Page 8 of Broken Daddy

How the fuck was this his life?

He’d lasted forty-three years without ever entering a beauty salon. This was not what he’d expected when he’d started working for Jensen International Security.

Sure, he hadn’t expected it to be high-energy or adventure all of the time. He hadn’t even wanted that. He’d wanted a job which would get him out of bed so he wouldn’t spend the rest of his days in a dark depression.

One where he could live his life in relative peace and just wait until he died.

So he could return to May.

He sucked in a breath. May hadn’t been interested in getting her nails or hair done. She’d loved working in her garden, and she was always tinkering with old machinery, painting something or repairing it. She used to say that there was no use getting her nails done when she’d just wreck them within a day.

God, he missed her.

“Hi Sondra!” The woman behind the desk greeted his charge with a genuine smile.

Sondra wasn’t the worst person he’d ever guarded. She was polite and she listened. She didn’t treat him like he was her slave the way some people he’d worked for did.

Normally, he’d tell them where they could shove their orders to get them coffee or in one person’s case, a tissue to wipe their nose.

He was the bodyguard not the tissue guy.

Sondra could be absent-minded and slightly self-absorbed, but she treated him like a person.

Of course she annoyed him sometimes.

Everyone annoyed him. He was easily pissed off.

Like when she kept getting Devi’s name wrong. He knew Sondra didn’t mean to be rude. She just didn’t think it was an important fact to retain.

He got that.

But for some reason it had still annoyed him and he wasn’t certain why. There was no reason for him to care if she remembered her server’s name. Even though that same girl served them every morning.

There was something about Devi that made him take notice. It was ridiculous. He’d never see her again after this job ended.

God, he was ready for that, to return home.

Well, not home.

To his cabin on Sanctuary Ranch. That was the other reason he’d taken this job. Because it came with accommodation. He liked living in peace and quiet. But he couldn’t go to his own cabin in the woods.

There were too many memories there.

At Sanctuary Ranch he didn’t have to deal with anyone when he wasn’t working. He could just stay in his cabin and . . . wait to die.

Fuck.

May would be fucking ashamed of him but he didn’t care.

He missed her.

Yeah? So why haven’t you been thinking of her much lately? Why haven’t your dreams been filled with her?

Why did panic fill you as you watched that young girl fall over? As you saw her shoulders slump and tears drip down her face?

Fuck.

He had to get Devi out of his mind. He was in his forties and she had to be in her twenties, he was certain of it.