Bringing Home the Bad Boy (Second Chance #1)(86)

He gripped the back of her head. “Got some of that for me?” he asked, amazed he’d found his voice at all.

She kissed him, and when she put her tongue in his mouth, he found new strength, sucking on her tongue, enjoying her amazing mouth. It didn’t take long for his cock to stir to life again.

Which she must have liked because next she wrapped her hand around it.

And stroked.

“Couch, Ace.”

“Bed?”

“Don’t care,” he answered. “Couch is closer.”

“Mmm,” she confirmed. “Couch.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE




Dinner was the no-muss-no-fuss combination of mac and cheese from a box, tater tots from the freezer, and for dessert, Oreos and ice-cold milk.

Charlie had no complaints. She didn’t need fancy, and she didn’t need healthy. What she needed, she’d discovered over these past weeks, was Evan.

Alarming? Not any longer. She was under no judgment from Rae’s parents, or Evan, or, as she learned tonight, Lyon.

“Are you guys getting married?” He carefully spun his Oreo, nose scrunching when the top didn’t come off clean, leaving the creamy filling half on each side of the cookie.

She’d been in the middle of licking the cream from her own cookie and realized she was sitting at the breakfast bar, tongue stuck out like the kid from A Christmas Story who froze himself to the flagpole.

Evan stopped dunking—the whole cookie, he didn’t bother with separating the tops, which was sacrilege in her opinion—and studied his son. Then he popped his cookie in his mouth, chewed, and kept chewing. When he was done chewing, Charlie managed to pull her tongue back into her mouth, but sat, cookie halves in hand, waiting for what she had no idea.

“Dad?”

Evan, done chewing, ran his tongue along his teeth for an agonizing two and a half seconds before answering… with a non-answer.

“Why do you ask, bud?”

Lyon, carefully transferring cream from one side of his cookie to the other, kept his eyes on his task. “Because a boy at school asked about my mom.”

Oh, Lyon.

New school. Of course he’d been asked.

“What’d you tell him?” This from Evan.

“What you told me to. Mommy is in heaven.”

And like that, her heart went from aching to melting. Evan had prepared his son for this situation. Of course he had. He was an amazing dad.

“I told him my aunt Charlie lived with us sometimes, though.”

Her eyes grew wide and met Evan’s lifted eyebrow.

“He told me it was illegal for my dad to marry my aunt and I called him a liar.”

Oh boy.

“Buddy, calling someone a liar isn’t nice.”

“I know.” Lyon scowled. “I got time-out.”

Evan’s frown drew down. Clearly, he hadn’t known, and clearly, he didn’t like that he hadn’t known. Charlie felt her face scowling as well. She didn’t like it, either.

“It’s not illegal for me to marry your aunt Charlie, because she’s not really your aunt.”

Lyon looked almost hurt. She gave him a wan smile, trusting Evan with this conversation. No way was she skirting the land mines dotted around this talk.

No freaking way.

“Aunt Sadie is your aunt because she married Uncle Aiden. And Aunt Kimber is your aunt because she married Uncle Landon,” he explained to Lyon. “Aunt Angel is your aunt because she’s my sister by blood.”

“By blood?” Lyon said, his lips forming an eww.

“That’s a way of saying people are related, bud.”

“Oh.” He looked at Charlie, then his dad. “And you and Aunt Charlie are not related?”

“No.”

“And you’re not married,” he said, puzzling his way through.

“No.”

“If you get married, will Aunt Charlie be my mom?”

Oh boy. The cookie halves were getting sweaty. She put them down and brushed the crumbs on her napkin.

Evan didn’t miss a beat. “Yes. She’d be your mom. Your second mom.”

“A second mom?” Lyon wrinkled his nose in confusion.

“Sure,” Evan answered. “You can have two moms.”

Lyon’s lips pulled. “My friend Rachael has two moms.”

Evan tilted a brow at Charlie, giving her a shoulder shrug that said, See? Easy peasy.

Meanwhile, she simply shook her head. He’d handled this like a champ, and here she sat trying not to let the moisture in her eyes leak out the sides. She had no idea how this was making her feel. There was an emotion there she couldn’t put her finger on.

After Russell and she decided not to marry or have children, she’d accepted an unmarried, childless future. She didn’t need either one to be happy, and for a few years with him, she proved herself right. She didn’t have pangs to be a mother, and she didn’t do photo shoots at weddings and feel pangs of loss that she wasn’t the one in the white dress smiling and posing.

But with Evan, a different possible future laid out before them, she found herself ready to accept an alternate reality. And with the phrase “second mom” bouncing around in her head, Charlie realized it was the perfect term for her. She and Rae. Linked in their pursuit to raise Lyon.