Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 107352 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 537(@200wpm)___ 429(@250wpm)___ 358(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 107352 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 537(@200wpm)___ 429(@250wpm)___ 358(@300wpm)
After pouring my coffee and adding the cream, I sat there with it, inhaling the smell of bacon. Griff was getting really good at making it, and even peppered it, which I liked. When Tatum bumped me—she was sitting beside me on the bench—I turned to her.
“What’s wrong with you?”
She shook her head.
“I know you,” I reminded her.
Sucking in a quick breath, she said, “I heard what you said last night.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“I came down to fill up my tumbler with water and I heard you telling Wink that if Dad said no, you would take him with you when you left.”
“Well, love, what else would we do?”
“He won’t make us get rid of Wink when I tell him what happened.”
“I’m sure he won’t,” I agreed. “So then what are you worried about?”
Sharp exhale. “I don’t—I don’t want you to go.”
I smiled at her. “Love, you know I won’t be here for—”
“You said you’d never leave what was yours,” she said miserably. “Aren’t I yours?”
I was sitting there, looking at her, and the world fell down around me. It was like sitting on a bench and suddenly getting hit by a freight train.
What had I done?
This could never, ever, happen. Or, more precisely, if the fixer saw it happening, we were immediately supposed to course-correct and call for someone else to take over.
This had never happened to me before. No one ever got attached. Not to me. How had I missed that I was fucking up?
Apparently, I wasn’t as bad with kids as I thought. Young kids, toddlers, even older, five, six, no good, but ten and older, I was all right. I never knew that about myself. As usual, epiphanies came at the worst times.
I needed to get up from the table and call Shaw. I needed to be swapped out, like, yesterday, and yes, Rais or one of the new people were going to be pissed about this, especially as close as we were getting to Thanksgiving, but there was nothing I could do about that. There were boundaries for a reason, lines to never cross, and I was way over mine.
“Nash?”
I looked up at Darwin.
“Why is Tatum crying?”
“She—”
“I’m just worried about Wink at the vet today, and I’m happy that now we can all go, but still, what if he’s sick?”
It was very nice of her to tell a little white lie to her brother.
“He could be,” Darwin stated flatly. “He could have, among other things, feline leukemia virus, or feline immunodeficiency virus, or feline panleukopenia.”
“What?” Tatum gasped, sounding horrified.
“I researched it last night before my no-screens-time kicked in,” Darwin assured me. “And I read up on all of them, and they’re terrible.”
“Oh no,” Tatum whimpered.
“What is happening?” Griff asked from the stove.
Before I could reply, there was furious pounding on the sliding glass door. We all turned, and there was Luke Duchesne, dripping wet, flailing his arms around. Over the booming thunder and driving rain, we hadn’t heard him open the garage door—I hadn’t replaced those remotes because there were only two, one in the Jeep and the other in his truck. So he must’ve opened the garage, gotten out of his truck, tried to come in, found out that the door had a new lock on it, and probably banged on it to no avail. With the rain, from the garage, through the mudroom, there was no way we could’ve heard him. Strangely, he’d then made the decision not to go to the front door and ring the doorbell—since his key wouldn’t have worked there either—but instead to walk all the way around the side of the house, in a hurricane, to the back door. That made no sense. I was starting to wonder about the man. His choices, in a lot of areas, were not great.
Regardless, the kids scrambled to let him in, and I went and moved the pan of bacon off the burner before darting to the mudroom for towels. I returned fast, but he was already yelling.
“Why the hell is there a lock on the door from the garage alluva sudden?” That question was for everyone, and then he zeroed in on me. “Who the fuck are you, and why are you in my house?”
I took the breath I always did. “I’m Nash Miller,” I explained, then beaned him in the face with a beach towel he immediately batted to the floor. “I was hired by your ex-brother-in-law to protect you and your children from—”
“I don’t give a fuck who you are! No one told me anything about this, and you need to get the hell out of my—”
I hit him with the second towel, harder, which must have startled him because it rendered him momentarily speechless.
“Please don’t raise your voice. It’s way too early, and I have not had my coffee yet.”