She pauses, dropping the clothes she has in her hand. “I like the sound of that, not to mention it gets us out of here that much faster.”
“Anything of sentimental value? Anything you absolutely positively need?”
“Just you.”
I wrap her up in my shirt, quickly slide into my pants and shoes and then scoop her up in my arms, my chest swelling with pride as all the stress of the world melts away. After all the money and everything else, we spend our time chasing I finally realize in the end that the only thing that is worth it all is our relationships with other people, and in my case, that starts and ends with her.
Carrying her down the steps the first thing I notice is a lot of partygoers have filed inside. Considering it’s not raining and it’s much more comfortable outside, it makes no sense…until I see the multitude of cops forming a half-moon around the senator.
Worst of all Destiny sees it too, and the smile disappears from her face causing anger to fill me. It’s my job to make my princess happy at all times, and this little detour is not what I wanted or expected on the way out the door.
My hand cups her backside making sure my shirt keeps her completely covered.
“I can go grab my dress real quick,” she offers.
“Too revealing. I don’t want anyone else ever seeing you in that again.”
“I only wore it for you, and I don’t care what anyone else thinks.” She pauses. “And to be honest, you here with your shirt off has a lot of the women ogling you. And I don’t like that either.”
“Fair enough,” I say, carrying her right back into her bedroom where she can get dressed properly, including a winter coat despite it being sunny and over seventy degrees outside. I put on my shirt and button it up a button higher than normal to keep things as fair as possible. As a leader, and that’s what a paternal figure is, I don’t ask anything of her that I don’t demand of myself, at least not in this regard.
“Ready to do this?” I check in with her one last time.
“Ready…unless you want to go another round,” she says, her eyes moving toward the scrap of lumber and mattress on the floor, the remnants of what used to serve as her bed.
“I could throw you up against the wall right now and take you all afternoon and night long, and I’m going to do exactly that…when we get home.” My lips come crashing down on hers and I scoop her up yet again, exiting her room
We’re not even halfway down the stairs when I hear Freddy’s voice. “I don’t know what you’re thinking, but you need to put my daughter down.”
“Your daughter?” I question, not even thinking of stopping. “Never was and never will be. She’s mine.”
“You’ll do as I say or I’ll have you tried for kidnapping!” he interjects, trying to step into the path he thinks I’m going to take, but after no officers fall in line behind him he wisely clears a path.
“You can’t keep me because I’m not a kid. I’m an adult,” Destiny says from my grip.
“You watch your mouth, young lady!”
Before I can put Destiny down on her feet, she takes charge. “No, you watch yours. See, once you made that statement to the police about our home being burglarized you incriminated yourself.”
“I have no idea what you’re…what she’s…talking about,” he says, his hands going to his hips.
She smirks at him and the silence in the room causes him to go fidgety.
“Sir, we’re going to have to ask you to leave the senator’s home,” a police officer says as a group of them descend on me.
“Where do you think I’m going?”
“Alone,” he adds.
“I’m going with him and you’re not escorting Dylan out, you’re escorting my abusive adoptive…whatever he is…monster…out,” she says, running to a corner of the room and pulling out a charging cube from the wall.
“See this? There are a dozen of these throughout the house. They’re hidden cameras installed. They tell the whole story. We were never burglarized. It was all a lie. The truth is his hugs were lasting a little too long, his stares getting too aggressive and I had these installed as proof. Oh,” she continues before anyone can interrupt. “The shots fired? That was me, warning him to stay back.”
“She’s lying!”
“See for yourself,” she says, tossing the cube to an officer who catches it and looks at it a bit incredulously. “Oh, and if my dad tries to bribe you, just know those videos are timestamped and backed up on the cloud on Google Drive, iCloud, and Dropbox so erase them at your own peril. There are plenty more copies that I can pull whenever and wherever I want.”
Nothing’s sexier than my girl when she shows just how smart she is, and this display of planning and brains has me hard as a rock. And now it’s time to make sure Freddy’s head isn’t full of stones on the way out.