Chapter Fifteen
Laney
I wake slowly, awareness creeping in through layers of contentment I’ve never experienced before.
The first thing I notice is warmth—not just from the blankets, but the delicious, lingering heat of remembered pleasure. The second thing I notice is tenderness. Everywhere.
My lips feel swollen from kissing. My breasts are sensitive where his mouth worshipped them for what felt like hours.
Between my thighs… Heat floods my face at the memory of his tongue, his careful tusks teasing the sensitive skin, the devastating bliss he wrung from my body over and over until I almost forgot my own name.
And then what I did to him. The taste of him still lingers on my tongue—salt and musk and… Ryder. The way he looked at me with such reverence when I took him in my mouth, the sounds he made, the way his hands clutched my hair as though he never wanted to let go.
Oh God. We really did that.
The physical evidence is everywhere: rumpled sheets, my clothes scattered across the floor where he stripped them away with reverent hands, the masculine scent of him lingering on my skin.
I should probably feel awkward or uncertain about what happened last night. Instead, I feel… powerful. Desired. Cherished in a way I’ve never experienced before.
The fire has burned low, its glow washing the room in soft amber light.
Ryder is crouched in front of the hearth, bare to the waist, adding another log with unhurried movements.
The poker clanks softly against the grate.
Hamlet lies curled nearby, positioned as though he’s guarding us both, though he’s lightly snoring.
I should get up. Put on clothes. Face him in the morning light and see if what happened last night changes things between us.
But part of me wants to stay here, wrapped in blankets that smell like him, holding onto this feeling for just a little longer.
“You didn’t have to get up so early.” I don’t know how I manage to sound so unconcerned. Inside, my desire is already rising as I notice that a few of his braids are so messy they’ll need to be re-plaited, and there are small half-moon cuts on his shoulder.
I did that, and I can’t find an iota of embarrassment about it.
“Wanted to.” He sets down the poker and rises in one fluid movement. Hamlet snorts in protest at whoever had the gall to wake him. “Besides, someone needed to make sure the fire didn’t go out. Can’t have you freezing after I worked so hard to keep you warm last night.”
The suggestive comment makes me blush to my roots, and his knowing smile says he notices. He crosses to me, and suddenly the room feels smaller, the air charged with the same electricity that crackled between us last night.
“Christmas Eve morning,” he says softly, his eyes warm as they trace my face. “Thought you might want coffee before we tackle the day.”
He kneels beside the mattress, close enough that I can smell the faint mix of smoke and clean skin. For a heartbeat, neither of us moves. The air feels thick with everything we’re not saying.
“How do you feel?” he asks quietly, one hand coming up to cup my face. His thumb brushes across my lips—lips that are still kiss-swollen from his attention.
“Tender,” I admit, and watch heat flare in his eyes. “But good. Really good.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear.” He leans closer, his forehead resting against mine. “I worried I might have been too… intense.”
“You were… what they write about in romances.” I reach up to touch his chest, feeling his heart hammering beneath my palm. “Everything was beyond amazing. I’ve never… it’s never been like that for me before.”
His arm tightens around me. “Never?”
I shake my head. “Never. The way you touched me, the way you made me feel…” I trail off, not sure how to put into words the magnitude of what he gave me last night. “I didn’t know it could be like that.”
“Good.” His voice rumbles with satisfaction. He shifts, cups the side of my head, and brushes a kiss across my temple. His breath stirs my hair as he speaks. “I want to be the one who shows you. The one who makes you feel cherished and wanted and absolutely perfect.”
“You do,” I whisper. “You make me feel all of that.”
He kisses me then, slow and deep, and I can taste coffee on his lips.
His tusks graze my cheek as he deepens the kiss, careful even in passion.
The rumble starts low in his chest—that purr I’m quickly becoming addicted to.
It vibrates through me where our bodies touch, soothing and arousing at once.
When we break apart, we’re both breathing hard.
“Come sit with me,” he says, leading me to the couch. Hamlet immediately waddles over, determined not to be left out. Peanut squawks commentary from his cage: “Kiss, kiss!”
We settle on the worn couch, Ryder pulling me against his side. Hamlet plants himself firmly between us and the fire. The domestic normalcy of it—sitting together in comfortable silence, his arm around me, the animals settled nearby—feels surreal after the intensity of last night.
