His soft snort was accompanied by his breath clouding the frigid air as he leaned away from the door and stepped inside. “Can’t imagine what’s worse than that.”
“Shoving you back out into the cold?”
He glanced over his shoulder with a single brow raised and then tugged the door out of my hand to shut it behind him. “The cold would be kinder to my eardrums.”
“Wait until she starts screaming about not being read a book before I turn the lights off.”
A small muscle ticked under his left eye while the rest of his face remained impassive.
It had me laughing instantly. What a dead giveaway. Or maybe I was just getting good at reading him. “Come on.”
Spinning on my heel and expertly hopping over a play tea set conveniently set down right in the pathway heading back down the hall, I followed the soft whimpering cries from my niece, finding her half hung over the side of her bed while the rest of her was twisted up in her blankets.
The one upside to putting her in a toddler bed and not giving into all of the momfluencers Amelia had been obsessed with watching while she was pregnant preaching about putting your kid in a twin mattress lifted off the ground—was that if Ainsley fell, she didn’t have very far to go on the way down.
Face planting, while hilariously awkward, two inches from the floor versus the two and a half feet she would have had if she was in a twin was a far better alternative in my opinion.
“Ainsley Mae.” My hands found my hips. “What in the world did you do?”
She lifted her head up from the floor, her hair a wild mess falling into her eyes. She lifted her hand up in the generaldirection I was in, making a grabbing motion with it. “Unca Terry.”
“Didn’t I tell you to stay put?”
Honestly, child...
She was lucky she was cute.
It saved me from actually being sent over the edge.
How could I truly be mad at a face as sweet as hers?
Shaking my head, I toed a few toys out of the way and headed over to her, tugging the blankets back to free her. She flopped the rest of the way onto the floor, rolling until she faced the ceiling to blink at it a few times. I let her stay there for a second and leaned over her to fix the fitted sheet on her mattress, tucking it back into the corners of the frame before tossing the blankets back on top and smoothing them out.
Her frown was a picture perfect mirror of her mother, dramatic and pitiful, while she stared up at me with her glassy-eyes and still slightly swollen face. “That bad, huh?”
Her frown merely deepened.
Across the way, a motion caught my attention, turning me away from her for half a second as I caught Silas settling himself against the door frame. Lacking his coat, his toned muscles bulged slightly when he crossed his arms over his chest again. His tattoos were dark impressions in the dim lighting from Ainsley’s single lamp in the corner, casting interesting shadows over him that made him appear both slightly ominous and alluring.
There was a subtle twist to his lips that I couldn’t help but stare at. It softened him a bit, took him away from that stone-faced demeanor he usually wore like a second skin and draped him into something more... human.
I liked it. Whatever side of Silas this was, I wanted more.
Get it together.
“All right. Up you go.” Turning back around, I tugged her up from the floor with a small grunt as she went completely limp—a cute little trick I didn’t remember either Amelia or I teaching her that had become her favorite default the second she wanted to object to the current circumstances.
She sagged like a ragdoll, crumpling into her mattress when I finally got her back onto it. Sinking to my knees, I tugged her sheet and two blankets up to cover her, rolling her onto her back in order to pull them up and tuck them under her chin.
“There you go. Sleep tight, okay?
“Bedtime book?” she asked.
“Not tonight.”
Her face scrunched up instantly.
Fuck...
