by Eva Ashwood
He says it like he’s talking to a wayward kid that snuck out after curfew or something, and I glare up at him, immediately getting defensive.
“I was just curious,” I tell him. “You disappear all the time, and for all I know you’re running drugs or something.”
True to form, Rory just chuckles. “Come on,” he says, shaking his head. “Come with me.”
My eyebrows shoot up immediately.
I half expected him to make me turn around and head right back to the house, or lock me in the car if he wasn’t going to take me there himself. Especially since I snuck out and followed him, getting all up in his business when I’m supposed to be at their house unless I have an escort or whatever.
But I’m not about to question it. I don’t want him to send me back to the house, and this might be a chance to learn more about him. So I follow, glancing around at the neighborhood we’re in and taking it in more than I did when I was following him.
It’s different from the place I grew up in, and even different from the area where the guys’ house is. This is more homey, a place where people probably raise families. Where their kids can play in the yards and swim in little backyard pools. It’s like one of those neighborhoods from a sitcom or something, and I’ve never really spent much time anywhere like this before.
Rory walks toward a nice house, a little smaller than the ones around it, but well-maintained all the same. There’s a little garden out front, and flowers in the window boxes. The front door is painted a sunny shade of yellow, and it looks warm and inviting.
I hesitate as we walk up the driveway, my eyes narrowing, and Rory turns around to grin at me.
“You wanted to see where I’m going.” He gestures to the yellow front door. “This is it. Come on, Hurricane, you’re not chickening out now, are you?”
I glare at him because his smug grin makes me want to hit him in the face, but of course that’s not a new feeling. He’s always saying the exact right thing to get under my skin, and I let out a huffed breath and roll my eyes.
“Yeah, yeah. I’m coming,” I shoot back, and he just smirks at me and then goes up to the door.
I wonder if he’s going to knock or if he has a key. What the hell is this place? For all the reasons I try to come up with for Rory to be coming here, I can’t wrap my head around who or what might be on the other side of that door.
When it opens before he has a chance to do anything more than step onto the front stoop, I’m surprised by what I see. Or who I see, I guess. Somehow, the last thing I expected was a gorgeous woman with rich red hair, standing there with a grin on her face.
“It’s about time you got here,” she says, hands on her hips for a second. “I was about to send out a search party. In case you got lost.”
Rory rolls his eyes, but there’s clear affection in his face as he looks at her. She looks about the same age as him, just a couple of years over twenty or so, and her smile is bright as she reaches out to hug him.
To my surprise, Rory lets her, and I can feel myself bristling. I don’t want to, because it’s no fucking business of mine who Rory wants to hug. It’s his life, and he doesn’t owe me anything. I don’t have any connection to him other than basically being his captive, and I don’t want to.
But that doesn’t explain what we’re doing here. If this is a hookup or something, then why the hell would Rory have brought me along? Is he showing off? Making it clear that even if I don’t want him—and I don’t—he has other women who do?
I can feel the annoyance building, and I want to demand that he tell me what the hell is going on, but I feel like I can’t say anything, standing there listening to the two of them banter lightly before the woman turns to me.
“Who’s your friend, Rory?” she asks, head tipped to one side.
“This is Mercy,” Rory says. “She’s hanging out with me today.”
The woman gives me the same sort of sunny smile she gave him, and I feel a little bit bad for not liking her. It’s not her fault Rory’s an asshole and I’m confused.
“Hey. It’s nice to meet you, Mercy,” she says, reaching out to shake my hand. “I didn’t even know Rory had other friends, so it’s nice to see him with some company for once.”
I blink in surprise, because Rory’s never really alone, considering he lives with Sloan and Levi. And he’s got a bunch of buddies in the Black Rose gang. But maybe she doesn’t know about them? I have no idea what to say, so I just smile awkwardly back and follow the two of them into the house.
The front room is nice and airy, and the furniture looks comfortable and lived in. A few toys are scattered here and there, and I frown, really confused now.
