Chapter 19

Chapter Nineteen

Blythe

I headed downstairs, in desperate need of a glass of wine after my conversation with Avett. I knew my son was smart, but he was much more insightful than I gave him credit for.

When it came to being a mom, I’d really lucked out. Maybe I was partial, but I couldn’t help feeling like I had the best kids on the planet.

My bare feet padded quietly against the floor as I moved to the kitchen for the bottle of wine I’d opened earlier with dinner. But instead of an empty kitchen like I expected, Rhodes stood at the sink, his back to me as he scrubbed the dirty dinner dishes.

He was dressed in a pair of light grey sweats that rested precariously low on his hips and nothing else. His hair was still damp from a shower, and beads of water dripped off the ends, trailing through the muscles that danced across his back as he moved around, scrubbing and rinsing and drying one dish at a time.

It was mesmerizing, and I couldn’t help but stare, transfixed, at all that hard, toned, tan skin on display. I knew Rhodes was seriously built, but I had no idea a back could be that ripped. I wasn’t sure I’d survive if he were to turn around and give me a look at the front, but my curiosity was more than piqued. It refused to be ignored.

“You know, you didn’t have to do that,” I said, finally alerting him to my presence. He grinned playfully over his shoulder, and I had to lock my knees to keep from melting into the floor when he shot me a wink. “I intended to do those tomorrow. And I planned to use your dishwasher, not wash them by hand.”

His chuckle filled the otherwise quiet kitchen. “You know the rules, Blythe. You do the cookin’, I do the cleanin’. It’s only fair.”

I barely heard a word that passed his lips after you know , because he’d chosen that moment to turn and face me in all his shirtless glory. First I’d been mesmerized by the way his biceps curled and his forearms bulged as he dried a water glass with a hand towel. Then my eyes snagged on the rows of ab muscles that lined his taut stomach. But as my gaze trailed up to his chest, everything in me froze, from the blood in my veins to the air in my lungs. Because right there, in the very center of his defined pec, above his heart, was a tattoo.

A pair of wings. Angel wings, to be exact.

My heart began to race as a burn built in my lungs, forcing me to let out the breath I’d been holding and suck in another one.

“Blythe?”

I blinked, dragging my attention to his face. “Sorry, what?”

One corner of his mouth was hooked up in a smirk. “You okay? You spaced out there for a few seconds.” His expression and tone dripped with cockiness that had me rolling my eyes.

I pushed the meaning of the tattoo to the back of my mind. At least for now. I unstuck my feet from the floor and rounded the island to grab the wine bottle. “I’m fine, just came in for a glass of wine,” I said as I poured.

Rhodes placed the sparkling clean glass in its cabinet and hung the dish towel over the handle of the oven door before turning to me, bracing his palms behind him on the counter and making the muscles in his chest pop.

“I was about to pour myself a whiskey and sit out on the back porch if you feel like joinin’ me. The view of the stars from there is unrivaled. Only place better is the lookout.”

That had always been one of my favorite things about Rhodes’s and my secret spot. The view during the day was breathtaking, but at night, it felt like you were lying beneath a literal blanket of stars.

“Yeah, okay. That sounds good.”

He brightened at that. Pushing off the counter and circling the island, he said, “All right then. I’ll grab a shirt and meet you out there.”

I moved to the hall closet for a light cardigan to pull on over my PJs. The nights were crisp in the mountains, and there wasn’t much material to the satin shorts and camisole set I’d changed into before tucking the kids in.

With my wine in hand, I opened the sliding glass door to the back porch and stepped onto the chilled wood planks. The only place to sit was on the massive swing bolted into the roof of the porch, so I took a seat on the far end, curling my legs beneath me and pressing against the pillows propped against the arm and back. Sure enough, millions of stars blinked up in the dark sky, and I tipped my head back, taking them in as a breeze danced over me, blowing my hair across my shoulders and sending goosebumps across my skin.

The door slid open again a few minutes later, and Rhodes stepped out, feet still bare, gray sweats still on, only now he’d added a black cotton shirt that molded to him like a second skin. One side of my brain mourned the loss of all that naked flesh, but the other side of my brain was grateful, because that tattoo was currently living rent-free in my head, and I didn’t think I had the bandwidth to get into the meaning of it just then.

Rhodes sat against the other arm, mindful to keep space between us, and kicked off with his foot, sending us back and forth in a slow, calming rock.

We sat in silence for a few minutes, enjoying the peace that came with being this far away from other people. The sounds of the forest were our playlist, the call of the night birds, the chirp of the crickets, the rustling of the trees as the wind slid through their branches.

“Kids get to bed okay?” he asked once I’d drunk half my glass.

That was a question he’d asked every night since we moved in, and I could tell by his expression that it wasn’t a filler question. He really wanted to know. It mattered to him that my kids were comfortable and sleeping well. I could see that in his unwavering patience whenever Avett peppered him with a million eager questions, or how he didn’t bat an eye when Ainsley demanded he have a tea party with her. It was in how he sat silently with Adeline while she read, reading a book of his own in complete silence while still providing her company. It was especially evident in the way he didn’t seem to care that my girls were determined to make Koda into the fluffiest, biggest purse dog in existence, complete with bows and sparkly jewels.

I closed my eyes and rested my head against the back of the swing, letting the cool air caress my skin. “They did. Avett had a little crisis of conscience, but I think he’s okay now.”

The swinging stopped abruptly, forcing my eyes open and my gaze to his. From the faint light glowing through the window from inside, I could see that his features had grown serious. “Is he okay? Is there anything I can do?”

