Chapter 24

TWENTY-FOUR

DEV

I watched Tully’s face as his cock began to stretch me open. His expressive face hid nothing. I could see his effort to hold back, to keep from ramming into me and hurting me. I could see emotion flooding him as he locked eyes with me, but he kept his words to himself.

I shouldn’t have been grateful that he was holding back with me, but I was. If he’d said any of the words that floated unspoken between us, I wouldn’t be able to bear it. Because I also knew that he wasn’t ready to give up his life in Texas to come be with us.

And I completely understood.

Katie’s grandmother had once told me that sometimes the wrong people came into your life at the right time. I was angry at my father and cursing while cleaning tack in the barn. Biddy had overheard me and counseled me on realizing that sometimes life just stunk, but there were lessons to learn from it.

“And the opposite is true, too, of course,” she’d cautioned. “Sometimes the right people come into your life at the wrong time. They teach you lessons, too, and you’ll thank god for the gift of them, even if they can’t stay forever.”

I felt that truth tonight, bone-deep. Right person, wrong time. Tully was the partner I wanted. The man I didn’t deserve but craved. He was perfect for me in every way, even though it wasn’t quite our time to make something of it.

While he thrust in and out of me, gasping praise against the hot skin of my neck and pressing a kiss after every exclamation, I decided to let go of fear and worry.

Tully was truly a gift.

This might not be the right time for us, but he was the right person.

And I would wait for him.

I love you.

The words drifted from my soul to his, unbidden, carrying my heart along with them.

If I’d been in control of my own heart, I wouldn’t have been able to let it go. It was too bruised, too beaten down and cast away by others, to risk handing it into someone else’s care.

But I wasn’t in control, and my heart had happily leapt away without my consent.

What would it be like when Tully took it away again at the end of the weekend? When he moved back into his regular life in Texas, carrying my heart in his chest?

“Tully.” My voice croaked, and I felt the warm slide of a tear down into my hairline.

Tully lurched forward to take my mouth in his as he continued to fuck in and out of me.

I held him as tightly as I could and tried not to notice when my tears mixed with his.

We didn’t speak. The feelings were too much and words not enough.

When we finally came, gasping and shuddering in a tangle of sweat-damp limbs, my heart did something I didn’t know was even possible.

It soared as it cracked wide open.

Unfortunately, the following morning, it broke cleanly in half.

I awoke sated and happy. Tully’s arms and legs were wrapped around me like a spider holding on to a twig in a strong wind, but his voice was more like the hissing tease of the snake character from the Jungle Book movie.

“Devonnnn,” he hissed softly. “Devonnn, wake up. I want to go see the babyyyy.”

For once, I didn’t agree. I didn’t want to see Lellie nearly as much as I wanted to see thirty more minutes of Tully in my bed.

“Still sleeping,” I grumbled, pulling him more tightly against me.

“You’ve had her every day. I haven’t seen her in forever.” Tully’s tone might have been whining if it hadn’t been spoken with a knowing grin. “Imagine if you hadn’t seen her in two weeks.”

“It’s been twelve days,” I corrected. “Not two full weeks.”

He laughed and pressed a kiss to my shoulder. “Was someone counting?”

I rolled him over and pinned him down before staring at his crinkled eyes. “Yes. Someone was counting. My dick was counting.” I ground down into him, our cocks already hard.

It took about three minutes of sleepy wrestling, kissing, and jacking each other off before we both came. Tully glanced over at me from where he’d thrown himself onto his back on the rumpled sheets. “I like your friends.”

I reached over and ran a thumb along his stubbled jaw. “They liked you. But I’m not loving the fact you’re thinking about my hot friends after you just came in my hand.”

His smile creased the corners of his bright eyes. “I seem to recall you giving me the third degree about my pretty new client recently.”

“Mpfh.” I tried to block the guy out of my mind, but I remembered seeing him in the lobby clear as day. “Hot and rich. I can give you one or the other, but expecting both is just selfish.”

Tully rolled over to straddle me. “You’re both, and you ride horses. Lellie’s not old enough yet, but one day, she’ll tell you that’s the real jackpot. And she’ll be right.”

He kissed me quickly before pushing off me to head to the bathroom.

I imagined my daughter grown up enough to care about cute boys. The thought of it made me groan into my pillow.

Tully chuckled from the bathroom. “Shake a leg. You’ve got horses to micromanage, and I’ve got babies to cuddle.”

If he was offering to share the shower with me, I wasn’t about to say no.

By the time we made our way up to the ranch house for breakfast, Lellie was seated in a booster chair at the big farmhouse table while Jo made pancakes on a griddle. Surprisingly, Landry was the one keeping Lellie from throwing her cut-up strawberries all over the kitchen, but I also noticed Kenji was nearby, keeping an eye on both of them.

Tully went straight to Lellie. “There she is!”

When she saw him, her face lit up. “Tuh-wee!”

Zane put a hand over his heart and gazed affectionately at the scene while Way and Silas exchanged a knowing glance. Meanwhile, Jo turned to me and tilted her head at Tully as if to say, “He the one?”

I didn’t nod.

But I wanted to.

Instead, I went over and kissed her on the cheek. “Thanks for watching her last night.”

She grabbed me and gave me a tight hug. “Grammy’s privilege,” she said. “I’ve decided that’s my grandma name, so all of you can start using it now instead of waiting for Sheridan’s baby to arrive.”

I’d only been back in Majestic for a few days when she’d gotten the whole story from me about Lellie’s near abduction by the Scotts and my parents’ subsequent rejection of me. Again.

