Page 69 of What We Broke

Smirking, I place my hand over his, stilling him. “Don’t you start distracting me. We were talking about Raine and dancing lessons.”

“Okay. Okay. You’re right.” He rolls his shoulders and puts his hands up in surrender. “Tell me about the dancing.”

“Okay.” I clap my hands together excitedly. “It took me a while to find something that wasn’t a class with twenty or thirty other kids,” I explain. “And a teacher willing to spend an hour teaching only one child, but persistence paid off and a great opportunity came through.”

His brows furrow in concentration. “You got her one-on-one lessons?”

“Of course I did. You heard how nervous she was about dancing in front of other people.”

He catches me completely off guard when he curls his hand around my nape and buries his head in the crook of my neck.

“Marry me,” he murmurs against my pulse.

I bite back the moan that wants to slip out of my mouth and rest a hand on his thigh. We are never going to get through this conversation, let alone dinner at this rate. “Jesse,” I groan.

“Don’t ‘Jesse’ me, when you’re here telling me all the effort you’re going through to get my daughter her own private dance lessons,” he says into my ear. “You expect me to keep my hands off you when all they want to do is thank you?”

“I promise,” I breathe out. “You can thank me later. More than once.”

“Fine. Fine. Fine,” he says loudly. He rises up off the chair, and I watch him move it across the table and take a seat. “Tell me the rest of it.”

I couldn’t stop the smile from spreading across my face. I will never get over just how much he loves being close to me. Kissing me. Seducing me. Loving me. He has a way to touch me for every occasion.

“So, I came across this dance studio,” I continue. “And when I explained the situation, the owner mentioned that her teenage daughter is in the process of getting herself accredited as a dance teacher and if I was okay with it, she could practice teaching Raine and me.”

“You really want to dance with her?” he asks me.

“It’s been months of us binging reruns ofSo You Think You Can Danceand us dancing together in the living room. I think she’ll love it,” I say truthfully. “And maybe me being there, showing her how ridiculous I am, will help take off the pressure she’s putting on herself to be perfect.”

Over the time I’ve spent with Raine, it was evident that she is an overachiever. She hates failure, and the expectation she puts on herself not to fail is too high for someone her age. I’d heard both Zara and Jesse tell her repeatedly that her best efforts would always be enough.

It’s obvious she has yet to believe them.

“What’s the worst thing that can happen?” I ask him. “We spend one afternoon a week dancing? I don’t see a problem with it.”

“And how much is it?”

I know he didn’t mean anything by the question, because he was just a father taking care of his daughter with no expectations that I needed to do the same, but I didn’t want it to be that way.

I want him to know that anything I do for Raine is because I want to, and that includes paying for her dance lessons.

“You’re not paying, so you don’t need to know how much it is.”

He shakes his head. “No, you can’t,” he argues. “That’s too much and she’s my—”

It didn’t matter that while the teacher was pretty much free, the studio time was highway robbery. If I have to sell my whole world to make sure I can afford her dance lessons, that’s what I’ll do. There is no way I’ll let him pay for something I want to give to her.

“I know.” I cut him off from finishing. “She’s your daughter.”

Hating the space between us, it’s my turn to rise up from my seat and move my chair closer to him. Sitting beside him, I lean in and plant a soft kiss on his cheek. “It’s because she’s yours that I want to do this. Just let me, okay?”

* * *

Giddy was an understatement.

Zara and Jesse and I had decided that we would leave the dance lessons as a surprise, but since this is the first time all three adults and Raine have been in a car together, I’m certain she knows something is going on.

“Where are we going?” she asks for the tenth time.

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