MINE 1 Read Free

baby has been struggling with his grief and loss for two years without much help. After Dad split I’d been so busy working and trying to keep things afloat that I hadn’t noticed his need until it was too late. Now I’m paying the price for being a shitty parent, no matter that I’m not really his parent, or to blame for any of the stuff that’s gone down in the last years.
    Maybe that’s why instead of thanking Lucian for his impromptu rescue I level a hard stare at him.
    “Put him down.”
    The look I get for my efforts is a cross between scorn and amusement, and he gives Ben a little shake before lowering him to his feet.
    “Get upstairs and into bed, Benjamin.”
    Just like that.
    Six words are all it takes for Ben to get the message and bolt.
    “Sit down before you collapse.”
    I want to argue, especially given that sneering tone, but my body slumps of its own accord and I fall onto the sofa, so drained I can’t decide whether to laugh or cry.
    I want to laugh at the irony of this situation. I’ve been avoiding even a thought about Lucian for years, since he’d taken his sexy ass back ‘over the pond’ and ignored every email or text I’d sent him.
    It hadn’t been great, not with the fact that I’d been head over heels for a guy who lived on another continent and who seemed to have forgotten me the moment he walked onto the plane all those years ago.
    Now here I am, with that same cold-hearted prick standing in my living room, glaring down at me as if I have anything to feel guilty about instead of the other way around.
    “What the hell is wrong with that boy?”
    I take great offense to that, and not because Ben doesn’t deserve it but because…well, because I freaking hate Lucian for breaking my heart, and I refuse to give him any sort of loyalty.
    “Please leave.” At least, that’s what I try to say. It comes out more of a ‘pweave weave’.
    And then I start coughing so hard I double over, somewhat afraid to look at my hand afterward in case one of my lungs have made a break for it.
    I hear a sigh, one of those resigned types of sounds where someone—him, the ass—is obviously practicing patience. As if I need his shit right now. With that thought comes the reminder that I’m out of a job and in a lot of crap where Ben’s concerned.
    The therapist had been clear. If I can’t get him under control, measures are gonna have to be taken to assure he gets ‘help’.
    I don’t know exactly what measures she was talking about, but I’m pretty sure it’s not good, not from the way she’d looked at me.
    “Ashley!” he snaps, and I jerk back to reality when a set of hard hands lands on my shoulders, shaking me back to awareness. “I asked you a bloody question, woman.”
    Oh.
    “Nothing. His mom died, and then his father ran away.”
    That’s about the long and short of it. Oh, and I’ve been a total asshole in the sister department.
    “Christ. Your mother…I’m so sorry, Ashley.”
    “Yeah.” I shrug.
    What else is there to say? My mom’s six feet under, my shit for brains old man split, and I’ve managed to mess everything else up so royally I definitely want to cry.
    “Your father?”
    I look up at this point and have to steel myself against the compassion I see there. It’s hard, looking at him, seeing the softness I’d missed all these years, a softness he’d only shown me while whispering secrets to me late at night when we lay in the yard watching the stars sparkle up above.
    I have to force myself to remember that he’s the same boy—man —who’d whispered his love to me and then walked away as if I meant nothing. I still can’t understand how that had even happened. Part of me is convinced I invented that long summer, that the lonely exchange student hadn’t existed.
    But he did, does, is currently standing over me where I’m slumped on the sofa, his strangely penetrating eyes glaring at me in a way I can’t decipher.
    “Ashley!”
    What? Oh yeah. He’d