“Then you better act like it.”
I looked away. “She told me to take it slow.”
“That’s smart. She’s smart.” Daddy took the wrench back, nodding to himself. “You got a lot of old habits. The kind that’ll make a woman like her run the hell toward the hills.”
I bristled. “I’m not gonna hurt her.”
“I know that,” he said. “But she don’t.”
Truth. Plain and hard.
“You want her?” he asked. “Really want her?”
I nodded once.
“Then stay away from the sweet butts,” he said. “All of ’em. No flirtin’, no lookin’, no old ways slippin’ in when temptation gets loud. You don’t get to be half in and half out with a woman like Lark.”
My jaw clenched. “I haven’t touched anyone since—” I cut myself off.
Daddy’s mouth curved. “Since her? Yeah. I figured.”
He leaned against the tractor and shook his head. “Women talk. Club women talk louder. If you so much as breathe wrong near one, word’ll get back to Lark before you get your helmet off.”
“I’m not like that anymore.”
He nodded—approving, but still wary. “She carries herself like someone who ain’t been treated right for most of her life. Makes a man want to stand a little more solid around her.”
He wasn’t wrong.
“She’s tougher than she looks,” I said.
“Never said she wasn’t.” His voice softened. “But tough don’t mean untouched. And it sure as hell don’t mean she don’t need gentleness from time to time.”
A muscle in my jaw ticked. “Gentle isn’t exactly my nature.”
“Funny,” he said, smirking, “’cause your Ma and I been watchin’ you with that girl, and all we’ve seen is gentle.”
I looked away. “It’s not that simple.”
“Don’t reckon it is,” he said. “But maybe simple ain’t what either of you need.”
Silence stretched—heavier this time, full of things we weren’t sayin'.
Daddy took a long drink from the water bottle he kept on the shelf, then pointed at me. “She feels safe here.”
I swallowed the weight of that. “I know.”
“She trust you?”
I thought of her hand in mine in the truck. The way she didn’t flinch when I touched her waist. The way she looked at me last night like she saw something worth believin’.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I think she does.”
He nodded like it confirmed a theory. “Then don’t go rushin’ it. Girls like her… they’re still learnin’ the world ain’t made of all sharp edges. Takes time.”
I looked down at my hands—scarred, rough, strong. “I’m not used to waitin’.”
“You’re too damn much like your old man,” Daddy snorted.
