He Left My Fever for His Ex, So I Took Our Daughter novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Only Ours

Leah's POV

Joel woke me by saying my name, once, very low.

I opened my eyes in the chair at the dock office, and he was crouched in front of me with Maisie's tablet in both hands.

"Don't wake her," he said. "Look."

I looked.

The call timer said two hours and sixteen minutes.

Then Ingrid's voice came out of the little speaker, close and warm, and I understood that she was still listening.

"Sweetheart, are you there? Tell your mommy that page forty-one is a lovely page."

Joel held up one finger to me.

Then he pressed the red button, and the picture of Ingrid's face vanished.

The silence afterward was the loudest thing I'd ever heard.

"She's had it open since when?" I whispered.

"Since eight tonight. I don't know about the nights before."

"The boat house," I said. "That tablet has sat on the shelf beside my bed all week."

He didn't answer, and that was the answer.

I stood up so fast the chair hit the wall.

I called Britt, who rushed over in her scrubs and lifted Maisie off the couch without waking her.

"I'll take her to the cat," Britt said.

"Go now."

She looked at my face and at Joel's.

"Is that a bad kind of angry or a good kind?"

"Both," I said.

When her taillights cleared the gate, Joel drove me to Pier Nine without speaking.

He locked the boat house door and slid the bolt, and he took the tablet out of my hands and put it in the truck, in the glove box, under a coil of rope.

"She's not going to hear one more thing," he said.

"No."

"What do you want?"

"I want her to have nothing of this." My voice shook with something that wasn't fear. "I want it to be only ours."

He crossed the room in three steps.

My back hit the door, and his mouth came down on mine, hot and rough.

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