Page 46 of The Bodyguard and the Bombshell

“And your mum found a way to forgive her and saved her life. I’m here today because of Avery O’Donnell’s boundless love. But her love couldn’t fix my mum’s guilt. It took something else to do that. She was ready to reject my father’s love because she didn’t think she was worthy of it. She was ready to let me go live with him. And then your da got stung by a bee.”

At the mention of her father, her hand retreated, and she went slightly stiff. “My da is very allergic to bees. Everyone jokes with him, but Mom saw it once and still shudders when she thinks about it.”

He was glad she didn’t remember that day. “My mom saved him, and what she realized was she wouldn’t have been there to save him if she hadn’t been on the road that night. She wouldn’t have learned what she needed to know, wouldn’t have had the skills to save him. Daisy, do you know why I’m telling you this?”

She shook her head.

He sat up. This was a conversation where they had to be face to face. “Because I’m not my dad. I need you to understand I don’t question fate. I don’t sit around and wonder if I’m good enough. I will make myself good enough for you.”

“Nate,” she began.

“No, don’t Nate me. I told you. You made your choice. If I thought for a second you pulling away from me had anything to do with your heart, I would step back. But this isn’t about your heart. You were perfectly happy before your father made an arse of himself. This is about you being worried he’s going to see you differently. He will, and it’s about bloody time, Dais.”

She sniffled. “You don’t understand.”

His heart ached, but he wasn’t going to let her continue down this road. “Don’t understand what? Being the kid in the family who doesn’t seem to have some awesome destiny? Who isn’t clearly talented? I do understand that. Since the day Elodie started to dance, I knew she was more talented, more driven than me, and therefore had a whole lot of our parents’ attention. That’s what it’s like to be the sibling who isn’t gifted.”

“I don’t resent my brother,” she replied quietly. “Not even after what I learned today. I’m happy for him.”

He believed her. “And I’m thrilled for my sister. I love watching her dance. She’s happy and she makes other people happy. They have their path, and we have ours.”

“Ours is apparently getting stuck in this club.”

He shrugged. “Maybe that’s fate, too. Maybe it wouldn’t work if you had too much time to think. If there was space between us, your father might decide I’m not worthy of his sweet daughter and he would get a chance to convince you. But that’s not what happened, and we’re here for a while. I meant what I said. I’m not leaving you. If you’re stuck here, then so am I. If it gets to be too much, we can go to Australia. My parents’ station hasn’t sold yet. We can stay there for a bit and then move to The Garden. Traveling might be good for us.”

Daisy sighed. “Somehow I don’t see Uncle Ian paying you to go on vacation with me.”

“I think you’ll find everyone wants you safe. They might fight me on travel, but it’s a fight I can win. If for some crazy reason he fires me, well, I’ve got a bit of cash saved. I can take care of us until you’re safe. I’ll find another job, and we’ll figure out where we want to be.”

Tears filled her eyes. “You are too good to be true.”

“I assure you, love, I’m not.”

“I want to believe you,” Daisy whispered. “I want to believe in this. You don’t even understand how weird this is for me.”

“I do,” he argued. He knew her better than she thought he did. “You’re the girl who throws herself into everything. When you decide to do something, you give it one hundred percent of yourself. You take it with both hands and try everything you can to make it work.”

“Nothing works, Nate.”

She’d had the roughest of days, and he needed to find a way to bring back her natural resiliency. “Sure it does. You have friends who adore you, a family who does everything they can to protect you.”

“Yeah, up to and including ruining any chance I had at finding a boyfriend.”

He was upset for her about what her father had done, but he rather thought it had proved a point. “Baby, if a man is too afraid to date you because your father and brother threaten him, he doesn’t want you enough. I need you to understand absolutely no one in this world can keep me away from you except you. If you don’t want me, I’ll walk away, but you’re the only one who can make me. There’s no threat, no incentive, nothing can control me with the exception of you.”

“How can you know you want me?”

“Do you want me?”

Tears dripped from her eyes. “So much it hurts.”

He pulled her close. “And how can you know?”

“Because I always have,” she whispered. “Because I knew what I was doing when I put on Kenzie’s mask. I was going to steal a night from you.”

He chuckled, a warm feeling invading his bones. This was so much more than lust. This was the reason his dad lit up when his mum walked in a room. He couldn’t imagine the demons his father must have fought, the ones that made him walk away from this feeling. He wasn’t making the same mistake. He cuddled her against his chest. “Sorry, love. Your plan is not going to work out.”

She seemed to give in, relaxing against him. “You better be sure, Carter, because you’re right. When I’m in, I’m in. And when the whole stupid assassins are after me thing is over, I’m going to find a job I love and you can move into my house and… I still don’t know what to do about my da.”

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