"You're timing me?" She didn’t even ask about him clearing it. She knew it would be another non-negotiable.
"I'm giving you space." He looked at her over the roof of the car. "Fifteen minutes means I'm not standing over you while you pack. More than fifteen means I'm coming in."
She grabbed her keys. "Fifteen minutes," she said.
She made it in twelve.
The left town quickly, drove through a hamburger joint on the way home and then, on the drive back to Grand Ridge talked about the lifestyle. He told her about his experience, how he’d been a Daddy before and she told him about hers. They talked about what it meant to each of them and she found herself relaxing more and more with him… and when they got back and she tucked herself in with her security blanket, she couldn’t helpbut wonder what it would be like for him to tuck her in and kiss her goodnight.
Six hours alone in a truck had been exactly what she needed to cement what she was already feeling inside. She wanted Rampage to be her Daddy, but was it wishful thinking?
CHAPTER 10
EMILY
Another three days passed. She spent them with the girls and got to know Rampage even better. The longer she was there, the more relaxed the girls got with showing her their little sides. As the time passed, she found herself itching to know what he’d be like as a Daddy. No, asherDaddy. Which, the girls had already decided he was, even if neither Rampage or Emily had spoken about it yet.
She knew when she did it that it was a bad idea. She wasn’t quite sure if she was testing her limits or pushing Rampage into acting, but whatever she was doing, she knew she shouldn’t be.
That was the thing she couldn't claim ignorance about later. She'd known, in the specific way you knew things when you were doing them anyway, that slipping out the side gate while Irish was occupied with Clover and Rampage was on a call was not within the parameters of what she'd agreed to.
She'd told herself it was fine. She needed air. Real air, not porch air, just a walk down the road and back, twenty minutes, nobody would notice. She was an adult woman who had been walking unaccompanied for twenty-six years and the threat was neutralized and she was not a prisoner.
She'd lost track of time and had been gone forty minutes.
She heard his bike before she saw him come up the road behind her. He pulled up beside her on the road just a few yards from the compound gate and she kept walking because stopping felt like an admission.
"Emily."
"I'm almost back."
"Stop walking."
She stopped. Turned.
He was looking at her with an expression that wasn't anger exactly. She'd seen anger before and this wasn't it. It was something more controlled and more deliberate, the specific stillness of a man who had already decided how this was going to go. She swallowed hard.
"Get on," he said.
She got on.
The ride back was two minutes. He helped her off, took her by the elbow and walked her inside and through the compound and up the stairs without a word, and the silence had a particular weight to it that she felt in her chest the whole way up.
He closed the door to her room behind them.
"You know what the rule was," he said.
"I needed air."
"You needed air." He held her gaze. "And the rule?"
She pressed her lips together.
"Emily."
"I know what the rule was," she said quietly.
"Then you know you broke it." He crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, and the look on his face was level and certain and completely without cruelty. "Come here."