It also feels perfect. Natural. Like maybe this is what I’ve been missing my whole life without knowing it.
But as we sit here, wrapped in the peaceful aftermath of last night and this quiet morning, something shifts in my chest. A restlessness I can’t quite name. The contentment is real, but underneath it, there’s a question that’s been buried for so long I barely recognize it as mine.
It’s strange how being truly happy for the first time makes you notice all the places you’ve been broken.
“What’s going on in that beautiful head of yours?” Ryder asks, his thumb brushing my temple. “It feels like you’re pulling away, even while you’re right here.”
I hesitate, not sure where this is coming from or how to put it into words. “I’ve been thinking about something. Someone, actually.”
“Tell me,” he urges, his hand stilling on my shoulder.
I pick at a loose thread on my thermal shirt, trying to find the courage. “My father. I’ve been thinking about my father.”
Ryder goes still but doesn’t interrupt, just waits with a patient attention that makes me feel safe enough to continue.
“He left when I was eight,” I murmur. “Just… walked away one day and never came back.”
“What do you remember about him?”
The question is gentle, non-judgmental. Not asking why I’m bringing this up now, just… listening.
“He used to call me Sunshine,” I whisper, and the word catches in my throat. “It was our thing, you know? He’d wake me up every morning saying, ‘Rise and shine, my little Sunshine.’ Made me feel special. Like I was the best part of his day.”
“You were,” Ryder says with quiet certainty.
“How can you know that?”
“Because I’ve seen how you light up a room. How you care for every creature that crosses your path. How you fight for what matters even when you’re scared.” His hand finds mine. “A father would have to be blind not to see that in his daughter.”
The words hit deeper than he probably intended. “What if I remembered it wrong? What if he wasn’t actually that good of a father and I’ve just… built him up in my memory?”
“Tell me more about him,” Ryder says. “A real memory. Something specific.”
I close my eyes, reaching back through two decades of trying not to remember.
“It was maybe a week before he left. I’d fallen off my bike and scraped my knee pretty badly.
I was crying, and he scooped me up and carried me inside.
Instead of just cleaning the cut and putting on a band-aid, he sat with me for an hour, telling me stories about brave little girls who overcame obstacles.
” My voice cracks. “He said I was the bravest little girl he knew. His brave little Sunshine.”
Ryder’s watching my face carefully. “What happened next?” Ryder asks quietly. “After that memory?”
“I don’t know exactly. One day he was there, and then…” I trail off, trying to piece together fragments. “Mom said he left. He didn’t want to be a father anymore. That we were better off without him.”
“Do you remember anything else about that time?”
I close my eyes, trying to remember instead of just accepting the version I’d been told for so long. And suddenly, details I’d forgotten start crystallizing.
“Mom packed us up really quickly,” I say slowly. “I remember being confused because she said we were moving across the country to Los Angeles for a ‘fresh start,’ but we left so many of my things behind. Things Dad had given me.”
“How quickly?”
“A day? Maybe two? I was upset because I didn’t get to say goodbye to my friends, and when I asked why we had to leave so fast, Mom said…” I pause, the memory hitting me like cold water. “She said Dad would probably try to follow us if we didn’t get far away quickly enough.”
Ryder goes very still. “She said he would try to follow you?”
“Yeah, but she made it sound like a bad thing. Like he’d try to hurt us or cause trouble.
” But even as I say it, I’m remembering the way my father had been with me—gentle, protective, loving.
The man who called me Sunshine and made me feel like I was the center of his world.
The disconnect is jarring. “But that doesn’t sound like the dad I remember, does it? ”
“No,” Ryder says carefully. “It doesn’t.”
Something shifts in my chest as I keep talking, the memories coming faster now.
“Did your dad know you were moving?”
I think back, painstakingly searching the memories.
“I don’t think so. Mom said we couldn’t tell him because it would ‘complicate things.’ I thought that meant he’d be mean about it or try to stop us out of spite.
” My voice cracks. “Or maybe he would have tried to stop us because he loved me and didn’t want to lose his daughter. ”
The tears come—hot and unexpected. Not just sadness, but anger. White-hot fury at my mother for maybe, possibly, stealing twenty years from me. For taking away a doting father and making me believe he didn’t want me anymore.
