Page 52 of Her Honorable Hero

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It had takeneverything Miranda could do to put Griff off the previous night. He’d wanted to talk, but she’d insisted the migraine had wiped her out. He’d been great making breakfast, going out and putting gas in her SUV, and taking Livvie to the Little Handprints Daycare this morning. She didn’t deserve him. She got into work at ten a.m., knowing the dreaded blocked call would be coming. It always did after the flowers.

Loathing coated her tongue, making her gag as the phone rang. But she was going to finish this, once and for all. He was not going to steal her honor. Not anymore.

“Let’s get this over with.” she answered.

“Is that any way to greet your father?”

“Heinrich, what do you want? You’re barely hanging on at DHS, just one more fuck-up and they’re going to boot your ass. You’re behind two mortgage payments, and your third wife left you. Rumor has it you miss the yippy dog she took with her. Your life is shit.” She waited a beat for emphasis. “As it should be. I’ll give you a tip, you can’t afford to be sending me flowers. You probably can’t even afford the blocked number upgrade on your phone. So what do you want?”

“Randa—” his voice was sickly sweet.

“Don’t call me that,” she cut him off, her voice ice. That nickname was reserved for Hope.

“I see you’ve been doing your homework. Had one of your husband’s little SEAL buddies look me up?”

“Could be,” she answered noncommittally. She wasn’t going to admit to a damn thing, but if he thought she wasn’t capable of finding out about his pathetic little life, he was sorely mistaken. Granted, she did end up tapping a friend of hers who had quit TAID and opened her own cyber-security company, but still, a lot of the stuff she’d discovered on her own.

“Still, it’s nice to have this much of a conversation with you, normally you just hang up.”

He was right. Eleven months ago when she’d gotten the first arrangement of sunflowers in the red vase, she’d gotten a call from the blocked number and picked up. Then she’d heard his voice and ice dripped down her spine. She’d immediately hung up. He’d called until she’d powered off her phone. Bastard had never left a voice mail, thank God.

“What are you talking about, Heinrich? We had a conversation when you hunted me down three years ago.”

“Can’t you find it in your heart to call me dad?” he wheedled.

Miranda almost choked at the very thought. “You’re lucky my mother raised me to be so polite, otherwise I wouldn’t be calling you Heinrich.”

“Yeah, Olivia was quite a woman, wasn’t she?”

Miranda slammed the flat of her hand on her desk. “Don’t you dare say her name.”

“I was paying her a compliment,” he whined.

“If you want this conversation to continue, Heinrich, you will never say her name again, are we clear?”

There was no response.

“Answer me.”

“Can’t you at least call me Roger?” His voice grated on her nerves.

Dammit, he was a bellyacher. She hated that.

“Heinrich, what do you want?” She enunciated every word clearly.

“I just want to spend time with you. Is that so hard to believe?”

She vaguely remembered him saying the same thing to her when she’d been at Griff’s house three years ago. She’d replayed that time in her head, and realized that he must have staked out Griff’s duplex and waited for her nurse to leave before approaching.

“What do you want?” She repeated her question, her voice was flat.

Had she asked him that question three years ago, or had she been grateful to see him? It killed her that the conversation with him was still fuzzy around the edges. He’d visited her at Griff’s house, right after she’d taken pain medication. He must have been keeping track of her schedule, because he came between the time when Griff left in the morning and before her nurse, Lilah arrived. So when her father had kept knocking on the door, she was totally out of it.

Before getting pictures from Ellen’s cyber-security company, Miranda just had a dim shadow of Roger Heinrich’s face seen through Griff’s screen door. She remembered him praising her for saving Hope. Vaguely, she remembered him gushing a lot about how wonderful she was.

Now it disgusted her to realize that deep down it had once been her heart’s secret desire that he love her, and there he’d been, giving it to her. Miranda remembered crying at Griff’s door, and it was when her father had tried to open the door and hug her, that all hell broke loose. She wasn’t a four-year-old wishing that her daddy loved her. She might be concussed and drugged but she remembered this was the bastard who’d belted and kicked her mom and railed at her for not having ‘aborted the thing’. Telling her mom that the brat should never have been born.