a minute.”
Right now, she didn’t care if a bad guy spotted her. She stalked down the curving drive toward the upscale street with its sycamore trees and bougainvillea hedges. Darius caught up to her with one long stride.
“I’m sorry you had to see all that,” she told him stiffly. “I warned you not to come.”
“Hey, it’s no skin off my nose. Are you okay?”
“I will be. I just need a minute.” After a few more steps, her frustration erupted. “Can you believe how stupid I am?” she cried. “I actually thought he’d start acting like a real father if I saved him from prison. I thought he’d appreciate me. I mean, he tried, I suppose. He said ‘thank you.’ But then he just had to insult me and manipulate me and…I know not to trust him. I know it. And yet I fall for it every time.”
“And you know why?”
“Why?” she asked automatically, even though she doubted that he could possibly know anything about it.
“Because your father’s dead wrong. You’re not hardhearted. If you were, why would you have torpedoed your legal career for him?”
She spun around to face him. “You know what’s a hardhearted thing to do? Evict a fire chief. I tried to do that before I even met you.”
“And a little bit after you met me,” he pointed out.
“Exactly. He’s right. That was cold.”
“Yeah, well.” He shrugged his massive shoulders. “You didn’t evict me, did you?”
“But…that’s…” Maybe it was time to confess something. “Because I didn’t want to,” she admitted.
He laughed. “Right, because you’re not the shark you pretend to be.” His silvery eyes gleamed down at her. “And because you wanted me around.”
On the verge of telling him exactly that, she snapped her mouth shut. “Because you were so good with things like shoveling the path.”
“And giving you hockey tickets.”
“And fixing the handrail. You’re really a very useful tenant.”
He dropped his voice into the register where the hot growls lived. “You have no idea how useful I can be.”
Her lower belly clenched with a stab of excitement. Her frustration with her father evaporated as she threw herself into flirting with Darius. “Like with the migraine? That kind of useful?”
“Sure, anything physical like that, it’s kind of my specialty.”
“I thought fires were your specialty.”
“Absolutely. All kinds of fires.” His deep voice reached right into her bloodstream and started a fire all on its own. It spread through her veins like warm honey.
“I’ll call a Lyft.” Her voice, on the other hand, had gone all tight and breathy. She fumbled with her phone as she went through the steps. “But before Dmitri in the red Honda gets here, I want to say something.”
He cocked his head, waiting, his eyes steady on hers. Steady as a rock, that was Darius. And damn, it was everything she wanted. Everything she needed.
“No one has ever stood up for me like that,” she said softly. “Most people find my father amusing and don’t understand why I get upset with him. I love him, he’s my father, but I’ve never felt safe with him. I’ve always known I had to watch my own back around him. And I had to do it alone. I mean, it was good training for being a lawyer. But—”
A red Honda pulled up next to them. Their driver had arrived, just in the nick of time to keep her from getting carried away.
“Thank you,” she finished quickly. “It meant a lot.”
He nodded simply. “You got it. Give me a second to check out the driver.”
That was Darius, always saying so much with just a few words. Better yet, his words were on point and none of them were trying to deceive. Especially after that encounter with Frank, it was a little dose of bliss.
Actually, a tall and broad-shouldered dose of bliss.
Chapter Eighteen
Darius lectured himself all the way back to the hotel about hopes, and not getting them up for nothing. But it was useless. The fact was, he’d been lusting after Kate for so long that he couldn’t ignore it anymore.
He wanted her so badly his scalp prickled.
Meeting her father didn’t change things at all. The opposite, actually. That dose of father-daughter dysfunction had made him understand so much more about Kate. Her independent spirit, her fire, even her prickliness—it all made sense now that he’d seen her with “dear old Dad.”
“Did you grow up mostly with your father?” he asked her as they sped toward the hotel in their third Lyft—taking the same precautions as before.
“Mostly, yeah.