Chapter 103 The Bad Man

Chapter 103 The Bad Man
Chapter 103: The Bad Man 

Leo 

Fuck. It was Ivy.

The perfect teacher Principal Skye had recommended—patient, good with four-year-olds, available after school—was my ex-girlfriend.

Crazy. This shit was actually crazy.

I sat in my Bentley with the engine still running and the California sun beating through the windshield hard enough to make the leather burn. 

Callum was in the back seat, kicking his legs and licking a red lollipop like it was the most important job in the world. My thumb hovered over Ivy’s new contact.

I wanted to delete it. That was the right thing to do.

Staying away had been the only clean decision I’d made in years. She had looked good in that office. Happy, healthy and steady. 

There had been a mark on her neck she hadn’t quite hidden properly with her blouse. A hickey. The principal was an old bat. He hadn't seen it. But I did. 

That meant someone else had their mouth on her. Their hands on her. Good for her. I was glad she wasn’t as miserable as I was. Lie. 

I had been about to erase the number and ask Skye for another name when fate did what it always did to me. It intervened. 

“Daddy.” Callum’s voice pulled me back. “I like Miss Ivy’s hair. She’s very pretty. I like Miss Ivy. She's going to be my teacher, right?”

I resisted the urge to curse the universe, Ivy, and my own rotten luck. I turned in the seat instead and looked at him. The thought that hit me was so sharp it almost made me laugh.

In another life—if Ivy and I had fucked a lot more, if the hospital and Anderson and my father hadn’t ripped everything apart—I might have been his father in every way that mattered, and she might have been his mother. We might have had a kid with her hair color and my temper.

Fate was cruel. Ivy had been crueler.

That didn’t stop my body from reacting to her like no time had passed. I had spent five years telling myself I was over it. I had still ended up in bed with women who looked a little too much like her. 

I had still thought about her when I shouldn’t. 

Seeing her today had been enough to leave me hard in my slacks like a teenager with no self-control. I glanced down. 

The tent was obvious. Creepy, even. Her new student’s father, sitting in a school parking lot, wanting the teacher. 

“Daddy?” Callum called again. “What are you looking at?”

I blinked, shook my head, and forced a laugh. “Nothing, Cal.”

Nothing except the fact that I wanted to take his new teacher apart. Wanted her bent over something that wasn’t a hospital bed. Wanted hours with my mouth on her breasts and in between her legs. 

I was officially the problem. 

A message lit up my phone and killed the thought cold. It was from Anderson.

Hey. Just wanted to know if you’re still gonna be able to make it. I’m waiting.

I read it twice, then looked at Callum in the rearview mirror. The boy looked like his father. The resemblance was getting harder to ignore the older he got. Same mouth. Same everything. 

I loved that child like he was mine. Technically, he was. My name wasn’t on the birth certificate, but I had been there for every appointment, every scare, every night Maddie couldn’t sleep. He was a good kid. Sweet. Mine in every way except blood.

I still wasn't completely comfortable with Anderson.

The two facts lived in the same body and somehow never cancelled each other out.

“Cal,” I said, starting the car, “we’re going somewhere now. We’re going to see your uncle.”

A little frown appeared between his brows. “You and Mum said I didn’t have an uncle.”

“You do.” I smiled at him in the mirror. “And we’re going to meet him today. He’s actually very excited to see you.”

“Okay, Daddy!” The frown vanished. “I’m excited too.”

Anderson was back from deployment in Afghanistan. He had been circling for weeks—messages, calls, careful apologies aimed at me and at Maddie. 

He sounded more mature now. Steadier. Nothing like the golden-haired bastard who used to treat Ivy like a toy he hadn’t finished playing with. Nothing like the boy who had gotten Maddie pregnant and then told her to end it. 

According to her, that had been their last real conversation. No calls after. No questions. No money. Nothing.

Now he wanted a glimpse of his son.

Maddie had been clear. She did not want Anderson around Callum. She did not want the boy to ever know that man as his father. I had promised her I wouldn’t break that. 

Today I was breaking it anyway. Once. That was all I could justify. They both deserved at least that much, even if Maddie would want to kill me for it later. I can handle her. 

By the time we reached the restaurant, Callum was bouncing on the sugar high, talking to himself about uncles and candy and whether Miss Ivy liked dinosaurs. 

