Page 66 of Daddy's Wild Girl

“I don’t really want to talk about this.” She moved her gaze back to the wall. This room would be so much lighter when she knocked through that wall.

There was silence, and eventually, she turned her head to look at him.

“Okay, I can’t make you talk to me even though I wish you’d talk to someone. I can’t make you sleep either. But I do want you to try to nap this afternoon.”

Now she was blushing.

Was he going to put her down for a nap? Tuck her in? Kiss her forehead?

Sheesh, chill.

You don’t really want any of that.

The problem was that she was pretty sure that she did.

“What I don’t want you doing is smashing a hole in your wall.”

“I wasn’t smashing a hole in the wall!” she protested.

He raised his eyebrows.

“I wasn’t,” she insisted. “I was trying to tear the entire wall down. That’s not just a hole.”

“Did you make sure that the wall wasn’t structural first?”

Her mouth opened, then closed. Then, opened again.

Oh. Shit.

Why hadn’t she done that?

Well, maybe because you don’t know how to do that. But also . . . shit.

If she’d knocked it down and it was load-bearing, she could have compromised the structure of the house.

And that wouldn’t have been good.

Perhaps that’s what Hayes had meant when he said he was worried the house would cave in.

Yeah.

Oops.

“I can tell from your silence that you didn’t. You also don’t have enough safety gear on.”

“What? I was wearing safety goggles.”

“Which you can barely see out of,” he told her. “Not acceptable. You should have on a hard hat and gloves and steel-toed boots.”

Shoot.

Next, he would tell her that she should be wearing a high-vis vest in her own house!

“And you should have a high-visibility vest on.”

“Okay, now you’re just talking crazy!” she told him. “A high-visibility vest? In my house? Why would I need that? Who needs to see me?”

“Me. So I can pull you out of the rubble when the damn house collapses on top of you.”

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