Chapter 34

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

NOVA

Hello, worst nightmare.

No, scratch that. My worst nightmare was anything happening to my children. Having Carter show up in a fit of pique because Ben wasn’t worshiping him was a close second, though. There was no legal way he could do anything to change where Ben and Alice lived. He’d already signed the form saying they could move to Texas with me, so he had no trump cards here.

At least I didn’t think he could. The night was balmy and comfortable, but a chill swept over me when I stepped out of Dusty’s arms, and he let me go.

“I think you need to explain yourself,” I finally said, when Carter had nothing to add.

His gaze flicked to Dusty before settling back on me with an accusatory glare. His blue eyes were sharp, assessing. “Can we go inside? Alone.”

Dusty’s hand found mine, his fingers brushing along my palm. It was subtle, but I read the message. He was here. There was no reason he couldn’t stay .

On the flip side of the coin, Carter was my children’s dad, and I would be dealing with him on some level for the rest of their lives. Better to keep things as neutral as possible.

“It’s late, Carter,” I said. “Why don’t we meet up in the morning? I’ll bring the kids, and you can spend the day with them.”

He took a step forward, orange light washing over his face from the house’s porch lights across the street. “I’m not here for a visit, Noves. I’m here to take them back home.”

My stomach split, forming a chasm that threatened to take all my equilibrium away. He couldn’t just show up and change the settlement, could he? My teeth hurt from clenching them together while I thought through the situation. Of course, he could have written some clause into the agreement that would give him power I knew nothing about, but my lawyer had combed over it. He would have spotted a loophole.

No, this was classic Carter. He had to be bluffing. If not, then I was about to break the law, because no one would take my kids from me.

“I’m not staying,” he said, as if I hadn’t heard him the first time.

My body went cold. At least he didn’t know where Gigi lived. In fact… “How did you get my address?”

“I had to send Alice’s birth certificate, remember?”

Then he really couldn’t know where Gigi lived. I was afraid I’d left it on a piece of mail somewhere and he’d brought it with him. “It’s late. We’ll meet you in the morning.”

Anger slashed over Carter’s face, and he took another step forward. Dusty did the same, coming to stand at my side. I hadn’t ever expected to be in this situation, so I hadn’t thought about how it would feel. I tended to be so independent that I wouldn’t want anyone stepping in to help me fight my battles. It was nice having Dusty’s support, knowing he was going to let me manage this on my own. But something about the way he had taken one small step to stand beside me infused me with confidence and security. He was still allowing me to handle it on my own, but now he wasn’t just reminding me he was here if I needed him—he was reminding Carter, too.

“Seriously?” Carter asked, glancing from Dusty to me. His frustration was mounting, and I’d been married to him long enough to know how this was going to go. He didn’t like not being the hero. He despised having to give even a quarter. This was not going to de-escalate easily. He was never violent, but he could become pretty angry.

“Okay, let’s compromise,” I said. “We can talk now, but you still won’t see the kids until tomorrow, after you’ve had time to cool off.”

“I don’t like this, Noves,” he said, ignoring Dusty again. There was a shift in his posture, his tone. His voice lowered in that conciliatory way he had, using it the same way he would before to charm me out of my point of view and edge me toward his. He’d done it so much during our marriage, but I had never really seen it for what it was before: manipulation, not true compromise. “You travel across the country, bring my kids to this backwater armpit town, and now they’re not speaking to me.”

Did he need to be reminded he’d left first? Besides, Alice had never stopped talking to him. He was lumping the kids together, only seeing the negative and magnifying it in his mind.

“The way I see it,” he continued, “there are two options. You come home and bring the kids with you, or they come home with me and you can stay here. I’ll put them back in school, cover the whole tuition. We can split custody down the middle. It’ll be like they never left.”

Except they did leave. Our marriage did dissolve and fracture and split beyond repair. Carter was asking for parts of his old life back, but he didn’t want his old life, not really. He still didn’t want me. The lack of control had caught up to him, and he saw us moving on with our lives and being okay, and it threatened his sense of self-worth. I could see it so clearly now, how everything revolved around him.

It was why he was here, late on a Saturday night, in a dramatic move to regain control after I’d stopped answering his calls for the last two days. He must have been out of his mind with frustration.

Standing there and being handed the option to return to my old life—sans husband—made me realize with startling clarity how much I didn’t want that. It wasn’t even that I didn’t want to step backward. I just wanted to stay here.

“No one is leaving Texas,” I said coolly. I didn’t miss the sharp intake of hope from Dusty. “But you’re welcome to come visit the kids tomorrow. They would love to see you.”

