She winces and looks away. “No. I mean, yes, but, like, not bad. This one time I was in Greece with Daria Rumplestein—you know,heiress to the Rumple Shipping empire—and I slipped on some cobblestone and went tumbling ass over teacups down a hill, and I sprained my wrist and couldn’t scroll on my phone for like six weeks, and that hurt a lot worse.”
I tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. “Tavi—”
“Tavi?” another voice says on the other side of the privacy screen.
“Dad.Go away.”
“Just wanted to check on you.”
“I’m fine, and I have a man in here taking care of me already.Go away.”
There’s a shuffling behind the screen, and then Michael Lightly pokes his head around. In the dim light, his beard and hair make him look more like a reclusive mountain dude than the polished upper-cruster he was when the family arrived almost three months ago.
I feel his gaze on me for a moment before he looks at Tavi, who’s vibrating with a new energy that I recognize all too well. “Please go away,” she says, her voice clipped but controlled.
“You need any more ice or painkillers or water or food?” Michael asks her.
“I’ve got her,” I tell him before she can answer.
He glances at her, then back to me. I wait for the inevitable—Don’t hurt my daughter—but what I get instead surprises me. “You’ll do a better job than I would.” He nods stiffly. “Good night.”
And then he leaves.
Shuffles back across the classroom floor without another word while Tavi and I both stare at the place he was standing.
“Did that ... did that just happen?” she whispers.
“Guess he wasn’t at the ball game,” I reply dryly. I know he was at the ball game. I know he heard everything everyone said about me.
She locks eyes with me, and then she’s laughing, and then she’s looping her arms around my neck and kissing me while she’s laughing, which is awkward but alsoperfect.
“We shouldn’t do this,” she says against my lips.
But I love you. I want to kiss you like this every day. I want to take away all of your pain any way I can.“I was so worried about you that I forgot goat cheese isn’t vegan and brought you my favorite beet salad to make you feel better.”
There’s a long beat of silence.
Then—
“Does the salad have candied walnuts?”
“We might be backwoods folk, but we know our way around a beet salad.”
She whimpers.
It’s the same whimper she makes when I’m devouring her pussy and knowjustwhen to pull back to keep her from coming for a little bit longer. The same whimper she makes when I get up to put my clothes back on.
The same whimper she probably doesn’t know she makes when she doesn’t realize she’s finished the last drop of her coffee and goes for another sip, or when we’ve spent the whole day with her riding along on jobs with me and I pull up in front of the school to drop her off because one of us has somewhere we have to be and we can’t sneak over to the church to get naked.
God, I love her.
“You are so sweet.” She strokes my cheek. “But you shouldn’t be here either. When’s the last time you got a full night’s sleep?”
“You think I’ll sleep without knowing that you’re okay?”
“Dylan—”
“I don’t want to hurt you. I won’t touch you, I swear. I’m not here for sex tonight. But I—I need to know you’re okay. Ineedto know I’ve done everything I can to make you comfortable.”
