Page 6 of Baby for My Ex’s Dad

“You’re staring,” he says, folding the shirt over the chair.

“You have a lot going on. Topographically.” Oh my God, Thea, shut the hell up. “The scars, I mean. Not the muscles. Well, I mean, they’re there, too, huge⁠—”

“Might I say something?”

I swallow. “I beg you to.”

Some strange low growl escapes his throat before he can stop it. For a flash, he is distracted. But then those eyes narrow on me again. “This will go faster if you focus on the task at hand.”

“Right. Right, sorry.”

The mouth-rumor again, there and gone. He sits on the arm of the sofa, which brings his eyes level with mine, and waits, and I realize the next move is mine, because I’m the one holding the washcloths, and this was, technically, on paper, my idea to accept.

The wine soaked through to his skin. There’s a faint red ghost of it across his chest. I wet a cloth with club soda, step in between his knees, and press it to his sternum. His skin is warm, which I did not expect for some reason, and the room is very quiet.

He watches my face while I work, not my hands. I give the stain a level of focus it doesn’t really require, because the alternative is the pale eyes at a distance of ten inches.

“Your party is very good. But the fountain is too much.”

I snort at that. “The fountain wasn’t mine. I fought the fountain and lost.” The laugh comes up through me before I can screen it. “You’ve been counting my ballroom all night. Exits or dollars?”

“Both.” No pause at all. “Habit. How did you know?”

“It’s my job to know these things.”

“You’re always so observant?”

I smile and shrug. “Sometimes, I’m too observant.” That’s the nice way of saying I have a near-photographic memory, a gift—or curse—for picking up languages and reading a scene before I choose a path, and right now I’m observing how his breath has slowed since I touched him.

I move the cloth along his collarbone, past the scar I’m not asking about. The no-asking is becoming a project of its own. I want to know about it. Curiosity killed the cat, but hey, I’ve got nine lives in that metaphor, so maybe it’d be okay to ask.

But there are the ink and the scars, and Klaus went pale for a reason. Lately, there have been some scary-looking men around the office, and they don’t make him go pale. In fact, he welcomes them with open arms.

So, why does this one freak him out?

The stain’s gone. It’s been gone for a while. My hand’s stopped pretending to clean and is simply resting flat on his chest, holding a damp cloth over his heart, and both of us are watching me do it.

I take a breath. “Um, I’ll work on your shirt⁠—”

His hand comes up and closes around my wrist. His thumb finds the skin over my pulse and settles there. “Thea… You should know I’m not a good man.”

I swallow hard. “I figured that out all on my own.”

There’s that flicker-hint of a smile again. “Did you?”

“The tattoos are… I’ve seen them before. On criminals. And that scar is either a bullet or one hell of a puncture wound. And you scared the shit out of my boss, so yeah. I figured it out.”

He throws his head back and laughs once, sharply. When he looks at me again, his face is different. More relaxed. More curious. Those deadly eyes take in my face, as if he’s finally seeing me. “And yet, you stayed. Do you like dangerous men?”

My voice drops without consulting me. “I just got done with a charming one. It went badly. Haven’t really tried dangerous men yet.”

“Do you want to try one now?”

The honest inventory takes a second. I’ve handled everything for everyone for as long as I can remember, and just once, for a few hours, I would like to be the thing that gets handled.

So, I ask the only thing that comes to mind. “Do dangerous men like to be in charge? Because I want one night where I don’t have to be. First names only. Nothing follows me out that door.”

He studies me for a long moment. Something in his shoulders drops by half an inch, and I get the strange sense that I’ve just handed this man a gift he did not expect to receive. “Agreed.”