throat tight. God, I just wanted them to get there. It had been years since I’d been so homesick for my parents.
“Your mom says she loves you,” he said. “I’d put her on the phone, but then we’d never get out of here.”
“It’s okay.”
“We’ll see you soon, baby.”
“Okay. Love you.”
“Love you, too,” he said before the line went dead.
I took a minute to compose myself before turning around to face the men again. Shaking my phone side to side, I attempted to smile, but I was pretty sure it was wobbly as hell. I walked back toward the kitchen, but when I met Mark’s eyes, my footsteps faltered.
I couldn’t interpret the look on his face.
“It’s been a long time since I’ve heard you call me Woody,” he said quietly. His lips tipped up at the corners, and suddenly, it was as if we were the only two people in the room. I knew that look. I’d seen it a million times. I used to crave it like a drug addict. A Mark Eastwood addict. My belly swooped, like I was on the downward slide of a roller coaster.
Oh, shit.
Chapter 4
Mark
“I’m uncomfortable with the amount of emotion in this room right now,” Wilson muttered seriously to Eli, making him laugh.
“We only have two diapers left,” Cecilia said suddenly, glancing at Wilson as she readjusted the baby in her arms. “And almost out of wipes.”
“Make a list, and one of the boys’ll go pick some up for you,” Forrest replied easily.
“Why us?” Eli asked.
“I have no fuckin’ clue what to buy a newborn. Send Lu,” Siah muttered, pointing at her as she came back into the room.
“Why would I know what to get?” she asked, rolling her eyes. “What? Because I’m a woman?”
“You have a niece,” Siah argued.
“That doesn’t mean I know what to get.”
“I’ll go,” I cut in before they really started arguing. The two of them could happily argue about the color of the sky for hours. They got off on that shit, but it irritated the hell out of the rest of us. “Uh, make a list like Forrest said. I’ll grab you some paper and a pen.”
“I can just go myself,” Cecilia argued, lifting her hand to wave me off. “Do you have a Target or something around here?”
“You gonna walk?” I asked, getting up from the table.
“Well, if it’s close enough, sure,” she said slowly.
“I was bein’ sarcastic,” I muttered as I searched through the junk drawer by the back door. “You’re not walking to the store in the middle of the night.”
“There a reason the two of you can’t go together?” Forrest asked dryly, amusement lacing his words.
I paused, bracing my hands on the countertop. Jesus, I needed to get my shit together. Never in a million years would I have thought that seeing Cecilia again would rattle me so badly. I knew it would hit me hard. The way things had happened, the way I’d loved her and the way the ties between us had been severed meant that it would never be easy to run into her. I hadn’t been concerned I’d see her in San Diego because I was barely ever there, but I’d braced for it every time I was in Oregon. I thought that I’d be able to handle it.
Maybe it was the situation we were in that was making things so difficult. The fear I’d felt. The fact that she was standing in the middle of my fucking kitchen holding a goddamn baby.
“That would work,” she said cautiously. “Is that okay with you?”
I turned to face her. Fuck, she looked tired. Tired and scared and sad, though I doubted any of the others noticed it. Cecilia had inherited most of her looks from her mother, but the calm, detached expression she wore was pure Casper.
“Yeah,” I said with a nod. “Go grab what you need and we’ll head out.”
After she left the room, Ephraim started chuckling and soon, everyone else was quietly laughing with him.
“Shut up,” I said with a sigh, leaning back against the counter.
“Who would’ve guessed that all we needed to rattle you was a little blonde woman holding a baby?” Lu asked.
“Not just any blonde woman,” Siah said.
“Cecilia,” he and Ephraim sang.
“It’s been a long fuckin’ night,” I replied.
“Gonna be even longer with a baby in the house,” Forrest said with a smile. “You see her? Cute little thing.”
“How could you tell?” Wilson asked. “She was holding that child so close I couldn’t even tell if it