"You want to help me put the Oreos on the cake?" I asked her and she raced into the kitchen. I set up a chair for her to kneel on, setting the cake in front of her so she could press the Oreos onto the top. I hadn't thought to go that far with it, but I'd let my baby girl do whatever she could to help decorate if it made her happy.
The grin on her face was worth every smear of Oreo cream cheese frosting that she spread when her fingers slipped all over the place.
???
It was safe to say my father was sufficiently enamored with Ryker. If the Maserati hadn't done it, the Chevelle would have.
If the way the kids loved him hadn't, the way Ryker spoiled them rotten with toys and rooms and the endless affection only he seemed to be able to provide them with would have.
Ines's tantrums even seemed like a thing of the past when he was around. A stern, but loving, look from Ryker was enough to dissuade my terrible two from melting down. I might have resented it, if she hadn't started respecting my warnings more too.
The full presence of two parental figures worked wonders for making sure she never wanted for attention, and the change in her behavior was obvious. It made me wonder what she would have been like with her father around, but though I hated to admit it, even I knew there wouldn't have been much difference between just me and the two of us.
By the end of our marriage, Chad had been so absent that it was almost like he wasn't there at all. To a two-year-old, I didn't imagine it felt like there was much difference between that and dead.
As horrible as that felt to think.
For Axel, there was an enormous difference. He knew what it meant when I told him his father was dead. He remembered the father who'd been present before work absorbed him.
“So, Ryker,” my Dad commented as he sliced through a slice of cake slowly. “What is it you do?”
My fork clattered to my plate, and I coughed around the bite I’d been chewing and tried to clear my throat.
“You okay, Calla Lily?” Dad asked, and Ryker patted my back reassuringly. How he seemed to think anything about the moment could be comforting was beyond me. He’d confessed less than a week prior to being a murderer.
That wasn’t exactly the typical dinner conversation a father wanted to have with his daughter’s boyfriend slash kidnapper.
Not that he knew that, but eff my life.
“I work in private security. Making sure people meet the justice they deserve,” Ryker answered with a smile. “I have several clients through the city, but I delegate most of my work to my employees at this point. I only consult on the particularly nasty cases.”
I knew without a doubt that it was a lie, or at the very least a gross misrepresentation of what he did. If he truly believed the men he killed deserved what they got, then the justice part was true enough.
Security seemed like a stretch.
“Like a cop?” Dad asked, crossing his arms over his chest as he leaned back in his chair and studied Ryker. My dad was a shark when it came to knowing when someone lied. Being a single father to a teenage girl made that a necessary skill he honed over the years.
“The specifics are confidential, but they vary from job to job. I promise you, nothing I do will ever get me in trouble with the law.” Knowing what I knew, I noticed the delicate nuances in his wording.
He didn’t say it wasn’t illegal, just that he wouldn’t get in trouble for it.
“Calla seems to have a type then,” Dad chuckled, and I huffed my own laugh and downed some more wine even if it was gross to mix it with the Oreo cake. The irony of the moment wasn’t lost on me. Dad unknowingly compared my cop husband to my murderer boyfriend.
How quaint.
Ryker stroked a hand over my bare thigh under the table and took pity on my discom
fort. “Are you going to let me teach you to swim soon, Princess?” Ryker asked my girl. She shook her head viciously, picking at her food with her fingers as her appetite vanished.
I had no clue where the intense fear of the water had come from, and as grateful as I was for it some days, others I cursed it. “No,” she pouted.
“I’ll hold you the whole time.”
“No,” she repeated, smacking her hand down on the high chair tray in a rare moment of defiance against her beloved ‘yker.
“We’ll work on it,” Ryker said with a chuckle as he turned to me. He’d wear her down, eventually. He seemed to excel at doing that.
Dad shoved his last bite of cake in his mouth, and I could already see that he was ready to go home. My old man had always been early to bed and early to rise. When he finished chewing, he studied my face intently. “You look well rested, Calla Lily,” he noted. “I don’t think I’ve seen you look so relaxed in years. Ryker must take good care of you.”