t way?
“I still don’t know exactly what he said or did to her to change her behavior like that,” Sheriff Skye said, his words echoing my thoughts. “She doesn’t talk about it, and I just hoped bringing her here and away from all of it would help her get herself back. I hadn’t really seen any signs of her… signs of that girl I knew the last summer she was here… signs of the daughter I used to have... not until the other day.”
“What other day?” I asked.
“When she came back from town, found you sitting on the front porch, and started tearing you a new one.”
The scene ran through my head again. She sure had been pissed off to find me there. I smiled a little.
“Yeah, I thought so,” the sheriff remarked.
“Thought what?” I asked. I looked at his face to find him smirking.
“Kinda cute that way, isn’t she?”
My face felt a little warm even in the cool fall breeze near the woods. I smiled at the thought of Rumple all ticked off and coming at me, kitten-claws extended and teeth bared. Yeah, she definitely was kind of cute that way. More than cute.
“Seeing that,” he went on, “was when I knew bringing her here had been the right choice. I gotta thank you for that, son.”
“You’re glad I piss her off?” Was I hearing him right?
“I’m going to guess just by the way you said that, you piss her off a lot, don’t cha?”
I nodded.
The sheriff laughed.
“Then I think you just might be good for her,” he finally said after he stopped laughing. “Tell me something else, Thomas.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Do you care about my daughter?”
All hints of a smile left my face as I looked into his eyes. I noticed how similar they were to Nicole’s—not just in color but in their expressiveness and the feeling that you could see right into their owner’s soul if you looked long enough.
“Yes, sir,” I replied. “I do.”
He nodded.
“Let me ask you something else,” he said as he sat up a little straighter and looked at me dead-on. “Was the last woman you ever cared about your mother?”
I swallowed past the hardening lump in my throat, but it only landed in my chest and started hanging out there. I reached up and rubbed deep into my eyes with my fingers then dropped my hand down and ran it over my thigh instead. I looked back at him, back into his eyes.
“Yes,” I said.
“Then maybe Nicole is good for you, too.”
We stared at each other for a moment, and I suddenly wasn’t as concerned about his potential ground rules as I had been a little while ago. I had no idea what he was going to demand, but at least it didn’t sound like it was going to include the words “Get the fuck away from my daughter before I blow your brains out.”
A few minutes of silence went by while I thought about what Sheriff Skye had said. I admitted that I cared about her, and he was quite right—I’d never given a shit about any of the other girls I had been with in the past. I honestly didn’t care if I ever saw any of them again. I didn’t want them dead or anything; I just didn’t even think about them at all.
Nicole was different; I thought about her all the fucking time. It was downright annoying, really. If I thought back to the day I first walked her around the entire school, I probably couldn’t come up with too many hours that had gone by when I didn’t think about her at least once.
My Rumple.
“All right, Thomas,” Sheriff Skye finally said as he ended our silence, “it’s time to go over the rules.”
He straightened his back up against the wall and looked me over.