There’s a little shriek of happiness from down the hall, and suddenly, a blur of a little girl comes barreling into the room and throws herself into Rory’s arms. She looks like she’s maybe three or four, small and obviously delighted to see him.
And Rory just scoops her right up with a whoop, swinging her around and dropping kisses to the top of her head and her cheeks. They both laugh together as I watch, staring in shock.
Finally, Rory turns back to me, his eyes bright. “Mercy,” he says. “This is Piper. My daughter.”
18
My daughter.
It takes a second for those words to process in my head, and I just gape at him in the meantime, probably looking like an idiot while I try to wrap my mind around it.
This is so not what I was expecting when I thought he was keeping a secret, leaving the house on his own all the time. An affair with a gorgeous woman? Some kind of criminal activity? Sure.
But… a daughter?
I’m stunned, and I know it shows on my face.
What I hope is less apparent is the way I feel like my ovaries might have just exploded. Because watching him hold a fucking kid like that, like she means the world to him, somehow makes his tattooed, built hotness even fucking hotter. I’m not even sure how that’s possible, but there it is. I’ve never even been a baby crazy kind of girl. Plenty of the girls I went to high school with were all about babies and men with children and thinking they were sexy as hell, but I never really got it.
Until right this moment.
Now I can kind of see where they were coming from, and that’s as much of a surprise as the rest of this is.
The redheaded woman laughs softly and steps forward. “I’m Jen, by the way,” she says, politely choosing to ignore the fact that my mouth is open wide enough for a bat to fly into it. “Figured I should introduce myself since Rory loses sight of everything, including his manners, when Piper’s around.”
“Nice to meet you.” I shake her hand a little robotically, still trying to regain my footing.
She grins at me, her expression friendly and open. When we both turn back to look at Rory and Piper, she shakes her head a little. “You know, it’s really not fair for you to be such a hot dad. You’re going to give someone an aneurysm one of these days.”
Something about the way she says that, and the way she talks to him in general, makes me feel like she’s not interested in Rory herself. It’s playful and teasing, but not flirtatious at all. More like how roommates or very close friends might talk to each other, but there’s nothing more than that there.
I clamp my jaw shut, refusing to either confirm or deny Rory being a hot dad, but there’s something about the way Jen looks at me that makes me positive she already knows how I feel. And that’s… fine, I guess. I mean, objectively, Rory is a delicious fucking specimen of manhood, so denying that would be a waste of time.
“And your name is Mercy, Rory said?” she asks, continuing on with the conversation. She’s doing one hundred percent of the heavy lifting in this interaction since I’m still too shell-shocked to offer up any conversation of my own.
I nod, trying to snap myself out of the surprised stupor I’m in.
“How do you two know each other?” Jen looks between the two of us, and I glance over at Rory to see what he’s going to
say. I’m not exactly going to lay out how he and his friends basically kidnapped me in front of his daughter.
“We met through Black Rose stuff,” he says and leaves it at that.
Jen just nods knowingly and doesn’t ask anything else. So clearly she knows something about what he does and who his friends are, but it doesn’t seem to be a topic they really discuss in much depth. Interesting.
She leans in and gives Piper a kiss on the cheek. “Do you think you can hold down the fort for a bit while I run out?” she asks, glancing up at Rory. “Amanda wanted to get lunch at that new sushi place downtown today.”
“Yeah, of course.” He shifts his daughter on his hip, grinning. “I’ve got it.”
“You’re a gem.” Jen reaches out to pinch his cheek.
He gives her a look and bats her away with his free hand. “You’re a menace.”
“Oh, stop. You’d be lost without me.” Jen turns to look at me, a grin stretching her features. “Don’t take any of his crap, okay? He always likes to pretend he knows everything, but that’s just an act.”
I can’t help but grin back at her. I like her already. “I won’t,” I promise. “I’m getting pretty good at seeing through him.”
