Page 62 of Daddy's Dirty Little Secret

He looked at me again, his expression unreadable. “You love me?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yes.”

“I don’t know how to do this,” he said. “I’ve been single for a long time. I don’t know what it means to share space with someone—really share it.”

“You don’t have to figure it out all at once,” I said. “We can take this one decision at a time.”

“I’ve never had to think about anyone but myself.”

“Well, that’s definitely over,” I said. “There’s no version of this that’s going to be NSA from here on out.”

That pulled another real smile from him. He leaned back, eyes still on me, and for the first time since we crawled into this bed, he looked a little lighter.

“And you can be patient with me while I figure it out?” He searched me with his eyes and I nodded at him.

“Gotta practice having a mother’s patience sometime…”

We didn’t say anything else for a while. He pulled me close again, my cheek against his collarbone, his hand smoothing along my back like he was still making sure I was real. And I stayed there, wrapped in the quiet, wondering how something that had started as casual could have ever felt small.

Xander slept beside me, one arm resting across my ribs. I lay awake, watching the shadows shift across the ceiling. My body ached in the way that came after fear had drained out and left something hollow behind.

I kept thinking about my father.

He had tried to fix it. He’d walked into that house with a suitcase full of money and the look of a man who already knew it wasn’t enough. I didn’t know how he would repay Xander. I wasn’t sure either of them had thought that far ahead.

It wasn’t just the money. That part could be counted. What Xander gave me was harder to name. He’d come for me when I didn’t ask him to. He had done it without conditions, without waiting to be needed. That wasn’t something my father could ever return.

And now there was the baby. The silence between us when we parted earlier had said more than anything. I didn’t know how Dad felt about it. I didn’t know if he saw it as a burden or a second chance. I didn’t ask. I wasn’t ready to hear if he was afraid of what it meant for me, or worse, ashamed.

I couldn’t forget that he was the reason I ended up in that room at all. Even though I’d forgiven him, I still didn’t know how to carry it.

There was love between us. I believed that. But love didn’t erase the things we had to face.

And there were still so many things left to face.

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