6. Chapter 6 #2
He swore, looking up in surprise just as a faint light lit up the tall grass around him, adding to the brightness of his own headlights.
It was just a soft brightening of the branches and the weeds, but it was enough for him to notice.
And when he turned his head, there was no doubt in his mind who was sitting behind the wheel of that distant vehicle, stopped in the middle of the road, watching them back.
It was too dark and too far away for him to make out the vehicle, but he knew.
Travis. Because he’d come up here looking for Tabitha, not expecting to be followed and certainly not expecting for Jeff to find her first.
And now he was just sitting there, way back on the road, not closing as any other probation officer might have done. Certainly, he had every legal right to drive right up to them and Jeff would have no recourse but to put her in Travis’s truck.
But he didn’t, and the only reason Jeff could think for why Travis was hanging well back was because his brother knew exactly what condition she was in.
Anger, raw and hot, ignited in the pit of his stomach. Jeff tore his gaze off the distant headlights and got down in the weeds with Tabitha.
“Come on.” He slung an arm under her shoulders, lifting her head up out of the grass. “Let’s get you up.”
Her groan at being moved broke swiftly down into dry sobs. “Go ‘way!”
“I know, baby.” He scooped his other arm under the backs of her knees, paying her feeble protests no attention. “Let’s get you off the ground.”
Lifting her into his arms, he ignored the smell that came with her—sweat, piss, and the unmistakable skunky odor of marijuana. Especially on her hands. He ignored his own temper too, because it was rising ever hotter as he carried her as gently as he could to the car.
“Did you fall in something?” he asked, as he wrangled the car door open. The very clothes she wore were weirdly stiff and yet tacky. “Are you hurt anywhere?”
“I wetted my pants.” Her voice was shaky, and higher pitched than normal, but it was the reversal to baby talk that stood out to him the most. Every breath she took was a sobby gasp, but when he got the door open and the interior lights lit her up, there were no tears.
Her face was dirty and red, and every inch of skin bared by her clothes was sunburnt worse than his headlights had suggested.
Her lips were cracked, as dry, as if she hadn’t had water in a week.
Her clothes had absorbed so much sweat over the course of the day, while they might be dry now, it was the stiffness of the salt now trapped in the fabric that he could feel. She wasn’t crying, he realized, because she didn’t have the moisture left in her for tears.
“I’m sorry I was bad,” she sobbed, dry and exhausted.
“You weren’t bad,” he soothed, setting her down as gently as he could. He checked her exposed skin for second degree blistering, but fortunately, there was none. “You’ve nothing to be sorry about.”
“I need a nap,” she cried, pointing to the grass where he’d found her.
His heart was breaking. He was furious.
“No, baby. We’re not sleeping in the grass tonight.” His own hands were shaking as he wrapped the seatbelt under her arms so he could buckle her in without hurting her further.
“So sleepy…”
“I know.”
“I wetted my p-pants.”
“It’s okay. Daddy’ll take care of it. It’s okay.
” He got her buckled in, his brain going a mile a minute as he plotted the fastest route to Doc’s from here, then made sure she was secure and her feet were in the car before shutting the door firmly.
He glared at the distant headlights again, and it wasn’t until he was all the way around the car, wrenching the driver’s side door open and hopping up behind the wheel that it finally occurred to him what he’d said.
He’d just referred to himself as Daddy in front of her.
Was she even well enough to notice? Sucking her filthy pot-reeking thumb, she stared aimlessly out the windshield. If she’d heard him, she didn’t show any sign of being confused or offended, both of which she was entitled to be after that kind of slip up.
This was a rescue, not a relationship. He had no business calling her baby or himself Daddy, but he was triggered.
Everything about her right now was triggering him, hard and fast and on every level, and he had no idea how to combat the hurricane of urges that had locked every muscle he had with the need to act. To do… something…
Whether it was his responsibility or not. She wasn’t his baby, and he wasn’t her daddy.
But he was the daddy who was here, by God, and she needed him. Starting up the truck, he glanced at the distant headlights in the rearview mirror and drove as fast as he safely could for town.
Her breath hitching around her thumb, Tabitha gasped and snuffled. “I w-want a nap!”
He’d known a few Littles in his time, but this was the first time he’d ever heard one cry to be put to bed.
“Close your eyes, baby. You can sleep on the way.” All the way into town, the other truck followed him.
He kept his eye on how far back it was, keeping pace with him, speeding up when he did and slowing down when Jeff applied the brakes.
His anger simmered, but he very carefully kept all trace of it out of his voice when he answered Little Tabitha’s feeble insistence that she was tired, she wanted sleep, she wanted to go home.
With every hiccup, sniffle, and half-sobbed out whine, she hit his Daddy Dom triggers remorselessly. He’d never endured anything like this. He’d never been this tense and this useless to help. He’d never wanted to stop the truck so badly, pull her into his lap, and just hug her.
