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“I wouldn’t be able to do shit,” Heather snapped. “I’d be trapped at your manor, at your beck and call.” She coughed. “Yes, thank you, Collins. ‘Shit’ is an unacceptable word. Thank you. I appreciate you telling me.”
“Cursing in front of my kid?” My lips had curled upward, imagining the possibilities I could create if I had Heather on retainer all the time. She wouldn’t leave my bed. That would be the first stipulation.
“She knows them all,” Heather said. “All the inappropriate words. How did you learn all that kind of language, jitterbug?”
“Daddy!” my daughter exclaimed in the background.
“Knew it,” Heather said, probably smug as fuck. “Thanks, Daddy.”
And, goddamn. She’d intended for that to be sarcastic, and I couldn’t say I particularly pursued that fetish, but Heather calling me “Daddy”…well, that was an instant boner.
“That was weird,” Heather allowed after an awkward beat. “But you can’t come home late. I have to make a drop-off at the secondhand store before it closes. Then I need to go back to my mom’s place in time for a teleconference with a client.”
“Save the drop-off for tomorrow,” I said. “What, like it’s going to go bad in the trunk of your car? You’ll be fine. Then set Collins up with a movie and get your teleconference over with.”
“Graham, I have already told you that staying late for me will not be possible,” Heather said. “This is not up for debate, and there is no compromise. I’m not a babysitting service. I’m only here on a temporary basis, and that basis does not extend to this evening.”
“Fair enough,” I said. I didn’t want to bicker anymore. Not when my daughter was within hearing distance. And I certainly didn’t want to die on the hill of some battle to go out with Jason. It would’ve been nice to blow off some steam with him, but it wasn’t worth all of this.
“I need you here at five sharp,” Heather said. “I’m not joking, Graham.”
“I’ll be there,” I said, already crafting a vague text to Jason about meeting up with him at a later date. He responded immediately with a line of rude insults that didn’t bear repeating.
Yep. I felt like an asshole.
A bitter, cornered, exhausted asshole.
8
Heather
Icould sense Collins’ waning attention on her dollhouse as she absently dusted a ceiling corner with her doll’s long, tangled hair.
“Hey, tell me something,” I said, bopping her gently on the head with my doll. Well, it wasn’t a doll. It was an action figure of Godzilla, who was somehow central to all of the action that occurred among Collins’ dolls.
I accepted it without overanalyzing it.
“What?” Collins asked, her green eyes meeting mine for a moment before darting around to search for more cobwebs. That stubborn determination made her look just like her dad. And the parts of Graham I could see in Collins actually made me like the man.
“Are you excited about kindergarten?” I asked. “When you get to go to school and learn things from teachers and play with your friends?”
That earned a one-shoulder shrug. “Daddy said maybe I wouldn’t go to school.”
“Hm, everybody needs to go to school to learn,” I said. “I went to school. And so did your dad.”
“Daddy said the school could come to me instead,” Collins reasoned.
Of course he did.“Sure, jitterbug,” I said, borrowing my mom’s term of endearment for Collins. It fit the kid perfectly. She was usually so full of energy and into everything. “But would you like to go to school instead of the school coming to you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“We can talk to your dad about it,” I promised. “If you want.” School was important for developing interpersonal skills. And with her family’s privilege and wealth, I was worried about this kid not getting the kind of social stimulus she needed and craved.
“Tell me about your friends,” I tried again. “Do you ever go to sleepovers? Go to your friends’ houses to play?”
Collins shook her head gravely. “Daddy says that’s not safe.”
“Sure, if you don’t know the person whose house it is,” I reasoned. “But if your dad and your friend’s parents have met, it is perfectly safe to go over and play, or even to have someone else come here and play. What do you think about that?”
