Page 22 of My Ex’s Dad (Scandalous Billionaires #1)

Chapter eleven

Warrick

T he last five days haven’t been fun, but this day tops it right off. I’m like an overflowing gas tank but fueled by fuckery.

The pounding in my head was better when I inadvisably let Amalphia give me a foot massage. I was too tired to start up with my regular string of protests, and the migraine left my brain in no condition to circulate around a bunch of arguments.

I force myself to go to my room and shut the door.

But I don’t get into bed. Instead, I walk to the window that overlooks the backyard.

There are three windows side by side, but this one has the best view.

The happy daylight sun feels more like the stuff of nightmares right now, but I stand there and take my punishment.

My eyes well up with water, stinging at the full-scale revolt my brain throws as it enters full-on tantrum mode.

It’s been all of five minutes since I told Amalphia to leave, but she headed straight outside.

I didn’t even get up here in time to see her.

I wait, enduring minutes of migraine torture bedevilment at the window, and there she is .

Or at least the pool house door cracks open, and a floral suitcase gets plunked beside it.

I run a hand over my face, wiping away the eye leakage.

I don’t want Amalphia to leave, but getting involved with her in any way would be a mistake.

It’s a good time to part. My gentlemanly intentions and thoughts have turned into something else lately.

There’s zero room to have my dick dictate my next steps.

That foot bath should have just been okay, but even in my state of agony, it was more than that.

It bordered on straight-up erotic. My cock certainly thought so.

I’m just glad Amalphia never glanced at my lap while it was happening.

Having her eyes run aground on Boner Island would have killed me.

Apparently, I needed a reminder of why this can never happen.

I needed it. I deserved it.

Not Amalphia.

She certainly wasn’t asking for what Reginald dished out. She just stood there and took it. How long would she have let him run his mouth, abusing her and treating her with disrespect?

A box follows the suitcase outside the pool house.

Then another. Then a strange setup with what looks like artwork tucked inside a quilt.

I told her she could decorate the place, and now she has to pack all of it up.

Guilt stabs me in the gut, but it’s not the only emotion that burns my insides.

I want to protect Amalphia, even if it means keeping her safe from making a mistake with me.

She was never anything but friendly because she’s a good person.

She couldn’t be anything else if she tried.

Lines might have been crossed, but only because she’s a wonderful person who didn’t realize there were lines at all.

My health and well-being and even happiness were more important to her than stodgy professionalism.

I’ve been happier in these past few weeks than I’ve been in half a lifetime before them.

That’s solely because of her. She deserves someone her age who can give her everything she needs and wants.

What can I offer her? Financially, everything, but Amalphia is one of those few people in the world that money isn’t going to work for.

She doesn’t want lavish, expensive, over-the-top bullshit.

She wants all the things I can’t give her because I have no idea how.

I can’t buy myself a different childhood.

I can’t change how my parents raised me.

I can’t go back and undo the fear of a scared teenager and make him listen to someone else besides his parents.

I should have fought harder and in a vastly different way for Reginald, but I can’t buy that time back either.

The only thing I could offer Amalphia is a night or two or maybe a week of passion.

I could make her feel good, and I know she would give back a hundred times anything I could find to give her, but it would never work.

My parents would lose their minds, and I have a professional image to uphold.

I’d be kissing my relationship with my son goodbye forever.

“Your relationship with Reg?” I scoff, spiraling down into the darkest depths of having to resort to talking to myself. “What relationship?”

A bulging bright pink duffel bag gets added to the pile. And then another box.

My throat closes up, and my chest gets tight. She has to be just about done packing by now.

I press my palm to the window and continue my downward trajectory of lecturing myself out loud. It’s only weird if there’s someone else to hear it, right?

“You’ve tried all your life to earn the right to be a dad.

Did you ever stop to think that maybe you were doing it wrong?

You didn’t like the way Amalphia was treated, and you hate the way you were played and cheated and forced to accept crumbs of nothing at all.

