He stared at me, his eyes searching mine. “You want this.”
I did. That was the whole problem.
Still, I convinced myself I could control this desire, but two weeks later, I’d be lying naked in a bridal suite with Ryker’s tongue buried between my thighs. A night when everything would change …
15
FAITH
I emerged from Ryker’s sleek BMW and smiled at the little blue house on the corner of Maple and Chestnut.
God, I remembered when I first bought this place. All those double shifts, years of scraping together every penny for the down payment.
Pride. That’s what I’d felt when I finally accomplished this dream. Now? Terror that I’d lose it all before these kids had anywhere else to go.
“What is this place?” Ryker shut his door with a solid thunk and surveyed the neighborhood like he was calculating property values. Or escape routes. The chipped paint and sagging front porch railing probably weren’t helping his assessment.
“It’s a …” I tilted my head, searching for the right words. “A group home of sorts.” Translation: the place where broken kids who had nowhere else to go came to heal. I seriously needed to work on branding. But the thought of doing that made my heart hurt because, now, I might not be around to name it properly.
“A group home?” Ryker’s lawyer brain was clearly spinning, trying to categorize what he was seeing. “What kind of group home?”
“My group home.” I locked eyes with him, my voice dropping to deadly serious. “Do me a favor and don’t breathe a word about what’s happening. Not to them.”
His expression softened in a way that knocked the air from my lungs. “Breathe a word to who?”
The front door burst open, and a tangle of red hair came flying down the steps.
“Faith!” Brooklyn crashed into me with the force of a small hurricane. I closed my eyes and inhaled the watermelon scent of her shampoo, the same brand she’d chosen on her very first day with me. The scent that meant safety and home and everything I was about to lose. “Where have you been?” She pulled back, eyes wide with worry. “We’ve been freaking out!”
“I’m sorry. I got tied up with some things.”Tied up. More like handcuffed and thrown in a cell, but who’s keeping track?
“Oh my God, what happened to your head?” She eyed the lingering white bandage.
“Minor injury. No big deal.”
“It doesn’t look like no big deal.”
“I swear, I’m fine.”
She didn’t look so sure, but her relief at seeing me appeared to win the battle for attention. Until she finally registered Ryker standing several feet away, hanging back near the car like he knew better than to crowd the reunion. Or perhaps he sensed her discomfort.
I didn’t bring men here. Hell, I hadn’t brought anyone here before.
“This is Ryker. He’s my friend.” I used that reassuring voice that silently said,You don’t need to be afraid of him.
Which freaking gutted me—that for the rest of her life, she might always be suspicious of men.
Offering him a simple nod, she returned her worried attention to me.
“We tried calling you, like,fifty times.”
My phone had been locked up in evidence, but I couldn’t tell her that. “Dead battery. But I’m here now.”
“You never just disappear like that. Ever.”
The guilt clawed up from my stomach like those first nights in a new foster home placement—choking, with nowhere to run.
I wrapped an arm around her shoulders and squeezed. Brooklyn was my biggest worrier among the kids I’d taken in. Nineteen chronologically, but emotionally frozen—somewhere around twelve—thanks to a childhood that would give grown men nightmares. “What can I say? Life gets crazy sometimes. But I’m here now, okay?”
