Page 12 of Boyfriend on Parole: The Care of Broken Things Extended Epilogue (Breaking Free #2)

Chapter One

It was late by the time they got to the house. Later than promised. But the girl sitting on the front steps had no space for rebuke, becoming a torpedo that hit Samuel in the chest before he’d managed to swing his legs out of the car.

“You’re late!” But she was smiling as she said it. Laughing as she said it. Her happiness an instant elixir that cured him every time.

“Hailey.”

She nuzzled right into his neck, her arms around him as he lifted her.

Again, it was everything to have her, a battery of the warmest, most potent energy.

“I love you.” That always seemed to come out of him whenever he was with her.

It was only her influence that had made the phrase so comfortable in his mouth. I missed you so much.”

Darren wasn’t impressed. “It was only six hours.”

Six and a half, and Samuel was definitely counting. “Easier for you to say. You always get to have her.”

Darren scowled. Then again, he was always scowling. He already had his arms locked around his brother, only just getting out of the car himself. “If you did anything disgusting to Nathaniel, I’ll kill you.”

That stopped him. Not the thought of Darren’s threat, which he was used to, but the thought of all the disgusting things just waiting there for him on the stage of his mind.

They hadn’t made it to the house in the end, pulling over at a hotel on the way back from the prison as an emergency stop-gap measure.

Actually, they hadn’t properly made it to the hotel either.

It was why they’d all but traumatized the young man at the check-in counter, who got to see a lot more of Samuel’s midriff than he normally showed strangers—and who knew what else considering Nathaniel had gotten his pants off in the elevator, and he hadn’t met them again until the return trip back down to the lobby hours later.

“Define disgusting.”

Darren’s scowl deepened. Nathaniel laughed and stroked his brother’s hair. “Poor thing. I’ll have to take you on a date to make up for it.”

Darren seized on it at once. “Can we go now?”

Samuel wasn’t sure what he felt as he approached the door. He still hadn’t figured it out when Jenny’s hand touched his back to say, “Door’s open.” And they all waited, nobody rushing, until Samuel twisted the knob.

It had a smell to it—their home. No one had described it to him. Perhaps none of them had thought to, so used to the smell they no longer noticed it. But Samuel noticed. Samuel was noticing everything.

There were pictures on the wall. Pictures crowding everywhere.

And even one of him, he realized, the shock of it stopping him, his own face staring down at him from up on the wall.

Well, not really. The picture-Samuel’s eyes were not on him, but on Eli’s face.

Almost like magic, the picture seemed to summon the real Eli, whose large and impossibly warm hands come up from behind him to rest on his hips.

Not to do anything, just to settle there, but Samuel felt himself flushing anyway.

Nathaniel hadn’t been the only man he’d done disgusting things with back at the hotel.

“Hungry?” Eli asked when Samuel turned his head.

“You fed me already.”

Eli’s smile went wicked, the white flash of it an arrow right to the heart—or maybe a different part of his anatomy. “I sure did.”

It meant another flash, or rather, a whole ream of flashes. Again, he felt it, the thick heat of Eli in his throat, his eyes watering a little with the pressure, and Eli’s hands, even hotter than they were now, that voice, deeply penetrating, Good puppy.

Samuel flushed so hot he thought Darren would murder him on the spot. “I meant your food. In the car.”

“But that was hours ago,” Nathaniel said, darting in to offer a kiss, but missing the mark, only catching his shoulder as he was dragged off by a determined Darren. “Give me a minute,” Nathaniel called back, his brother’s tugging relentless. “Don’t do anything fun without me.”

“Fun?” Samuel’s head was full of static. It didn’t help that Eli’s hands were still on him, promising things they were only too capable of fulfilling.

“Forget it,” Eli said. “We’ll have to sit in a circle with our eyes closed until he’s back or he’ll never forgive us. I know him, Samuel. He may look like a feeble scholar, but he is vindictive .”

But Nathaniel didn’t look feeble at all. The man was also smiling, his eyes dancing, waving to them as he was pushed up the stairs. And with it, Samuel’s heart—the real feeble thing among them—broke. “Where is he going?”

“To have all his skin scrubbed off, probably,” Hailey said. “That’s what Uncle Darren always does whenever Daddy puts cooties on Thaniel. Here.”

