“Reviews? What reviews?” This baby girl in front of me was freaking beautiful but bat shit crazy, still clinging to the story my place was a rental.
“On the site the cabin was on,” she clipped, adorably stomping her foot. I hated the way her hand shook with the poker still between us. Regardless of if she was an intruder or not, I didn’t want her to be scared of me. I wanted to protect her. An overwhelming need to not only keep her safe but be the man who ensured that safety washed through me.What the hell is wrong with me?
“I promise you’re safe with me,” I said gently, putting my hands up. As much as everything in my body and mind was yelling at me not to move away from her, my heart said I needed to make her feel like I wasn’t a danger. I stepped back all the way to the door. “Wait… you’re telling me this cabin, my place, was on a site?”
“Yes.” She swallowed and reached for her phone. Picking it up, she tapped the screen before carefully bringing the phone over to me and dropping it on the couch, keeping space between us.Good girl,I thought to myself. If I were any other man, I would want her to keep her space and wits about her. I picked it up, and my eyes widened.
“What the fuck?” I whispered under my breath as I stared at my cabin on her screen.
There were over ten reviews in the last month alone. I scrolled and scrolled, unable to believe my eyes. My own phonerang in my pocket. I reached and answered it without bothering to look at who might be on the other end. I still couldn’t believe what I was looking at. “Hello?”
“Uncle Ash? You okay?” Dane’s voice sounded, and I blinked.
“Yeah, kid, just at the cabin.” With what looked like a problem.
I lifted my eyes from the cell phone screen, and they connected with bright blue ones. Jesus, she was beautiful. I didn’t know Ember’s last name or where she was from or what she did, but fuck me, I knew she was going to be important to me. The actual ground underneath me might be solid, but my reality had shifted and left me unsteady. The woman who stood across the room, who looked like a real-life princess, was the one to blame.
“Problem?” My nephew’s voice cracked, and something inside me stilled. Not only had I spoken out loud, but I knew that tone.
“Yeah.” I stopped for a beat. “Huge problem,” I repeated.
“Thought, umm, you were going to stop here first. You know, to surprise Mom and stuff,” he said, and again, I knew that tone.
“Yeah, but the storm was coming in, and I wanted to make sure the place was okay.”
“I’ve been keeping an eye on it,” he quickly added. I bet he had.
“An eye on it, huh?” I repeated, slowly putting the pieces together. “Dane, buddy, any chance you might have noticed anything… weird going on here?”
“Weird? Like, umm, weird how?” I was great at reading people, and I had a feeling I was reading Dane like an open book. I tossed my head back and stared at the ceiling before shutting my eyes and silently counting to ten.
“Dane,” I said, my voice sterner than I’d ever spoken to him before.
“I’m guessing Miss Thomas is already there.” I could almost hear him wincing on the other end of the line. Bright side, I had a last name for my gorgeous princess.
“Miss Thomas is here,” I confirmed, opening my eyes and glancing at her. “Now, you wanna explain the list of reviews Miss Thomas just showed me on a rental site?”
“I can explain.”
“How about you start explaining right now, kiddo?”
“Look, Mom’s been working a lot. She needed a new car, and then she was talking about getting me a truck for my senior year…” The kid kept talking, telling me about how he was the man of the house and he started to freak out about paying for school. “Then I, well… I thought about your cabin. It was just there. Empty. All alone. And you never even came out to see it. Not once. It had been sitting there for a little less than a year so?—“
“A year,” I whispered, and Dean got quiet. “You’ve been renting my place out for a year?”
“To help pay for college,” he reminded me. Fucking hell, if he had called me to tell me about his idea, I would have green-lighted it immediately. Dane was a good kid. A responsible one. But way too damn smart for his own good. “I’ve been cleaning it up, too, made sure nothing went wrong. And if there were ever any issues, I took care of it.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“The original toaster broke. Someone bumped into it, and it fell on the floor, cracked in half, but I replaced it,” he explained. I pinched the bridge of my nose. Had I really been working so much that my teenage nephew had been able to get away with renting my place out for over a year?
“And the money?” Not that it mattered to me. I sure as fuck didn’t need it.
“It’s in an account.” He sighed. “I was going to use it to help pay for college because I knew if Mom was already overwhelmed with me living at home, I knew she would work even harder to pay for it. And she still has Layne and Briana to worry about.”
My heart cracked inside my chest. Jesus Christ, I couldn’t even be upset when the kid was just looking out for his mom, my sister.
“Buddy,” my voice softened. “I am paying for your college. I talked to your mom about it when you started high school. Hell, I would have paid for your truck and her car if…” If I’d pulled my head out of my ass and realized my stubborn older sister wouldn’t ask for a fucking dime.
