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Chapter TwelveElijahI hadn’t slept in well over thirty-six hours, but I wasn’t tired. I was riding a high that I hadn’t ever felt before.
Even her dad glaring at me couldn’t bring me down.
“So you just knocked her up and left?”
“No, sir. I acted like a dick, left to clear my head so that I could come back to Sadie the man she deserves, and then discovered she was pregnant.”
“He also made sure his brother was watching over her,” MeeMee added, pointing at Jackson, who waved.
“We’ve met!” he shouted across the waiting room we were all standing in, drinking shitty coffee.
“And what are your intentions?” Ned growled.
Seeing as how he was sitting down, I took the chair next to him, not wanting to look like I was trying to intimidate him. Talking to him at the same level was more respectful.
“Sir, if I asked your daughter to marry me right now, I think she’d try to kill me.” Ned snorted and nodded in agreement. “That doesn’t mean that it’s not in the cards, though. It just means I need to explain myself to her, and then we need to have a long discussion about where I see us heading as a couple, and now with the baby, too.”
Hearing a “Psssst,” coming from across the room, I glanced over and saw MeeMee giving me the thumbs up.
“There’s also the matter of her safety,” I added, watching his cheeks turn pink. “I wasn’t aware of everything that was going on while I was in Florida, but what I know now has made me think about how I can keep her safe.”
“She’s moving to Austin,” he sniffed, ignoring his mother’s growl. “My place is safe—”
“And in the public eye,” I pointed out. “While I was away, I did some work on a small house I own in Sarasota Bay so that I could bring Sadie there one day. It’s hidden by trees, but I had security installed, and I own the land it’s on, so I had a company install some cameras and sensors in it as well.”
Ned looked at me assessingly, and I got the feeling that nothing went unnoticed. “Know why I didn’t tell you everything as soon as my men found out where you were?”
“I’ve got a lot of possible answers floating around my head for that, but I can’t pick just one.”
“That’s because they’re probably all wrong.” Leaning in closer to me, he held my eyes. “I know what it’s like to let someone you love down by not being there to protect them from that fuck wad. When I found out from my men what’d happened, I knew you needed to get your shit together so that you could come back with a clear head. No man looks at someone the way you look at my daughter if they don’t feel like she hung the moon, so there was no doubt in my mind that you weren’t trying to come back to her a full man.
“I needed to let you focus on that while also making sure you didn’t come back before you were ready. Only a man who’s fully with it can keep his woman safe. You had your brother watching out for her, but I knew you’d do something dumb like come back before you were ready unless I showed you that I had eyes on her, too.”
There was no way in hell that I could pull my eyes away from him to see what the others thought of this news.
“That’s why you sent me files with just enough information in them, but not the most important?”
He nodded. “I can understand someone needing time to get their head around something. When Sadie’s mom died, even though we weren’t together, I lost it. She meant the world to me, and it was hard to cope with, so I took off without warning anyone after the kids decided to stay in the UK. It doesn’t work for everyone, but time alone to come to terms with it worked for me, and I’m seeing that it worked for you. All I’m asking is if you ever need to do that again—”
“I won’t.”
“—that you explain it to her first, and let her know what’s going on inside you. Sadie isn’t a stranger to doing that, so she’ll understand.”
Blowing out a breath, I had to admit he was right. What he was asking and saying made sense, and it wasn’t something that I hadn’t thought about doing not long after I’d left, except I didn’t have my cell, and I didn’t know any of my family’s numbers off by heart. It was pure luck that I’d texted Jackson before I left to ask him to watch over Sadie, otherwise…
Fuck me, I’d have left her on her own.
“Get those thoughts out of your head, son,” Ned muttered. “She wouldn’t have ever been alone, even if you hadn’t had your brother come and babysit her. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t a dumb thing to do.”