Carter narrowed his eyes. “You wouldn’t prefer to keep them here. I know you. You miss the city and your friends and your family.”

That was true.

“Don’t tell me you haven’t talked to Blair every day, wishing you were close enough to go to her place for lunch,” he pressed.

Not every day. But, yeah, he was right about that, too.

Carter seemed to sense this, because he kept going. “They have nothing here. No Target, no Met museum, no Carmines or Barney Greengrass.”

Yes, I missed those things. Yes, I talked to Blair most days, and when my parents returned home, my homesickness would probably mount in a cataclysmic wave. But Carter was so wrong on a more important fundamental level. Arcadia Creek didn’t have nothing . It had the same sense of community I’d grown up with on our Brooklyn block. It had stability and consistency and traditions. It had friendship and diner regulars and Gigi and that bone-deep feeling of home when I was standing on a back porch looking at a sunset.

It had Dusty.

I cleared my throat, searching for the patience to remain calm and not shout all of that back at him. “There’s a cute inn just down the street. It’s right up a little hill, and they might have a vacancy. If you want to stay there, we can meet up in the morning—” I stopped myself before inviting him over for breakfast. He didn’t need to step foot in my new home. It was safe and mine, and I didn’t want him tainting that. “We can grab coffee?—”

“Where are my kids?”

“With Gigi,” I said bluntly. “They’re having a sleepover, and we aren’t going to ruin it.”

His jaw ticked. “I deserve?—”

“No,” I said firmly. “We will not talk about what we deserve, or I will start talking about how much more child support I deserve.” I hadn’t known how he had done it, but he must have hidden funds somewhere in order to get my payments so low, and it wasn’t until I’d come out of the post-divorce fog that I realized it. I knew Carter’s income. I’d been so stupid before now.

“You wouldn’t,” he said quietly.

I turned, pointing up at my apartment. “We’re good here. The kids have a great room, and we’re warm and well fed. You haven’t ruined anyone’s life. But your kids deserve a lot more than you’ve given them. Alice should be able to do gymnastics and Ben should be able to join a flag football team without me needing to dip into my savings. If you want to storm in making demands, then I will counter them.”

Carter’s chest rose and fell rapidly, his anger manifesting in the clenching of his jaw and heavy breathing. “I don’t like this.”

He wouldn’t though, would he? It wasn’t going the way he’d planned. I wanted to ask about Kristen, to find out if she was home waiting for him, if she knew where he was right now. But his life had moved on, and until it became relevant for me to know—like my kids going to visit him in the summer—then I wouldn’t ask. Our lives were separate, and it hit me like a wave of relief that he could move on and so could I.

Feeling Dusty’s presence beside me, I realized I already had.

It was time to delete that screenshot I’d taken of their moving day. Later, when I was alone. “I’ll call you in the morning and we can walk over to Gigi’s together.”

Carter’s gaze flicked to Dusty before falling back on me again. “You’ve changed.”

I disagreed. He was just seeing me differently now that I wasn’t diminishing my thoughts and shaping myself to fit him better. “Good night, Carter.”

He shook his head softly before walking down the road and climbing into a silver sedan.

“Do you want me to call Jack and see if he has vacancies?” Dusty asked softly, once Carter had closed his door.

“No.” I drew in a shaky breath and let it out. “I have a feeling he won’t be staying tonight.”

Dusty turned to face me sharply. “You think he’d leave? He hasn’t even seen the kids yet.”

“He didn’t really come for them,” I said. “I mean, that’s what he said, but it was just a stupid power move. He wanted me to agree to move the kids back to New York, but for what? So he could have us under his nose. I hope I’m wrong, but until we know for sure, it would be best if no one knows he was here.”

“So it doesn’t get back to Ben and Alice,” he said. “I get it.”

“They’re so little. They won’t understand.”

“Disinterested parents are hard to deal with, no matter what age you are,” Dusty said quietly, his eyes raking over my face with concern and breaking my heart for the pain he’d gone through as a kid. “For what it’s worth, I think you’re making the right call.”

“In refusing to take him to them tonight?”

“That, yeah, but also in staying. That’s what you meant when you said no one was leaving Texas, right?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

He took my hand, his fingers holding mine in a loose grip, and tugged me away from the sidewalk and down to the end of his truck. He put down the tailgate and lifted his eyebrows. “You look like you need to sit down.”

“My adrenaline rush is fading.”

