This probably spoke to something deeply fractured in my own psyche, but the thought of him doing that for me, well, it made my heart do that swelling thing again.
“So,” my father said, reaching for the syrup. “Do you have any name suggestions for my cat?” he asked, looking over toward where she was licking her paw a few feet away.
That moment, right there, in a sprawling mansion with cheap takeout spread out in front on the table, animals all around us, seamlessly mixing the homicidal and the mundane, felt like it was foreshadowing the future.
Somehow, I was completely okay with that.
“She kind of reminds me of Mrs. Norris from the Harry Potter movies.”
“So, seeing as I missed your formative years where you might have asked for one, I feel like I am supposed to buy you a pony.”
“Careful,” I said, smirking. “You are starting to sound like Dezi.”
“Seeing as you clearly love him, I can think of worse things.”
“It’s new,” I insisted.
“He loves you too,” he told me, making me look over. “In case that is the reason you are insisting it’s too new for it. That man loves you too.”
Some part of me wanted to rebel against that. It was that part of me that always had to protect myself, that needed to anticipate and even expect things to go wrong, so nothing ever knocked me down or took me out.
That part of me was an innate pessimist. It was safer to believe everything was going to go to shit.
It was risky to hope that it could go right.
But, for perhaps the first time in my entire life that mattered in any sort of significant way, I wanted to hope.
For many more mornings around the kitchen with greasy hash browns and overcooked eggs.
With my father.
With the animals.
And with Dezi in all of his sweetness and his crazy.
Perhaps, for the first time, it was safe to hope.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Dezi
Of fucking course it was that bent dick fuck.
I was actually furious with myself for not seeing it sooner.
I was sure I would have. If I hadn’t been so focused on Theo and her recovery.
She’d been a decent patient, thanks in part to a shitton of food, cute animals, long binges of old TV shows, and pain medicine.
But caretaking was new to me, so it had occupied the majority of my brain space.
Besides, I knew that the girls club and my brothers were all working on finding the attacker.
I could just… be with her, make sure she was taking it easy, so she recovered fully and quickly.
So I wasn’t thinking about who might have it out for her.
But of fucking course it was him.
Hell, just the way he’d had her cornered in the grocery store was a massive red flag.
And once the whole story came out, yeah, I had no doubt it was him.
The man had a lot to lose.
Millions.
I mean, for all I knew, billions.
And if a man was greedy and evil enough to deprive a young, single, mother and her baby of even halfway decent lives, then, yeah, I was pretty sure he was willing to pay someone to cut the brake lines of that grown child’s car to get her out of the picture.
In his twisted fucking mind, he might even be able to think he wasn’t even guilty, since he wasn’t the one who actually did the dirty shit.
Or, it was completely possible that he just didn’t give a fuck, that he was willing to do whatever it took to get what he wanted.
That kind of money was a powerful motivator. And maybe he thought he was more deserving. He had, after all, been the one there with Edmund, creating the business, working through problems, even being there for him at the beginning stages of his illness.
But because of an orgasm and some shared DNA, he could lose all of it, could have it all taken from him.
“Hey, the prodigal fucking son returns,” Seth said as I strode into the clubhouse a few minutes after rushing out of Edmund’s house.
“What is it?” Brooks asked after looking at me.
“Who would a rich fuck go to in this town if he’s looking for someone to do a hit?” I asked, looking around to the guys who’d been raised in Navesink Bank. Or, at least, ones who’d lived there more than I had.
“Assuming you mean the kind of guys who would take a contract that was on a woman?” Finn asked.
“Yeah.”
“That’s probably a longer list than the decent guys,” Seth mused, rubbing his temple. “I mean, honestly, you can walk into a rough area and ask almost anyone to do something for you if you are willing to pay.”
“Yeah, but this is a silver spoon kind of guy. Driving through the rough areas with the windows up, doors locked, with a granny hold on the steering wheel. Who would someone like that go to? Who fixes problems for rich people?”