Page 17 of Tempt (Peachwood Falls #1)

M egan

“Coffee?”

Chase’s chair screeches against the floor as he pushes away from the table. He doesn’t wait for an answer. Instead, he heads to the coffee pot like a man on a mission.

His question throws me. Do I want coffee ? It’s almost noon.

“I guess …” I shrug when he looks over his shoulder. “I mean, it’s lunchtime, but I won’t turn down coffee.”

“Yeah.” He exhales, leaning against the counter. “Hungry?”

I scoot my chair around so I can still see him.

He’s crossed his long legs in front of him. His waist digs into the edge of the cabinet. With his contented annoyance—a look that’s wildly amusing and hot beyond measure—he’s the picture of single dad perfection.

Thank God Calista can’t see this.

“I’m always hungry,” I say.

For once in the three days I’ve known Chase Marshall, I answer his question directly. No sarcasm. No prodding. No innuendo dripping from my words. But it doesn’t matter.

Chase’s gaze heats anyway, pinning me to my seat.

My heart pounds. The room spikes ten degrees. An array of goose bumps spill across my skin in anticipation of his touch … that never comes. That can’t come. That’s not why I’m here .

Yet I’m convinced that if I stood and walked across the kitchen, Chase would have a hard time turning away. My instincts say I could kiss him—that he wants me to.

And dammit if I don’t want to .

But I can’t.

“Want to make something?” His gravelly voice prickles against my skin. “Or we could go into town and grab a sandwich. I probably need to go to the grocery store anyway. I don’t know if we have anything here.”

He’s talking about sandwiches, but I can only focus on the snack right in front of me.

His hair is tousled at the top—just needing a trim. The veins in his forearm rope around the muscle. His eyes tell me he wants to grab ahold of me and toss me against the wall.

I steady myself. We need to break this moment .

“Why don’t you show me around instead?” I say, figuring movement is the best form of defense. “We can figure out food later—or I can go shopping tomorrow while Kennedy is at school.”

His shoulders sag as if he, too, were holding his breath. “Are you sure? I can put together a ham and cheese sandwich at worst.”

“Yeah, unless you’re hungry.”

He crosses the room. “Nah, we had bacon and waffles this morning.” He disappears into the mudroom and comes back carrying my bags.

“Should I expect homemade breakfasts every weekend?”

He grins. “Ken goes with Dad for brunch on Saturdays, so I usually grab cereal or a sandwich if I’m out fucking around. But we do usually cook together on Sunday mornings.”

“You two seem close,” I say, following him into the hallway and toward the foyer.

“Who? Me and Dad?”

“No, you and Kennedy.”

He stops by the steps leading upstairs. “We are close. I think. I hope .” He looks up, giving me a front-row seat to his long eyelashes. “She wants to hang out and watch movies one day, and the next, she hates me for no apparent reason. She’s emotionally erratic, and it’s borderline abusive.”

I giggle.

“It’s not funny,” he says, shaking his head and switching his gaze to mine. “I know I’m a grown man who shouldn’t be scared of a little girl, but I’m terrified of her most days. I find myself approaching her door with a brownie as tribute.”

My giggles turn into outright laughter. “Stop it.”

“This is the living room.”

He motions toward the left before dragging his eyes away from mine like he isn’t done with that part of our conversation.

I peer into the cozy area in the front of the house. There’s a mantel over the fireplace that I overlooked yesterday. It’s dark lumber, resembling a railroad tie, and hosts a variety of picture frames in various colors.

“We live in there,” he says.

“Fitting.”

“And the dining room we never use is over there.” He tilts his head toward the other side of the foyer.

“I keep thinking I ought to do something different in there. But, hell, I’m not home long enough to get involved in a huge project, though Mom keeps insisting that a day will come when I’ll need it. ”

I lean against the wall, absorbing the sun's warmth from where it filters through the transom window above the door. The house is quiet, perfectly still, but I can imagine it filled with fun and laughter—the sound of big family dinners.

