Rev It Up (Black Knights Inc. #3)(76)
Now she was starving. And worried.
Worried about Franklin. Worried about Lisa and her brother and…Jake…
“She probably just broke her phone or dropped it in the toilet or something,” he assured her, still talking about the nanny. “I bet when you get home, charge your phone and check your email, you’ll find she sent you something explaining her absence.”
That made sense. Lisa did have a bad habit of going through cell phones. She was always leaving them on the El-train or forgetting them in class…
“Maybe you’re right,” she said, although she couldn’t shake the niggle of unease that teased at the back of her brain. Of course, maybe that was just light-headedness brought on by having gone nearly twenty-four hours without food.
Digging in her purse, she pulled out her emergency granola bar and peeled off the wrapper, eating half the thing in one bite.
“Mmm,” she murmured. Never had nuts, fruit, and rolled oats tasted so good. “I’d offer you some,” she said around the mouthful, “but I’m afraid I might eat your hand should you reach for it.”
He smiled, his green eyes flashing, his dimples deepening in his shadowed cheeks. The expression was so shocking and unexpected given the events of the last day, the granola turned to dust when she tried to swallow it.
Finally managing to choke it down, she decided now was her chance to ask him his intentions.
“What are you going to do, Jake?” The words tumbled from her lips.
“About what?” He turned to frown at her.
“About Franklin.” She held her breath.
He glanced into the rearview mirror. “He can’t hear us?”
“Not with those earphones on. And he won’t take them off for an instant while Tangled is playing. He loves the horse.”
He nodded, remaining quiet for too long, then, “I want joint custody,” he blurted.
She nearly threw up.
“But how…but where…I mean…” There were so many questions, and she had so many objections, she didn’t know where to begin. So she just stopped and swallowed the last bits of granola in the hopes that it might actually stay down.
Joint custody?
But then she’d only get to see her son three or four days a week! Just think of all the things she’d miss…
Kinda like the things Jake has missed over the past three years? a little voice whispered.
Oh, dear Lord.
“Boss has offered me a job,” he said, oblivious to the fact that she might be having a nervous breakdown in the passenger seat. “So I’ll be living here in Chicago. And I know how you are about Franklin’s schedule not getting interrupted, but kids are more resilient than you think. I don’t see why us splitting time with him should be a problem.”
And just as quickly as the panic had seized her, it slid away, leaving her with a feeling of numbness. Helpless numbness.
“You know,” she murmured after a while, staring out the window even though she was blind to the traffic whizzing by, “my brother thinks I stick to a routine with Franklin because of our father leaving. He thinks it’s a control issue brought on by a childlike need to ensure nothing bad ever happens to me again. But that’s not true.”
“No?” Jake asked as he inched onto the highway running between the city and Lake Michigan.
“No,” she shook her head, absently watching a dog owner chunk a stick into the water at the edge of Oak Street Beach. A black Labrador retriever raced into the choppy waves after it, and for a moment she wondered how the world kept on turning, how everything kept on moving, when her entire life was spinning out of control.
Joint custody…
“Dad was a douchebag of epic proportions; there’s no question of that,” she admitted distractedly, her mind only half on the conversation. The other half was busy silently screaming. “But Mom was just as bad. Maybe worse. Because even though she stuck around, she was no kind of mother. After my dad left, she decided the best way to bury her sorrow was in a daily bottle of Stoli.”
“Christ,” Jake spat, and she could feel him glance over at her, feel his sympathetic gaze heating her face and somehow that made everything worse. She didn’t want his sympathy. She wanted his understanding. She wanted her son. She wanted…so many things that could never be…
“I learned to live in fear of the unexpected. Like the day I came home from school to find the man from next door tearing away my mother’s clothes as she lay passed-out on the living room sofa. I don’t remember much about what happened after I flew at him, mainly because he hit me hard enough to knock me senseless, but sometimes, late at night when I’m just drifting to sleep, I have these brief flashbacks of Frank barreling through the open front door and tackling our neighbor to the ground.”
“Good for Boss.”
“Yeah,” she nodded, remembering very clearly the fury that’d contorted her brother’s young face when he flew through the door. Killing rage. That’s how most people would describe it. “At fifteen, he was already bigger than most full-grown men, and though my recollection of the exact chain of events is sketchy at best,” she absently drew a broken heart in the condensation that’d formed from her breath on the passenger side window, “I do remember three things. The neighbor ended up in the hospital. Frank installed triple locks on our front door. And I was never allowed to walk home alone again.”