Daddy Said So (Yes, Daddy #6)

1. Saoirse

SAOIRSE

He shows up with one bag.

One. Six foot five and built like a brick wall, and he packs light enough to fit everything into a single black duffel that he drops by my front door like it belongs there.

“Miss Flynn.”

“Saoirse,” I say.

“Miss Flynn.” He’s already moving through my apartment.

Not exploring—assessing. His eyes go to the windows first. Then the door hinges.

Then the smoke detector, which he studies for two full seconds before apparently deciding it’s not a problem.

He does all of this while I’m standing in my entry hall holding a coffee mug like an idiot.

He’s not what I expected. I don’t know what I expected—my father said private security, which conjures sunglasses and earpieces and men who look bored.

Lachlan Burke does not look bored. He looks like a man who went to a very demanding school and graduated first in his class and then did it again for fifteen years and now has opinions about my smoke detector.

He also looks like this: six-five, built like a brick wall, dark hair cropped close with silver threaded through it at the temples—not much silver, just enough to make you aware that this is not a young man and that being not-young has been extremely good to him.

Deep tan skin, weathered the way skin gets when it’s spent years outdoors in conditions that weren’t recreational.

A jaw that could cut glass. His sleeves are pushed up to the elbow.

His forearms are corded and tan, and he has the hands of someone who has used them for purposes I’m choosing not to think about at nine AM on a Monday.

“I need to see the building layout,” he says.

“Hello to you too.”

“Good afternoon, Miss Flynn. I need to see the building layout.”

I pour myself another coffee and hand him the welcome packet the building sends everyone. He takes it without looking at me.

“Security report will take me an hour,” he says. “Don’t leave the apartment.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“Good. Any questions?”

I have about forty-five. I ask the most reasonable one. “Where are you sleeping?”

He looks at the couch. Back at me. “That’ll work.”

“It’s seventy-two inches long.”

“I’ve slept in worse.”

I believe him completely.

He’s thorough. Not just about the apartment—about everything.

He checks the door twice an hour the first night.

He notes the time my neighbor across the hall leaves for work.

He asks me three questions about my routine and takes no notes because he doesn’t need to.

I get the sense Lachlan Burke does not forget things.

Which is a problem, because I forget everything, and now there’s a six-foot-five witness who remembers all of it and judges none of it. I could survive the judging. It’s the not-judging that’s going to be the end of me.

He also doesn’t talk. Not in the way that feels hostile—in the way that feels like silence costs him nothing.

Like he’s got so much stillness in him it just occupies whatever room he’s in.

My apartment, which has always felt too big and too quiet, feels smaller now.

Occupied. Like the air has weight in it now.

On day two I test him.

I don’t plan it. Or maybe I do. I’ve been watching dangerous men my whole life—military bases, deployment dinners, generals and colonels, men who could end things with their hands and still ate dinner like it was nothing.

I know what physical authority does to my pulse.

I’ve been managing my reaction to it since I was old enough to understand what I was reacting to.

I come out of the shower in a towel.

His back is to me. He’s standing at the window with his coffee—he woke up before me, found the beans, figured out the machine, made a better cup than I would have.

He doesn’t turn around at the sound of the bathroom door.

The morning light hits the back of him: the width of those shoulders, the close crop of his dark hair, the silver at his temples catching.

His forearms rest on the window frame. Tan skin, corded muscle, completely still.

“I’m going to need you in the other room when I get dressed,” I say.

“I’m already looking at the street,” he says. Not defensive. Factual.

“Still.”

“I’ll stay at the window.” His voice doesn’t change. He doesn’t look.

I stand there for a moment, dripping slightly, aware that I’m annoyed. He was supposed to look. Or look away very deliberately. He was supposed to do something that acknowledges I exist at all. He just—doesn’t. He watches the street and drinks his coffee.

I go get dressed.

Day two I leave my bedroom door open.

He’s at the kitchen table with a report he’s typing on his laptop—threat assessment, he told me, when I asked. He glances up. Notes the open door. Goes back to his report.

“I run warm,” I say. From inside my room.

“Thermostat’s at sixty-eight.”

“I know. I still run warm.”

He doesn’t say anything. He keeps typing.

I change my shirt three times deciding what to wear to nowhere. I’m not allowed to leave the apartment. I’m bored. Something is fundamentally wrong with me. Then I put on a dress because I like how it feels and I don’t know who I’m proving anything to.

“Zip?” I say from the doorway.

He looks up.

The dress has a back zip. It’s not manufactured—it’s a real dress with a real zip, and I have worn it before without incident.

He looks at the zip. Looks at me. Stands up from the table and walks across the kitchen in the unhurried way he does everything, and then he’s behind me.

His hands are at my zipper. Very large, very steady—tan against the pale of my lower back, dark against the fabric of the dress.