She’d been incensed and had immediately claimed me as her own child from here on out, telling me that when the time was right for me to call her “Mom,” she would be ready for it. Jolene Blake was good people. The best.

I poured and doctored a coffee for Tully before taking it to him at the table. He’d pulled Lellie out of her booster seat and into his lap, where he was trying without much success to clean her red, sticky hands.

“Thank you,” he said in pleased surprise when I handed him the coffee. He set it out of Lellie’s reach when he realized it was still too hot to drink.

As I turned to make my own coffee, the shrill sound of my phone ringing pierced the gentle hum of family and friends chattering all around me.

I glanced down at the display, surprised to see Susanna’s name on the screen. A call from my Texas attorney on a Saturday morning? I felt a sliver of unease in my stomach.

“Hey,” I said, answering it quickly.

Tully looked over with furrowed eyebrows. So did the others.

“Hey, Dev. Got a sec?”

My body began to tremble at the careful tone of her voice. “Of course. What is it?”

“The paternity results came back. And Dev… they show Lellie isn’t your biological child.”

Black shadows rushed in around the edges of my vision. “That’s ridiculous.”

“I know. Dev, I know. It may be a lab mix-up, or it may be… something else. The results came in last night, but I didn’t check my mail until this morning. I wanted to tell you first thing and let you know not to worry yet.”

Yet . She said not to worry yet . As if there would come a time for worrying soon.

As if I could simply stop worrying that I might lose my daughter.

“Baby,” Tully said, startling me by grabbing my arm and trying to guide me to a chair. “What’s wrong? Who’s on the phone?”

My hands shook as I tried to figure out whether to hand him the phone or try to find the words to explain that this situation had suddenly taken an unexpected and horrific turn.

The kitchen was silent as everyone stared.

Tully didn’t wait to get a response from me. He grabbed the phone and held it to his ear. “This is Tully Bowman. Who am I speaking to?”

The temporary relief in his voice only lasted a moment until Susanna explained the situation. But then his tone was one of anger, not shock and disappointment like I felt.

“That’s fucking ridiculous,” he snapped before lowering his voice. “Anyone with eyeballs can see this child is Devon McKay’s flesh and blood. Hell, Susanna, she looks more like Dev than Katie. What the fuck happened?”

I stared at Lellie as if studying her features would give me some kind of reassurance. I remembered the first moment I saw her—Tully standing defiantly among the crowd at Final Night with her propped on his hip, her little head lifting up from where it had lain on his shoulder, her eyes so instantly familiar to me.

Tully was right.

My rational brain knew there was no possible way she wasn’t my daughter. Not only did she have my eyes, but I knew Katie. Tully knew Katie. Renata knew Katie. And all of us knew that Katie was asexual. She’d planned her fertility journey carefully and had selected me because she knew me well and was comfortable with me.

But the less-rational part of me, the part that had learned the hard way that life was a series of plot twists and fuckups, reminded me that mistakes happened in labs, and there were probably plenty of sperm donors with hazel eyes. That part of me believed every bit of Susanna’s news because it had tapped into my worst fear.

I was going to lose another beloved family member, only this time, the family member was closer and more important to me than Matt had ever been. More important even than my own mother and father.

My daughter was the most important human in my life, and I could not, would not, lose her.

“Tully?” I croaked, trying to blink away the shadows at the edges of my vision.

He murmured something to Susanna before squatting in front of my chair and grabbing my hand. “Yeah, baby?”

“Tell her we’ll go down there and take the test again. It has to be a mistake. I’m not giving Lellie up, so we have to… we have to…” I suddenly realized I couldn’t risk it. Returning to Texas meant putting custody of my daughter in jeopardy. Without proof I was Lellie’s biological father, Katie’s wish to leave her with me was barely worth the paper it was printed on. Not up against a man as powerful as Franklin Scott and the lawyers he had behind him.

I glanced past Tully to my friends, the brotherhood. Silas and Bash both shook their heads frantically behind Tully’s back. I glanced over to Kenji, who was frantically tapping on his phone. He looked up when I went silent and also shook his head at me with a meaningful glance at Lellie.

They were right. I couldn’t take her back to Texas. At least without serious thought and legal consultation. But I also couldn’t ask Tully to be a party to anything that might be illegal or that could get him fired from his job at the firm.

I cleared my throat. Suddenly, my path was clear. “Tully. I need you to go back to Texas and see what you can find out about our options.”

This was a lie. I didn’t need him to figure out my legal situation—I had Susanna and a huge team of attorneys back in New York for that. What I needed was for him to leave so I could speak freely and make a plan to protect and keep my daughter without creating a conflict of interest that might jeopardize the job he loved.

Tully’s eyes, so full of kindness and affection and trust, met mine. “Of course. I’ll figure this out, Dev. You know I will.”

He reached up and stroked my cheek with his hand before leaning forward to press a kiss to the corner of my lips. Then he stood up, all business, and began to arrange a meeting with Susanna for the following morning in Dallas.

I glanced over at Kenji, who nodded and began arranging for the plane to be ready.

And then I got up and crossed the room to take Lellie out of Jo’s arms. I held her to my chest and pressed my lips to her wispy curls. “I love you, sweet girl,” I murmured. “Daddy’s got this.”

Becoming a parent was a steep and unforgiving learning curve. I finally understood that lying played a critical role in protecting your children.

I did not, in fact, got this .

But I would figure it out.

No matter what.