Page 150 of Smooth Sailing

“You are not,” he growled.

“All my life, I’ve been ignoring what a spoiled brat she is.”

“She’s your ma. That’s shit you don’t notice.”

“Well, Dad wasn’t like that. Nic wasn’t like that. So how didn’t I notice?”

“Because she’s your ma.”

She stared at him a beat before she teetered, landing face first in the bed.

Christ, the last few weeks she’d been put through the gamut of emotions.

And still, she could be cute.

He toed off his boots before he got in the bed on the other side, claimed her under her arms and hauled her up to his side.

He then went still when Diana shifted so she was on her hip and she could flip off her pumps. She then immediately shifted again so she was straddling his hips, collapsed her chest on his and dug her forehead into his neck.

“There’s more with Dad,” she announced. “Stuff we have to talk through. But I think I’m getting it.”

“Getting what?”

“Why it felt like he was so hard on me. Okay, not felt like, he was hard on me. But maybe he was like that so I wouldn’t turn out like Mom.”

Hugger had his fingers wrapped around her waist. She felt too good astride him, her weight on him, her smell everywhere. All of that was so fantastic he didn’t trust himself to move his hands.

So he kept them where they were and asked, “How was he hard on you?”

She pushed up so she was resting her forearms in his chest, which wasn’t better or worse on the effect she was having on his cock, though now he could see her beautiful face and fantastic hair, and that was definitely worse.

Fuck, he had to get his shit tight. She was going through something and all he could think about was banging her.

“I had to get good grades, as in, a B was unacceptable,” she said. “Extracurricular activities, and a lot of them, so I could have a well-rounded experience in school and didn’t ‘waste my time,’ Dad’s words, on something useless like TV. I had chores around the house. I had a reading list that was not school mandated, but Dad mandated. He opened a joint checking account for me when I was sixteen, and I had to keep it balanced monthly and show him my work. He had firm opinions about how I wore my hair, and my clothes, lecturing about how they represented me, but also him. He was also pretty intense about me not gaining weight. He’s a fit guy, and into healthy living, and he pressed that on me in a big way.”

Listening to all of this, Hugger treaded cautiously. “So, essentially, he was a dad.”

“It was a lot, Hugger, and maybe as a man, he didn’t get how being judgy about how a girl ate and her weight and appearance are really, really not good things. But more, I never got a ‘well-done.’ It was more, ‘okay, you did that, this is what you need to learn next.’ His disappointment was pretty extreme when I put a foot wrong, and he didn’t hesitate to share it. It felt like he wanted me to be a Stepford kid. Part of it was suffocating, most of it was that it sucks to disappoint your dad.”

She shut her mouth with a snap and her eyes got big.

She explained this by saying hurriedly, “This must all sound pretty stupid to someone like you.”

He didn’t get what she was saying. “Why?”

“I had a dad who gave a shit and maybe was a little too tough on me, probably because he didn’t want me to grow up spoiled and so selfish, it was more important for me to get my hooks in a rich man who would take care of me as I wished to be taken care of, than it was to retain custody of my only child. And you haven’t shared, but you must have?—”

Hugger’s fingers moved, not of their volition, and they did this to dig into her flesh.

“Your mom gave up custody of you?”

“Yeah. From the beginning, Dad had full custody, and she didn’t fight it. And when she met Rick, she moved to Idaho to be with him.”

Hugger tried to digest that.

He couldn’t digest it.

He then tried to come to terms with it, because that had to have destroyed Diana when it happened.

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