“I do. Let’s go somewhere.”

“Where?”

“My mom’s,” I said, swallowing hard. Jesse may have been okay with leaving the Artem shit hanging in the air, but I wasn’t. The two women I loved—the only people I loved—not only didn’t know each other, but one of them actively saw the other as the villain. My mother wasn’t the antihero of this story. She was the greatest fucking person in the world. Jesse needed to know that.

She whipped her head around, flinching like I’d clocked her.

“You want me to meet the woman who…” she started, before clamping her mouth shut and looking out the window again. I had to remind myself that for many years (four, to be exact), Jesse’d had to share the only thing good about her life—her father—with Mom and me. And that Artem had been at our place. A lot.

It was probably easier to pull shit like that off when you were a social worker and had to work your ass off, and many of your cases got you on the road, but at the end of the day, he’d been with us days and nights. Entire weekends, sometimes. He’d told my mother he was married to his job, and probably told Pam the same thing. He’d brought my mom and me over to his place plenty of times. Only it wasn’t his place. It was his dead mother’s place—the apartment he and his brothers never got around to selling. My mom found out about it after he died and she went over there to see if any of his living relatives needed any help. “Artem didn’t live here,” his brother, Boris, had said. “At least not in the last ten years,” he huffed.

My suspicion was that she’d vowed to never let a man in again.

And she hadn’t.

Trent Rexroth had been a fuck buddy.

All the ones after him were more of the same shit.

It killed me that my mother had given up on love, but maybe that’s why I owed it to myself to be less of a dick in general.

Snowflake’s posture crumbled, her chin shaking slightly. “O…okay,” she whispered. “I mean, sure.”

“We don’t have to.” I was staring hard at the busy road and hoping my long, internal scream wasn’t audible to the outside world.

You need to give her a fucking chance, Jesse. For me.

I glanced at my phone every now and again. Saw something I’d been waiting for. Smiled.

“Why are you smiling?” she asked, shuffling in my peripheral.

“Beck won the competition. First place.”

Her jaw nearly dropped. “That was today?”

I nodded.

“And you missed it, even though you trained him?”

I hadn’t really thought about it like that. I just knew I couldn’t be there when Jesse was dealing with so much shit. Even if she didn’t let me be a part of that shit.

“No biggie. I’ve been to plenty of surf competitions before.”

“Oh, Bane…”

“It’s Roman.”

“I want to meet your mom, Roman.”

“What made you change your mind?”

“You.”

I spun my head to look at her. She let loose a bitter grin.

“You made me change my mind. Your sperm donor was obviously an asshole, and yet you’re the best person I know. She must have done something very right to make that happen. So, yeah, I’d like to meet her.”

I nodded, taking a sharp right toward my mom’s place. It was the weekend. She’d be home. She’d be happy to see me. She’d be happy to see Jesse—even though I’d brought her up to speed with our issues. It’s not like I’d wanted to, but she’d nearly kicked down my door when I’d been mourning my lost relationship—and had told me everything was going to be okay.

Possibly.

Probably.

Hell, hopefully.

I parked in front of my mom’s house and rounded the truck to open Jesse’s door. She kept on checking her phone, waiting for that phone call from Madison Villegas, and I had to pluck it from between her delicate fingers and tuck it into the back pocket of my pants.

“Don’t worry. They didn’t arrest them only to let them go because they forgot their weed at the party,” I said. She crinkled her nose at me, which was also adorable, and also made my dick hard. Then again, there weren’t very many things about Jesse that didn’t inspire my blood to rush straight to my dick.

We walked into the house. I kicked my boots off against the wall, Jesse slipped off her Keds then arranged them neatly by the door. She wasn’t the tidy type, so I took it as a good sign. She was trying to make a good impression.

“Mamul?” I called out from the hallway. I heard a thud coming from her bedroom, then a loud moan of pain. She came out a few seconds later, looking flushed and flustered, knotting a robe over her waist. She wiped her hair away from her face and smiled through a suspicious blush. “Roman. My sun.”