not going to be responsible for you getting caught.”
The beast rumbles in contentment at our mate’s fierce tone, but the side of me that wants to take care of her, the side that says I should be providing for her, doesn’t like the sound of it at all.
“That’s not really how I work,” I tell her.
She angles her body my way, and damn, her legs look amazing. “What’s that mean?”
“It means that I want to pay for you and take care of you. Maybe you should let me pay your tuition.”
She crosses her arms. “Do I not strike you as someone who can take care of herself?”
“On the contrary, you seem quite capable, but you’re my woman, and I have every intention of providing for you.”
“Your woman?” A twinkle forms in her eye. “Is that how it works nowadays, Caveman?”
I chuckle. “You can call me a caveman all you want. It won’t change how I feel, and it won’t change how I’ll treat you. I’m going to take care of you from now on, and if you don’t like it, well…” I shrug. “You better get used to it cause it’s how I’m made.”
Instead of that making her smile, she picks at her shorts.
My stomach sinks. Shit. Maybe she doesn’t want that. But I don’t know how to stop feeling this way.
“Or I could try not to take care of you, if you don’t like that—”
Her large eyes glisten, and the emotion in them makes me stop. “No, it’s not that. It’s just that nobody’s ever taken care of me.”
“No one?”
She shakes her head.
“What about when you were a kid?”
She shakes her head again. “Not even then. My mom died when I was young, and my dad kind of fell apart after that. He tried to look after me, but he could barely take care of himself, so I was kind of left to deal with stuff on my own.”
I frown, and my grip tightens on the steering wheel. “How old were you?”
“Five.”
My jaw locks. “That’s pretty young to be on your own.”
“I mean, I wasn’t entirely on my own. He still bought me clothes and food and whatnot, but a lot of times he’d forget to feed me, so I had to make my own meals, and I was doing my own laundry by the time I was seven. And when I had something going on at school, like a sports game, I usually had to get myself there cause he wasn’t reliable.” She presses her lips together, and an old pained expression forms in her eyes. “Sometimes it felt like I was the grownup, and he was the kid.”
When she catches my scowl, she quickly adds, “But he’s a good dad, really he is. He loves me completely, and he tries, really he does … he’s just not very good at taking care of others, at least, not after my mom died.”
“Sounds like he was pretty wrapped up in himself if he couldn’t take care of his only daughter after his wife passed away.”
“He’s not a bad guy. He’s really not. He just loved her too much.” She picks at her fingernail. “My mom had depression, and she killed herself because of it, but my dad loved her, like really loved her. He’s never remarried. And twenty years later, I still catch him staring at her picture. There’s only one left of her in the house. It was too painful for him to be reminded about her after she passed, but when he does stop to look at it, he’ll stand there for so long, and I can tell he’s lost in his memories of her.”
I frown again, trying to imagine how he must have felt. Even though I’ve only known Brianna for a few days, I already know that if something happened to her I would never get over it. Never. Maybe I’m being too hard on her dad, but then I shake my head.
“He could have at least done your laundry, I mean, could you even reach the buttons on the wash machine when you were seven?”
My lighthearted tone makes her laugh. “Actually, I could. I was tall even then so I just barely managed to reach them.”
“Did you mix your darks and whites?”
She laughs again. “Oh yeah. My whites were a disaster. They were actually all gray, but I’ve learned since then. I now keep them separate.”
I study her for a moment as we sail down the interstate. “You’re really something, you know that?”