“Yay!” the girl screeched.

All this went on while High and Dot’s husband faced off in the hall.

Dot had caved when he’d confronted her. As she would. She’d been there. She knew.

This guy, High had his work cut out for him.

Their face-off continued until the little boy announced, “You’re not Auntie Millie’s boyfriend. I am.”

High looked down at the kid whose face was now twisted with dislike and outrage and, fuck him, but he couldn’t beat back the smile.

“You’re not my boyfriend, sweetheart,” Millie said. “You’re my nephew.”

The boy looked to his aunt and snapped, “Same thing.”

If High didn’t know they were already close, what happened next would prove it.

“We’re making waffles,” Millie announced, adeptly dealing with the kid’s attitude by offering food. “Who wants waffles?”

The kid’s stomach was obviously more important than his claim on his aunt because he forgot about his issue with High and yelled, “Me!”

The girl started jumping around, also yelling, “Me too! I love waffles.”

“You guys had oatmeal at home,” Dottie said, herding her kids into the house.

“That wore off like ages ago,” the boy replied, pulling away from his mother and dashing into the living room, following his aunt, so intent on doing it that his arms were pumping in an effort to give him more speed.

They disappeared.

With that distraction gone, High turned back to Alan and was again confronted with a wall of attitude, the adult kind he didn’t like all that much.

It didn’t sit well with him because this guy didn’t get it and was making judgments that weren’t his to make.

But that didn’t matter.

It was High who was going to have to make the effort.

“It means a lot you give a shit,” he said low. “And as you can see, she’s doin’ good. And so you know, I get it may take time and I’ll put in the time but in the end, you’ll know I got this.”

“You fuckin’ better,” Alan replied, and High had to remind himself it was good Millie had people who cared in her life, as that was all the guy gave him before he prowled away.

He looked to his feet, sighed, then looked up again when he heard little Freddie shout, “Bacon! Yee ha!”

And High steeled himself against what he knew would be all good at the same time it was pure torture as he walked out of the foyer toward the living room, hearing Millie ask, “Okay, who’s going to help man the waffle iron and who’s gonna help fry the bacon?”

She got two, “Waffle irons!”

When he hit the living room, he felt slightly better seeing Dottie’s eyes come to him with a soft look of understanding and a definite communication that it was all going to be okay.

He felt a fuckuva lot better when Millie’s eyes came to him and she gave him a smile that said she was happy her house was filled with people she loved.

Then it was High who ended up frying the bacon.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Gonna Be My Throat

Millie

“ALAN WILL COME around,” I whispered against Logan’s neck.

We were in my bed, Logan in his clothes, me in my pj’s, Logan on his back, me on top of him.

My sister and her family had left five minutes ago. The snowplow had gone down our street thirty minutes before that but it didn’t matter. Alan told us it was going to get near sixty degrees that day, so Denver was going to thaw.

When they’d left, I’d wanted to do the dishes.

Logan had firmly led me right where I was.

“I know, Millie,” he whispered back.

I lifted my head to look up at him. “How did Dot know about us?”

Conversation had not been heavy during our surprise visit with my family. We made waffles. We ate them. We talked about France. I gave out presents. The kids took most of the attention but that didn’t mean Dot didn’t go out of her way to communicate to her children and her husband that Logan was welcome and accepted. This meant she went out of her way to communicate the same to Logan.

Alan, on the other hand, resolutely refused to heed this communication and spent a lot of his time scowling at Logan and being very loving and familiar to me. He did this last bit by centering anything he said around things Logan couldn’t know or hadn’t been a part of, leaving him out.

Logan appeared not to give a shit about this.

But he was human and he was back with me. Family was all important to him.

He’d give a shit.

This was one concern.

The other concern was the fact that they’d come at all, not to see me after France, but obviously to check I was okay since they knew Logan was there.

“After you passed out in my bed in the Compound,” Logan began, “I went to her. We had words.”

I felt myself go tense as I felt my eyes go wide.

“Uh... what?” I asked.

His arms were already around me, loose but warm.

At my question, he started stroking my back with one hand.

“Babe, she’s Dot,” he declared. “She was more worried about you than me showin’ up at her door pissed off she didn’t share with me back then. Then she showed her usual spunk, and side note, glad to see she hasn’t lost that, it can be irritatin’ as fuck, but just like you, mostly it’s cute. In the end, she asked me in for cocoa and welcomed me back.”

I felt better at his words.

I also felt amused at the cocoa bit.

“Did you have cocoa?” I asked.

“Fuck no. Had you back in my bed. Said what I had to say and got the fuck outta there.” His hand stroked up my spine and curled around the back of my neck. “And seein’ as I’m sharin’ this, even if you weren’t already pullin’ out of that Arizona thing, Dottie’s probably been manipulatin’ that since I was at her place so you would be pullin’ out of it, seein’ as I gave her that assignment and, like her little sister, when she’s in, she’s all in.”

That didn’t surprise me either. Dottie, like my parents, had loved Logan. They’d missed him. Dot had tried repeatedly (and failed miserably) to talk me out of ending things with him.

However, Logan going to get in her face wasn’t fair.

He didn’t know that.

But it wasn’t.

I bent closer to him and shared carefully, “You should know, she didn’t agree with what I did. She tried—”

He slid his hand to cup my cheek in his palm. “Babe, you don’t gotta say no more. She told me you were in a state. I told you I get the state you were in. We’ve talked that through. Let’s not go back there.”

I stared at him.

I knew I missed him. I lived with that pain every day.

But now I was remembering all the reasons why I missed him.

One of these being that he was understanding. He listened. He did it with focus. He heard what you were saying and if it meant something to you, he found a way to get it so it wasn’t an issue. Alternatively, if he didn’t get it, he eventually found a way to accept it. That didn’t mean there weren’t arguments or out and out fights, but that was usually about unimportant stuff.

The important stuff Logan treated as important.

Another of these things was the fact that once an issue was put to bed, it was done. Not only did Logan not dredge it up again, hold a grudge, use it as an example, reopen discussions, he also didn’t let me do it either.

If we found ourselves at a hurdle in life, once we cleared it, we kept going.

No turning back.

These thoughts were profound and made me an alarming mixture of happy, hopeful, and sad, thus they made me drop my head so I hit his collarbone with my forehead. I turned so my cheek was pressed to him and his fingers were forced to glide into my hair. To get more of him, I then slid my hand down his stomach and up so I could shove it his shirt, skin against skin, around to his back.