Andorra had been quiet. Isolated. Maddie was overprotective to the point of erasure. She had never told him he had an aunt named Ivy. She had never told him much of anything beyond the two people who made up his whole world: her and me.

I almost missed Anderson in the crowd. If he hadn’t lifted a hand, I might have decided he’d ghosted us and walked back out.

He looked different. Too different.

Tanned. Bigger. His arms strained the sleeves of a plain shirt. The buzz cut had grown out just enough to stop looking like a regulation cut. 

The biggest change was his eyes. They were hollow. Gaunt. Like whatever light used to live there had been scraped out and not replaced. 

He looked haunted in a way I recognized from men who had seen too much and come home anyway.

He met us halfway, smiling too wide. “Leo. Thank you for coming. I was really beginning to doubt you’d show.”

I shook his hand. “I gave you my word.”

His gaze dropped to the little boy gripping the side of my trousers. He looked at Callum for a long second. The smile turned sad. His eyes shone.

“That’s him, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

Callum, who had never met a stranger he didn’t try to feed, held out his lollipop. “Hello, Uncle. Do you want some?”

Anderson took it like it was made of glass. “T…Thank you.” I didn't miss the way his hands trembled uncontrollably. Like he couldn't help it. 

Callum stared at him, head tilted, then looked up at me. “Daddy, why does Uncle look so much like me?”

Anderson made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. He pinched the bridge of his nose, folded himself down to Callum’s height, and started crying right there between the tables.

“Fuck.” Anderson sobbed into his hands. 

“Language,” I said, glancing around. “He’s at the age where he repeats everything.” 

Callum reached out and patted Anderson’s shoulder with sticky fingers. “Uncle, why are you crying?”

Anderson looked up at me, wrecked. “Can I hold him? I just want to—”

He didn’t get to finish. Callum had already decided. He let go of my pant leg, walked straight into Anderson’s space, and wrapped both small arms around his neck.

“Don’t cry, Uncle. Daddy doesn’t like it when people cry. He doesn’t like when mummy cries because of the bad man.”

Anderson’s eyes found mine over the boy’s shoulder.

I closed my hands into fists. Thanks a lot, Cal.

We sat down because standing there was starting to attract looks. I ordered water for myself and juice for Callum. 

Anderson didn’t touch the menu. He kept staring at the child like he was afraid if he blinked the whole thing would disappear.

“He doesn’t know,” I said quietly, once Callum was busy peeling the wrapper off another candy I should not have given him. “Maddie doesn’t want him to. I brought him today against that. Don’t make me regret it.”

Anderson nodded. His voice came out rough. “I won’t tell him. I just… I needed to see him. I know I don’t deserve it.”

“You don’t,” I agreed. No point dressing it up. “You told her to get rid of him. You vanished. You don’t get to play father because the army sanded some of the asshole off you.”

He flinched, but he didn’t argue.

“I know what I was. I’m not asking to take him. I’m asking to look at him and know he’s real.” He swallowed. “Maddie still hates me?”

“She doesn’t use that word around him. She uses ‘the bad man.’ You’re welcome.”

Anderson let out a breath that sounded like it hurt. Callum climbed onto the booth seat beside him without asking and started explaining, in great detail, how his Daddy knocks out the big guys. 

He even made little punching movements. Anderson watched with glistening eyes. 

I watched them and felt two things at once: the old, familiar disgust, and a reluctant, ugly pity. 

Five years ago I would have put him through a wall for breathing near anyone I cared about. Today I was the one who had driven his son across town so Anderson could cry into a four-year-old’s shoulder.

My phone buzzed. A reminder about the press junket tomorrow. Another about sparring at six. The comeback machine didn’t pause because my past had decided to sit down at the same table.

Callum yawned, sugar crash arriving right on schedule. He leaned against Anderson’s arm like it belonged to him.

“Uncle is sad,” he informed me solemnly. “You should tell him the joke about the penguin.”

“Another time,” I said.

Anderson looked at me over the boy’s head. “Have you heard from Ivy?” 

The name in his mouth made my jaw tighten. “Don’t.”

“I’m not trying to start anything. I saw her at her graduation. She told me to leave. I left.” He hesitated. “She looked… done with me. I don’t blame her.”

“Good.”