Chapter 3 #2
Christ, she’d taken my breath away. There hadn’t been a day in the past sixteen years where I hadn’t thought about her at least a thousand times, yet I still managed to forget just how beautiful she was.
When she stepped off that elevator I thought I was hallucinating.
My jaw practically hit the floor as she moved down the hall like an apparition, and as she passed me, it felt like she’d reached right inside my chest and ripped my goddamn heart out, taking it with her.
The girl I’d loved with every single piece of me was all woman now.
Her hips were rounder, her tits and ass fuller than they had been.
What hadn’t changed were those mile-long legs I used to spend hours tasting every inch of.
And all that thick, long, golden hair that always reminded me of a wheatfield swaying in the breeze beneath a cloudless blue sky.
I recognized the freckles that dotted across her nose and cheekbones.
There were so many nights we’d lie in the bed of my old truck where I would trace those freckles with my finger and eyes while she mapped the stars above us.
Dakota might have loved to stargaze, but those freckles were my own personal constellations.
Aside from her beauty hitting me in the gut like a sledgehammer, it was the look on her face when she basically told me she hated me that had burned itself into the backs of my eyelids.
She thought she hid it, but I saw the pain in her eyes.
The sky blue swam with so much it left me gutted, bleeding out on concrete as she walked away. Again.
She could think I didn’t still know her well enough to see behind that mask she’d been wearing, but she was dead wrong. Sixteen years didn’t change the fact that the woman’s entire being was etched into my bones. She was a part of me. Time and space hadn’t changed that.
Although, those were thoughts for another time.
When I had a moment to myself to get lost in the past for a bit.
When Cassi came into this world, everything changed.
She healed the broken pieces of me left behind.
They might not have fit together perfectly, but it was the imperfections that made it even better.
Creating a beautiful mosaic that was somehow even stronger than before.
Dakota might have been in my bones, but my baby girl had my soul in her tiny hand and always would as long as I was drawing breath. I made a promise the very first time I held her in my arms that when she was with me my whole life would be about her.
I arched a brow, making exaggerated faces at her in the mirror, hoping to distract her from the pain as the hairbrush caught another knot.
For Christ’s sake, my girl had the thickest head of hair in existence.
“You were fighting bad guys in your dreams, huh? That’s supposed to be my job.
You tryin’ to get me fired as your protector? ”
Her giggle lit me up. “Silly Daddy.” She rolled her eyes at me like I was an idiot. “Princesses save themselves. That’s why they’re so strong.”
My eyes went wide. “Who taught you that, baby girl?”
“Auntie Lennon and Marigold.”
One corner of my mouth hooked up as I chuckled.
“Of course.” It couldn’t have been anyone else.
My best friend Pope’s woman might love it when he treated her like a queen, but she would also shove every single person she loved out of the way of a bullet if it meant taking it in their place.
When his niece, Marigold, was taken, it was because of Lennon that we’d been able to get her back before anything seriously bad could happen to her.
She didn’t believe in sitting back and waiting for someone else to do the protecting, and now that Marigold was living with them full time, Lennon was teaching her the same lessons. I couldn’t think of a better example for my girl.
“Auntie Lennon’s right. Princesses don’t need anyone else to save them, but how about you let your old man do the job for a little while longer, yeah?”
She turned on the stool she was standing on to face me. Her eyes were squinted as she tapped her chin in thought. My heart still jumped in my chest every time she looked into my eyes. “Would it keep you from bein’ sad?”
Christ, my daughter had a way of cutting me off at the knees without even trying.
I never knew something so little could have a heart so big.
Truth was, I didn’t have much faith in the world before she came into it.
I’d seen some nasty shit and lived through worse.
But then she’d say something like that and remind me that there had to be more good than I thought if she existed.
“Yeah, baby. Being your protector for a few more years would keep me from being sad.”
“Okay then.” She lifted her shoulder and spun back around, simple as that. Conversation over. “Can you do sparkly braids, Daddy? It always makes Poppy happy when my hair’s sparkly.”
She was speaking about Pops. When she was about a year old she’d dubbed him Poppy, and that was what he’d been to her and only her ever since.
The irony wasn’t lost on me that my daughter’s hair was sifting through fingers that were covered in tattoos, most of the ink a tie to the club I’d given and taken blood for.
If someone told me seven years ago that these hands would be winding his daughter’s hair into her favorite braids, then spraying them down with fucking aerosol glitter, I would have laughed in their face.
But the bachelor/biker esthetic I’d lived with most my life had been overrun by pink unicorns and glitter rainbows, stuffed animals, and every color of hair tie and clip in existence. And I didn’t give a single fuck.
“Yeah, baby girl. We’ll do sparkles for Poppy.” Because she wasn’t wrong, they’d definitely make him happy.