow her mother down. If anything, the attempt at deflection just made Bronwyn Jameson dig in harder. “I need to speak with you about Elizabeth’s wedding. She tells me you’ve RSVP’d as not attending.”
“That’s because I’m not going,” Tess replied, ignoring the squeeze in her belly that she always felt when talking to her mother in favor of searching for her flats. She’d long since stopped expecting any pleasantries from the woman, and anyway, it was easier when Bronwyn didn’t pretend to care about anything other than herself or what she wanted. At least, things stung less that way.
Her mother scoffed, but softly, because manners. “Don’t be ridiculous. Why on earth wouldn’t you go?”
Tess replied in list form. “Because I have a job that makes three-day weekends difficult. Because I have a baby who makes traveling difficult. And because I haven’t seen Elizabeth in a decade. Maybe more. We aren’t close.”
Also, because you’d spend the whole weekend showcasing my flaws to every single human in attendance, she added mentally. She’d rather take the night shift on New Year’s Eve, St. Patrick’s Day, and Halloween than sign on for that.
“Oh, Tess, please.” Her mother sighed, all disdain. “Elizabeth is your cousin. I understand that weddings might be…uncomfortable for you, what with everything that happened with Alec. But do be sensible.”
The jab landed as it was meant to, right in Tess’s solar plexus, and okay, yeah, it was time to end this conversation, stat. “What happened with Alec is that we got divorced, Mom. That was me being sensible. As for Elizabeth’s wedding, I can’t make it. I also can’t argue about it, because I’m running late for something important. Bye!”
Tess jammed her thumb over the end button, then jammed her phone into the back pocket of her capris. Her mother wasn’t going to let this drop—Tess hadn’t come by her relentlessness by accident. But Bronwyn could tastefully bitch about Tess’s non-attendance at this wedding all she wanted. No way was Tess giving in.
Not even she had enough armor to make it through three full days of familial vivisection.
“Nope,” she whispered, shoving down the emotions that wanted to ransack her chest. She had far more important things to worry about.
Like the fact that if she didn’t leave in the next thirty seconds, she was going to need a time machine to make it to Declan’s apartment anywhere close to on time.
Scooping Jackson out of his ExerSaucer and giving him an extra-close hug to defray her stress, Tess grabbed his diaper bag and her keys, sternly reminding herself to always, always check her caller ID before answering her phone. She had to bribe him into his car seat with King Henry the Octopus and a bunch of raspberry kisses as distraction, but he let her strap him in (thank you, baby Jesus) without too much fuss. She navigated the trip to the address Declan had texted her once he’d signed the month-to-month lease, pulling up outside the—whoa—squat, crumbling building she could only describe as ugly as original sin.
“Okaaaay,” Tess said under her breath, wondering why on earth anyone would live here voluntarily. The fact that it was doing a bang-up job of impersonating a prison (did the place even have windows?) aside, the building seemed to have seen the last of its better days forty years ago. It wasn’t in an unsafe part of the city, per se, but Tess was more than a tiny bit stunned that the building hadn’t been snatched up by some developer and slated for demolition, to be replaced by something newer and shinier and far more attractive to renters.