I only realize I’m smiling when Chase catches my attention. He watches me curiously.

“What are you thinking?” he asks.

I push away from the wall and sigh. “That I agree with your mom. It needs to be a dining room.”

“Even if we never use it?”

“You will someday.”

He rolls his eyes and heads upstairs. “I’m sorry for Kennedy’s cool reception today, by the way.”

“No, she was great. I imagine it was hard for her to have another woman in her house.”

His lips twitch.

“She is the woman of the house, you know,” I say. “You might see her as a kid, and she is a child by all definitions. But in her mind, she’s a woman, and this is her house.”

“Are you telling me I’m worrying too much?”

I think about it. “No, I think you’re right to worry. I think it’s great that you worry, actually.”

He scoffs like he’s embarrassed at being caught for being nice. It makes me laugh.

“I’m just saying maybe you don’t totally understand her,” I say. “So some of what she does looks like it’s coming out of left field when maybe it’s not.”

“Yeah, well, left field would be better than outer space.”

My smile grows.

I’m sure I was a handful for my mom when she was a single mother. Although we could get on the same page, she was still my mother, and I was still a bratty teenager. We butted heads. Even so, she could come at our issues from a place of understanding.

We get to the top of the stairs and stop. There is a door to the left, one in front of us, and a hallway to the right. Pictures adorn the walls—most of Kennedy at various stages of her life. A little table sits next to the hallway with an oddly shaped vase on it.

“Were you this way with your dad?” he asks. “Did you fight him all the time? Make everything hard?”

My smile slips. “No.”

“Then what did he do differently because I’d like that kind of relationship with my hell-raiser.”

“Well,” I say, my thoughts going to a man I’ve not thought about in a while. “I guess the biggest reason we didn’t fight was that he wasn’t there.”

Chase furrows a brow.

“It’s hard to fight with someone who doesn’t know you exist,” I say.

He regrips the handles of my bags, studying me with a quiet intensity. I’m unsure if he wants me to elaborate—if he wants the messy details, or if he’s trying to determine how to get out of this conversation.

Probably the latter.

“Think of it that way,” I say, giving him an exit. “You might fight with her right now. But she’ll grow up and appreciate that she had a dad who cared enough about her to stick around.”

His lips twist into a semblance of a smile. “Right.” He tips his head toward the lone door on the left. “That’s my room. The one in front of you is a closet. Extra blankets, board games, candles because I swear every time Kennedy has an extra dollar to her name, she buys another damn candle.”

“Yeah, well, I relate.”

“Of course you do,” he mumbles, heading down the hallway. “The door on the right is Ken’s. The one at the end is the bathroom. You can get situated there. And this is your room.”

He pauses by the door on the left and flicks the handle.

We step inside the small but gracious bedroom. It smells faintly of cinnamon and has a window that overlooks the driveway. A small bed is covered with a blue-and-white quilt that looks like it was plucked out of an Amish store.

A wooden rocking chair sits in the corner, and a large dressing table with an oval mirror rounds out the furniture. The only other item of interest is an accordion door in the corner segregating the tiniest closet known to man and the rest of the room.

Chase places my bags on the floor next to the chair.

“This is the cutest little guest room,” I say, checking out a picture of a baby Kennedy on the table.

“No one ever uses it. Mom put fresh sheets and pillows on it this week, so you should be good to go.”

“I’ll be fine. I don’t need much to make me happy.”

He sits on the edge of the bed. The springs squeak with his weight. “Thank you for doing this.”

I stand across from him with my back to the mirror. The room is so tight that only a few feet separates us.

He folds his hands together, elbows resting on his knees, and leans forward. His eyes are bright and clear, and unlike every other time we’ve been this close, he doesn’t want to hide from me.

“Can I ask you a question?” I lace my fingers together in front of me. “If you don’t want me to, just say so.”

He shrugs. “Depends on what it is.”

“Where is Kennedy’s mom?”

