My Best Friend's Dad - Flora Ferrari Page 0,29

she’s not going to suddenly return and surprise us with a sneak attack.

Finally, Sadie turns back to me with a shiver. “Did you see that look, Saul? I thought she knew for a second then.”

“Me too,” I admit.

“But she can’t, right?” Sadie goes on. “I mean, if she did, she’d be going berserk. Fi’s a very emotional person. I’ve lived with her for long enough. Heck, what am I saying? You’ve lived with her for long enough to know that.”

“I have, I do,” I agree. “What if she knows and she approves?”

Sadie’s mouth falls open and a disbelieving look comes into her eyes. “Are you serious? Do you really think that’s even a possibility?”

“I don’t know,” I admit gruffly. “I do know that that didn’t feel good, though. At least she’s happy.”

“Um, yeah,” Sadie laughs. “She’s been talking about that convention for a month. I saw that you got her first-class, too. She’s going to be stoked. Fi’s the most outgoing person I’ve ever met. She’ll have made a hundred more writer friends by the time she gets back.”

“Yeah,” I say, nodding.

But we both know we’re just trying to make ourselves feel better, trying to fight off the feeling that what we just did was unforgivable.

I try to push the guilt away and let my feelings for Sadie rise. My possessive certainty for her – my seed – my everything roars at me that this is a good thing.

Because no matter how we got here, I’m going to have Sadie alone in a hotel suite, naked and shivering and begging for my come to shoot into her willing womb.

“Yeah,” I growl again, stalking around the bar and reaching over to touch her face. “Soon it’ll be time for our wager, Sparkplug. And I’ve got a pretty good idea who’s going to win.”

She turns her head toward my hand, nuzzling into it beautifully despite the risk.

It’s true.

I know who’s going to win.

Both of us.

The real question is, who the hell is going to lose?

Chapter Fifteen

Sadie

Riding the cab with Fiona on the way to the airport, I feel like a different person from the woman who drove away from it only a couple of days ago.

That timeframe sucker-punches me every time I think of it.

Only a couple of days.

I watch the snow-heavy landscape drift by, the clouds parting to shaft down powerful beams of sunlight that turn the world into the inside of a crystal ball.

I try to fit it into my mind that so much emotional transformation can happen inside of a person in such a short space of time. And yet the logic if it continues to dance away from me, always just beyond my grasp.

All I can do is look to my heart, my womb, all the thousand flurries inside of me that tell me this is right.

Every time he says he’s claiming me, a chorus rises inside of me, a chorus that screams, I want to be claimed, I need to be claimed.

“Sadie?” Fiona says, calling me from my reverie.

“Sorry,” I murmur. “I was miles away.”

“I could tell,” she smiles, looking at me closely. “If you don’t want me to go on this trip, you know all you’ve gotta do is say, right? I’ll jump out of this car and carry us both home if I have to.”

“That seems a little dramatic,” I laugh. “I’m fine, really.”

I’m more than fine, that’s the truth.

I’m experiencing the greatest awakening of my life.

With my best friend’s dad.

I find I can’t hold Fiona’s gaze for long, the deceit of what we’re doing too powerful when we’re so close, physically, and emotionally. I want to blurt out the truth right here, but a roadblock rises inside of me, hammering that idea into a crumpled ball of impossibility.

“Goldilocks,” Fiona murmurs a moment later. “You know I’ll never judge you, don’t you? If you ever wanted to talk to me about anything …”

I force myself to look at her again, even as my gaze tries to focus on the passing trees behind her, the inside of the car, anything so I don’t have to feel as though she’s pinning me with a laser of guilt.

“I know that,” I say.

Does she know?

I remember how she behaved earlier when Saul revealed the writer’s convention tickets, and the same suspicion comes to me.

“Never,” she says firmly, holding my gaze.

“I know,” I repeat, laughing a little now.

She looks at me a beat longer, opens her mouth then closes it again. A look passes across her face as though she’s