I let out a breath and took another sip of wine. “He’s good now. He was worried what it meant that he wasn’t as sad about his father passing as he had been when it was still fresh.”

“Christ,” he grunted. “Poor kid.”

“I explained it was all a part of healing. That we aren’t meant to stay sad forever. They’ve handled this loss with so much grace it’s easy to forget how young they are sometimes.”

“They’ve handled it so well because they have an incredible mom to guide them through.”

My chest tightened and my eyes burned, but I managed to battle back the emotion, twisting my neck around to give him an appreciative smile. “Thank you for saying that,” I said in a hushed voice. “I think I needed to hear it. Truth is, I’ve been questioning the job I’ve been doing lately.”

He set us to swinging again. “You shouldn’t. From everything I’ve seen, you’re nailing it.”

I let out a self-deprecating scoff as I looked out to the trees. “I wouldn’t say I’ve been nailing it. More like muddling my way through. I got too wrapped up in my grief when Elliott died. Then all his secrets started coming to light just as I’d finally gotten my head above water. I let that consume me for too long, and I worried they had suffered for it.”

His fingers caressed beneath my chin, turning my face and tilting it back so I met his eyes. Fire licked deliciously at my skin where he touched, and it took everything I had not to scoot closer to him on the bench.

“Hey, don’t do that,” he ordered in a tone that was somehow gentle and firm at the same time. “Don’t downplay what you went through. Being a mother doesn’t mean you don’t get to grieve just because you have other people to be responsible for. You lost too, and you lost more. It wasn’t just about him dying, you also had to deal with him not being who you thought he was. You’re allowed to feel that too.”

My breathing picked up and my heart began to race as his eyes held me captive. His words burrowed through my skin and into my chest, filling some of the places that had felt hollow for so long now.

“Thank you,” I whispered, those two words laced with everything I was feeling.

Silence wrapped around us, creating a bubble only we were allowed in. The apple in his throat moved on a thick swallow, causing my mouth to go dry. My tongue peeked out to slide across my bottom lip, drawing his gaze to my mouth.

For a second I could have sworn he was going to kiss me, and I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do if he did. But then his hand fell away and he scooted back across the bench.

The bubble had been popped, and it took a moment for me to catch my breath from what had happened.

I cleared my throat, taking another swallow of wine and returning to my study of the shadows the trees cast in the moonlight.

“So,” I started once my heartrate finally returned to normal, then asked the first question to pop into my head. “How come you never settled down and had kids of your own?”

He brought his glass to his lips, drinking back a healthy swallow of the rich, amber liquid inside. I couldn’t help but notice the way his fingers clutched the glass so tight his knuckles had turned bone white.

His jaw was tense and I could see the flutter of the pulse in his neck as I studied his profile. “Just wasn’t in the cards for me, I guess.”

I bit down on my bottom lip, unable to shake the sense there was more that he wasn’t saying. “That’s a shame. You’re really great with my little band-of-chaos monsters.”

He cast a quick grin in my direction before looking back out at the night. “Yeah, well, your kids are pretty damn incredible. It would be impossible not to like them.”

My belly fluttered and my heart did a little flip.

“There was never anyone serious?” I didn’t know why the hell I was pushing all of a sudden. I couldn’t seem to help myself. “What about that woman from the grocery store? Looked like you guys might have had something at one time.” A nasty, oily sensation coated my skin as I thought back to how she’d looked at him. I’d never considered myself a jealous person, but there was no other explanation for the way I was feeling.

“Grace?” His brows furrowed as he twisted in my direction and let out a little laugh. “No. We dated for a few months, but we were never that. It wasn’t serious.”

I thought back to the way her face lit up when she saw him, then to how she reacted when I introduced myself. “Did she know it wasn’t that serious?”

Rhodes heaved out a sigh and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he scrubbed at his jaw with his free hand. “I thought so. I was never anything but honest with her, but apparently, she had it in the back of her head that she could change my mind.”

My mouth pulled into a wince. For Grace and for Rhodes. That couldn’t have been a pleasant situation for either of them. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah,” he sighed, “me too. She is a good woman. I just couldn’t make it work.”

I tried to tamp down my next question, but the words spilled out before I could swallow them down. “Why was that?”

His gaze collided with mine, no traces of humor in his eyes. “You know why, Blythe,” he rumbled, his voice like gravel wrapped in silk.

My eyes widened and my lips parted on a gasp. The goosebumps that spread across my body had nothing to do with the temperature. “No, I?—”

“Don’t play that game. It’s one thing if you don’t feel it yourself, but don’t pretend you don’t know the truth. You saw the tattoo, for Christ’s sake.”

I couldn’t catch my breath all of a sudden. The sound of his voice was all I could hear over the rush of blood in my ears. “Rhodes,” I whispered, my fingers tensing with the need to reach out and touch him. But I held myself back.

“I never wanted to make it work with anyone else because they weren’t you, Angel. It was you or no one. You married Elliott and had those incredible kids upstairs, so I chose no one.”

I didn’t know how the hell it was possible, but hearing him say that somehow broke my heart and stitched pieces of it back together at the same time. I shouldn’t have liked hearing he was alone because he never stopped wanting me, but I did.

He lifted his glass and knocked back the rest of the whiskey before standing from the swing. “I never regretted that decision, Blythe. Not for a single fuckin’ minute, because I never stopped hoping that one day, you’d come back to me.”

With that, he leaned down and hooked his hand behind my neck. My head tipped back and he pressed his full lips into the very corner of my mouth. “Sleep good, Angel,” he said quietly, then he walked back into the house, leaving me reeling.