His hand skimmed from my ass cheek up to my ribs, taking its time and using enough pressure for my nipples to tighten as I practically held my breath with the anticipation of it touching my breast.
He was only an inch away from it when he tore his mouth away from mine and swore under his breath. “Fuck!”
“Wha—”
That’s when I heard it. The one voice that would always come first over anyone or anything.
“Mommy? I was sick.”
Bond moved back as I shifted to jump down, allowing me the space to do it with his hands on my hips, keeping me stable.
“You go and get her, and I’ll lock up down here,” he said gently, pushing my hair away from my face.
Giving him a tense smile, I moved to do just that when his hand gently caught my wrist and tugged at it.
“When the princess is feeling better, I’m going to want a date, Heidi. Mom and Dad would happily babysit her while we go out, or you can ask someone else to do it. Either way is fine by me, so long as I get to take you out and treat you like a princess.”
My parents didn’t raise no fool, that’s why I nodded in agreement. It didn’t matter how we’d first met or what his reputation was, it’d all been debunked since then, so there was no way I’d say no to a date with him. Especially after that kiss.
While I changed Nemi’s now dirty bedding, I waited for the freakout and/or guilt to hit that I was doing something for me that didn’t include her. Something that went so against what I’d sworn I wouldn’t do for fifteen years, but it never happened. Instead, I felt lighter and happy.
My daughter loved Bond, and he was genuine and good with her, and that went a long way to appeasing the maternal side of me where she was the priority in everything I did.
Plus, a date was just a date. It didn’t mean anything huge, just two people going out and eating a meal or doing something together. People did it every day, so why should this be any different from that?
Subconsciously I knew the answer to that—because it was Bond. He wasn’t just anyone, he was special. That’s why I needed to change the law of things and look at this as matter over mind, instead of mind over matter. My mind wouldn’t do me any good with thoughts like that, so I was going to just go with the matter and live for the day.
I could do that. I’d followed every bit of advice the doctors had given me to get Nemi to turn around when I was pregnant with her, and a lot of them weren’t comfortable or pleasant. In addition to that, having your stomach and womb cut open was painful as hell. If I could go through all of that, I could totally live for the day when it came to a man.
Lies, we all tell them.
Just to be sure I was doing the right thing, I ended up calling my best friend. We usually saw each other for lunch during the week or for an hour in the evening, but my schedule had been so full, and Naomi had been stressed about something at work, so we hadn’t managed to get any real time together recently.
With both of us sitting on the decking as we watched Nemi and Shanti playing with my neighbor’s daughter, Zoyla, I felt relief all over again that Naomi had moved here. Both of our girls were a couple of years older than Marisol’s daughter, but they kept bringing her toys and making the one-year-old giggle.
“Those two are like little mommy’s,” Naomi snickered as she watched them.
“They are. Then again, Nemi’s a thirty-year-old in a three-year-old’s body, I swear.”
“It’s funny, Shanti’s the same. I see so much of my brother in her and her mom, too, but then she gets this flash of attitude, and I’m like, whoa, where’d that come from?”
Pinning her with a look, I answered honestly, “From you. I’ve seen the way you dish it out to Carter.”
Lifting a shoulder, she turned back to the girls, avoiding my eyes. “He deserves it a majority of the time. Anyway, how are things going between you and Bond?”
“He kissed me the other night and almost touched my booby, then he asked me on a date,” I blurted. “I said yes.”
“Well, now,” she sang, turning back to me with a wide grin on her face. “All of that in one night. How was the kiss?”
“Amazing. He has this way of easing into it, then he steals your senses so you don’t even know where you are, and then he takes your breath away. It was the night Nemi had an upset tummy, and I didn’t even hear her calling for me until he pulled away. I felt like such a bad mom.”