“Dad!”
Lila had to step in front of him. “Stop right now. Cool down, Sheriff. She is a responsible young woman. She didn’t ask me for condoms, although you should know that if she had, I would have given them to her. She isn’t trying to have sex with some kid. She’s trying to experiment, and she has every right to do that. Just because she’s in a wheelchair doesn’t mean she can’t eventually enjoy sex, and that includes masturbation. And don’t you dare give me some moral lecture on the evils of masturbation. I bet you can’t tell me you didn’t do it when you were her age.”
He stopped, his whole body going still. “You talked to her about . . . that? You talked to her about how to do that? She’s not pregnant?”
“Dad, eww, no. I haven’t done anything that could get me pregnant. Why would your brain even go there? Why?” Noelle shuddered.
“Likely because he was doing far more than self-pleasure at your age.” She couldn’t imagine teenage Armie hadn’t been the local player.
“When she said you ordered something, I thought it might be a pregnancy test,” Armie said.
“I bought her a wand,” Lila admitted. “It’s for clitoral stimulation. I think she should start there.”
“I want to die.” Noelle picked up a pillow and muffled her scream into it.
Armie’s shoulders dropped. “So you talked to my daughter about sex and bought her something to help her feel more normal?”
Lila nodded.
Armie sighed, a deeply relieved sound, and then he was wrapping her up in his arms. He lifted her off the ground and held her against his body. “Thank you for being so kind to my daughter.”
“You’re not mad at me?” She let her arms drift up around his shoulders. “Because I meant what I said, Armie. I think she has the right to have a private life.”
“She does,” he agreed. “I’m sorry I reacted the way I did, but you’re right about what I was doing at her age. And she’s my baby. I worry about her.”
She could understand that. “You can’t arrest every boy who wants to date her.”
“On this we are going to have to disagree.” Armie set her on her feet and kissed her forehead. “So I will happily give you permission to talk to my daughter about all the female stuff, and I will not ask about it again.”
He’d ceded that fight quickly.
“Can I die now?” Noelle asked.
Armie ignored her, his eyes on Lila. “I want you to take your coffee and sit on the back porch and enjoy the morning. I’ll get everything else ready and we’ll have a nice breakfast.”
“Or I could help you. Actually, I don’t normally eat breakfast,” she admitted.
Noelle’s head came out of the pillow. She managed to go from embarrassed to disappointed in a heartbeat. “But I brought you donuts. They’re my favorites from this place in town. I would have brought beignets, but they don’t travel well. The donuts were a way to say thank you.”
It wouldn’t hurt to have one donut, though she didn’t see the need to sit on the porch.
Still, she found herself being hustled outside, a mug of coffee and a donut in her hands.
She sank down in the surprisingly comfortable rocker. There were two of them, side by side. She could imagine the couple who’d owned the house sitting here, watching the sunset.
It was quiet in the early morning hours, the world seeming softer. Maybe it was simply that she’d gotten sleep the night before. Maybe it was that she’d never taken the time to sit in Dallas, never gone on the balcony of her condo and watched the city come to life around her as she sipped coffee and ate donuts.
It wasn’t terrible.
She took a deep breath and let her mind float, let the sights and sounds of the world around her sink in.
She sipped the coffee, feeling more peaceful than she had in years. She could hear Armie in the kitchen and Noelle telling her dad how he was doing everything wrong. It was nice to not be alone all the time.
And maybe she should get her nails done. It might be fun.
She sat back and sipped her coffee.
That was damn fine coffee.chapter elevenTwo days later, Lila looked over at Remy’s sister and wondered if she’d ever been that young and enthusiastic.
“I think we should go with something a little bigger. You’ve got such amazing hair. It shouldn’t be in a bun all the time.” Seraphina Guidry was all of twenty-five years old and was brimming with enthusiasm for her new job.
“I was only looking for a trim,” Lila explained.
Seraphina had long blond hair. At least four hundred pounds of it, and it was teased into something that would make a showgirl jealous as hell. It was gorgeous on the lithe young woman but would look utterly ridiculous on her. There were people who could pull off teased hair. She was not one of them.