Travis was the result of one wild night in Silverpine when I was eighteen and too stupid to know what forever looked like. My buddy Teddy and I had rolled into the next town for a party at one of his friend’s ranches. We were chasing a good time and not thinking past the next beer in our hands. Music thumped through the open fields, mixing with laughter and the kind of reckless energy that only comes when you’re young and convinced you’re invincible.
That’s when I saw her.
Meredith.
She was beautiful. I remember thinking so even through the haze of cheap beer. Her long golden hair caught the firelight, and her bright blue eyes flicked to mine across the crowd, and that was it. One look, and I was gone.
One moment was all it took to change my entire life, and nine months later, there was Travis. Our boy. The child I never planned for but loved fiercely from the second he wrapped his tiny fist around my finger.
I might not have been a perfect father, but I made damn sure I was present in whatever way his mother would allow. Every visitation, every phone call, every school event she’d let me attend, I was there.
Meredith has fed him a steady diet of bullshit about me since he was old enough to understand words. She painted me as some absent, uninterested parent, and maybe I wasn’t around as much as I should’ve been. But God knows I tried to be the father he deserved.
And now, Travis is too much like her.
He’s got her looks, a hint of my temper, but none of my grit. None of the understanding that life doesn’t hand you a damn thing—you have to earn it.
I’ve watched him grow into a man who takes but never gives, who shows up when he needs something but disappears when real responsibilitycomes knocking. Sometimes, I catch glimpses of myself in him, but mostly, I see the things that break my heart. The entitlement. The way he judges first and asks questions later. The assumption that the world owes him something. And yeah, maybe it’s the world we live in now, one that lets boys coast through life untouched by consequence and never forced to own up to their choices. Maybe it’s because his mother spent years telling him he was perfect just as he was, never pushing him to be better or do better. Maybe it’s just who he is at his core, and all the good intentions in the world can’t change that. Or maybe it’s on both of us and the mess we made ever since I didn’t step up and marry her when she got pregnant.
But I know better than to think you can force yourself to love someone. Just as I know you can’t help who you fall for, no matter how much damage it might cause.
I understand the irony that my son, the boy I could never quite reach, is with the woman I’m pretty damn sure was meant for me but handed to me twenty years too late.
I know I spend too much time with her, but obsession isn’t a choice you make. It’s something that latches on, digs in deep, and refuses to let go, and Piper’s wrapped around my ribs like barbed wire, threaded through my veins like she’s always been there, just waiting for me to notice.
Outside of my fantasies, would I ever cross that line with her? Not a chance. I might be many things, but I’m not the kind of man who rips his family apart. Not intentionally, anyway. But Jesus, the way she looks at me sometimes.
There’s something there between us, a spark, a connection that has no business existing, but it does. Even before Travis started dating her, before he ever touched her, I’d catch her watching me.
I still notice her green eyes drifting to me when she thinks I’m not paying attention. I still feel the weight of her stare on my skin, which only feeds my obsession, and maybe I should be angry that she’s entertaining these thoughts while dating my son. That would be the right reaction, wouldn’t it? The moral one. The one that proves I have a goddamn conscience.
But I guess I’m not built that way.
Instead, I’m perversely pleased. Because even if nothing ever happens, at least I know the truth.
She sees me.
Not Travis’s father.
Not just another Crawford.
Me.
And I can’t bring myself to feel guilty about that.
Now I’m staring down fourteen days of exquisite torture.
Two weeks of Piper and Travis under my roof, watching her move through my space like she belongs there.
Two weeks of trying to build something real with a son who looks at me like I’m a stranger, while the woman I’ve fallen for sleeps down the hall in his arms.
I’ve spent years trying to find common ground with Travis. I’ve tried to find some kind of thread that might tie us together, anything that proves we’re cut from the same cloth, but we’re not. We’re so fundamentally different that we may as well be speaking different languages. It’s like we’re two strangers forced into the same bloodline by some cosmic joke.
I’d swear he wasn’t mine if I didn’t know better, but Meredith’s father made damn sure of that, demanding a paternity test faster than you can say “small-town fuckup.” Because heaven forbid his precious daughter have a baby with a rough-around-the-edges cowboy like me.
We were just two reckless kids, drunk on youth and each other. Stupid enough to believe the future was too far away to touch us and young enough to never think we’d end up as teenage parents.
And as Travis so often likes to remind me, I’m just the guy who knocked up his mom and walked away.