The zip goes up in one smooth pull. His hands are gone.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Mm.”

I look over my shoulder. He’s already walking back to the table.

This is a problem.

Day three. Breakfast.

He makes eggs. He does this every morning—gets up first, handles the food, puts a plate in front of me before I’ve decided I’m hungry.

It’s not deferential. It’s not a service, exactly.

It’s more like a default behavior: this is something that needs doing, I’ll do it.

He handles all the things that need handling and takes up zero emotional space doing it.

I eat the eggs. He eats his. I think about all the men I’ve dated who couldn’t figure out how to use a spatula. Or a thermostat. Or, frankly, me.

“My father said you’re good,” I say.

“Your father is right.” No ego in it. Just—accurate.

“He says you were in the unit with him for two years.”

“One year. Then I went independent.”

“Why?”

“Preferred to.”

I try a different angle. “You’ve done celebrity protection before?”

“Some.”

“Why’d you stop?”

He looks at me across the table. Eyes like river water over rocks—gray-green, and very still, and deeper than they need to be. “Too soft,” he says.

“The celebrities or the work?”

“Both.”

I put my fork down. “I’m not soft.”

“No,” he says. “You’re not.”

He says it like I just told him the weather. Not soft. Okay then. I want to climb across the table and shake him until he reacts to something.

“You know what my problem is?” I say.

He waits.

“Every man I’ve dated lets me get away with everything.

Because they’re scared of my father or because they’re passive or because they don’t care enough to push back.

I make a choice they disagree with and they say okay and I hate them a little more each time.

” I pick up my coffee. “I need someone who doesn’t. ”

He’s looking at me.

“Someone who says no,” I say. “Someone who makes me follow through. Someone who—“ I stop because I’m getting too honest and I’ve only known him for three days.

He puts his coffee cup down. “Be careful what you ask for.”

The words land differently than I expect. Not a warning exactly. More like an acknowledgment. Like he’s seen this road before and knows where it goes.

“Or what?” I say. And then I add the word that’s been waiting in my mouth—the one I’ve thought about at three AM, when the apartment was too quiet and the absence of anyone who gave a damn about what I did got loud.

“Or what... Daddy?”

The coffee cup cracks.

Not breaks. The handle cracks—a hairline fracture, clean, and Lachlan looks down at his hand where the ceramic gave under the pressure of his grip and then he looks at me.

Something changes in the air. In the morning light through my window, in the smell of coffee and eggs, in the inch of table between us that’s always been professional distance. It isn’t that distance anymore.

“Do NOT call me that,” he says. Quiet. Quiet enough that it runs along my spine. “Unless you’re ready for what happens next.”

My pulse does something.

“What happens next?” I ask. My voice is steady. I’m proud of that.

“Are you ready?” he says. “Or are you testing me?”

I put my mug down. I hold his eyes—gray-green and terrifyingly still—and I think about all the things he said he’s slept through.

All the places he’s clearly been. Everything he handles without anyone ever seeing him handle it.

He cracked a coffee cup with one hand from across a breakfast table because I said a word wrong.

“I’m ready,” I say.

He looks at me for a long moment. The crack in the cup. The distance between us. The morning light. “No,” he says. “You’re not yet.”

He picks up both plates, takes them to the sink, and washes them. His back is to me for exactly ninety seconds. When he turns around he’s Lachlan Burke again—professional, controlled, eyes on the window. Doing his job.

I sit at the table with my coffee going cold.

“We’re going to set some ground rules today,” he says, when I think the conversation is over. Still at the sink, still looking at the street. “This afternoon.”

“Are we?”

“Yes.” He folds the dish towel. Replaces it on the oven handle. “About the way this works. About what you can and can’t do while you’re under my protection.” He finally looks at me from across the kitchen. “And about what happened at breakfast.”

My pulse again. “I didn’t do anything.”

“No.” His eyes hold mine. Steady. “But I’m going to.”

He walks back to his laptop at the kitchen table. Opens it. Goes back to the threat assessment like the whole conversation was just another item on the morning’s list.

I sit in my chair, cold coffee, cracked mug on the counter, and I think: I am not going to survive this posting intact.

I’m not sure anymore that I want to.

His hands are still tight around his pen. He’s not as composed as he looks. I’ve spent my whole life around men who needed to look composed, and I know the difference between calm and controlled.

He’s holding himself very still.

So am I.

Outside, the city does what the city does—indifferent, continuous, not paying any attention to the small detonation that just happened over scrambled eggs in my third-floor apartment. I drink my cold coffee. Lachlan Burke types his threat assessment. The cracked cup sits on the counter between us.

I said Daddy. That’s what’s beginning.

I don’t know yet what it costs.

I’m going to find out.