Unexpected Love (Timid Souls Book 3) (3 page)

She was silent for a moment. “You mean…” she asked, trailing off while making some ridiculous gesture with her hands by slapping them together, a motion I assumed was supposed to represent sex.

I said nothing and just raised both eyebrows at her. That was answer enough.

Her eyes widened to the size of dinner plates and she screeched like a banshee. “No freakin’ way! Felicity Paxton, you little sex fiend!”

I winced at that word. It just sounded wrong somehow. “Pipe down, would ya?” I said, rubbing my temples to relieve some tension. “It’s nothin’ to get excited over, okay? We haven’t talked since then so I don’t even know if it meant anything.”

She narrowed her eyes in speculation at that and I knew what it meant. When Bea got protective, she was a force to be reckoned with. “He blew you off?” she asked, an edge to her voice.

“No, he didn’t blow me off. We just didn’t talk afterwards, which is fine with me.”

“Right…” she said slowly, doubt evident in her tone. “I’ll get back to that part in a minute. Because hell…you finally screwed your crush, little F! How was he?”

I couldn’t keep the smile from creeping onto my face as I remembered how good he’d felt that afternoon, how fiercely he’d turned me on. I looked up at her and chuckled at the knowing grin she had on her face.

“He bent me over the bathroom counter, Bea.”

She groaned. “Oh my God, that’s hot.” She held up a finger and started to make her way out the door. “Wait one second! I’m goin’ to make a bag of popcorn. I feel like I’m goin’ to need it. Then, I want to hear everything!”

By the time I’d finished the story, Bea was speechless and I couldn’t deny the fact that it made me proud. I had managed to surprise Beatrice Paxton with my sexual escapades.

Whether that was good or bad, I didn’t care because I suddenly felt like a whole new woman.

##

Gabe

Harder.

Please, lick me.

I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Felicity’s breathy pleas from the bathroom were driving me out of my damn mind. She had been so gone for me, for my touch. So desperate for me to make her feel good.

And
fuck
, how I had loved driving into her.

No matter how many balance sheets I analyzed or projected figures I ran, I could not stop picturing little Felicity Paxton bent over the bathroom counter in my new house, beautifully naked from the waist down, begging for me to give it to her harder.

I had no idea what had come over me that day. For some reason, being in Penny’s new room that Felicity had designed, imagining her playing in it and being the happy, carefree child that she had every right to be, something in me had just snapped. I wanted a home for Penny, somewhere that she loved and never wanted to leave and Felicity had given me that.

I remembered thinking that I was so grateful to her that I wanted to kiss her. And then I thought,
well, why not
? So I did.

I kissed her and then I couldn’t stop.

I hadn’t been lying to her. I had wanted my sexy interior designer from the moment I met her. From the very beginning, I sensed something in her. An intriguing mix of shyness and curiosity, a kind of latent sexual prowess that I couldn’t really explain. Either way, it had drawn me in like a moth to a flame and the other day, I’d finally reached the point where I couldn’t keep my hands off any longer. And thank Christ she’d been into it because I wouldn’t have known what to do with myself otherwise.

But after we had both given into our desires, I hadn’t known what to say.

I was ashamed to say that I panicked and had taken the coward’s way out. I needed to get my head together before I said something to her that I couldn’t take back. I didn’t want to make any promises before I figured out what I wanted.

Because ever since Vanessa, that was something I was very careful about.

My heart was not something I would give away very easily anymore.

My bitch of an ex-wife was truly evil. That wasn’t me being a spiteful asshole; that was the cold, hard truth. Not only had she screwed one of my closest friends, who was also my colleague, shortly after we moved down to D.C. from New York City with Penny, but she was now making my life a living hell as we tried to work out our custody situation with our six-year-old daughter.

Thinking that Vanessa was the woman I had wanted to spend the rest of my life with was the biggest mistake of my life. One that I was still paying for. But I couldn’t totally regret being with her either because it had given me Penny, the light of my world. She was my whole reason for living, and it was the only thing I would ever be grateful to Vanessa for.

Her cheating ways hadn’t been the only reason for our divorce but it had certainly been the final nail in the coffin. I had wanted to get out of New York and move somewhere that would allow for a little more stability for Penny. Sure, D.C. was still a city but it was nowhere near as hectic as New York and there were actually real estate opportunities here. Vanessa hadn’t liked the idea from the beginning, had only been concerned about herself and her modeling career. She wasn’t internationally known yet, but she’d definitely had her face plastered on billboards across the country so people often recognized her name.

