Page 77 of Snowed In With the Mountain Man
“Lia,” he said with a shrug, grabbing a jelly bean and popping it in his mouth. “I don’t know. I like nicknames, and there’s not much to do with Dahlia, unless I call you Dee—”
He stopped with a laugh when she shook her head vigorously. “No way. I had a teacher named Miss Dee.” She pretended to shudder in horror.
“That nice, huh?” he teased. “All right, then, what nicknames do your sisters have for you?”
She arched her brows. “Aside from dragon?”
“Aside from that,” he said with a grin.
And all at once he was desperate to know. He wanted to learn more about what this woman was like to the ones she loved. How they saw her, what they called her. Her friends, her exes, her sisters. He wanted to see her from every point of view.
Because from what he knew of her, he was well aware that there was more than meets the eye. She could be wild and free one moment—a competitive, funny tomboy. But the next second she could be the uptight, put-together businesswoman. She was an enigma.
He’d caught glimpses of what lay beneath, but he suspected the key to figuring it out lay in her past.
Leaning forward he rested his weight on his elbows. “Didn’t you have any nicknames growing up?”
She opened her mouth as if to protest but then stopped, her eyes widening. She shook her head. “It was stupid…”
“What was it?”
She cleared her throat, and he caught the hint of a smile curving her lips. “Rose, when she was little…” She laughed softly. “I’d totally forgotten about it.”
“Oh come on, you’re killing me here, Lia.” The nickname felt natural on his tongue, and she didn’t even seem to notice.
“When Rose was little, she couldn’t say my full name,” Dahlia said, her eyes were trained on the cards, but her gaze was distant. “So she started calling me Dah-dah.” She started to chuckle, and he did too. “As you can imagine, it sounded a lot like… like Dada.”
His laughter trailed off. He didn’t know the entirety of their story, but everyone in Aspire knew Frank O’Sullivan had abandoned his daughters.
Dahlia cleared her throat again, her smile a little strained but still there. “Anyway, I never really thought much of it, and Daisy didn’t either. It was just what she called me, but…”
“But?”
“But then she got older, and she still kept calling me that. And I remember…” She stopped shuffling, her gaze focused somewhere in the distance. “It must have been second grade, maybe? Somewhere around there. They had parent-teacher conferences, you know? And sweet little Rose kept telling her teacher that Dada was coming.”
“Oh no,” he murmured.
“Oh yes.” She burst out in a laugh that nearly broke his heart because it was so sweet and youthful, and yet that story…
That story was so freakin’ sad.
She shook her head, clearly coming back to the present. “You can imagine the teacher’s surprise when Dada showed up and it was a girl from junior high.”
“Junior… What grade were you in?”
“Seventh.” She nodded, her smile fading slightly. “The teacher kept asking where my mom was, but… she was having a bad week.” She winced, like the memory was physically painful.
He watched her closely as she got back to the business of shuffling.
He’d wanted to see her in a new light, and that was exactly what he’d gotten. And this new view…
Well, it explained a whole lot.
“You were mom and dad for Rose as a kid, weren’t you?”
She acted like she didn’t hear him.
“I bet Daisy too,” he mused, more to himself than anything as he put the pieces together from all he’d heard about the O’Sullivan sisters these past few months. “From the sounds of it, your twin isn’t exactly the reliable sort.”