He put his hands on my waist and guided me up to sit on the edge of his truck bed, the cool metal seeping immediately through my skirt. The truck dipped when he lifted himself to sit beside me. “Should we go ask Mr. Roberts to turn off his insanely bright porch light so we can see more stars?”

I stared at him. “Do you know everyone in town?”

He gave me a sheepish smile. “Most people, yeah. I’ve spent my entire life here. Well, almost all of it.”

“It looks good on you.”

“The town?” he asked, his brow bent in confusion.

“The small-town Texas thing. The Arcadia Creek community. The Wranglers.”

Dusty’s face brightened in a grin. “You like my jeans.”

“Everyone likes your jeans,” I shot back. He couldn’t be entirely blind to how women looked at him.

“I only care if you do.”

“Well, I do. They’re very nice.”

Dusty laughed, the sound breaking through the cool night and my residual restlessness. It was like a comfort blanket, or a hug from Peaches after a long day.

“You didn’t meet my grandpa at the Battle of the Badges,” he said carefully, meeting my gaze, “and I assumed it was a message. ”

“It was.” I slid my hands under my thighs to warm them. “I was nervous. It felt like a big step, but I know that was mostly in my head. I’d just—Alice had asked if you were my boyfriend, remember? It made me think we needed to keep our distance until we knew where we stood and how my kids felt about it.”

“Where do we stand now?”

“Honestly, I don’t know.” Inhaling fresh air, I let it out in a rush. “I like you.”

“I like you, too.”

“I wouldn’t say no to another date.”

“Me either,” he agreed.

“But I have to ask Ben and Alice what they think.”

“I’m a patient man.”

“You’d have to be. You’re a Longhorns fan.”

“What?” Dusty asked, his grin crinkling the lines next to his eyes. “What kind of burn was that?”

“I don’t know.” I grinned back. “I know nothing about the team except that Gigi hates them.”

“Apparently. This town is divided, but facts don’t lie, and our win-loss percentage?—”

“I don’t really care about football right now.”

He seemed to sense the shift in my mood. “Me either.”

We looked at each other, listening to the distant buzz of cicadas in the otherwise quiet town. So much had happened tonight, but the one constant in all of it was Dusty and his purity. He was a good man. He slid down from the tailgate and faced me in a fluid motion, stopping my legs from swinging by standing in front of them. “In fact,” he said, cupping my face with both hands, “I don’t think I’ve ever cared about football less.”

Clutching his shirt, I tugged him closer until he was flush with the tailgate, my legs wrapping around his waist. “Yeah? Well, I can one-up you. I’ve never cared about football at all.”

He cringed. “Oh, straight to the heart. ”

“But I’m growing to appreciate flag football. My kid’s coach is kind of hot.”

He leaned so close, his breath tickled my skin while he talked. “Do I need to fight Jake now?”

“Assistant coach, then? What are you?”

“Something like that.” His hand slid to my waist, pulling me closer, while his lips brushed the edge of my jaw. “But, again, I don’t care about sports right now.”

“You care about me,” I said quietly, the words heavy. He grew still. “I noticed your missing kitchen table.”

Dusty straightened. He didn’t remove his hands, but his face leveled me with a look so full of longing it struck me. “I care about you a lot, Nova. Probably more than I have a right to, honestly. You, Ben, and Alice are important. I’m sure it’s been obvious for a while now, but I’ve been drawn to you since the moment I saw you in the ice cream aisle. What really clinched it for me was watching you with your kids and the Hot Wheels mess. You are incredible. Ben and Alice are incredible. I’m a lucky man since you’re even willing to give me a shot.”

My eyes grew misty, my chest warm and fuzzy. Everything disappeared around us except for me and this man. “You’re not real.”

“I can show you exactly how real I am.” Dusty didn’t hesitate. He pulled me close, his lips crashing over mine with a wave of heat that could melt Alaska. Time stopped, the world ringing in silence. I felt nothing but his hands roaming my back and my waist, his heart thundering under my palm, the warm, rough skin of his neck as I slid a hand up his jaw.

Dusty’s kiss brought a rush of butterflies swarming through my body, giving me a deep need to be closer to him.

Maybe I didn’t know what the future had in store for me, but I did know with a sudden clarity that it would be in Arcadia Creek, and it would probably be with this man .

His hands cupped my cheeks, his lips layering tender kisses on mine that made my breath catch.

“We don’t have to define anything yet,” he said breathlessly, “but you know you’re probably going to marry me someday, right?”

My lips curved into a smile I felt him mirror. I didn’t bother answering with words. I just showed him exactly how in sync we were.