“What if he came to pick me up that Saturday for his visitation and we were just… gone?” I whisper. “What if he showed up at our house and found it empty? What if he had no idea where we went?”
“Exactly, Sunshine. What if he spent years looking for you?”
I press my hands to my face, trying to process this new, terrible possibility. Ryder pulls me against his chest, one hand stroking my hair while I cry into his bare shoulder.
“There’s a term for this. I watched a movie about it,” he says quietly after a while. “Parental alienation. When one parent turns a child against the other parent through manipulation and lies.”
The clinical term makes it real in a way that speculation didn’t. My stomach plummets as I pull back to look at him. “You think that’s what happened?”
“I don’t know, sweet. But the pieces you’re describing—the sudden move, the stories about him not wanting you, preventing you from saying goodbye, scaring you by saying he might hurt you if he followed you—those fit the pattern.”
“If it’s true…” I have to stop; the enormity of it is overwhelming. “If it’s true, then my whole childhood was built on lies. Everything I believed about myself, about why I wasn’t worth loving…”
“You are worth loving,” Ryder says fiercely, framing my face with his hands. “No matter what happened with your parents, that doesn’t change. You hear me? You are worth everything.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I’ve seen who you are. The way you care for every animal here, the way you’ve fought for your dreams even when everything felt hopeless. That’s not someone who isn’t worth loving. That’s someone extraordinary.”
I want to argue, to catalog every flaw and fracture that makes me unworthy. But the conviction in his gaze steals my protest, and for the first time in a long while, I let myself believe him.
“I need to know,” I say. “I need to find out what really happened.”
“Then we’ll find out. Together.”
“How? I don’t even know where he is.”
“We start with what you remember. His name, his last address. People leave trails, especially online.” He brushes away my tears with his thumbs. “When the power’s stable, we can search. Find current addresses, phone numbers. Whatever you need.”
The thought terrifies and thrills me in equal measure. “What if he doesn’t want to hear from me?”
“Then at least you’ll know for sure. But Laney…
” His eyes are serious, intent. “The man who raised a daughter like you? Who taught her to care for every living thing and fight for what matters? I can’t believe he just walked away without a damn good reason.
And if your mother did this to both of you…
” He takes a breath. “Then he’s probably been hoping for this call for twenty years. ”
Hope blooms in my chest, fragile but real. “You think so?”
“I know so.”
We sit for a long moment, holding each other while this new possibility reshapes everything I thought I knew. Hamlet snorts and shifts closer, somehow sensing the emotional weight of the moment. Peanut, for once, is quiet.
“Will you help me?” I ask finally. “When we search online, when I make the call—if I make the call—will you stay with me?”
“I’m not going anywhere.” He pulls me closer. “Whatever you need, however you need to do this—I’m here.”
The promise settles into my bones, solid and sure. For the first time in my life, I don’t flinch away from someone offering to stay.
We head to the barn and spend a couple of hours tending to the animals. Their unconditional affection is exactly the therapy I need right now.
We spend the rest of the morning quietly together. When the power flickers back on around noon, Ryder helps me set up my laptop at the kitchen table. We search methodically—David Hillman, cross-referenced with my old town.
We find three possibilities. One by one, we narrow them down using addresses I half-remember, public records, Facebook profiles with carefully limited information.
“This one,” I say finally, my hands shaking as I point at the screen. “David Hillman. Age fifty-three, moved to Sacramento fifteen years ago. That’s him. That has to be him.”
Ryder pulls up a phone number associated with the address. “Do you want to call now?”
“No.” I shake my head quickly. “I need time to think about what I’ll say. Tomorrow. I’ll call tomorrow.”
“Christmas morning?”
“Yeah.” My voice is steady despite the nerves underneath. “It feels right somehow. Like… giving myself the gift of truth.”
Ryder pulls me close, and we sit in silence, the weight of tomorrow settling over us both. The cabin feels smaller suddenly, more intimate, as if the walls are drawing in to hold just the two of us and this fragile hope.
“Whatever you discover tomorrow,” Ryder says quietly, his lips against my temple, “you won’t be facing it alone.”
I lean into him, letting his certainty become mine. “I know.”