Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 68735 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 344(@200wpm)___ 275(@250wpm)___ 229(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68735 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 344(@200wpm)___ 275(@250wpm)___ 229(@300wpm)
“Surgery for what?” Gunner croaked, looking sick all over again.
Fuck.
I hadn’t thought about that aspect of it.
The thought of losing not one, but two kids, seemed like the worst form of hell.
That had to be where his mind was going.
Without thought, I walked out the door with the little girl asleep in my arms.
She’d been there asleep for the better part of an hour.
She was exhausted and hurting, the poor thing.
She’d been passed around to everyone in the room as they tried to calm her down, and she’d finally passed out on me after an hour of fighting sleep.
So I didn’t think twice about taking her with me as I hurried outside.
I was talking before I could even comprehend what I was saying.
“She’s perfectly fine,” I said. “This is routine with her ears. She needs tubes for sure. Nothing too scary or invasive. Her eyesight they were talking about having issues with is a genetic disorder called amblyopia. It’s an inherited trait. That doesn’t require surgery. I looked it up. It does require her wearing an eyepatch, though.”
His wild eyes calmed just a bit at my matter-of-fact tone.
“There are a few other things with her ears that they’re worried about since she might have damage to an eardrum, but again, that’s something that’s easily fixed. It’s not a scary surgery. It’s normal.”
As I spoke, I watched the man visibly relax more and more.
But the moment his eyes dropped down to the little girl in my arms, he was back up to freaking out.
“You want me to call your uncle?” Webber asked, looking at Gunner.
Gunner swallowed hard, his throat bobbing in a comically loud move. “Would you?”
“Yeah.” Webber slammed his hand on Gunner’s back so hard that the crack startled the little girl in my arms.
She woke up and looked around in confusion.
She smiled when she saw Gunner. “Hey!”
Gunner visibly swallowed before he said, “Hey.”
She patted my chest and said, “Down!”
I put her down, and she walked right over to Gunner and touched his hand, then hauled ass toward a tree that had flowers growing under it.
Gunner, Audric, and I watched her closely.
She raised her leg to get a better angle on the flowers, and the brick that was surrounding the flower bed slipped, causing her to squeak in surprise.
She didn’t fall, though.
Gunner was there before she could think about falling down, righting her with a large palm across her back.
“She was practically raised by the club,” Audric mused as he watched Lottie bend down and pull a flower out by the root. “I worked, one of them watched her. She has sleepovers all the time. Gunner’s probably the only one that really hasn’t spent all that much time with her, though. He’s pretty standoffish with the kids.”
I watched as Gunner took a seat on the bricks that made up the flower bed and said, “Looks like she doesn’t hold that against him.”
“She wouldn’t,” he agreed. “She’s a really good kid. I think it might break my heart a little bit when she’s not under my roof.”
“But that’s not a super surprise, is it?” I asked. “I think you knew all along that this was never a permanent thing. She loves you. I can tell. But she also loves them all. I think she could take you or leave you as long as someone else from your club is in the room. And you made that possible. You made sure that, in case one of them was the father, that they would all transition over well with her.”
“Should’ve tried harder with Gunner, though,” he admitted. “Just never thought Laney would do that to him of all people.”
I had no answer to that.
“Surely it was the liquor,” I said, but the excuse sounded pitiful, even to my own ears.
“Guess we will never know,” he admitted. “Unless there’s some long-lost diary explaining why she did the things she did.”
“Not that I know of.”
He crossed his arms, and his large, bulky arms brushed against mine.
I didn’t freak out, which had me examining the feeling deeper, but he chose to move away from me anyway despite my not asking him to.
“What do you think that Luciano and Paula will do about this?” I wondered.
“I’m sure they’ll just pivot,” he grumbled. “The only thing that Gunner will have going for him is the fact that his money won’t be tied up in an estate battle like mine.”
“I thought that the court gave you access after the last fight?” I wondered. “To help Lottie get into that fancy preschool.”
“It had to be agreed upon by both of us, and when I finally agreed, the Combs found something wrong with it. So I let the nanny go for no reason,” he grumbled.
“Wasn’t that nanny friends with Gunner?” I asked.
“She was his best friend. I felt fucking awful when I had to let her go after only three months,” he admitted. “But it worked out okay in the end because she was interested in taking a full-time, live-in nanny position with Shasha Semyonov.”