“I did get you one more thing, but you can’t have it until later,” she adds with an ominous smirk.
I kiss her once more before getting dressed. She stays in the outfit while she cleans the house, and it’s all I can do to let her work instead of bending her over the arm of the couch like I’ve been envisioning all morning.
So instead, I try to focus on something productive. Despite it being my day off, when you own a business, a part of your head is always at work. I sit in the living room and look over the inventory lists to see what’s currently trending as a hot seller, cross checking prices of different suppliers to see where I can get the best deals. I also browse forums and chat rooms, looking for a trend of anything up and coming I can get ahead of.
My phone vibrates in my pocket and I answer it, sighing when I see the name. “Yeah?”
“D? You’ve got to get down here man, we’ve got a problem,” Nick says on the other side of the line, breathless.
I set aside my notebook on the coffee table, a sinking feeling in my stomach. “What’s going on?”
“A pipe burst or something in the customer bathroom and the place is starting to flood,” he replies.
“Shit!”
Hanging up, I jump to my feet, calling for Cambria and scrambling to get my shoes on. I’m just about to race out the door when I remember Luce’s warning and look back at my sweet little fae.
“You’re going to need to change before we can leave, because if you show up looking like that right now, you’ll incite a riot,” I tell her honestly.
She snorts before heading back to her room to throw on jean shorts and one of Atlas’ band shirts. “Better?” she asks, undoing her braids and switching to a ponytail.
“I’m sure as soon as you walk in, nobody will care about the flood anyway,” I answer honestly, laughing, “but thanks for humoring me. I would never let anyone do something, but there’s a stupid guy part of me that wants to be the only one to see you like that.”
We get into my car and I race towards work as she taps her fingers on the dashboard like drum sticks. “I kind of like it, if we’re being honest. How possessive the three of you act; it makes me feel wanted. Is that dumb? I know full well you guys wouldn’t stop me from doing something I was determined to do even if you didn’t approve of it, so even Lucien’s controlling demeanor doesn’t bug me like it should after how I grew up.”
I steal her hand and kiss the back of it. “Not dumb. There is no one set way to look at things. You feel how you feel and there’s no shame in that.” I shrug. “If you spend your entire life worried about living a way everyone approves of, you’ll never be happy and you’ll still never please everyone. Ultimately, you’re the one living it, gorgeous. Do what makes you happy, others be damned.
“Atlas pretty much signed his life away to Lucien and is far happier for it, even though most of society would balk at the idea. If anyone heard that a twenty-two year old took in a fifteen year old he didn’t know, they would have instantly called him a predator without looking any deeper. But you and I know that’s the farthest thing from the truth.
“Stop worrying about if it’s okay to feel the way you do. Trust me, Cambria, if something comes up that isn’t working for all of us, we’ll bring it up. Just like I’d hope that you’d talk to us if something was bothering you so we could address the problem rather than suffering in silence. You know why?” I park the car and shut off the engine, turning to face her.
“Because that’s what a family does?” she guesses and I smile.
“Exactly. We love each other, more so for our imperfections. Trust yourself, Cambria, and the rest will fall into place.”
I kiss her briefly before heading into the store and my jaw about hits the floor. It’s far worse than I could have imagined; the entire first level is under two inches of water.
“You didn’t shut off the water?!” I shout at Nick, and he frowns.
“Was I supposed to?” he asks with honest confusion.
Sometimes I forget that he’s only nineteen. Thankfully, he isn’t a total dumbass and managed to clear the bottom shelves of books before they got damaged and stacked them up on a table. I bite my tongue instead of yelling at him. Despite the way I was forced to grow up early, not everyone was.
“I plugged the fan in in the back to try and keep stuff dry, but it isn’t doing much to help,” Nick adds and I rescind my previous thoughts.
Some people are just born without common sense.
Scrubbing a hand down my face, I hurry up and unplug the fan before we end up electrocuted and turn around to find Cambria, but she’s already gone. She comes up from the basement a minute later, shaking her head at Nick.
“Water’s off, but it’s leaking into the basement.” She walks off towards the bathroom and I stop Nick who was starting to sneak out the front door.
“Oh fuck no, get your ass back in here. How long was this going on before you called me?”
He looks sheepish and doesn’t answer.
“Look, I’m just going to check the security footage anyway, so you might as well come clean,” I sigh, pinching the bridge of my nose and taking slow breaths so I don’t explode.
Nick refuses to look at me. “You wouldn’t blame me if you saw her.”