The second he crossed the city line, he was on his radio. “Gideon, where are you?”
His affable deputy came crackling back a half second later. “About two feet from the coffee pot, feet up on my desk. Why?”
“I need you.”
“I live for those words. Where you at?”
“About two miles from the station and on my way toward you. I think Travis is tailing me.”
“On my way.”
Two minutes later. He was turning a corner when his deputy passed him, his patrol car completely dark. Switching on his lights, Gideon gunned it, heading straight for Travis and moving fast. The other vehicle immediately made a U-turn in the middle of the road and took off.
"Yeah," Jeff muttered, watching both cars retreat into the night. "You better run."
He took her the rest of the way to Doc's, back through town to the old man's country driveway where the sign atop an old-fashioned ranchers' archway declared the property to be The Johnsons'.
"Daddy?” she asked around her thumb when he turned down the driveway. She looked around nervously.
“It’s okay,” he said, once his shock at hearing that word fall from her lips wore off. "The doctor lives up here. We’re just going to see the doctor and make sure you’re okay."
She immediately tried to escape, wriggling to get out of the seatbelt and grabbing for the door handle.
"Whoa." He caught the buckle, forcing it to remain locked with its base until she gave up. "What are you doing?"
Her pitch wailed higher. "No-no doctor!"
He grabbed her hand to stop her struggles and if he had to, yank her back into the cab if she managed to get the door open. He instantly gentled his touch when she yelped.
Stomach sinking, he turned them over to look at her palms. They were worse than just filthy. Her nails were broken, and her fingers and palms cut and raw from more broken blisters than he cared to count.
He swore again. "What happened?"
"I worked." She studied her hands with him, as if she hadn’t noticed how injured they were.
"You're definitely seeing the Doc." Letting her take back her hands, he took his foot off the brake and headed down the driveway again.
"No, Daddy!" She'd twisted on her seat, struggling with both injured hands to unbuckle herself and escape.
"Child locks are on," he told her as they bounced in and out of the next rut. It wasn't, but she immediately stopped and frowned at him.
"Police cars don’t have child locks," she challenged.
"Sure, there are. The children I deal with are just bigger than most."
"I want out!" she ordered, turning instantly combative. "I want out, Daddy, right now!"
He tightened his inner control, refusing to let himself be triggered by her combative tone.
Except, it wasn't her tone that kept needling under his skin. It was everything else he could hear—the exhaustion, frustration, the lost sadness underlying her words as she bounced in her seat and smacked her hands on her thighs. She yelped again, hugging her hands to her chest and rocking. Having seen her hands, he didn’t doubt for a second how much that had hurt.
He swung around, arm braced across the back of the bench-style seat and no-nonsense in his tone as he sternly told her, "Either I take you to Doc Johnson's, young lady, or I take you home. You pick."
The look on her face as she stared back at him waffled for only a second between rapidly failing anger and the shattering he could see, feel, and hear in her cracking voice as she broke down right there on the front seat of his patrol car beside him.
"I w-want… to go ho-home.” Her voice shrank, becoming a hoarse whisper. She sucked air, wilting in on herself as she cried without tears. “I-I-I wa-want to g-go hoooome!”
The fucking gear shift was in his way. But then, he had no business pulling her onto his lap and into his arms anyway. Which didn't stop him from wanting to give her what she needed—a strong hug and a sympathetic shoulder to pour all her heartache onto.
"I d-don't wanna d-do this anymore," she sobbed, weaving out of baby talk.
He stared ahead through the dark toward Doc's, but his mind was already made up.
"If I take you home, do you promise to let me take care of you and your injuries so they don't get infected?" he demanded. "I'm serious, it's either Doc or me, and if I take you home, it's me."
She caught her breath, her sobs dwindling to hiccups as right back into baby talk she went. "I getta g-go h-home? An’ have a nap?”
"Yes," he promised, feeling like an ass for lying. There was no way in hell he'd be taking her back to the old motel. He wasn't about to leave her anywhere that Travis could get her. That left one place he trusted, and that was his house.
She sniffled. "Okay."
“Okay,” he agreed. Shifting into reverse, he turned around. But as soon as he turned out of Doc's driveway, she knew something was up.
She pointed right when he went left. "We goin’ the wrong way, Daddy? Wrong way."
"Nope," he said, and kept driving. "You said you want to go home. That’s exactly what Daddy’s doing. I’m taking you to Daddy’s house."
Where he had absolutely zero jurisdiction over her, and where his brother could literally walk in with his paperwork and take her back again whenever he wanted to.
If he dared.
Because while Jeff had zero legal recourse without first making some serious career ending—his or Travis’s—allegations, he already knew he would say whatever he had to, do whatever he had to do, to keep Tabitha safe.
What true Daddy would do anything less?