Page 30 of The Pucking Wrong Man

I wasn’t sure what was so shocking. Any man on earth would be following her around like a lost puppy.

Anastasia finally tipped her gaze up to mine, realizing there wasn’t anyone else around I could be talking to. Her lush lips parted for a moment, like she was having trouble finding words. I held her gaze and she cleared her throat slightly. “The turkey sub is great,” she finally murmured as she took a big bite for good measure.

I awkwardly stared at her, continuing to take in all her glorious details.

She was young, I was really getting that now. Her face was completely void of any lines or blemishes, and wide-eyed innocence was written all over her. Over eighteen, though, because this particular place didn’t allow unaccompanied minors. They were sticklers about it.

Still. What was she? Nineteen? Twenty? And I was thirty-one-fucking-years old.

Well, that was fine.

I tended to go for older women, but there was something about Anastasia that drew me in. Not just her talent or the way she’d performed like she’d die up there on the stage because she was giving it her all.

There was also the vulnerability in her eyes, it pulled at something inside me. I wanted to protect her. To make her mine. It didn’t matter that I was probably quite a bit older than her. Something told me my baby girl needed that.

Besides, as I was constantly telling Logan, our cheeky, arrogant little rookie. I wasn’t an old man.

I was seasoned.

I could be the best kind of seasoning for her.

“Did you need something?” she whispered, her gaze falling to the table. She fiddled with the bun on her sandwich, crushing the edges as she bit down on her plump lower lip that I had the urge to lean forward and take between my own teeth.

I was making her nervous. Fuck. How long had I been standing here without saying anything?

“I…I just haven’t seen you around here before.”

“Hmm.” She pushed a tendril of her white-blonde hair behind her ear and gifted me her crystalline gaze. Anastasia eyed me thoughtfully for a moment, like she was deciding my fate. It kind of felt like she held my entire life in her pretty hands as I stood there and waited for whatever was going to come next.

“You must be a Wednesday volunteer,” she finally said. “I usually come in...another day.” She’d cut herself off before she said “another day,” which meant that she was probably thinking I was some kind of demented stalker and didn’t want to give me too much information.

I would have told her I wasn’t a stalker, but overnight, that had become one of the untruest things that could be said about me.

I was a stalker.

Her fucking stalker.

And I didn’t see that changing. Because by the looks of things, fate was decidedly onboard with that new life calling since it had brought her to me today.

“Yep, Wednesdays are my day,” I said, wondering if I’d be able to sneak in some other days here and there. It’s just that I volunteered at the nursing home on Mondays with practice right after, and I had games usually on Tuesdays and Fridays. Thursday we had weights and then practice.

Fuck. Well, I was just going to have to figure something out. If I was going to be her stalker, I was going to be good at it.

It was needling at my insides, though…why was someone her age needing to come to a community kitchen for food in the first place?

My eyes roamed over her, delving past the beauty, and seeing what I hadn’t before. She was thin—overly so I would say, even though I didn’t make a habit of judging women’s bodies. I’d thought it was from dancing…but maybe it was because she didn’t have anything to eat. Fuck. And those slight circles under her eyes…maybe they weren’t from just a busy dance routine, but a deeper stress in her life.

Now that the shock of seeing her had worn off, the fact that she was here...really fucking bothered me.

I didn’t want her to struggle. I needed to help my little dancer.

“Do you need anything else?” she pressed.

She was trying to act like she was annoyed, but no. Now that I was studying her more closely, I could see her fidgeting, the way she’d stopped eating, and how she could barely meet my eyes…

I made her nervous.

Most girls just looked at me like eye candy, and were very forward with their attraction. Anastasia was…shy.

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