Dirty: The Complete Series (Secret Baby Romance Love Story) (25 page)

Autumn and I danced together a bit as one song
ended and another started, and I began to relax more and more; there wasn’t
really anyone there at the show who would notice us together, and most of the
people at the festival were out-of-town folks. We were as safe as we could be
while still being inside the state.

As the set wore on, though, I noticed that Autumn
was paying less and less attention to the band; she was cheering at the end of
the songs, but she wasn’t exactly engaged.

“Are you okay?” I had to almost shout my
whisper, the crowd and the speakers were so loud.

“I’m fine,” she said, giving me a quick smile.

“Worried about Addie?” It was the only thing
that I could think of that could keep her so distracted.

“She’s with my mom; I’m not worried about
her.”

“You’re clearly not into this.” I was beginning
to wonder if the date had been as good an idea as I’d thought it was.

“I’m into it,” she said briskly.

“Then what’s up? You keep looking distracted.”
I made a face as if I was offended, but really I was concerned. “Am I boring
you these days?”

“Never,” she told me, smiling again. “It’s
always interesting to be with you.”

I snorted. “Not exactly the best reference
I’ve been given, but I’ll take it,” I told her. “Come on, Autumn, you can tell
me if something is on your mind. Are you worried about your parents finding
out?”

She shrugged. “No more than usual,” she said.
“Look, I’m a little distracted but it’s kind of a me thing.”

“Are you telling me, young lady, that there
are things you worry about enough to not pay attention to a great concert, but
which you’re not willing to share with me?” Her cheeks colored and I knew I’d
hit on a sensitive spot.

“Just tell me, I’m sure it’s fine,” I told
her. I hadn’t wanted to pry, but the fact that she was clearly not having as
good a time as we usually had together had me worried about her. If there was
something going on with her mom, Bob, or with Tuck, I wanted to know about it,
if only so that I could help support her.

“It’s nothing,” she said, shaking her head. We
watched the end of the Ragers’ set, and then I pulled her back from the stage,
out to where it wasn’t quite so loud, where we could talk without having to
shout.

“You’re obviously preoccupied with something,”
I pointed out. “I’d hate for you to have gone to so much trouble to get away
from home for the day only to not have any real fun while you’re away.”

I gave Autumn a quick hug and felt a jolt of
heat work through my body at the feeling of her curves against me. “You can
tell me,” I told her, pulling back slightly to look down into her face.

She looked down at our feet, and I could tell
she was trying to make up her mind as to whether or not to tell me. I
reiterated that she could trust me, and promised that whatever it was, I wasn’t
going to freak out.

“Fine,” she said, smiling nervously. She took
a quick breath and I saw the look of determination cross over her face. “I
didn’t want to tell you about it because...well, it’s not important.”

“Just tell me, babe,” I said, keeping the
smile on my face.

“Titan’s been texting me,” Autumn said finally.
“Not about getting together or anything; he’s coming into town to visit with
his family, and he was thinking he finally wants to meet Addie. I-I guess I
feel like I should give him a chance to get to know her, since she’s his blood,
you know?”

“And, you felt the need to keep this from me
because…” I could feel my anger beginning to rise, but if I gave into it I knew
I’d regret it. I needed to give Autumn the chance to explain herself.

“Because Titan’s my ex,” she admitted. “Even
though there’s nothing between us, and I’m not even remotely interested…” She
shook her head. “I figured since it was something with Addie and him, I would
just keep it between me and Addie and him until I found out whether he was
actually going to be part of her life or not.”

I held her gaze; I wanted to be convinced, I
wanted to believe her, but the fact that Titan was her ex-fiancé made it hard.
The fact that she’d seen fit to hide it from me that Titan had gotten back in
touch with her didn’t give me a lot of trust that she was telling me the truth
about the situation between them.

“If you thought that there wasn’t anything
between the two of you, why would you hide it? Even if Titan is your ex?” I
tried to keep my voice level, but I could feel jealousy gnawing away at me. I’d
been risking my job to be with Autumn, and she had had Titan hiding behind her
back for how long?

“Titan isn’t interested in me, and I can
guarantee you that I wouldn’t be interested in him if he were the last man on
earth,” she told me firmly. “But he is my ex, and he is Adelyn’s biological
father. I thought I needed to give him a chance, and I thought getting you
involved would just make things more complicated.”

“Why would Titan go from being totally
uninterested in getting to know about her to texting you to try and make it
happen?” I raised an eyebrow. It was hard for me to believe any guy who hadn’t
been interested in his child for the first year of her life would suddenly
become
interested.

“I think things are probably not going as well
as he claimed,” Autumn said with a shrug. “So he’s coming to town to visit with
his family, and he wanted to meet Addie while he’s here. He’s not even going to
be in town for that long.”

“You swear to me that you’re not even a little
interested in him? As the father of your child?”

Autumn nodded. “Like I said, even if he were
the last man on earth,” she told me. “I have the exact opposite of interest in
Titan.”

“Prove it,” I said.

She frowned, looking up at me in confusion.
“Prove it?”

I leaned in close, pressing my lips to her
ear. “Come home with me, right now,” I suggested. I’d been wanting to suggest
it all day, and I’d been hoping to find a way to broach the topic, but I needed
to be alone with Autumn in light of what she’d told me.

“How is that going to prove anything?”

I smiled slightly and shrugged, trying to be
more casual than I felt. “It’ll show me you’re really into me,” I pointed out.
“And that it’s not just a flirtation to you.”

“I’ve already slept with you though,” she
countered.

“I want to be close to you. I want to feel
you,” I told her. “I want to know we’re still...us.”

