Page 137 of Stay for Me

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Diana

Iansweredonthethird ring, my heart fluttering. “Hello?”

“Firefly,” the cowboy greeted, the jagged edges of his voice warming my soul. “You get home okay?”

“I did,” I answered softly.

“You ready for tomorrow?”

“Well, I was, but now, I’m getting the jitters,” I told him, looking down to my work bags I’d placed on the counter. My laundry was done, my house was clean, and my Filofax was prepped.

“The jitters?” he parroted, something heavy moving in the background.

“Yeah,” I laughed softly, knowing it was silly. “It’s nerve-wracking. standing in front of a bunch of ego-filled college students who think they know everything.” I got like this at the start of every semester, but by next week, the nerves would be gone, and my students would be too deep in the assignments to give a damn about what I was doing in front of the board.

There was a smile in his voice as he said, “Baby, you stand up in front of judges and defend clients.”

“I’d rather take a judge over a twenty-year-old who’s ready to take on the world,” I mumbled, shutting down my desktop before heading out of my office. He was silent. “Are you okay?” I asked, checking the security system.

“Happiest I’ve ever been, Firefly,” he murmured.

My bottom lip wobbled, and I braced my hand on the wall, my body not used to this level of happiness. “I need you to give me a warning if you’re going to be sweet to me,” I rasped, voice thick as tears filled my eyes. “I can’t handle it.”

“Get used to it,” he muttered.

I smiled, heat going to my cheeks. “I still can’t believe this is happening,” I whispered, more to myself than to him. Still, he’d heard it.

“You’re a treasure, Diana.”

Minutes later, when I was in my room, sitting in the middle of my bed, listening to him tell me about his current furniture piece, peace settled over me. I knew we were going to be okay. My future didn’t look so…lonely anymore.

“Know it’s late, but I need to talk to you about something,” he told me softly as I picked excess fuzz off my blanket.

“Does it have anything to do with your bounty hunter best friend popping by?” I blurted before I could stop myself.

A pause, and then, “Yeah, it does.”

When he didn’t continue, I took a breath. “Whatever it is, we can handle it.”

“Handle it?”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek. “Yeah, handle it.”

“Told you that you were never going to know my family, beautiful. Told you they don’t get you, your light, or anything else. Told you I would tell you what they did to me and nothing more.”

“Yes, I know.” I hated them already. I hated everything about them. Whatever they did to my cowboy was incomparable to what my family did to me.

“What I didn’t tell you—because I’d lost all hope in it—was that somewhere out there, I have a younger half-brother,” he said.

I sat back, falling into the pillows. “What?” I breathed.

“My father was a piece of shit, Diana. The worst kind of man. From the moment I could walk, he was beating the shit out of me and my mother. Then, somewhere along the way, my mother stopped protecting me. Instead, she would offer me up as my father’s personal punching bag to save her own ass,” he explained, his voice void of any emotion. He didn’t sound like Mags.

He sounded like a ghost.

“Mags, we don’t have to do this,” I offered, my heart aching for him. I was half a second away from heading back to his cabin.

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