And her daughter’s happiness and well-being had taken a back seat to her career.

Which was why I was seeking sole custody.

Because it wasn’t just Vanessa’s obsession with success that made her an unfit mother. It was her partying, bed-surfing ways. Modeling was only a fraction of that lifestyle for her. She loved going to the parties she got invited to, rubbing elbows with the rich and glamorous, and living it up with her man of the week.

That had been the kicker for me. When I’d heard that Vanessa had been having strange men in her house after the divorce—men I didn’t know—and had them around Penny…I lost it. I’d went straight to the judge after that and demanded that I be the sole caretaker of Penny. Vanessa was not only putting Penny in an unstable environment, she was putting her in a dangerous one, too.

And of course, she was fighting me tooth and nail on it.

It had nothing to do with her wanting to see Penny and spend more time with her. It was strictly because she knew it was something I wanted and out of spite, she didn’t want to allow me to have it.

Definitely an unfit mother.

Hopefully, the matter was going to be resolved soon but I couldn’t relax until the official ruling from the judge.

This was why the whole thing with Felicity had me so messed up. Vanessa and I had been divorced for over two years, but I still didn’t want to bring a woman around Penny and get her all confused if I wasn’t serious about her. Penny needed a responsible, loving mother figure in her life, but I was afraid of choosing the wrong one again. Whether she’d be wrong for Penny or wrong for me didn’t matter. Wrong was wrong and the last thing I wanted was for Penny to once again get caught in the middle and get hurt.

But
wrong
was the last word I would ever use to describe anything that had to do with Felicity. Because everything with her felt very, very right.

Before I could drown any further in thoughts of the woman of my dreams, my cell phone started buzzing on my office desk. I looked at the ID on the screen and groaned.
Speak of the she-devil.

“Yes?” I answered. Pleasantries between us were as extinct as the dinosaurs.

“I’m going to need you to keep Penny an extra two days this time,” Vanessa said in her raspy, smoker’s voice.

The woman’s diet consisted of cigarettes and
Ex-lax,
and I constantly worried that she wasn’t feeding Penny properly when she watched her. Not to mention the fact that Penny was constantly breathing in second-hand smoke around her. Vanessa had always been self-conscious of her image and since her career had taken off, she was now as skinny as a rail. It sounded awful but I was also worried about her giving Penny some sort of complex. She was only six but I could see Vanessa hammering certain ideas into her head about watching what she ate and I didn’t my daughter to hear that shit.

“Why?” I asked in a curt tone.

“I just booked a show in L.A. and won’t be back until Tuesday,” she responded nonchalantly, like she couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the whereabouts of her daughter.

This was another reason why I was seeking sole custody. Vanessa would get random jobs and would have to take off unexpectedly, dumping Penny wherever was convenient, which was always with me. Not that I minded because that was exactly what I wanted: Penny living with me, permanently. I didn’t want Penny going on those trips with Vanessa and she didn’t want to have to watch over a little girl the whole time because it would cramp her style. Even if it was her own daughter.

How I hadn’t seen all these red flags when we had first gotten married, I had no idea.

She had just hidden them really well.

“That’s fine,” I told her. “You know that’s what I want anyway.”

She huffed over the line. “Yes, you’ve made that very clear. Just do me a favor and don’t feed her so much junk food this time.”

I could feel my blood pressure starting to rise at her indignant tone but I fought to control my temper. “What are you talking about?”

“Penny told me that you let her have cake and ice cream last time she was over there.”

“It was her friend’s birthday party, Vanessa.” This was what I constantly had to listen to and it was becoming so tiresome. If I got sole custody and Vanessa only had supervised visits, I wouldn’t have to hear it all the time. “Six-year-olds are allowed to eat cake and ice cream.”

She made an angry noise into the receiver and I could just picture her signature scowl on her face. It was astounding how such a beautiful woman could be so incredibly ugly. It made me wonder what I ever saw in her. “I don’t want her getting fat, Gabe.”

I choked out an incredulous laugh. “Are you kidding me? She’s a kid. An active one with a fast metabolism. She burned off those calories in five minutes. She’s going to have body image issues if you don’t quit feeding her that psychobabble bullshit.”

