My eyes automatically shifted to Everett again. His worry-filled blue eyes met mine. My body felt like it was going to explode with the need to escape.
Gage released me and quickly climbed off me. His hand went to his bloodied lip, but all he did was touch it briefly, as if to check the injury. Seconds later, Charlie came barreling at him and he quickly gathered her up. I could hear her sobbing.
“It’s okay, honey,” he murmured to her as he swept his hand over her hair. “Nash and I were having an argument and it got out of hand. I’m okay.”
I didn’t wait around to see what Charlie’s response would be. I stumbled to my feet and then I was hurrying toward the driveway.
“Nash,” Everett called as I rushed past him, but I ignored him and went to my car. In that moment, I didn’t give a shit about protocol or my duty to the other man. I wanted to get gone, so that was exactly what I did.
I told myself I’d just take a quick drive to clear my head and then I’d be back, but as I jammed my foot down on the gas, I had no clue if that were true or not.
And for once, I didn’t really care either way.
Chapter 12
GAGE
“I fucked up.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’re not even going to argue with me?” I asked.
“Nope,” my father easily responded as he carefully applied a butterfly bandage to the cut beneath my eye.
“Don’t you want to know what I did to deserve this?” I asked as I pointed to my face.
“I know what you did,” my father returned. “You tried to fix something that wasn’t yours to fix.”
That was true enough. I’d stepped so far over the line with Nash, I couldn’t even see the damn thing anymore.
My father finished securing the bandage, then lowered himself back in the chair across from me. He picked up one of Charlie’s boo-boo packs off the table and gently pressed it to my nose. Fortunately, Nash hadn’t broken it, but I’d be sporting a couple of black eyes for a while, among other things.
I glanced at my watch and saw that Nash had been gone for almost twenty minutes now. It had taken nearly that long to calm Charlie down enough that she’d go upstairs with Everett to look formore vegetable recipes on the internet while my father patched me up.
“You’re usually good about knowing when to stop pushing,” my father murmured. “What was different this time?”
I shook my head because I didn’t have an answer for that. At least, not one that I wanted to confess to.
But my father had no such reservations.
“Since you can’t stop looking at your watch, I’m guessing you weren’t trying to drive Nash away because he wants a certain former commander in chief as badly as you do.”
“No, that’s not the problem.”
My father nodded. “You want them both.”
I sighed and took the small ice pack from his hand. “I found out some information about Nash,” I hedged.
My father leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “Found out?” he asked knowingly.
“Fine, I had someone get me some information on him,” I admitted. I was forty-five fucking years old, but I still felt like a little kid who’d been caught shoplifting candy or cheating on a test. “I just wanted to learn more about the guy, since he’s not exactly talkative. I figured I’d get the basics, but what I found out… it wasn’t what I was expecting.”
That was the understatement of the decade. I’d had a preconceived notion that Nash was someone who’d come from a well-to-do family and that his biggest act of rebellion had been pursuing a career in law enforcement instead of following in his daddy’s footsteps and becoming a lawyer or a banker or whatever. I’d pictured him growing up in a swanky Manhattan apartment or a big house in the Hamptons. When I’d asked Ronan’s IT girl, Daisy, to get me information on Nash so I’d at least have some idea of how to draw the distant man out, I hadn’t expected to receive the records from all the years he’d spent in foster care.
“The shit that happened to him when he was a kid… no one fucking deserves that,” I muttered.
“No, they don’t,” my father agreed with a sigh.
