Page 22 of Reluctantly His

No wonder people cowered whenever he entered a boardroom.

He was like a Bond villain without the British accent, especially dressed in a Saville Row bespoke tuxedo.

As I folded the black silk to create a bow shape on the right end, he remarked softly. “Your mother used to do this for me.”

A lump formed in my throat. My vision blurred briefly as I focused on my task.

There it was… my mother. The invisible haunting force that would always be between us. Although an arranged society marriage, it had been a love match. They married very young when my mother was barely out of finishing school and when my father was still at university in London.

My brother was a honeymoon baby. Then they had Olivia straight after that. They were a very happy young family.

Until I came along.

I knew it was stupid to blame myself. I was just a baby. It was a hemorrhage during labor. Her excessive bleeding decreased my oxygen. The doctors had to make a choice.

My mother told them to save me.

My father told them to save her.

Barely in his twenties, he had become a widower with two young children and a baby to care for. Except he didn’t. He foisted us all off on a succession of nannies and retreated behind an icy wall.

A wall that never thawed.

“Where did you learn to do this?”

I shrugged. “Youtube.” The real answer was one of the faceless nannies he had hired over the years.

Unlike in the movies, there had been no gentle bonding with a kind-hearted, matronly woman who treated us like her own.

A nanny position in the illustrious Manwarring family was treated like a dating game. There was one young woman after another who would pretend to be caring for us while outrageously flirting with my father, hoping to be the next Mrs. Manwarring.

The nanny when I was twelve had even gone so far as to sneak into my father’s bed naked. Another crashed a party at our house after drugging us with Benadryl instead of watching us and told all the guests she was my father’s future fiancé.

He’d ignored them all.

After pinching both folded ends and pulling to change the size of the bow, I stepped back.

My father studied his reflection as he adjusted the bow. “Very impressive, Charlotte.”

“Thank you, Father.” I took a deep breath as I twisted my fingers in front of me. “Father, about the bodyguard you hired.”

He shrugged into his tuxedo jacket. “Reid? Fine man. A former non-commissioned officer in the Marine Corps. Highly skilled.”

My cheeks burned. I knew he was referring to Reid’s security skills, but I was thinking of his other skill. “Yes. Of course. I was wondering if maybe you could assign someone else?”

He turned sharply as his dark brown eyes that so closely matched my own scanned my face. “Has something happened? Was he inappropriate with you?”

I wasn’t stupid enough to think this was fatherly concern for a cherished daughter. It was more like examining an expensive car for a scratch in the finish.

I gripped my fingers harder. “Nothing like that. I just think it would be more appropriate to have a woman guarding me, given the intimacy of it.”

His gaze narrowed. “I hadn’t considered that.”

Warming up to my argument, I leaned in. “You know how the press likes to make up stories. I would hate for there to be any salacious gossip or some trumped up scandal because someone captured a photo of Reid and me together and made nasty assumptions.”

He rubbed his finger under his lower lip as he considered my reasoning.

I knew I had him. I was, after all, my father’s daughter, whether he liked it or not, and had inherited his genes for negotiating.

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