She nods approvingly and then dashes out, leaving the two of us—or rather, the three of us—alone.
Piper blinks at me once her mother leaves, and I blink back at her, not really sure how to interact with her. My experience with kids is pretty much nil, and I’m more nervous about having a conversation with her than I was about getting into the ring with Baldy that night at the Black Rose training gym.
Luckily, Rory steps in to fill the silence, giving the little girl a squeeze and then putting her down.
“Piper, this is my friend Mercy,” he says. “She’s going to hang out with us today. Are you okay with that?”
She nods, looking a little shy but peering up at me curiously. I can see Rory in her for sure—in the way her eyes gleam, and how she isn’t afraid of some stranger in her home. She smiles a little and offers a wave before sticking her thumb in her mouth, and I can’t help but smile back.
She’s adorable, and it’s so obvious that she loves Rory and he loves her right back.
“Lunch time, I think. No sushi like your mom, but we’ll see what we can get for you, okay?”
Piper nods enthusiastically, and they head to the kitchen. I follow a few steps behind, still trying to get my brain to catch up with everything that’s happening here.
Rory has a daughter.
One he spends a lot of time with, if he’s coming here every time he leaves the house on his own. I was quick to assume it was something shady, some gang business or whatever, but instead it’s something so completely… wholesome.
Fucking weird.
I watch him rummage through the refrigerator for a second and come out with some milk and a block of cheese. “How do we feel about mac and cheese?” he asks, addressing Piper, though his eyes flick to me.
“Yes!” the little girl says, bouncing excitedly on the chair she’s climbed up onto.
Rory lifts an eyebrow at me, and I nod. Apparently I’m a part of the we now. “Sure. I haven’t eaten lunch yet.”
“Too busy sneaking around to eat, I guess,” he says, but his grin is teasing. He doesn’t seem all that upset about it, and I can’t quite figure out why. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, for him to get on my case for following him here.
But he doesn’t. Maybe he just doesn’t want to fight in front of his daughter.
He moves around the kitchen with the same confidence and ease he has in the kitchen back at the guys’ house, and I watch as he fills a pot with water and puts it on the stove before hunting down a cheese grater to start shredding the block of cheddar.
Watching him cook does nothing to make me less turned on than I already am, and desire simmers under the surface of my skin, no matter how hard I try to ignore it.
This is a different side of him, and yet it isn’t at the same time. He’s always been sort of domestic, usually in the kitchen, making food or coffee, leaning against the counter and cracking jokes. I see him in there more than I see the other two, and I realize that I’ve sort of been thinking of it as his domain.
While he works, he makes faces at Piper and asks her questions about her day.
“Mr. Twinkle got…” Piper frowns like she’s searching for a word. “Permoted?”
“Promoted,” Rory corrects with a smile. “That’s good for Mr. Twinkle. Isn’t it, Mercy?”
I nod, impressed that the little girl knows a word like that, even if she said it wrong. “Very impressive. What did he get promoted to? And from?”
She’s still shy when she looks at me, but it’s clear she’s happy we’re engaging with her about who or whatever Mr. Twinkle is. “Boss to Big Boss,” she says. “He works hard.”
Rory nods solemnly. “Then it’s important that he got bumped up. I hope you offered him a generous raise to go with his new title.”
“Six cookies,” she says, beaming and holding up her fingers to show us.
“Six? Dang. Maybe I should think about switching careers if working for you pays that well. I’m on a three cookie salary.”
I can’t help but laugh as he teases her, grinning while his hands never stop moving. It’s so clear that he loves his daughter. He’s always silly and playful, but there’s a different edge to it here, more loving than how he acts around the rest of us. Which makes sense.
It’s a disaster for me, because while I sit here and watch, chiming in when asked something, I realize that the confusing pull I feel toward him isn’t just sexual attraction anymore. That was hard enough to deal with, but now I’m actually starting to fucking like this guy.
Shit.
