Page 115 of Daddy By Design

She locked her eyes on mine. “You went back in?”

“No. I looked at it from the roof.”

“Nolan!”

“What?”

“The roof? Are you serious?”

“Worried about me?”

I could practically hear her molars grinding. “I was perfectly safe.”

“Why didn’t you just go back into the room?”

“I wasn’t chancing another trip into that space. Not that I could if I wanted to. The inspector tried to get in to check it out and now the opening won’t budge.”

“Really?” She slipped her finger into the page like a bookmark and closed it. “Maybe we could try again?”

“What makes you so special?”

“I think she likes me.”

“I think you want to believe that.”

She gave me a long look. “Can we try, anyway?”

“No.”

The memory of those books careening around the room was still too fresh. In the center of it, there had been Dahlia without an ounce of self-preservation. What if the bookcases came down? Or the floor gave way? Regardless of the spectral component, which I still wasn’t sure was a thing, it was too dangerous for her to be in there.

A seething Dahlia was rapidly becoming one of my favorite things. I wasn’t entirely sure what that said about me. As reckless as she was, she wasn’t stupid.

At least I chose to believe that.

She flipped the notebook back open. “I didn’t notice the owl. Just the bassinet and the roses in the—” She gasped as she found the study I’d made of the stained-glass ceiling. I’d spent a whole evening up on the widow’s walk, staring down at that glass.

The roof was structurally sound, as was the walk, but it needed a lot of work to bring it back to its former glory. Being in the center of that space had given me a lot of ideas about the more decorative items I wanted to bring to the house.

The whole damn house was a money pit, but it was the first thing to charge me up in too many years to count. The stained glass was one of the things I’d been most excited about working on.

I tried to take the notebook back, but she held it against her chest. “I’m not finished.” She paced away as she flipped pages. I’d done quite a few studies of different parts of the glass and wanted to echo them around the house in different ways.

She set it on the scaffolding and pulled out her phone.

“What are you doing?”

She snapped photos of the sketches. “I want to do some research. I wonder who did the original glass work?”

I crowded into her and reached around her to slam the notebook shut. “Those are my drawings.”

“I’m not going to steal them.” She turned in my arms. She smelled of sunshine and ripe peaches today. With her hair scraped back in a braid, there was nothing but full throttle Dahlia. Her elven chin that made me itch for my charcoals, and those huge dark eyes that saw too damn much. “When I was in that room, I couldn’t stop looking at that ceiling piece. And here it is. You did that.”

My heart was slamming in my chest. “It’s just a study, Hellcat.”

“It’s not. If that’s all you wanted, you could have taken a photo on your phone. You drew this because it moved you, same as me.” She tipped up her chin to meet my gaze.

“I’ll send you photos.”

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