He hangs his head for a long minute, and I’m not sure he will answer. I hold my breath, second-guessing my decision to prod into this area of his life, and start to change the subject. But before I can take back my question, he speaks.

“Monica, that was her name …” He looks up at me. “She’s gone.”

“Oh.”

“She died when Kennedy was four,” he says.

“Oh.”

His tone is void of feelings, but his eyes tell a different story. There’s pain there—sadness. There’s a pit of emotion that I’m unsure how to handle.

Suddenly, I want to wrap my arms around Chase Marshall and hug him. Only hug him, for once. I don’t know his relationship with her— were they married? Dating? How did she die ?—but I can tell her passing affected him deeply.

“Chase, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“It’s okay. How would you have known?”

I blow out a shaky breath. “I …”

I stumble with words. They all feel wrong and heavy—inappropriate. I hate that I don’t know what to say to him and even more that I put him in a position to discuss all of this.

“It’s okay,” he says. “You don’t have to say anything.”

“Good, because I don’t know what to say. I feel like I just stuck my foot in my mouth.”

He runs a hand down his face and groans. “Monica and I weren’t a thing. We never were.”

Oh . “You don’t owe me an explanation.”

“I know. I don’t. But if I don’t tell you, it’ll hang between us and make things weird.”

“Okay …”

He takes a long, deep breath. “I was working in Michigan after a storm. We were there for about a month trying to get shit back together. Then one night, I met Monica at a little pizza restaurant, and we started talking.”

“I’m a grown-up, you know.”

He furrows a brow.

“I get you did more than talking. You have a kid,” I say, teasing him in hopes it’ll lighten him up.

He shakes his head … and grins.

“So you’re talking to her,” I say, motioning for him to continue. “I’ve already gotten you this far. There’s no turning back now.”

He holds his hands out. “There’s not a lot more to say. I came back home after the job. We talked a couple of times, but she never told me she was pregnant or wanted anything more with me. I had no idea, or else I would’ve been there.”

“Why didn’t she tell you?”

“I have no idea.” He sighs, meandering through the room. “I was here living my best life, and she was …” He laughs sadly. “I don’t even know where the hell she was or what was happening to her. I’ll never know.”

None of this has anything to do with me, and a part of me thinks I should stay out of it and stop asking him questions.

But when he stops moving and looks at me, there’s an expectant look in his eye as if he wants me to ask.

Like he wants to talk about it. Like no one has ever asked him this story and how he feels about being left out of his daughter’s life— for years .

I sit on the edge of the bed. “How did you find Kennedy?”

“Child Protective Services called me one Tuesday afternoon. I hung up the first time, figuring it was Luke being a prick. But, no, I had a four-year-old child I’d never met sitting in an office in Ann Arbor.”

“Wow. I’m … speechless.”

He snorts. “Well, I wasn’t.”

I smile at him.

“Monica was killed in a carjacking, and Kennedy was strapped in a car seat in the back.” A flash of anger bolts through his features. “They found her crying in the parking lot of a gas station that night.”

“Oh, Chase.”

He nods, agreeing with the sentiment. “I’m just happy they found me, you know?”

“How did they find you? I mean, if she hadn’t contacted you before, how did anyone know you existed or how to find you?”

“Monica had written down my name and where I worked and gave it to her best friend. Just in case.” He smiles sadly. “ Just in case .”

I have so many questions. How does he feel about all of this? Did Monica take care of Kennedy? Was she okay? But as I consider which to ask first, my stomach knots.

Instead, I stand. “She’s really lucky to have you, you know.”

He rolls his head around on his neck.

“Thank you for sharing all that with me,” I say. “You didn’t have to, but I think it’ll help me understand Kennedy better.”

He stands before me, taking me in like it’s the first time he’s ever seen me. And I probably like this look the most out of all I’ve gotten so far.

“Hey,” I whisper.

“What?”

“I’m still hungry.”

His cheeks split into a wide smile. “You’re a pain in the ass.”

My laughter follows us out of the room.