You did nothing wrong, but you’ve accepted that this is your life. Congrats.”

I wish I could tell myself to shut the fuck up without sounding unhinged.

“You’ve tried so hard to live this life for everyone else, and now you’re alone and cold, and you haven’t even ventured to think about love since you were a teenager.”

Even then, I didn’t have the faintest notion of what it was, and I still got jaded. I knew about trust, and I knew how easy it was to break and get broken.

“What if you just didn’t give a fuck what people thought?”

Shut up.

But what if I stopped doing all the things that haven’t worked and considered the one thing in the world that might actually go right if I gave it a chance?

Amalphia steps out of the pool house and closes the door.

My calculations outside of a business environment have traditionally been a dumpster fire, but by my calculations right now, I have five minutes to stop her before she loads all that stuff into her car and drives away.

Once she leaves, I know she’s not going to come back.

I could go to Harrisburg and beg, but it won’t make a difference.

I scramble through the room, half in blinding pain. The sun has all but scalded my retinas, my brain is a mushy migraine mess, and my body is not nearly one hundred percent. I’m running on the last dregs of what little energy I had this morning.

Still .

This is the first time I’ve felt a spark of clarity in years.

I fumble down the steps, grasping the railing to keep from faceplanting.

I don’t need to make like a toboggan and slide down face first to eat the floor.

Speaking of eating, I smell the soup right away.

The special, amazing, thoughtful chicken soup that Amalphia made from scratch just to try to entice me into eating.

The burner is turned off under the large pot.

She made sure the house wasn’t going to burn down.

She bathed my feet, for fuck’s sake.

She did all of this for me and so much more.

I burst outside and holler her name. “Amalphia!”

She yelps and drops the box she’s carrying. It smashes on the concrete with a sickening crunch.

Shit.

So, tell me all about how you were going to stop fucking shit up again.

I feel like I’m going to pass out just from running across the backyard, but I keep going until I’m standing right in front of her. She’s frozen, the box at her shoes, one of the bottom corners dented.

“I don’t want you to leave. I’m sorry.”

Her pretty eyes well up with tears, and she sucks in a shaky breath.

I can see her mentally arming herself, trying to be tough enough to just get through this.

She gives me a watery smile I don’t deserve.

“I know, Warrick. I know you’re sorry, but don’t worry.

I’ll be okay. This isn’t your fault. Reg is just Reg, and life is just life.

You’re a good man. You don’t have to convince me of that, and you don’t have to apologize. ”

“I. Don’t. Want. You. To. Leave.”

“I. Know. That. Everything. Will. Be. Fine.” She enunciates the words back, parroting mine just about exactly. She’s trying to get me to hear her.

I dial myself right the shit back in. I’m basically frantic. I came running out here like a wild man. Her eyes are wide and shiny, and she’s more than a little bit taken aback. She’s worried about me.

I shake my head, raking a hand too roughly through my hair. “It won’t. It’ll be my fault if I let you go back to Harrisburg without telling you that since you’ve been here, I’ve unexpectedly become…I…I think I might be… happy .”

She snorts and crosses her arms. “You want to find more half-drowned maids, endure more cooking disasters, and more nearly dying in the shower because it’s been waxed with furniture polish? More of me almost burning your house down?”

She might be sassy, passing this off as humor so we can get through it, but I can see the burning question in the depths of her eyes.

“Yes,” I grind, the words a painful lump in my throat.

I think it might be emotion. All the sensations I can’t even label because I wasn’t taught to give names to them.

“Yes.” My voice has some strength this time.

“Yes, I want more. I want to be hugged. By you. I want chicken soup. I want you to try and cure headaches by touching my feet like feet aren’t actually the creepiest part of the body.

You’re good, and you’re kind . You make parts of me that never did much of any living at all feel alive.

You look at me without judgment or expectation.

