Page 169 of Mad Love

Ryan wouldn’t meet my gaze. “There’s so much shit left to do. Linus said we’ll have the will read after the funeral is done, but it’s a formality. We all know—”

I stepped around the desk, forcing myself between him and the edge until he had to roll the chair back.

He stabbed his fingers into his hair with a sigh. “She hates me, and I can’t blame her.”

I leaned against the desk. “No, she doesn’t.”

His eyes flashed. “You heard her, Maddie.”

“I heard a little girl who just had her world rocked again,” I countered, shaking my head. “She was lashing out at the only safe space she has left.”

He leaned back in the chair, his jaw tight. “Mads.”

“No,” I cut him off sharply. “Not Mads. Trust me, Ryan. The last thing she said to me just now was asking if you hated her because of what she’d said.”

He looked stricken by the idea.

I placed my hands on his shoulders to stop him from jumping up. “I told her that of course you don’t. That you love her and always will. That both of us will always be there for her.”

His chest seemed to cave in as he exhaled. “Fuck, Maddie, I can’t do this. Grandpa always held it all together. How the fuck am I supposed to live up to that?”

I moved forward, straddling him in the chair. With the wheels and arms, it was a precarious balancing act, and I was pretty damn proud of myself for not tipping the chair over and knocking both our asses to the floor.

Immediately, his arms came around my waist.

“Listen to me, Ryan Cain,” I demanded, looping my arms around his neck and making sure I had total eye contact before going on. “No one expects you to be your grandfather. Not me, not the guys, not Corinne. All we need is for you to be you. You’re the guy we trust, the guy we lean on. You have a house full of people who have your back, because you learned how to be a man watching your grandfather.”

His eyes began to shine as he listened to me.

“I love you,” I finished, with all the ferocity I could muster in my tone. “Corinne loves you. The guys, too. You are not alone. Not yesterday, not now, not ever. We’ll get through this together.”

He leaned in and kissed me. “I couldn’t do this without you.”

“You could,” I answered. “But I love that I get to be by your side.”

“Always,” he swore, pulling me against his chest.

I lay my head over his heart, my body molded around his in the chair as we simply breathed the same air for a few minutes, letting the moment settle around us.

“Royal took Corinne to see the puppies,” I told him after a long pause.

He nodded, his jaw brushing the top of my head. “Good. Cori loves them.”

“Has she always sucked her thumb?”

He stilled for a beat. “Not since she was a little kid.”

I made a noncommittal humming sound. “Well, her world has been upset. It’s probably a comfort thing.”

“We’ll need to keep an eye on her,” he reasoned. “She’s had a lot of upheaval this year, and I don’t want her regressing if we can avoid it.”

I wasn’t an expert on autism, but I knew that it came in a multipack of variations, and it never seemed to affect anyone the same way. Corinne was higher functioning, but she had a few other disabilities to contend with in addition to her spectrum diagnosis.

“We’ll all keep an eye on her,” I promised him, tracing a star pattern on his chest.

“With my father gone, Grandpa was her guardian,” Ryan said. “I told Court to file the paperwork to have that shifted to me, but I’m also going to formally adopt her.”

I sat up and nodded. “Okay. You were always more of a father to her than Beckett was anyway.”

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