Walk Through Fire (Chaos, #4)(84)

It wasn’t that he wanted to hide that from Millie. It was just that he needed to introduce it to her slow-like.

One thing was certain from the last two days. He had to handle Millie with care. He had to pay attention. As they rode out their reunion, he had to have total focus on her even when he had other important things in his life that needed his focus.

This was because he needed to take care of her.

It was also because he was not about to let anything spook her so she slipped through his fingers again.

So he carefully extricated himself from her, exited the bed, made sure she was covered, and found his briefs. He yanked them on, and his jeans, pulling his phone out of his back pocket.

He checked the screen.

The call didn’t come from who he thought it came from.

It came from Tack.

Tack could wait. The call he needed to make couldn’t.

He went to the bathroom, took a piss, washed his hands, brushed his teeth, and came back out to the bedroom. Eyes to Millie curled up in bed looking peaceful, his lips curved up. Then he nabbed the Henley he wore the day before off the floor and tugged it on as he walked out of the room, closing the door behind him.

He started to make coffee at the same time he hit the buttons on the phone and put it to his ear.

He’d called her yesterday, before Millie got up and again after Millie crashed the first time.

And he’d learned from Deb that his girls were disappointed the snow came right before a weekend so they were shut in but not shut out of school.

Though, Deb reported they had plenty of food and all was good.

The second time he phoned, he’d talked to his girls, both now ecstatic about the snow, both wanting him to come over so they could go out and do shit in it.

He couldn’t and he lucked out when he heard Deb say in the background, “I know you want to see your dad but I also know you don’t want him driving in this snow. It’s dangerous. You can see him after the roads are cleared.”

With her doing it, he didn’t have to say no to his babies, something he found difficult to do, which in turn didn’t make Deb happy.

On this thought, after pouring the water in the coffeemaker, he was shoving the pot under when she picked up.

“Hey, High,” Deb greeted.

She’d always called him High. Not once did she call him Logan. She knew his name—it was on their marriage certificate, their kids’ birth certificates—but he’d introduced himself to her at the bar where they met as High and he’d never been anything but all the time they were together.

Truth be told, not many people called him Logan anymore. Even his mom and dad had reverted to using High most of the time.

So that had become Millie’s.

And now he had her back so he had Logan back.

There was something significant about that that he wasn’t going to sift through while on the phone with Deb.

But he understood it. He remembered the man he was before her, with her.

He also knew the man he became when he lost her.

Having that name back was like having that man back. Washing away the shit of his life without Millie and starting clean.

It would take more than that but that didn’t mean it didn’t feel f*cking great.

“Hey, Deb,” he replied. “The girls good?”

“They’re hoping for more snow so school will be canceled tomorrow,” she told him. “But it’s good. They’re clearing the roads. Company sent us home on Friday, so I’ll probably need to go in this afternoon to do some catch-up so I’m not swamped on Monday. But Mom said she could come around and look after the girls when I do.”

Deb had a great job, made good money as the manager of the shipping department of a computer parts factory in town. They had five factories all over the world and were corporate through and through, but they weren’t *s, which was good in times like these since they did shit like send her home when a storm got bad.

And he knew Deb’s mom, Connie, would look after the girls. Her son had taken a job in Idaho, married a woman there, had kids there. Her other daughter had moved to Alabama when her husband had been transferred, and obviously their kids went with them. So Connie only had Cleo and Zadie to shower with love and attention and she had a lot of both for her grandbabies and she did it as often as she could.

High liked Connie. She was a good woman. Her husband had walked out on her when her kids were young and then did only the minimum of what a father should do for his kids financially and to be in their lives, so it was all on her to raise them and do it right.

This had been one of the reasons why Deb had accepted his ring. It wasn’t lost on her how hard it was for her mother to do what she did for her children. She didn’t want that for herself or her own kids.

So she took his ring and the only way that didn’t end as a massive f*ckup was that they had Zadie and they both loved their girls.

“Cool,” he muttered, pouring beans into the grinder, then setting the bag aside. “Got somethin’ goin’ down but would like to see ’em tomorrow.”

“That works, High,” she replied.

He drew in breath and looked out the window over Millie’s sink that showed a view of her courtyard and his truck, all covered in snow.

It was gorgeous.

And looking at it, it struck him some of the changes in his Millie, some of the things she’d built along the way, absolutely did not suck.