No Quick Fix (Torus Intercession 1)

“Sure.”

He shook his head and huffed out a breath. “Why in the world am I standing here trying to convince you?”

“I have no idea.”

His self-deprecating smile wrinkled the laugh lines in the corner of his eyes, and I felt an utterly unexpected flutter in my stomach. “You’re very easy to converse with.”

“Not normally,” I told him, being honest, having already surprised myself that I was listening and not talking over him. I had a bad habit of doing that, of telling people what I thought was wrong with them.

“Oh, no?”

“I’ve been called self-absorbed.”

He chuckled. “Really? Do we find that in our military? Self-absorption?”

“You’re funny,” I assured him, hoping the sarcasm was there instead of the weird tremble of want in my voice.

It was already important that he liked me.

“Well, anyway….” He sighed, making himself another cup of coffee. “The marriage is for business reasons, yes, but it will help my girls and me, and no matter what they tell you, they both need another person in their lives besides their father.”

“Well, sure,” I said, because of course that made sense. “When one parent gets tired, the other takes over and vice-versa. If you can’t pick up the kids, then your partner does. That’s how it works, right?”

He nodded as he turned back around to face me instead of going to the refrigerator to pull out more vanilla creamer.

“Can I ask why you never hired anyone before?”

“You mean why did it take the sheriff in the town I live in to suggest to my soon-to-be father-in-law that I hire someone?”

“Yeah,” I said with a chuckle. “That would be the question.”

“The short answer is, my girls weren’t ready to have anyone who wasn’t their mother in their home,” he said honestly, his voice hitching with sadness and memory. “And I wasn’t about to push that, no matter how far under water I went.”

“It would have been better in the long run, though.”

“Yes, but at first it was too painful even having one of my sisters here, or my mother, and then later we just fell into this rut of making do. I think it’s like when you get hurt and you figure out how to do things around your injury.”

“I get that.”

“We got used to things not working, being forgotten, or––”

“For example?”

“Well, like last week I was running late because I got caught behind an accident, and April was upset.”

“Why?”

“It’s the same old argument; she says I’m always late.”

“And are you?”

“I am a lot, yes, as I told you earlier,” he confessed, and I watched the way his shoulders fell and how he bit his bottom lip. “But that day was an uphill grind from start to finish, so when I got there, I offered her pizza to make up for it, which you should never do. It’s better to accept whatever your child wants to dish out and not try to placate them.”

“Pro tip,” I said, winking at him.

His chuckle made me smile.

“Placating gets you nowhere because not only are they still upset but now they feel like they can’t be honest. You’ve given them what they said they wanted so they’d get over it, and everything gets all bottled up.”

“Seems legit.”

“Oh, well, thank you,” he teased with a roll of his eyes.

I shrugged and he laughed, and the sound, like he was actually enjoying himself with me, guard down, wicked grin, all warm and disheveled from sleep, sent a pulse of arousal straight to my cock.

Fuck.

I needed to run. I should have run. Because even though I was a retired SEAL, nothing in my life had prepared me for being in this house with this man and his children. Already I could tell they were going to change me.

He reached for me then and squeezed my arm and held on like he was holding me there, keeping me from flying back out the front door. It was gentle, friendly, and I had the fleeting thought that he could read my mind.

“What happened when you got to school?” I asked so I didn’t stand there like an idiot and just stare into his eyes.

His hand tightened on my arm, and I felt bad because I knew it was him remembering something he didn’t want to. “I told her starting this weekend that you’d be here to help me, and she said she didn’t want to live with a stranger, and I told her she didn’t have a choice and she’d be living with Lydia soon anyway, and then there were more words back-and-forth that weren’t kind as we were both frustrated.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yes, but that wasn’t the end of it because I’d missed the underlying cause of her distress,” he said, huffing out a breath. “When I finally turned around in my seat to look at her, I saw that she was about to cry.”