Games of the Heart (The 'Burg #4)(54)
“Will the talk be deep and meaningful?” I asked.
“If you want it to be,” he replied.
“I think I’m topped up on that for tonight,” I informed him and he chuckled.
“Then it can be about nothing,” he offered.
“Okay,” I accepted.
“Except,” he started and I braced, “you gotta know one thing. Audrey will be at Reesee’s birthday party.”
“Oh God,” I blurted and he grinned.
“Not nice, you bein’ sweet, givin’ me another shot and me treatin’ you to trial by fire as payback.”
He could say that again. Dinner with his kids and then his daughter’s birthday party with his ex in attendance.
“At least tell me Vi won’t be there,” I demanded and his grin grew to a smile.
“No, Vi won’t be there.”
“Then I’m good. Your ex, I can handle. Some chick who you fell for, uh…no.”
“She’s married.”
“Uh…no.”
“With a baby.”
“Did I say no?”
He started chuckling.
Then he stopped abruptly, took one arm from around me and cupped my jaw in his hand.
I held my breath at the look in his eyes.
But he just repeated, “You made me a happy man, Dusty.”
“Good,” I replied softly.
“No, Angel, you don’t get it. I haven’t been happy, truly happy without anything f**king it up in eighteen years.”
I stared at him feeling my lips part.
“And tonight, givin’ me another shot, you made me happy. Truly happy without anything f**king it up.”
I felt my throat clog and my nose sting and the word was husky when I repeated, “Good.”
His voice was thick when he replied, “Yeah, it is.”
I took in a stuttering breath.
Then I asked, “Can we start talking about nothing before I start bawling?”
He grinned again and whispered, “Yeah.”
To that I whispered back another, “Good.”
Then he led me to the couch. He flicked off the TV and we started out talking about nothing then we talked about bitchface Debbie’s antics and then before he had to get back home to his kids, we ended up talking about nothing again (with not a small amount of making out mixed in).
As with everything I did with Mike, it came naturally.
Chapter Eight
Way Past Curfew
“Have you lost your mind?”
“Jerra, honey, Mike’s gonna be here in a couple of minutes.”
Suffice it to say, I shouldn’t have taken my girl Jerra’s call while in the midst of preparing to meet Mike’s kids and go out to dinner. And I definitely shouldn’t have shared that I’d driven myself and my babies up to my childhood home and then approximately three and a half hours later reconciled with the guy I fell for who broke my heart, both happening in the expanse of two weeks.
She was not as happy as Rhonda was when I told her Mike and me hooked up that morning after the boys went off to school. Rhonda was kind of a prude but definitely a romantic and clearly Darrin had shared his dreams about Mike and me with his wife. So I left out all the juicy stuff and definitely the Mike being a dick stuff. And I told her the whole thing cautiously because she’d just lost her husband and I didn’t want to rub my new relationship in her face however crazy it might be (not that I told her the crazy parts).
I also didn’t share with her I knew she gave Mike the diaries or that Mike shared them with me. I probably would never go there. It shocked the shit out of me she had the gumption to take them to Mike in the first place. She was delicate always, now extremely. I was there to try to patch her up, not shatter her.
But she was ecstatic about what I did tell her, like, off the wall, whacked out ecstatic. I’d been around her three times since Darrin died and she hadn’t been even close to that animated any of those times. Or, actually, pretty much any time I saw her in the twenty years she’d been with my brother.
I thought this was good.
Jerra, who had had several drunken orgies with me since Mike broke up with me, was understandably the opposite. She’d been riding my high that we hooked up then she rode my uncertainty when he closed me down then she plummeted with me when I lost him. She’d then commiserated with me when Fin called to let me in on what was going down and I had no choice but to put my life on hold and haul my ass up to Indiana to sort out Rhonda’s shit, help Fin with the land and prepare to go head-to-head with my bitchface sister. All of this on a farm that was a hop, skip and a jump from Mike Haines’s back gate.
Now she thought I was crazy.
“Hunter! Get this! Dusty has been back up in Hoosierland for about a day and she’s hooked up again with that f**kin’ Mike guy!” I heard her shout.
“Jerra, please, I have to get ready,” I told her, sitting on the bed, holding my phone between my ear and shoulder and yanking on my kickass fawn suede cowboy boot. They were boots that I bought six years ago to wear on my babies but I loved them so much they never saw a stirrup. They might not have ridden the range but they did see a lot of barroom dance floors.
“You’re f**king shittin’ me!” I heard Hunter shout back.
“I wish I was but no!” Jerra shouted to Hunter.