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Ruby chose this time to come barreling down the hall, skidding to a stop in front of them. “Hope! Come see what I built in my room. I set up all my Barbies.” She tugged Hope’s hand. “Come on, you can be the one that looks like you!”
Without taking his eyes off Hope, Gabe crouched down to Ruby. “Baby, I need to talk to Hope about something. You go back to your room, and I’ll send her over when we’re done. Okay?”
Ruby glanced between him and Hope. Then with a shrug of assent ran back to her room. Gabe rose and cupped Hope’s chin, tilting it up until she was looking at him.
“Talk to me?” he asked, keeping his voice gentle this time.
She tried to lower her gaze, but he held firm to her chin so she couldn’t move away from him. He’d come to realize that she was good at hiding, avoiding, or diverting depending on the situation. He’d seen her do it plenty of times. Hadlether do it plenty of times. But today she looked shattered, and he wasn’t going to let her be alone with whatever was bothering her.
“Really, Gabe, it’s nothing.”
He loved it when she said his name. So intimate and warm, like the connection he imagined growing between them was real.
“Crazy family stuff,” she added. “That’s all.”
“Your family can’t be crazier than mine, Hope.” He had a pretty hard time believing the Morgans were any kind of crazy. But he let that go, and said, “Trust me, I can deal with crazy. So tell me. What’s up?”
Her eyes rolled upward, and she blew out a breath. “I had a phone call with my mom. It didn’t go so well. Then my brother texted afterward to tell me off and made me feel like a colossal asshole, so—” She shrugged, like it was nothing, but he could see what had been said had hurt her. “You know. The usual.”
“Actually, I don’t know,” Gabe said, looking into her eyes. “You haven’t talked about your family much.” It reminded him how much more he wanted to know about her. These little pockets of time before and after his shift didn’t give him nearly enough time with her. And the scary thing was, he wanted more time with her. Much more time.
He ran his hands down her arms, enjoying the way she quivered under his touch. Yeah, there was still something between them. Something they both wanted, something he didn’t intend to let go of. But this wasn’t the time to go after it, not when she was clearly still reeling from what her mom and brother had said to her. “Keep talking to me, Hope. Tell me exactly what’s up.”
She gazed at him then, her deep brown eyes fathomless and so full of emotion he felt like he could stand there and read them for hours. She opened her mouth, and he was sure she was going to say something, open up to him in a way she hadn’t yet.
But, of course, Ruby chose that moment to once again come out of her room and interrupt them.
“You guys done talking?” she demanded, impatiently tapping her foot.
Hope laughed, her eyes warming, and she turned from Gabe to face Ruby. “I’m all yours,” she said, walking away from him. But as she went down the hall, following his daughter, she glanced over her shoulder and said, “Thanks.”
“For what?” He’d done nothing; she hadn’t given him a chance to.
Hope shrugged. “For caring,” she said, before disappearing into the bedroom to play Barbies with his daughter.
Shaking his head, he stalked toward his own room to change from his dad gear to his bar gear. He didn’t know if he’d ever understand women, wasn’t sure there were many he wanted to understand, but when it came to Hope Morgan, he was finding it harder and harder to pretend that he wasn’t interested. He wanted to know what made her tick, what made her laugh and cry, what made her hot—he really wanted to know what made her hot—and just what made her, her.
And he hadn’t wanted that with a woman since Carrie.
Knowing what that signified was scary as fuck, and he wasn’t ready to dig deep into the emotional implications of his growing feelings for Hope. So, instead of dwelling, he shoved any thoughts of her to the back of his mind and stripped out of the shirt he’d been wearing all day. Pulling on a black Bowie’s t-shirt, he reminded himself that his priority was Ruby, and if he kept focused on that, he’d be safe from whatever threat Hope Morgan was posing on his heart. And his soul.
CHAPTERTWELVE
Later that night, Hope was sitting with Ruby at the dining room table. Over the last week and a bit, they had fallen into a nice little routine. Much to their mutual delight they’d discovered they shared an intense love for drawing, and they spent the time between dinner and bedtime sitting at the dining room table with sheets of paper spread out between them, drawing all the things their imaginations could come up with.
Tonight they were working on people, and Ruby was bent over her paper with her tongue sticking out the way it always did when she was concentrating. She was practicing drawing noses.
“Mine doesn’t look like yours,” she declared. “Mine’s ugly.” Ruby shoved the paper away from her and crossed her arms.
Hope continued shading in the contours of the face she was drawing with an HB pencil. “You know,” she said, “if you are going to be a good artist, then there is probably one very important secret you should know.”
Taking the bait, Ruby dropped her frustrated posture and turned to Hope. “Really?” She sounded uncertain but hopeful.
The beauty of children, Hope thought, smiling. They could be pessimistic and optimistic at the same time. They could be swayed either way. They didn’t commit their personalities to only one side. They were fluid, ready to accept change, flexible and resilient in a way that was lost in adulthood. It was a gift.
She knew that whatever she told Ruby now would be accepted as truth without question, and she didn’t take that kind of blind trust lightly.
Turning to Ruby, who was gazing up at her with those bright green eyes that she was finding harder and harder to resist in both man and child, she bent to Ruby’s eye level.
