“Trinity.”
“Let me just stay like this for a minute.”
When the minute was up, he shifted back to look at me. “I love you.”
“Yay me!”
He laughed. “Not the reaction I expected, but oddly enough I have come to expect that from you.”
I gave his smiling mouth a smacking kiss. “What else is on your mind? Because the smile doesn’t hide the clouds in your eyes, babe.”
“Your father is an asshole.”
“Uh, yeah. I told you that.” I poked him in the chest. “You should listen to me about that kind of stuff. Wait. Did you talk to him again?”
“I wanted to let my fists do the talking, but I refrained. He tried to play off bribing Kierkegaard as an honest mistake that his ‘name’ could fix.” Walker splayed his fingers around the back of my neck and followed the arc of my jawline. “I hate that he did this to you.”
“I’m not being flip when I say I’m used to it. It’s a perfect example of why he’s out of my life, Walker.”
“I get that now. And I’m sorry for being a jerk about you not telling me, even though you should have. From here on out, we share all family stuff, okay?”
“Okay. Speaking of . . . Annika the PR whiz might’ve created a silver lining out of the Kierkegaard situation. When your mother told her what happened, she was outraged, mostly because she hadn’t been there.”
He frowned. “Now that you mention it, I never asked why Brady, Lennox and Annika weren’t at the LI shindig.”
“Because Annika was at the hospital with them. Evidently Lennox got really sick and Brady freaked out. He hauled her to the ER and called Annika, who immediately showed up and jumped to the conclusion that Lennox was pregnant. Which pissed Lennox off, because she’s not pregnant; she just had food poisoning. But thankfully Annika didn’t call Selka with the news she might be a grandma because can you imagine how mad your mom would be if that was yanked away from her?”
Walker stared at me with the oddest expression.
“What?”
“You’re in the Lund family gossip loop now.”
I grinned. “Isn’t it great?”
His slow-blooming smile was a thing of beauty. “Yeah, babe, it is.”
“Anyway, Annika has created this whole PR campaign for me. ‘Trinity Amelia’s artwork is deemed too edgy and controversial for local art galleries’ or something along those lines. She claims my work will be even more in demand. Isn’t that crazy?”
“Very.” Walker lowered his mouth to mine, kissing me with the seductiveness I’d grown to crave. As much as I wanted to surrender to him, I also knew that once we were in his bed we wouldn’t leave it the rest of the day.
I forced myself to break the kiss.
He growled. “Come back here.”
“You’re distracting me.”
“That’s the plan. I plan on distracting you to the point you don’t know your own name.”
Gulp.
Walker whispered, “It’s time to fuck and make up.”
“Umm . . . don’t you mean ‘kiss and make up’?”
“Nope. We’re starting a new tradition.”
My mind blanked.
And the sexy man kept it blank for the next three hours as he proved just what an awesome tradition it was . . . four times.
—
I kissed Walker’s damp pectoral and attempted to roll to my side of the bed.
He clamped a big hand on my ass and said, “Where are you going?”
“To the neutral zone. We need to finish talking.”
He sighed.
I disentangled from him. “I need at least five feet between me and your lips during this discussion.”
“You get five minutes to say what you need to. Then my lips are gonna be back where they belong.”
“Where’s that?”
His wicked smile caused my heart to trip. “All over you.”
Swoon.
He sat up and glanced at the clock on the nightstand. “Meter is running, babe.”
“All right.”
“Hold up. First, you want to tell me why you showed up at my house with a sledgehammer and your cat?”
And about twenty cans of paint. But he hadn’t seen that yet. “How’d you know about that?”
“Mom told my intervention crew—my brothers and cousins—that showed up at the lake today.”
“That’s where you’ve been the past few days? Chilling at the lake?” I kicked myself for not thinking of that.
“We do our soul-searching in different places. On the water is mine.”
“Since I couldn’t get ahold of you, I brought everything with me, including Buttons. You know, as a sign I was here to stay.”