He turns to add the cheese to the simmering pot on the stove, and I can’t help myself. My curiosity is killing me.
“So, what’s the story here?” I ask.
I half expect Rory to make a joke or say something flippant to deflect, but when he turns back, he’s giving me a considering look. “Hold that thought,” he says. “And watch this pot while you’re at it.”
“I can’t cook for shi—” I cut myself off, glancing over at Piper. “Anything. I can’t cook for anything.”
“You don’t have to cook.” He shakes his head, grinning. “Just make sure it doesn’t boil over. If the bubbles start going, turn it down. Stir it a little. I have absolute faith in you, Hurricane.” He winks and steps away from the stove, ruffling Piper’s hair as he moves past where she’s sitting and then disappears into the living room.
I grumble under my breath but walk over to the stove and peer into the pot of cheese sauce. It smells good, and I give it a slight stir. Piper seems content to hum to herself at the table, her little legs swinging as we both wait for her father to get back.
It’s only a minute or so later when Rory comes back, arms full of coloring books with a huge box of crayons balanced on top. He presents them to Piper who claps enthusiastically and reaches to take the box from him, setting it on the table. Rory puts the coloring books down on the table too and then sweeps a silly bow, eyes bright.
“Your entertainment, Your Highness,” he says, dropping a kiss to the top of her head before he comes back over to where he left me with the pot. As he walks behind me, sliding into the space between me and the island, his hand brushes the small of my back, just lightly enough that I can’t tell if it was an accident or not.
I jump slightly and go back to stirring, cheeks turning red.
“It’s fine,” I say, a little defensive on instinct. “It’s not burned.”
His smile softens a bit, and he shoos me away from the pot, taking the spoon and stirring the sauce himself. “I trusted you could manage not to burn the house down for a minute, Hurricane, don’t worry.”
I roll my eyes at him but don’t go back to my seat at the island. Instead, I lean against the counter, my gaze flicking from Piper, who is happily coloring
in one of the books, back to Rory.
He catches the look and shrugs a shoulder. “Jen and I dated for a while, but it wasn’t anything really serious,” he says, answering a question I had before but wasn’t going to ask out loud. “She’s great, really great, but it just wasn’t going to work out. But when she got pregnant, I promised I was going to be there for her no matter what she decided to do. I went with her to all her appointments, sat in the car if she wanted to go in alone. Bought her so many weird fucking foods when she was having those pregnancy cravings.”
“And you never thought about getting married or anything?” I ask. I don’t mean it in a judgmental way at all, I’m just curious.
Rory seems to recognize that, and he shakes his head. “Nah. I mean, we thought about it for a hot second, but it wasn’t going to be worth it. We don’t love each other, you know? And a kid deserves to see their parents really in love, even if that’s with other people and not each other.”
“Oh,” I reply, surprised at the sudden bout of seriousness from him.
I’ve only seen him without the teasing glint in his eyes a few times since I’ve met him. He speaks with gravity and conviction, like it’s something he and Jen had a lot of long talks about, and it makes me see him in yet another light. It’s been a big day for surprises, and seeing this side of Rory is… interesting, to say the least.
He shrugs again, gazing down at the cheese sauce as he stirs. “I look out for them. Jen and Piper. And I’m in Piper’s life and make sure they have everything they need.”
“And the Black Rose stuff?” I ask because I can’t help myself. “Jen seemed to know a little bit about it, at least.”
“Yeah. She knows I’m in the gang,” Rory answers. “No way around that, really. But I try to keep distance between that business and Jen. Just to keep her insulated from that life and everything that goes along with it. She has her own stuff going on, and I don’t want her to get mixed up with this kind of shit.”
That’s fair, and honestly kind of noble. I furrow my brow and find myself watching Rory as he finishes cooking, dumping the cooked pasta in the cheese sauce and adding some extra seasonings. He tastes a bite off the spoon and inhales through his mouth when it burns his tongue, and I snort a laugh, shaking my head at him.