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That was it exactly.

I just hadn’t known it until it happened.

I wanted it.

I wanted it all.

And I wanted it badly.

Maybe even more than I had ever wanted anything before.

I looked down at my bare finger and felt like I maybe, sort of, needed to lock myself back in the bathroom again for about five hours so I could cry my heart out once again. I definitely couldn’t do that with Rain around. He’d burn the house down in a fit of rage.

My father thus far was the only man in my life who never disappointed me.

“Do you think I’m being a stupid girl about this?” I asked.

He snorted. “I hate to break this to you, kid, but youarea girl.”

He turned the Rover around, and we headed in a different direction. I thought we were supposed to be going to his cabin in the middle of nowhere, but this wasn’t the right way.

“Uh, Rain?”

“Sucks for you, baby girl, but I’m all you’ve got. Don’t you worry too much though, we’ll get through it together.”

Oh boy.

That didn’t sound good at all.

I shut my mouth and stopped asking questions.

I should have kept my ass home.

Because he was the wisest man I knew, the first stop we made was a drive-through window for coffee. Though I wasn’t entirely sure the thing I ordered could be classified as a coffee.

I would never tell the guys this, but it might have actually been the very best thing I ever put in my mouth before. Boys with big dicks who loved their blowjobs wouldn’t appreciate that at all.

After that, we drove for what felt like hours but probably wasn’t. My phone kept ringing and ringing. I finally had to turn the volume off because I couldn’t take it anymore. Even Marcus’s name flashed across the screen a time or two. I thought it was really low of them to use him like that.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Baxter’s name popped up next. Clearly they had sunk down to the next level of assholeism. I didn’t think they could get much lower.

I knew it wasn’t fair to paint them all with the same brush because they hadn’t all done something wrong, but I was incapable of being rational in the state I was in. Besides, there was no way in hell Quinton hadn’t talked to them about what he wanted at some point. They were all probably in on it, like one big joke I was to be the butt of.

Well, I wasn’t laughing because I didn’t find anything funny.

Rain pulled up to a small, cute house with a white picket fence surrounded by trees in a neighborhood where the houses weren’t on top of each other and there was a decent amount of privacy. It looked like a great place to raise a family, unless, of course, your neighbor was a secret, psychotic witch who could burn your whole house down without so much as blinking.

“What is this place?” I was almost too afraid to ask.

“It’s a safe house of a sort. Nobody knows about it but me, and now you. I bought it for your mother and me before we got married. We didn’t live here, but we did spend a lot of time here, just the two of us.”

My breath caught in my throat, and my chest ached at the sadness in his voice. If it wasn’t for me, I don’t think he’d ever speak about my mother again, it hurt him too much.

I reached across the console and took his hand in my own. I wanted to hug him, but we weren’t exactly a hugging family. Maybe at one point we had been, but it had been stolen away from us too.

“You don’t have to do this,” I choked out around the bundle of emotion lodged in my throat.

He didn’t have to, but I really, really wanted him to. We both knew just how full of shit my words were, but I had to try for him.