“I’m trying to protect her from obesity!” she shouted over the line. Another fight, same as always.
What a surprise.
“Maybe you should be more concerned about your daughter’s health.”

That’s it.
I didn’t even try to contain the volume of my voice this time. “Really, Vanessa? Maybe you should be more concerned about your daughter’s happiness. Or maybe you forgot the time I picked her up crying because her mommy wouldn’t play dolls with her. Or the time she accidentally spilled her Kool-Aid on your new carpet and you went ballistic on her. You’ve got a knack for making her cry, I’ll give you that.”

“Fuck you,” she spat. “You give her whatever she wants, let her do whatever she wants so she’ll want to stay with you. I’m the one who has to set boundaries and rules. I’m the one who looks like the bad guy because I tell her ‘no.’”

I shook my head. The woman was so delusional. “Keep telling yourself that. Maybe one day you could even convince yourself that you’re a good mother. What’s one more lie to tell, right?”

She hung up.

I sighed and leaned back in my chair. Every conversation with her drained me of energy. Every one of them was vicious and unapologetic.

That was my ex-wife.

##

At three-thirty that afternoon, I pulled up in front of my daughter’s school to pick her up and felt a lot of the stress and heaviness melt off of me as soon as I got a glimpse of that little head of raven hair, standing on the sidewalk next to her teacher. She was getting ready to finish her kindergarten school year, and I couldn’t believe the time had gone by so fast.

I got out of my car and practically ran over to her. She never failed to make my day better, no matter what kind of shit storm I was dealing with. “Daddy!” she squealed when I finally had her scooped up in my arms.

“Hey, Peanut!” I said as I kissed the top of her head. “What did you do in school today?”

She held up a picture with a lot of different squiggly lines on it, but a few shapes looked distinctly like stick figures. “I drew you a pitcher,” she replied, showing me her artwork.

She could have blown her nose and saved it just to show me she knew how to use a tissue and my heart still would have cracked open. I couldn’t be more proud of my little girl.

“See, here’s me and here’s you and here’s Gingerbread,” she said, pointing to a brown blob that definitely had something akin to a tail coming out of it.

“Who’s Gingerbread?” I asked but I already had an idea.

Her head whipped up to flash me a bright smile that was missing one of her front teeth. She lost it last week and had been amazed when the Tooth Fairy visited her overnight. “It’s my horsie! She’s real pretty and has a long black tail and is big enough that I can ride her.”

Penny and her horses.

It didn’t escape my notice that Vanessa was not in the picture.

I looked over at her teacher, Ms. Henderson, and smiled. She was probably in her early thirties and constantly flashed her bare ring finger at me, like after this whole year of conversations with her I wouldn’t have noticed it by now. She was pretty and I got along with her, but I had no interest whatsoever.

All of my attentions lately had been devoted to a short blonde and only her.

Ms. Henderson extended the rest of Penny’s school papers to me, which I quickly took before her hand could linger on my arm. She often did that. “Any problems today?” I asked her.

She offered a soft, almost sad, smile and I knew what she was thinking. “No issues, no,” she responded. “She colored a lot by herself but she enjoyed it.”

My chest tightened at hearing that. Penny didn’t have a lot of friends at school and it absolutely broke my heart. Ever since Vanessa and I divorced, she had become a more sedate kid, not quite as outgoing as she once was. It was the worst whenever I picked her up from Vanessa’s. It usually took me a couple of days to get my Penny back and then she would start smiling again and talking more.

The teachers at school always told me that Penny was pretty reserved around the other kids, not talking a whole lot and staying by herself most of the time at recess. The kid whose birthday party I told Vanessa about earlier I think only invited Penny out of obligation more than anything else because he was in her class. She was a bright, wonderful kid. I just didn’t think that other kids always knew how to handle her when she was quiet and somewhat closed off.

I felt overwhelming guilt about the situation because I knew that it was mine and Vanessa’s fault for whatever was going on with her.

But I was sure Vanessa didn’t care and probably hadn’t even noticed the changes in her daughter.

“Okay, thanks,” I told Ms. Henderson. “See you tomorrow,” I called over my shoulder as I headed back to the car before she tried to spark up a conversation.

I took Penny’s backpack off, placed her in her booster seat, and a minute later was off to our soon-to-be-ex-apartment. The place had only been temporary until I could get our new house built and designed. Now, it was mostly completed and we were going to be moving in a matter of weeks.