Total pages in book: 137
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135696 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 678(@200wpm)___ 543(@250wpm)___ 452(@300wpm)
“Get off our land.”
The color drained from her face.
“Yeah, princess. Now…pack.”
She dashed to the closet.
Gia sat her ass beside him.
He looked down at the dog.
She looked up at him, panting, but she closed her mouth to swallow before she opened it to lick his hand.
He scratched her head for a while then, not long later, he adjusted the driver’s seat of Nadia’s Range Rover to accommodate his longer legs and cracked a window in the back for Gia to sniff at when he drove all three females to his house.
THIRTY-SIX
More Happy
Riggs
Riggs didn’t want to do it.
But he had to do it.
So, while his son was wolfing down breakfast the next morning (both women were upstairs getting ready to hit the road), he leaned into his forearms on the counter across from his boy.
“I told you when I woke you up, Nadia had another situation at her cabin last night,” Riggs reminded him.
“I know,” Ledge said, shoveling scrambled eggs into his mouth. He chewed maybe twice, swallowed, then looked to his dad “That’s why MB is in the guest room and Nadia is up with you. And Gia is here.”
His kid aimed his eyes to the floor where Gia was lying at the foot of the stool by her boy.
Ledger then resumed eating.
“Well, got some things to cover with all that,” Riggs told him.
“All right. And no shade, Dad, but Nadia’s eggs are better than yours. She puts cheese in them.”
He felt his lips quirk. “I’ll take that note. Now I gotta tell you, I’m gonna call your mom and ask her to take you until Harry can figure out what’s going on with that cabin.”
Ledger lifted both shoulders. “It’s just people goofing around and being dorks.”
Damn it.
“Ledge, we don’t think it is. We think it’s something more, and it might be dangerous.”
Ledger’s eyes slashed to his.
Seeing his son’s face like that, he hoped Harry caught these assholes, at the same time he didn’t because he wanted to be the first one to get his hands on them.
“So I want you to stay with your mom,” Riggs finished.
“No,” Ledger replied, not bratty, calmly but firmly.
Riggs pushed up from his forearms and said low, “Ledge.”
“You promised you’d listen to me when I thought something was important. This is important.”
Shit.
It was.
Riggs crossed his arms and nodded for him to go on.
“If stuff is going down, I don’t want to be at Mom’s, worrying about stuff going down. I want to be with you, so I know you’re okay.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll be worried about you if you’re with me.”
“No, you won’t. Because you know you won’t let anything happen to me. Nadia or me. You and Gia won’t let anything happen to us.”
“Ledge—”
“Please don’t make me go, Dad,” Ledger whispered.
Feeling something uneasy slither up the back of his neck, he narrowed his eyes on his son. “Is there something to that I don’t know about?”
Ledger looked to the side.
“We’re talking about something important, and, buddy, you need to share when there’s something I need to know,” Riggs reminded him.
Ledger looked back to his dad.
“I’m not safer at Mom’s.”
That didn’t make anything slither.
Riggs felt his neck instantly get tight.
It took a good deal out of him, but he kept his voice modulated when he asked, “Why?”
“Because she’s never there, and Cami, our babysitter, is, like…seventeen years old.”
His son had been doing his best to protect his mom, be a big boy and take it, and he did good, but apparently, there was only so much a kid could take.
So…
Right.
Decision made.
Easy.
He was going for full custody, and he was going to be co-plaintiff with Storm.
“Then I want you staying at your gramme’s,” he amended.
“When you said you’d listen to me if something is important, you also said you were going to try not to stand in the way of me becoming a man,” Ledger returned.
“This is one of those times I gotta make a decision with you still being a kid.”
“Would you let anything hurt me?”
“Never. But—”
“How would you feel, even at my age, if someone sent you away from Gramme?”
Goddammit.
He tried to find an argument for that.
He couldn’t find an argument for that.
“Shit goes down, you do what I say, no backtalk,” Riggs gave in.
Ledger smiled. It wasn’t victorious. It was grateful.
“Thanks, Dad.”
Fuck.
“Right, now. Second topic,” Riggs began. “If I can do better at talking Nadia into doing what I think is right for her, unlike how this just went down with you, Nadia’s going to be staying with us again.”
Ledger went back to his eggs, muttering, “Cool with me.”
“Ledger, it’s gonna be different this time.” Shit, this was tougher than he thought it would be. “See, she and me are together this time. We care about each other. And we like spending time together. And when a man and woman are like that, they sleep in the same bed.”