Free First Kiss by Bernadette Marie Page A

She dropped the diaper bag back in the car. “This is a mistake, Cade.” She reached her arms out for Gage. “We should just go. You should finish fixing up the house, sell it, close out his accounts, and get back to your life. Gage and I need to…”
    He couldn’t take anymore of her common sense. He moved in and planted a firm kiss on her lips.
    She pulled back. “Not in front of him.” She glanced at Gage.
    “He needs to know someone else thinks the world of you, too.” He looked at Gage. “I have something for you.”
    He headed toward the garage with Gage still in his arms, and he could hear Olivia grunt as she reached back into the car for the diaper bag, slammed the car door shut, and followed them.
    Cade opened the side door to the garage and set Gage on the floor in front of an old, antique pedal car. Immediately Gage hurried over to the toy and climbed in.
    “Cade, that is wonderful. Where did you find it?”
    “Dad had it buried in the back of the garage under a tarp with all of Conner’s things.”
    The smile on her face diminished. “It was Conner’s?”
    “Yeah, I’d forgotten all about it. I think he had it when he was Gage’s age. Seems like it broke when we were about five. His mom beat his ass for it.” The words had come out before the feelings hit him. The car broke because of him, not Conner. Conner had paid for that, and Cade had never told a soul.
    He cleared his throat. “I fixed it up. It’s his now.”
    “Oh, no.” She was quick to reject his gift. “He can’t have it. It’s not his.”
    “I want him to have it. Dad would want him to have it.”
    Olivia walked out of the garage. Again, he had her in tears. Most women would slap him across the face and leave him to move on to the next woman in line. This one was different.
    “C’mon, big guy, let’s drive this on the driveway.”
    He helped Gage out of the car and pushed it out in front of the garage. Olivia was on the back porch wiping her eyes.
    Gage quickly figured out the pedals and was off, giggling and driving about. Cade slowly walked up the few steps to the back porch, watched Gage climb from the car and try to turn it around before getting back in, and then walked toward the grill and turned it on.
    “Dad must have cooked out here not too long ago. The grill plate was clean, and the propane bottle was full.”
    Olivia looked out over the driveway. “We celebrated his birthday. Sixty was certainly too young for him to die.”
    “He’d turned sixty?” He closed the lid to the grill. “I don’t think I ever knew how old my dad was.” He sat down in the chair next to her, but she kept an eye on Gage. “I don’t think I knew much about him at all.”
    “It’s not too late.”
    He sat back in the chair and rubbed his knee. It ached as bad as his heart did. “I suppose I’ll know plenty when I start going through all the things here.”
    “He had a full life before he settled here.”
    “You’ve talked to him a lot about that, huh?”
    “He’s all I had, Cade. I know that probably makes you mad, but…”
    “No. Not mad. Sad that I wasn’t a good son. I always blamed him for that.”
    Now she turned around and her eyes narrowed on him. “You blame him for your lack of compassion?”
    She deserved to be angry. He was angry at himself, too. “I always did. I had it in my head that he drove my mother away. If a mother didn’t even want her son, the father must have been horrible.”
    Olivia shook her head. “He loved her. She just couldn’t love him back.”
    “So why have his son?”
    He watched her take in a deep breath and then look out over the driveway at Gage. “He said she thought she could change.” She turned back to him. “She thought she could try to do the domestic life, small town, man at home and a baby. She was wrong.”
    “Nice. You know more about my mother than I do.”
    “I asked.”
    Cade knew that was more than he’d ever done. He’d never asked where his mother was.