Page 54 of Daddy, Sir

“Would you please inform Mr. Westerly that I am in a meeting with you and we do not care to be interrupted?”

Audra’s eyes reflected an emotion I didn’t like as it looked far too much like sympathy. “I’m sorry, Ms. Flanagan, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

“Why not! I came to your office seeking help and?—”

“And we will definitely help you, but this office isn’t mine.”

“Whose is it?” I demanded, though I suddenly had a good idea I already knew the answer.

“It’s mine.”

Of course it was. I’d suspected it, but that didn’t make hearing it any easier. Still, I pulled up my big-girl panties and powered on. Turning my head, I met his gaze. The throbbing in my hand was the only reason he wasn’t doubling over in agony. “You work here too?”

“You could say that.”

I didn’t bother hiding the roll of my eyes. “I’m not saying it, I’m asking it. Do you work here or do you just serve as fucking eye candy?” The moment I said the word, I wanted to take it back more than I wanted my next breath. Not the curse word… I was mad and could cuss all I wanted. It was the word before that. Though Landon didn’t say a thing, he didn’t need to. All it took was his lips not just to twitch, but to curl into a full-on smile, open lips, pearly-whites gleaming to have me remembering the last time the wordservehad been part of our conversation.

The floor didn’t open up to swallow me. Lightning didn’t strike and I didn’t suddenly drop to the floor in a dead faint. Nope, all I could do was stare at the man as if I trying to imprint every last feature into my mind. Features I already saw every single night when I closed my eyes.

I had to fist my hands to resist the urge to slide my fingers through his hair. A ray of sunlight suddenly spotlighted Landon, bathing him in gold. But it wasn’t the halo the light provided, but the sheen of the strands of silver in his thick black hair that mesmerized me. Yes, it had been twelve years since I’d seen him, and yes he was a few months older than me, but I wouldn’t have thought enough time had passed for him to have gray hair. It took me a moment to realize that, while his smile remained, the humor in his eyes had shifted into something else. The cool blue of the ocean had darkened into the hue of water only seen where the land dropped away into an abyss. Dark sapphire blue drilled into me, sending me back to my teens as another memory surged to the surface. Landon wasn’t a man to give out warnings and the fact he’d already given me two about cussing had my feet instantly shuffle and my buttocks clench. All the words I’d ever known flew from my head, leaving me completely incapable of speech.

Chapter Two

Landon

As I live and breathe, Fiona Flanagan was standing, or rather kneeling at my feet in the middle of my office.

I was still getting over the jolt of recognition at seeing hair that never failed to remind me of embers in a fire rising like flames as her head whipped around. Perhaps it was the tracks of tears on her cheeks or the dilation of her pupils telegraphing her shock a split second before she spit a mouthful of my private reserve that stopped me from tucking her under my arm and over my knee in order to swat her ass for swearing like a fishwife and pushing my buttons.

Or kiss her until she remembered who she belonged to and then fuck her until she was too boneless ever to move as much as an inch away ever again.

Okay, that was closer to the truth of what I wished to do, but just as the woman before me was no longer a teen, I was no longer that hormone-driven young man. Of course when she punched me, I quickly remembered that she might be small, but the girl had balls. Not literally of course, but being the youngestof six children, and the only girl, she’d had to grow a set simply to survive at the dinner table. I was willing to take one punch, but two was simply out of the question. She might be as mad as a wet hen, but enough was enough. When she finally ran out of steam, when a simple word was enough to have those big emerald eyes go even wider and begin to glisten again, her mouth opening and closing without another word managing to emerge, I offered her a lifeline.

“Shall we start over?”

Any other woman would most likely have simply thanked me, but Fiona wasn’t any other woman. Nope, she was Fionnuala Méabh Flanagan. Hell, after birthing five boys, her mother, evidently given free rein, had taken one look at her only daughter and pulled not one but two names straight out of Irish mythology. Not even her father could disagree for each suited the newborn and it seemed they still did. Fionnuala meant beautiful face, and Méabh meant intoxicating. All one had to do was look at the woman standing before me and know that while life would never be easy with this red-headed, green-eyed tempest, it sure as hell would never be boring either. Fiona was one of the most kind-hearted, fun-loving, free-spirited women I’d ever known. She was also the most stubborn mule when she wanted to be. I decided to take her inability to answer as a silent repeat of the “uncle” she’d offered before.

“Let’s sit,” I suggested, gesturing toward the chair she’d recently vacated. I watched, not sure if she’d stomp out of the office or accept the offer of a truce. It took another moment before her shoulders straightened and she nodded and slipped into the chair, her hands playing with the shot glass she’d emptied. When she fumbled and it headed toward the floor, I reached down and caught it before a hundred dollars’ worth of crystal shattered on the wooden planks.

“Good save. With that gray hair, I was afraid you’d lost some skills but I suppose once a quarterback, always a quarterback.”

I’d earned every single one of those strands and, most likely, more than a few could be attributed to this woman. “Still the brattiest cheerleader on the squad I see.”

That earned me the first hint of a smile, but it didn’t reach her eyes. I straightened and set the shot glass on the credenza, noting Audra had chosen to return the bourbon to its proper place.

Good choice.

Audra took the chair next to Fiona’s and I reclaimed mine. Five slips of paper were laid out on the desk’s surface. Though it only took me a minute to read through them, sixty seconds was long enough to know Fiona was in serious trouble. “Is this all of them?”

Fiona glanced at Audra who gave her a nod of encouragement.

“Yes… but I don’t think it’s the last.”

I didn’t either but was curious to know how she’d come to the same conclusion. “What makes you say that?”

The question was enough to have Fiona sitting forward, her fingers no longer clenched together. As she reached to tap a fingertip against one of the slips, I noticed the nail had been gnawed down to the quick. A glance revealed that every single nail of both hands was ragged, a couple of hangnails proof of the irritation her fingers had gone through. The evidence also told me that while a lot of Fiona’s sass was part of her DNA, I suspected a larger part was an attempt to deal with the terror somebody had brought into her life.

“The letters, the words are all spelled correctly, but the capitalization is wrong, and those letters are in a different font and just a little larger.” She tapped on the word “tease” on the first slip. “See, the ‘S’ is capitalized. There is a different wordwith a different capital in each set. If you put them together, I think they spell something. At first I thought it might be the wordSAVEsince the third set of lines mentions he believes he needs to save me from myself and that one came with the letter ‘V’ capitalized, but then the fourth one came and it is an ‘I’ not an ‘E’.” She paused and took a moment, her eyes scanning the desk’s surface though, from her recitation of the order and the letters, I knew she wasn’t reading them again. Instead, she was reliving those moments when she was holding each slip and attempting to figure out why someone was playing what was clearly not a juvenile joke, but a madman’s tactic to instill fear.

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