It was only then that he noticed the slippers she’d set in front of him, exactly his size and straight out of the box.

But his traitorous eyes had already gone to the shoe rack where other, more enticing offerings sat.

Eli laughed when he caught him looking and set an older pair, a little too big, in front of him.

Samuel was stepping into them before he could stop himself, so his token refusal meant nothing. “Are you sure? Don’t you need—”

“I rarely wear them,” Eli lied, the slippers themselves betraying his words, comfortably worn down, and well-formed to an altogether different set of feet. “You can have them.”

Eli was already sliding his feet into the new pair, and it brought a surge of such intense love into Samuel he was frozen with it, and only Jenny’s quiet, “breathe,” reminded him to fill his lungs again.

Hailey swatted her father’s hands away. She was still in Samuel’s arms, and didn’t ask to be put down, even though it had to be strange to be carried around when you were already thirteen years old—albeit, a little small for her age, strange when both her father and mother were so tall.

Samuel had passed a few sleepless nights worrying about it, though Eli had given assurance that he’d experienced a late growth spurt himself as a child.

Hailey tugged at his ear. “Go left. I need to give you the tour.”

They passed through several rooms, and though Samuel was only too grateful for the warm bundle in his arms, it did make interacting with the house difficult.

Later , he promised himself, though that was also impossible to believe.

That there could be a later. That there could even be a now.

Well, maybe it didn’t matter what he could or couldn’t do as he couldn’t seem to keep his eyes on the house anyway.

He wanted to. Had waited so long to see the magic of Hailey’s drawings of the place come to life.

But he kept switching over to people instead, and his eyes hardly knew which to choose.

Seeing Jenny in the house—seeing Jenny comfortable in the house—and her things here and there.

Her laptop on the kitchen table. Her rain jacket on a hook on the wall.

It all put a lump the size of a tennis ball in his throat.

And then there was Eli, meeting his eyes every because the man was watching him just as closely, and with the same adoring excitement.

Samuel wanted it so badly. Eli was right there, his hand regularly brushing his back or touching his hair, and still it wasn’t close enough.

Even back at the hotel when the man had been inside him, it hadn’t been.

“I miss you,” he found himself blurting when all the man did was cross the kitchen to get him a glass of water. “Come back.”

And Eli did, his arms going around both Samuel and his daughter, plenty of room in them for both.

“We’ve been waiting so long,” Eli said. And Samuel could feel the movements of that jaw directly, Eli’s face pressed right up against his as he spoke.

“It became my whole life. When I would write you letters or answer your calls, you’d ask for updates and my mind would go blank.

There just didn’t seem to be anything to say around the so much larger truth of missing you. ”

It was agony to hear it. Agony and redemption.

Those nine months without him, so much longer than all the years in prison that had preceded it.

Longer than his whole life even, which felt like only microseconds in comparison.

Every day of that absence had hurt. He’d had the letters, yes, and the calls, the visits, and all their memories together too, and yet…

perhaps it wasn’t that closeness wasn’t enough.

Maybe it was simply that no one on earth had felt a greed quite as rampant as his was and lived to tell about it. “Please.”

Eli kissed him. Then his daughter. Then Samuel again. “Let me cook you something. I want to.”

Well, Samuel didn’t want him to. Not when it meant putting space between them again.

But Eli’s hurt was still in his voice, the ache of it, and though it made no sense for Eli to agonize as he did with Nathaniel and Hailey right there at his side, it was also impossible to doubt the pain there, and he had to wonder if what he’d felt whenever he’d stare at Eli’s old prison bunk was the same pain Eli felt when he set the table in the kitchen and didn’t add his plate.

Samuel didn’t want to eat, but the request wasn’t about him. Not really. “Alright. Thank you.”

It got him one more kiss, right at the corner of his eye, so there was at least that.

“Come,” Hailey said, sliding to her feet—another betrayal. A real one-two punch. “We have to be quick. If you start crying you won’t be able to see your surprise properly.

“Surprise?” He tried to put excitement into his voice, but he was only too aware of the increasing distance between him and the two perfect loves he was leaving behind. Thankfully, Hailey had enough excitement for the both of them.

“Come see! Come see!”

It wasn’t her room they led them toward, but his .