Southern Chance - Natasha Madison Page 0,73

and bless the apple pie.”

I try not to laugh, and we all say, “Amen.”

Dinner goes smoothly even though Kallie barely eats anything. She just pushes things around on her plate, and I look at her when Ethan asks for a second serving. She’s about to get up when I put my hand on hers. “I’ll get it. You eat.” I point at her, and she smiles tightly.

Ethan tells her all about football and the positions he plays, and he tells her about his favorite subject in school, which is gym, and how he hates math. When he finishes eating his two plates, he brings his plate over to the sink and puts it on the counter. “Can we have pie now?”

“How about you go take a shower and let the pie cool?” I say, and he starts to frown.

“I think it’ll be better cooler,” Kallie says, getting up. “This way, the ice cream won’t melt when I put the scoop on it.”

His eyes go big. “Ice cream and pie?”

Kallie throws up her hands. “Well, yeah, silly, how else do you eat apple pie?”

“Not like that,” he says and looks at me. “Why haven’t I had it like that?”

“I have no idea,” I say and then look at Kallie, who is putting the dishes in the dishwasher, “but go shower, and we can have it.”

He hops and skips to his bathroom, and I count, “Five, four, three, two, one,” and point when he says my name.

“Dad, come turn on the water.” I get up and walk over to Kallie first.

“Coming!” I yell down the hall. “You didn’t eat,” I tell Kallie, and she just shrugs.

“I thought I was going to throw up I was so nervous.” She looks at me, and I see the tears in her eyes. “He’s perfect.”

“Yeah,” I admit. “It’s why I know what I did was wrong, but why I can’t regret it. If I regret it, I regret him, and I can’t do that.” No matter how much I wanted to hate Savannah for doing what she did, I couldn’t hate her because of Ethan. It was a very tight line, and no matter how many times I wanted to hate her, I couldn’t do that to Ethan.

“You’re a good man,” she says. “I may sometimes want to kill you, but a good man none the same.”

I’m about to lean in and kiss her when Ethan yells my name again. “I’m naked, and things are shrinking, Dad!”

She rolls her lips. “I’m going to clean up.” She kisses my lips. “You make sure things don’t shrink.”

“I love you, Kallie,” I say, and she looks me in the eyes.

“I love you, too, Jacob.” She says the words quietly and then leans in to kiss me one more time before I go off and make sure my son is okay.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Kallie

“I’m not staying,” I hiss at Jacob when he takes my purse, my phone, and my shoes away from me. “What if Ethan wakes up?”

“Then he will call my name,” he says.

We just had the best dinner ever. Sure, I had a mini freak-out and rushed to my mother’s house and had a panic attack on her couch while I made her get me bread crumbs and a fucking apple pie. I didn’t know if she had it or not. If she didn’t, she would just have had to make one and deliver it to me because there was no way I would have let Ethan not have apple pie.

I didn’t eat much since the nerves in my stomach were all over the place. I kept holding my breath and waiting for him to tell me he hates me and that no one is going to love his dad. But none of that happened; it was the opposite. He sat there with a huge smile on his face the whole time, while he ate two huge plates of my mac and cheese. And then when he took a shower and came out in his pjs, I wanted to hug him and smell his hair. Instead, I blinked away the tears, watching Jacob be a dad. I always knew he would be a great father, but seeing it is so much more.

We ate apple pie, which is now Ethan’s favorite, and he asked if he could bring a piece to school tomorrow, so I already cut and packed it for his lunch. I sat listening to Ethan rehearse his nighttime story, and just when I thought my heart couldn’t get