My eyes travel down to my trapped wrist, my skin slowly turning white in his powerful grip, and my legs weakening by the second as I try not to think about him holding me like this as he kisses my neck. He lets go as I regain my footing and my balance.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘Is there something I can help you with, Mr Ledger?’
He gestures for me to follow him and stops by my door, looking back briefly toward Thea’s. My stomach twists as I fear the oncoming admonishment, the dressing down, the telling off, but then his face shifts.
‘Thea hasn’t said goodnight to me in four years,’ he says.
I open my mouth, blink, and look toward her door. I’m lost for words. ‘She hasn’t?’
He looks at me again, but it’s different somehow as if I’ve become different. ‘What happened in there?’ he asks.
My stomach drops as an onslaught of conflicting emotions hit me like a freight train. I’ve just had a breakthrough with Thea, and I don’t want to derail that by betraying her confidence, and I also really don’t want to have a conversation with Mr Ledger about the context of each of my tattoos right n-
‘She wanted to see my tattoos,’ I say, shutting my thoughts down as I spiral. He’s a walking lie detector, there’s no point messing around, and the more I stand here in silence freaking out, the more likely I am to say something really stupid. He blinks, processing this. I gather from the expression on his face that he hadn’t been expecting that sentence.
‘You have tattoos?’ he says at last.
I nod. ‘Several.’
‘Did you… show her?’
‘Yes,’ I say quietly.
Again, he says nothing for a few seconds, then he takes a single breath. ‘I need to go away, for a few nights,’ he says as if he’s suddenly come to this conclusion.
‘Oh, okay,’ I say, still reeling.
‘I’ll be staying at the facility,’ he says, assuming that I understand what he’s talking about. ‘And I need to leave early in the morning before the girls wake up.’
‘Oh,’ I say.
He looks at me with those dark steel eyes and for a moment my stomach plunges, and then he squints. ‘You want a beer?’ he says.
I blink as my chest fills with dread. Is this a test? He’s just found out about my tats, and he’s going away for three nights, so maybe this is his way of working out if I’m planning to binge dri-
‘This isn’t a test,’ he says, a wry grin on his lips.
I breathe out and laugh, holding my palm to my chest. ‘In that case, yes,’ I say, relief flooding through me like cold lemonade on a warm summer’s day. ‘But you… you know that I’m nineteen though, right?’
He falters for a moment, a strange expression crossing his face, as if he’s trying to process this and admonish himself at the same time, then he smiles. ‘I can’t stop you from helping yourself.’
I smile mischievously, tweaking my lips and then I shrug. ‘I guess you can’t.’
He looks at me again, his eyes lingering on mine for a moment, and then he nods, and turns away. And I take a long, slow, deep, and shuddering breath before I follow.
*
She’s too young to drink, you fucking asshole. Jesus.
It’s easy to forget though. She’s mature, organised, efficient, and straight-talking. She’s managed the house and the girls over the last three days more efficiently than I ever could, and so far, better than any of our previous nannies, and they were old enough to be her mother.
There’s no justifying it, old man. She can’t order a cocktail in a bar, but you keep thinking about fucking her until her eyes roll back into her head and she screams your name.
I have a problem.
Three days at the facility will fix that. I need the order, the discipline, the simplicity. And maybe I can drive into town and find some bar girl, bang her brains out and get past this messed up fixation.
I open the fridge door and crack out a beer, unscrewing the cap with one hand and flicking it onto the kitchen surface before turning around and eyeing Red as she swings her sweet little hips into the room.