“What about Lia?”
The teenager was quiet for a minute. “Maybe.”
“So why are you telling me, Sorrel?”
“I like that you’re here.” Face flushed, she straightened. “I like living here. I don’t want to have to go home. I thought maybe… Sometimes I wish…”
Instinctively Conall recoiled from finding out what she wished. He cast a brief look of longing toward the screen door, through which he could see the empty entryway. This would be a really great time for someone to interrupt.
No one did.
He made himself ask. “What do you wish?”
Color flamed in her cheeks now. She kicked up her chin. “I wish that you would…you know. You wouldn’t have to pay me or anything. I like you.”
Oh, shit, oh, shit. It took everything he had not to leap to his feet and back away. This pretty, curvaceous girl was gazing at him with yearning in her eyes.
In an act of will, he stayed where he was. Long practice kept his posture relaxed. “I’m old enough to be your father, you know, Sorrel.”
“Yeah, so?” She inched her butt a little bit closer.
Another shit. The men who’d bought her, a desperate runaway girl, had probably been his age. Or older. Lots older.
He unclenched his jaw. “I’m thirty-three years old. Twenty years older than you. You’re a nice girl, Sorrel, but you should be flirting with boys your age.”
She wrinkled her nose and he laughed.
“Yeah, I know, middle school boys haven’t exactly hit their stride yet, have they?”
She gave a tiny giggle that heartened him. Had her hectic flush subsided, too?
“You’ll be in high school next year, won’t you?”
She shook her head. “The middle school here is grades six through nine.”
“Really? It wasn’t when I went here.”
“Wow. I can’t imagine you in middle school.”
His laugh was genuine. “Trust me, you wouldn’t have looked twice at me, not a girl as pretty as you. I was really short until I hit…oh, sixteen, seventeen. I was scrawny and wild.” He smiled at her. “Some of the boys your age are going to turn out okay. Some of them, more than okay.”
“Mostly thinking about boys freaks me out,” she admitted, so softly he had to strain to hear her. “But you’re different. And—and I know there’s no reason you’d want me—”
“Whoa. Let me say this. You’re right. I don’t. No man my age should respond sexually to a girl your age. It’s wrong. And I’m betting you’ve been thinking about me that way because you know I’m safe. You’re afraid of the boys at school because they probably are checking you out. You really are pretty. And after your uncle and the creeps who paid you for sex you’re not so sure about men, but you’ve gotten to know me and—”
“I wish a guy like you did like me,” she mumbled, hiding her face again.
He took the risk of laying a hand on her back and rubbing gently. “Someday one will,” he said. “When the right time comes. In the meantime, I think what you’re doing is looking for, I don’t know, a role model, I guess.”
She gave an audible sniff. Her cheeks were wet when she lifted her head to look at him. To his dismay, she flung herself at him and wrapped her arms tight around him. Conall froze, unsure what to do. At a flicker of movement, he looked over her head to see Lia standing on the other side of the screen watching them. He hoped like hell she’d been there long enough to hear at least part of the conversation. After the longest hesitation, he enclosed the girl in his arms and hugged her, then carefully set her away from him.
“This counseling thing. I think you should give it another chance. Your parents might have decided to listen.”
“I don’t care.”
“I know you’re mad at them. I don’t blame you. But holding grudges…” He hesitated. “I’m here to tell you how much you miss, cutting people who love you out of your life.” Conall didn’t even know if he meant it; the words coming out of his mouth surprised him. But he thought it was what she needed to hear, and that’s what he was good at telling people.