Sharing You

Suddenly his body was gone from mine, and I stumbled back a step before he caught me.

“What the hell?”

He laughed loudly and leaned around my body to kiss me chastely. “I’ll finish the sausage,” he said as he moved in front of me to check the cooking sausage.

“But—you—what—not fair!”

“Sausage, sweetheart. Breakfast for di

I just stood there staring at him like he’d stolen an ice cream cone from a child. “That was so hateful!”

Brody barked out a laugh and wrapped an arm around my waist to pull me in for another kiss. “God, I love that accent of yours.”

“I don’t have one,” I grumbled and moved away from his hold to begin cutting up fruit.

It had been three days since we talked out everything in the entryway of Kinlee and Jace’s house, and in that time . . . there had been nothing but us. No Olivia, no Reynoldses, no J. Shepherd . . . just us. It had been beyond amazing and felt like a dream that I wasn’t ready to wake up from. While we’d spent most of the time in the bedroom, we had done a lot of talking. He’d told me everything that was happening with Olivia’s psychotic family that he’d kept hidden from me. He told me about J. Shepherd’s threats, and his worries about what they might come back with now that he had filed for divorce, even though he had a lot of evidence on Olivia. But mostly he told me about everything he wanted to do now that we were about to start our forever. Including being reintroduced to his parents as his girlfriend. I’m not going to lie—that one was scaring me.

Jace and Kinlee had taken the news well—too well—but that was because they hated Olivia and wanted Brody back. Well, and probably because they both knew me and liked me. But while I’d met Brody and Jace’s parents, I don’t think they’d ever given me a second thought. So even though I knew they would be happy Brody had left Olivia, I had no idea how they would react to me. My bet was that it wouldn’t be good. In my mind I was still a home-wrecker. I was still “the other woman.” And I still didn’t understand how anyone could see me as anything but those things.

“What are you thinking so hard about?”

My body tightened as Brody’s voice broke through my i

Brody was about to pour batter on the waffle maker, but stopped and frowned at me. “It’s going to be okay, Kamryn.”

“Just because Kinlee and Jace were okay with it doesn’t mean your parents will be.”

“I’m not expecting them to be okay with it. I was never expecting anyone to be okay with it. Hell, my two closest friends more or less said they were glad I was happy but didn’t approve of what I was doing.”

My eyebrows rose, and my eyelids blinked slowly. “Um . . . who?”

“When Hudson and Steele came down for Tate’s—”

“Oh, my God, they know?!” I didn’t even know these men, and they’d known that Brody and I had been having an affair? My cheeks heated in embarrassment. Whenever Brody mentioned them, he always told me they were guys he wanted me to meet someday . . . but I doubted, because of what they knew about me, that this meeting would ever happen.

“They’re not really the kind of guys I can keep things from. Steele figured it out on his own, Kam.” He stepped closer to me and cupped my cheeks in his large hands. “Don’t be embarrassed. They don’t think any less of you, and they weren’t judging you, I swear. They were mad at me for making you wait for me to leave Olivia.”

I breathed out heavily and dropped my head. “This is a disaster. Your best friends and family are always going to think of me as the woman you had an affair with,” I grumbled. “Even if you think they won’t judge me,” I said before he could say anything.

“I’m sorry, Kamryn,” he said simply. “I’m just sorry.”

Looking up into his gray eyes, I placed my hands over his and sighed. “We went in this thing together. Please stop saying you’re sorry.” Leaning up to kiss him softly, I smiled against his lips and said, “We just have a few more things to get through, including telling your family, and then one day this will all just be a memory.”

“You know what I’m scared about?” he asked seriously, and my eyebrows bunched together. “When you tell Barb. From what you’ve said, I’m afraid she’ll come after me with a wooden spoon or something.”

I laughed, and he kissed me hard before releasing me.

“We’ll get through it, Kamryn. But until I go to work tomorrow, let’s just keep pretending like we have nothing to deal with and nothing waiting for us out there. All right?”

I studied his worried eyes and nodded. “All right, Brody.”

After our breakfast-for-di

It was all so stress-free, so normal, and so perfect.

Later, my eyelids cracked open when Brody removed my glasses and put them on my nightstand. Ru

“I fell asleep?” I guessed.

“Little bit,” he said, his voice warm and rough with exhaustion. “Snoring and drooling all over the place.”

“Shut up.” I pushed at his bare chest, and he caught my hand in his, his laugh filling the otherwise quiet room.

“No, you looked adorable.” He kissed me gently and pulled my body closer to his. “Go back to sleep, Kamryn.”

And I did, so easily, just as I had done the last three nights. There was no fear that he would leave. There was no watching the clock. There was no Olivia. Again, it was just us. It was perfect.

Brody

July 21, 2015

“I DON’T KNOW if I can do this!” Kamryn hissed and dropped her phone into one of the cup holders in my SUV.

I sent her a reassuring smile and picked up her phone, searching for Barb’s number.

Kamryn refused to go out in public with me until my family knew about us, and I wasn’t about to keep hiding us. So we were having brunch at Kinlee and Jace’s with my parents, and I was making her call her aunt Barb on the way so we could get it all done at once.

“I’m going to be right here with you. None of them will be easy to tell, but it needs to be done. And the sooner we do it the sooner we can start our forever. Then it will be done, babe. We won’t have to hide, we won’t have to worry about them finding out . . . it’ll all be over.”

She nodded her head a few times and roughly swallowed as she looked out the window.

Pressing Barb’s number, I let the call go through my car and watched as Kamryn jumped at the first ring. For a few seconds, I didn’t think Barb was going to answer as the phone continued to ring. Just as I was about to end the call, I heard an accent that put Kamryn’s to shame come through the phone.

“Baby girl, are you all right? You never call me!”

My brow furrowed, and Kamryn started biting on one of her fingernails—something I knew she didn’t do.

“I’m fine,” she said shakily.

“What’s going on, I’m getting your—”

“Barb, I’m not alone.”

There was silence for a few seconds, and I wanted to ask why Barb said Kamryn never called her, and why the start of the call was already weird as shit.