Autumn considered it for a moment longer.
“Okay,” she said, smiling slowly. “But instead of going to your place, let’s go
to mine. It’ll be dark by the time we get into town.” I thought about her
counter-offer; it was actually riskier for us both for me to go with her to the
guest house on her parents’ property. But I had to admit I was more than a
little intrigued at the idea.

“Let me say goodbye to Donny and then let’s
go,” I said. “I want as much time as humanly possible with you.”

Chapter Thirty Three

Autumn

I could tell that Cade was even more upset
than I’d thought he’d be at the fact that Titan had been texting me; and I
could understand why he’d be upset that I was hiding it. In retrospect, all my
fine and logical justifications for not telling him about the messages sounded
as stupid to me as they probably sounded to him.

As I pulled around behind my parents’ house to
the guest house with Cade hot on my heels, I felt my heart pounding in my
chest. I had known that I needed to make a gesture, that I needed to prove to
him that I was into
him
and only him.
By the time we were both getting out of our respective cars, it was dark out,
and I could only hope that my parents weren’t paying too much attention to what
was going on outside…and that Tuck wasn’t keeping watch to see if I was doing
something I shouldn’t be.

Before we’d left the festival, I’d told Cade
how to park so that my parents would hopefully not see his car. We’d done the
wider loop around the main house, and he had pulled around to the far side of
the guest house, so I could hope that we were in the clear. I heard him walking
over to me and had a panicked thought that I had somehow managed to forget or
misplace my house key, but I found it in my purse, and my heart slowed just a
little bit.

He wrapped his arms around me in the darkness
and I tilted my face up, looking for his eyes, hoping against hope that I’d
done enough to show him that I truly wanted him, just by inviting him to my
house instead of going to his. His lips brushed against mine, and I could feel
the tension in his body, but it was familiar tension, the feeling of him
wanting me.

“I don’t want to rush you,” I whispered,
pulling back just a little bit, “but every minute we’re out here is a minute
someone could see us.”

He chuckled. “That’s a good point,” he agreed.
“Let’s go inside.”

I felt weirdly even more nervous once I’d
opened the front door to the house and let Cade come in behind me. It had been
ages since I’d had a man in my space, and the last one who’d been in the house
who wasn’t related to me had been Titan; at that, Titan had only been inside
once, the day he’d told me that he was really and truly abandoning me to be
with his new girlfriend.

I felt exposed in a way I never had before,
even though I’d been naked around Cade. I felt like I didn’t know what to do
with my hands, what to do with my mouth. “Do you want something to drink?”

He grinned at me as if he knew exactly what
was going on in my mind and nodded. “Whatever you’ve got handy,” he suggested.

I had water more than handy, but after the
confusion of the day, I wanted something stronger than that. I opened the
little pantry I’d made out of a closet next to the kitchen and took out a
bottle of whiskey that one of my friends had gotten me once I’d started weaning
Addie a few months before. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but the notion of
drinking a little whiskey to calm my nerves before Cade or I made a move to the
bedroom was comforting.

I mixed us up both whiskey-cokes, and we went
into the living room of the guest house. “This is a nice little place,” he
said, looking around.

“It’s a total mess, but it’s nice of you to
say,” I told him, smiling wryly. Now that Adelyn was fully walking around, I
could barely keep her in one room, and at that she managed to throw and scatter
her toys everywhere, wherever she was. I could barely keep up with the cleaning
just for her messy ways, much less everything else.

“I’ve seen worse,” he told me with a little
smile. “Don’t feel bad; Addie’s at that raging mess age
—
you’re doing good just to keep some clean
clothes.”

I laughed and sipped at my drink, and as we
sat around on the couch together, talking about nothing at all, I started to
feel more and more relaxed; warmth spread through me with the whiskey, and the
tension from earlier in the day didn’t seem to matter much at all anymore.

When Cade moved in to begin kissing me again,
I didn’t hesitate for even a moment. I’d been
—
in the back of my mind
—
waiting for him to kiss me, waiting for the
feeling of his lips on mine, the taste of his tongue. I could also taste the
whiskey coating his mouth, but it made a warm, sharp counterpoint to his soft
lips and rough tongue.

His hands started to wander over my body
slowly, and I leaned into his touches, feeling more and more turned on in a
matter of moments. It was probably partly the alcohol, but I didn’t care. I had
wanted to get some time alone with him even before Titan had texted me, and
after the confrontation between the farmhand and me, I only wanted him all the
more.

When Cade pulled me onto his lap, any thought
of the remainder of my drink just flowed right out of my mind. I kept kissing
him, moving against his body, rubbing against him, loving the feeling of his
hard muscles, the heat of him. He was everything I had ever wanted in a man,
and I couldn’t believe that I’d fallen for such a fools’ gold compromise lover
as Titan when I compared the best of what my ex had given me to the least that
Cade had ever done.

Cade’s hands became more and more urgent on my
body, groping and touching me, not hesitating, but oddly respectful as we made
out on my couch, letting the tension build up slowly but steadily. They slipped
up underneath my blouse, and I shivered. I felt so weirdly ticklish, so
sensitive to every little touch, every nerve in my body awake in a way that I’d
only ever experienced with him.

We broke away from each other’s lips to catch
our breath for a moment, and I could feel how turned on I was. It was buzzing
through my veins, making it hard to even think about thinking.

The fact of Titan texting me
—
and Cade’s reaction to me hiding my ex’s
attempts at contact
—
rose up in my mind as my heart started to slow
just a little bit. I decided that whatever the risks, I wanted to be with Cade
—
right then and there in the guest house, even
if my parents found out about us that way. I wanted to put Titan out of my mind
for good, and make Cade understand that I really, truly wanted him; more than I
had ever wanted any other man I’d been involved with.