I want to just be me, a person, not the one who needs to fix the entire world for everyone. ”

Her eyes well up with tears, and mine aren’t all that stable.

The world swims, and I know I’m getting close to unmanning myself.

I can practically see both my parents cringing and asking me where the ever-loving goodness I came from and for what reason on earth they were cursed with me as a son.

“I want to be a man and not a dollar, or a suit, or a car, or a house,” I continue.

To them, I’m an unmanageable liability. “I want to be okay with hurting because I have been. And just for once, I want to have someone ask me if I’m going to be okay. You do that. You ask . You listen .”

She’s frozen. I’m frozen. Until I can get my legs to react and take one faltering step forward, which is basically right into her. She tilts her face up, her lips parted, her breath irregular. I fit my hand under her chin like it was made to rest there, tilting her face up further.

I shouldn’t do this. Everything about this is taboo.

But without further ado, I set about probably ruining both of our lives with honesty. “I want to kiss you so badly, but this damn virus is still lingering off and on, and I don’t want to make you sick and—”

She arches up, wraps her arms around my neck, and slants her mouth over mine.

It’s the softest brush of her lips, almost chaste, and it’s so shocking that I don’t even have time to respond before she pulls back. She cups my face tenderly, looking completely unphased while I’m reeling.

“You’re right. You’re not feeling well, and you’ve barely eaten in days. Let’s go inside. I’ll get you some soup, and you can take a nap. If that migraine doesn’t go away by tomorrow, I’ll need to call someone and—”

I kiss her. It’s also just a brush of my lips against her sweet ones. Also chaste. She’s the one who remains frozen this time. Surprised. My face does something funny when I pull away, and it makes my cheeks hurt.

“You’re smiling, Warrick,” she says in amazement.

Oh! Is that what’s happening? I touch my cheek.

“You have dimples. They’re adorable.”

“What the fuck? I…I don’t know. About any of this.”

Her eyes glisten, full of emotions and questions. It’s messy. It’s something I should be running from, but I want to stay. I want to stay. Right. Here. “I don’t know either. Is that okay?”

“I want it to be.”

I feel like I’m in another fever dream as she takes my hand and leads me back inside.

She sits me down at the island counter, gets me a bowl of soup, and asks me to eat.

So I do. It’s delicious. I want to tell her that, but all the words seem trapped inside me now.

My head is still aching, and it’s coming back, the roar of pain, the black edges closing in and moving off, closing back.

The pain doesn’t shove off after I’ve eaten something. Instead, it makes the soup churn in my stomach, but it settles the second Amalphia coaxes me up to my room. She pulls back the blankets, and I get into bed with zero grace.

Closing my eyes feels a little bit better. Her hand caresses my forehead, pushing back a strand of hair. It’s a slick glide. I didn’t realize I was sweating.

I hear Amalphia’s voice like an angel, like music, like a stream of cats riding unicorns and real dogs, not robot dogs, bouncing along on them as their silky ears flap in the breeze, and their tongues loll out, slobbering and barking, living their best dog lives.

“I better go and put my stuff back inside. It looks like it’s going to rain. You should sleep, War. I think we’d both be incredibly relieved if you felt better.”

I don’t think sleep is possible against the wall of white pain just waiting there in my brain to envelop me, but Amalphia’s words wrap around it like a blanket and a barrier. If she’s putting her things away, it means she’s staying .

She kissed me.

I kissed her.

And it was beyond perfect. I want to do it again. Over and over. She was the sweetest heaven. All the cats riding all the unicorns and all of that all over again.

We kissed, and the world didn’t combust or crumble.

My sore brain is so scrambled that it’s starting to try to turn over a scenario where maybe this could work.

It’s trying to evoke a dangerous emotion, hope , to rub it all over my face like exceptionally delicious cake that we can both take our time licking off before we move on to whipped cream and start to explore all the fun ways to create edible clothing.

That’s about as far as I get before the white wall recedes and a much gentler blackness closes in.