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When his eyes dart away to the back door as someone else joins us, I make my decision. The water is perfect on my skin, and I have no idea how it stays so cool with the hot sun beating down on it all day.
I feel refreshed and slightly cleaner from my hours of hard work getting the clubhouse ready for the party when I resurface.
I grin in Boomer’s direction, splashing him in the face when he frowns.
“What?”
He angles his head to the left, and I lift my eyes. With arms crossed over his chest, Harley stands on the edge of the pool, looking as irritated and angry as he did the very first time he heard me singing to Aria.
I want to hold my breath, dive back under the water, and stay there until he leaves. I was just feeling a little freer, a little more normal, and he has to show up and ruin that amazing mood.
“Can I speak with you?”
“Sure,” I tell him, feeling a little petty as I give him a fake smile. “As soon as I’m done in the pool, I’ll come find you.”
I’ll never get out of this pool now. I move my feet and flutter my hands over the top of the water to keep treading.
“Now would be better.”
I want to argue, but the look on Boomer’s face tells me he’s just as uncomfortable now as he was yesterday before excusing himself and going back outside to wait for me.
“You don’t have to go,” Boomer whispers as I start heading toward the stairs.
“I do,” I tell him.
“Not after the way he upset you yesterday. You don’t owe him anything.”
“I’ll be back,” I promise as I swim past.
I do feel like I owe him something. I’m living in his house, and as much as I tried to make it seem like a job when I was speaking to him earlier and trying to draw thicker lines between us, I love his little girl. I don’t see the time I get to spend with her as work. To me, it’s a blessing, and I don’t want to anger him so much that he takes that away from me.
Harley’s waiting with my towel in his hand as I approach, an indication that we won’t be speaking out here. I wrap it around myself. I may be comfortable enough to be in a swimsuit near a pool, but I draw the line at walking casually around in it.
“Inside?” I ask when he directs me that way.
He doesn’t answer but instead opens the back door for me. He walks past me once we’re both inside, and I kind of hate the way I just obediently follow him.
He opens the door to one of the rooms, and I have to presume it’s the one he was staying in before coming back to the house. Seeing the crib in the corner confirms my assumption.
“You left the house without telling me where you were going?” he snaps the second the door is closed. “You aren’t supposed to go out alone.”
Something I’ve never felt before washes over me, and it’s more than anger. It’s fear.
Seeing how easy it was for him to act mostly normal outside, only for him to flip a switch and turn into this man, makes me wonder what his marriage was really like with Lana. Was he this verbally aggressive to her? Did he get so angry he hit her?
That anger needs a place to go, right? It would be a natural escalation for words to grow useless. He’d have to find an outlet for that anger somewhere else.
I shrink back away from him, my eyes darting to the door at my back as I try to assess if I can get out of the room safely.
His eyes widen as he notices my reaction.
“Fuck,” he grumbles. “You’re fucking scared of me. That’s the last thing I want.”
He scrubs his hands over his face, and when he looks up at me, he’s a changed man. Right now, I’m seeing something I’ve never seen from him before, vulnerability.
“I would never forgive myself if you left the house upset and something bad happened.” He swallows as if his throat doesn’t want to work right. “I’m so fucking glad you’re okay.”
His eyes search mine, and in them I see more than just the pain from losing his wife that way.
“I hate how much pain you’re in,” I tell him truthfully.
He shakes his head as if he’s rejecting what I’m saying, denying what I see so clearly on his face, in his actions every day.
Unsure of what else I can do to make things better for him, I walk into his chest, wrapping my arms around his waist. He’s stiff at first, but after several deep breaths, he lifts his arms and hugs me back.
