Read Online Complete Harmony by Julia Kent - Free Book Online Page A

up all night with a baby a few nights a week and you’re a complete wastoid when it comes to handling a twenty-four at the station.
    Hell, he couldn’t manage a twelve-hour shift any more. Sleep when you can sleep. Jillian’s latest bout of teething mean t the handful of weeks where she’d started to sleep through the night felt like a dream.
    Mike and Laura came out of the bedroom a hell of a lot happier than they’d been going in, he noticed. Jillian had drop p ed off t o sleep, and he looked on the counter near the coffee maker. Sitting at the tiny kitchen table, sipping a cup of much-needed Joe, gave him a rare moment to just think.
    Sometimes thinking was overrated. But not when you felt like you never had the time to do it.
    His cell phone and car keys were in their newly designated spot, the phone plugged in to charge. Training himself to put them there would take a few weeks, but it was better than the hack he and Mike had finally devised to get his cell phone out of the heating system.
    He was telling that story to Jillian’s prom date some day.
    Yesterday ha d to go down in the history of their entire relationship— his and M ike’s—as one of the weirdest. And that wa s saying a lot, because after Jill died, Mike turned strange. Then, again, after they thought they had lost Laura. He had this hidden ball of something badass deep down in the dark reaches of himself, and while most guys deal with it by being assholes, competing for who’s the bigger man, or just blowing it out through weightlifting or pickup basketball, Mike used running and meditation.
    Dylan thought punching something was so much better.
    He’d spent the afternoon in a haze in the Kid’s Korner of the lodge as Jillian found new ways to pull his hair and tug at his heart. Toddlers wobbled on new walking feet around her, and she tilted her head, wide green eyes fol l owing the movements of the kids, a drooly grin ever at the ready for whoever looked her way. He’d become accustomed to the other parents cooing at her and then looking at him quiz z ically.
    “She takes after her mother?” they’d say, and something in his throat would tighten. Jillian had dark blond hair and green eyes, and looked like a blend, as if genetics really had somehow taken three sets of DNA, put them in a Vitamix, and poured them out into a live newborn.
    But she didn’t look at all like him right now. You cou l d see it in her shoulders and the way she tilted her head. Her expressions, too, especially when she frowned and tipped her eyes up, lips pursed. The looks was so quintessentially a Stanwyck trademark that he’d taken pictures whenever he could and sent them to his mom and dad.
    They’d responded with scanned pictures of him at that age with the same exact look. Laura and Mike had gawked, and something about the look they gave him, Jillian, and then each other had made his throat tighten, too.
    Home was a sanctuary. He didn’t have to worry about what people thought (not that he did…much). Mike and Laura and he had a pact to raise the baby together as one unit, and they had n’t gi v en him even a hint that Jillian’s paternity meant one tiny damn. Whether he was her biological father or not, she was his heart child. Embedded forever and holding a piece of him, it was like she was his soul, raw and naked, crawling through the world.
    And right now she was sitting up in her toy room, her hand clutching something she munched happily on.
    Wait.
    He hadn’t fed her a snack.
    On well-practiced feet, he moved like a lion across the room, sleek and graceful, not wanting to scare her.
    A crumb-filled grin was h is reward, five teeth poking out in odd syncopation. Those five teeth had cost him, Mike, and Laura plenty of sleep.
    “Whatcha got there, Jelly Belly?” he asked, cooing.
    “Aga da!” she pronounced, holding the fist high like a victor’s.
    A well-gummed teething biscuit and a long insect’s wing poked out between chubby, dimpled