In His Keeping (Slow Burn 2)

“She’s the most beautiful woman in the world,” Ari whispered. “Warm. Loving. Always smiling and happy. And the way my father looks at her. Like she lights up his entire world. And the way she smiles at him when he looks at her that way. Theirs is a love I thought only existed in romance novels, but I’ve lived with the reality of two people who love each other with all their heart and soul, who both love me. Unconditionally.”

“Who do you get your eyes from? They’re such an unusual color. Or rather colors plural,” he amended. “I’ve never seen anyone with eyes like yours.”

She stared at him, momentarily without words. Then she frowned, drawing on the image of her mother and her father. She sent Beau a puzzled look because she’d never considered where her eyes had come from or who she’d inherited the unusual kaleidoscope of colors from.

“Neither,” she said honestly. “I assume perhaps one of my grandparents, but I don’t know. They died—both sets—before my parents were even married. And they were both only children. No family. Kindred spirits, my father always said. Two halves of a whole, alone in the world until finally finding one another.”

She ducked her head self-consciously because spoken aloud by her and not said in the reverent tone with which her father spoke of his wife, it seemed contrived. Something she’d made up or some lame attempt at poetry.

Beau surprised her. “That’s a beautiful sentiment. It’s too bad more people don’t feel that way about the person they choose to spend their life with. Or at least a portion of it.”

She frowned at the last part. “You don’t believe in forever?”

He shrugged. “I guess I’ve just never met someone who made me want forever.”

His matter-of-factness didn’t surprise her. He was a man after all. They often didn’t think in the same ways women thought. She shouldn’t have even wasted a frown over his brisk, no-nonsense view of relationships. She had quickly learned that her father was . . . well, he was one of a kind and not because he was her father and she put him on a pedestal as some daddy’s girls did.

She saw the adoration in his eyes every time he looked at his wife. Saw how openly affectionate he was with her when he was grim and cold to the rest of the world. She’d never realized how other people viewed her father until she was older and was more cognizant of the differences between her father, when he was home with his “girls,” as he termed them affectionately, and when he was outside their sanctuary.

But he also didn’t give one damn who knew that he was, in effect, at his wife’s feet. While it might seem that he was the dominating force in their relationship, Ari knew for a fact that her mother held all the power and that everything her father did was for her mother. And for Ari.

“Feeling better?”

Her frown of concentration disappeared at Beau’s question and her lips softened into a smile, one of thanks for even the brief memory of all the good things in her life. And in fact, the pain and pressure in her head had lessened. It was still there. Still quite painful, but it no longer felt like it would explode at any second or that she was a ticking time bomb primed to go off.

“Yes, thank you,” she said in a husky voice, laced with emotion. “I needed that moment of happiness. It gave me a much-needed boost of hope. Because without hope, I have nothing.”

To her surprise, the vehicle came to a stop. She hadn’t even registered them slowing and turning into the parking lot of a one-story building that sported the name of a medical clinic.

Beau didn’t move immediately, however. He focused his gaze on Ari, his entire being radiating seriousness and . . . sincerity.

“You do have something, Ari. And I don’t want you to ever forget it. You have me now. And you have the full power and resources available to DSS.”

Ari held her breath, his last words fading, unheard, because all she’d registered was the fact that he’d told her she had him. And she wondered if he really knew and comprehended what a statement like that meant to someone like her.

Someone who believed in miracles and happily ever afters, even in the face of seemingly hopeless obstacles.

Ever the optimist. She could literally hear her father’s teasing voice and her mother scolding him for even suggesting such a trait wasn’t a good one.

And then Beau was opening the door, and this time, she didn’t utter a single protest when he protectively cradled her in his arms and swiftly took her into one of the side entrances marked “Employees Only.”

Apparently the rules didn’t apply to men like Beau. Her smile was rueful even as she shivered at the chill present in the medical clinic. She hated the smell. The sterile antiseptic odor and even the subtle smell of sickness and illness, death and desolation. This was a place of complete opposing factors. People who came here either got good news, or they received life-changing bad news. She couldn’t help but feel sorrow for those who fell in the realm of the bad.

Beau carried her into a room where a CT scanner was centered in the middle, and she looked at it in panic, because it was for all practical purposes a tube, an enclosed tube into which they slid you in and where walls closed tightly around you.

Her respiration ratcheted up and she held her hand to her nose just in case her sudden bout of stress initiated another bleed. Beau was already freaked out enough over her. There was no reason to give him even more reason to be unreasonable.

The doctor directed Beau to lay Ari down on the table and position her just so. Then he kindly patted her on the arm.