This was the second time he’d made a sexual innuendo with me, and honestly, my poor love-sick body could barely handle it.
I blinked again and suddenly, he was in front of me. There was nothing in his features, shallow hollows and steep cliffs of stony bones and golden skin, but his eyes were so alive they burned.
“Not in charge of you, but as I said, I’m gonna look out for you even if you don’t like it. So, you’re taking Hero with you wherever you fucking go, because you love him, you miss him and you need that affection right now, but also because he’s a trained retired police dog and he’ll kill a man before he lets you get hurt. You understand me, Harleigh Rose?”
“You can’t just come back into my life and run roughshod all the fuck over it, Danner,” I said, but the sass wasn’t starched like it should have been. The warmth of his body so close to me made it wrinkled at the edges.
He flashed one of his rare, million dollar smiles and it hit me right in the womb. “Hero takes two cups of chow in a little warm water twice a day, needs twice daily walks as well, an hour each if you can hack it.”
I scowled at him and humor creased his face into interesting planes I wanted to trace with my fingers.
“And quit it with this Berserker MC business. Stay away from Wrath and the boys, and you see me, you act like you barely know me unless it’s inside these walls.”
“Whatever.”
Danner bit at the corner of his grin then moved away to crouch in front of Hero, who sat contentedly to our side wagging his tail.
“You take care of our Rosie, okay boy?” he said, cupping the pup’s face and looking into his eyes the way he would a young boy.
Hero let out a gentle woof of affirmation and trotted to my side the second Danner stood up to leave. I wanted to shout out an insult, something to keep him on his toes and secure me the coveted last words. Instead, my head was filled with romantic delusions, with the lurid image of Danner breaking me under a firm, calm hand…
“Lion,” I called before I could stop myself.
He paused with his hand on the door handle and I distractedly noticed that there were more locks on my door than there had been before the accident. I swallowed when he shifted slightly to face me and I could take in the long, muscled length of him. It killed me that I couldn’t look at him without wanting to put my hands on his body, through his thick, glossy flaxen hair and down the ridge of muscles in his back to his high, taut ass. It killed me even more that I didn’t have the right to do so.
“Thanks for lending me Hero,” I said and then in invisible ink written in the space between us I added, and thank you for always taking care of me.
“My job, Rosie,” he said softly, and it was, but what he meant was that he felt taking care of me was his duty just as much as being a cop was.
Even though I’d never said the words out loud, he knew.
I’d been his since the day he bought me my first rose.
2008
Harleigh Rose is six. Danner is sixteen.
I remember the day started with a slap.
I was six years old so young, but still old enough to know better than to wake up my Mum when she was sleeping off a hangover. It was getting late though, mid-morning, and it was Sunday, which meant it was time to go to Mega Music down on Main Street so I could get a new record. It was tradition. Sure, Dad started it, not Mum, but if he wasn’t around, then he made her promise to take me instead. Mum and King didn’t care much for music. Mum was too busy with her boozin’ and partyin’, and King was all about his books so after the record store, even though we didn’t have a whack of money, our next stop was the bookstore.
But Dad and me? We loved music. Not the stupid, tinny new stuff they played on the radio that Dad said sounded like a bunch of ‘snot nosed cry wankers’ or ‘straight up douchebags,’ but the old stuff, like Black Sabbath and Guns n Roses. Dad loved AC/DC best, so I did too. I’d been a daddy’s girl since I could cogitate and so even though I was upset Dad wasn’t around to take me himself, I was still excited to go to Mega Music and pick out a rockin’ record to show him when he finally got back from where work at The Fallen MC took him.