Page 13 of Smitten with the Single Dad

“It’d be fucked up if you liked it,” Wyatt replied, earning his eighth glare of the night. One more and he got a free sandwich? Or was it a free ride to the slammer?

“I’ve got it from here, guys,” Myla said. “I’m sure you have paperwork to attend to back at the station.”

They barely acknowledged Myla as they climbed back into their cruiser.

Nobody said anything until the two idiots with guns were gone.

“All right, Vica,” Myla said, offering a gentle and supportive smile, “I’m here to help you in any way I can. Just know that even if those two geezers don’t believe you, I do.”

Vica nodded and smiled, whispering a small, “Thank you.”

“Wyatt, can we use your place?” Justine asked, her gaze drifting down to where his hand was still tightly intertwined with Vica’s. She was gripping onto him now, more than he was her, and he hadn’t even noticed. Now she held his arm with her other hand too. “She seems to trust you.”

“Of course,” he said quickly. “Whatever she needs. I can sleep in the study or on the couch.”

Everyone nodded.

“I need to close up the bar,” Dom said. “Bennett, can you help so it’ll go faster?”

Bennett agreed.

“I’m going to get the body back to the hospital,” Grayson said. “But I’ll be in touch.” He headed to the driver’s side of his van.

Justine, Myla, and Wyatt surrounded Vica like adult elephants circle the young to protect them from lions, and escorted her up the hill, through the security gate, and into Wyatt and his brothers’ private little sanctuary.

There were five brothers altogether, but each lived in their own house. All the houses were carbon copies of each other, just a different color. Wyatt’s was a sage-green and smack-dab in the middle, with Bennett on one side and Dom on the other.

They each had a small, but nice, backyard and an enormous rolling hillside behind them loaded with wildflowers where all the kids liked to burn off excess energy.

He reached his front door first and opened it. Nobody really locked their doors on the island, and since they installed the security gate there was even less of a need to lock anything.

“Just give me half a sec to make sure there are no underwear on the floor or anything,” he said, booking it up the stairs. But he stopped at the landing and met Vica’s gaze. “You’re safe here. I promise. My family … me, we won’t let anything happen to you. I promise.”

He wasn’t sure what possessed him to make such a proclamation to a complete stranger, but he felt it so intrinsically in his soul that he was the one to help Vica that nobody could convince him otherwise.

Maybe it was because he couldn’t save his wife Sheila from that car accident that killed her and his other three sisters-in-law. Or maybe it was just because he knew what it was like to not have anybody believe you when you were telling the truth.

Whatever it was, he was committed to helping Vica any way he could.

She wasn’t a murderer. She wasn’t a victim. She was a survivor. And he was going to do whatever he could to make sure everyone believed her, and that she survived.

CHAPTER THREE

He didn’t see her after she went into his bedroom with Myla and Justine.

They were in there for a while with her, taking pictures and collecting evidence.

All he knew about that whole scenario was what he watched on police procedurals. He knew it would be invasive, possibly even degrading, but ultimately necessary if they wanted to strengthen their case.

He didn’t watch a lot of television anymore—at least not a lot of adult television. His boys were into superheroes and zombies, so he watched the kid appropriate shit in those genres.

But it didn’t take a penchant for cop shows to know that standing naked and having pictures taken of your body after a brutal assault would be a new kind of a trauma that he didn’t wish on even his worst enemy.

After nearly an hour, Myla and Justine came down the stairs to let him know that Vica was having a shower in his en suite and Justine would be back over with clothes in a moment.

“I put fresh sheets on the bed,” he said, unsure what else to say as Myla met him at the bottom of the stairwell.

The woman’s emerald-green eyes were sad and tired. “She knows. She wantedto convey her thanks to you, but I don’t think you’ll see her until morning.”

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