Page 283 of Daddy's Pride

He nodded, his voice shaky as he agreed. “Yeah, um, that’s kind of what they said, too? They called it, uh, ‘contributory negligence’. They said if I’d done the proper maintenance and hadn’t ignored the, um, the warning signs that it was going to break, then… then it could have been replaced before all that flooding happened, and now they’re not going to pay out any of it.” He swallowed hard, his face losing even more color. “I had to tell my parents that, and they’re, um, they’re really pissed.”

They were really pissed?

I clamped my lips together, breathing out through my nose as my blood surged with the same unprecedented anger I’d felt when Owen had been upset the night I’d left the club to get him. My boy was one of the most responsible people I knew, but far too willing to accept blame that didn’t belong to him. And somehow, as his Daddy, I needed to find a way to point that out without saying something I’d regret, something I might mean but could never take back, about his parents.

Because Owen was it for me. I was in it with him for the long haul, if he’d have me. I wanted exactly what Juan had been teasing me about, to eventually give him my name and make my home into our home, from now until death did us part.

And part of that meant that whatever I thought about his parents, I couldn’t afford to alienate them, or to be the one to drive a wedge between them and Owen.

“Daddy?” he asked, his voice quivering. “Um…”

I put my finger over his lips, taking one more breath to calm myself down. I knew the next thing out of his mouth would have been an apology. Not because he had anything at all to be sorry for, and definitely not to me, but just because that seemed to be his default setting whenever anything went sideways.

We’d work on that, because my boy deserved better.

But first things first.

“Sweetheart, you did nothing wrong here.”

He tugged on my wrist, moving my finger away from his mouth. “But?—”

“No,” I interrupted, leaning in to plant a firm, listen-to-Daddy kiss on his lips. “You didn’t. I have months’ worth of texts showing that you were not ignoring the warning signs. You were doing your best on a non-existent budget to mitigate them. Isn’t that right? The rusty water. The fluctuating temperature. The leaks.”

His eyes widened, his shoulders lowering a bit. “Yes? I mean, yeah, I did my best with all that stuff. Do you really think the insurance company will change their mind if we give them all our texts?”

I almost hated to kill the hope in his eyes, but I would always be honest with him. And right now, I gave zero shits about the insurance payout. What I cared about was my boy’s feelings, and helping him see the truth.

“No, baby,” I said gently. “Those warning signs were ignored, but my point is, not by you. How many times did you tell your parents about them and ask them to invest more money in maintaining their investment property?”

He blinked at me. “Um, you mean, put money in the house account? Yeah, uh, they told me before I moved out here that they’d never do that, though. Property is way more expensive out here, but they still figured it would be a good investment in the long run if we could keep all the rooms rented out? But, um, they said I’d have to make sure to cover all the expenses from that. They couldn’t keep just, like, dumping more money into it.”

I scrubbed a hand back through my hair, silently reminding myself not to burn bridges here.

“Tell me something, sweetheart,” I finally said. “Did the math work?”

“What?”

“They expected you to manage the property, and from what you’ve shared with me, I know you keep a pretty involved budget to help you do that. Did the rent cover everything?”

He looked down. “No. I wasn’t very good at that part.”

I tipped his face back up. “Owen, it’s math. It’s numbers. You are fucking excellent at it. You know what needs to be done and when, you pay your bills on time, and you stay on top of seasonal maintenance tasks.”

“Except the water heater.”

“Except the ones that simply exceeded your budget, baby. But it’s not your house. It’s your parents’. And if they weren’t willing to invest the money it actually took to maintain it, then taking the hit on their investment is on them, not you.”

His eyes widened as he stared at me, unblinking.

“From what I’ve seen, you did everything right. But you were only able to work with what you had, and you stretched that as far as you could and then some. If there was negligence, then the insurance company is probably in the right, but it was their negligence, not yours. This is not your fault.”

“It’s not?”

He clamped down on his lower lip with his teeth.

“No. It’s not,” I said, tsking at him gently as I tugged it free, then leaned in to soothe it with a gentle kiss.

“But…”

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