Page 121 of The Heartbreaker

“Fuck,” Ridge groaned in response.

What the hell is happening right now?

I glanced over my shoulder. Jana was standing in front of the coffee table as if she’d been heading for the patio with a sleepy Daisy in her arms. Daisy’s eyes were opening, aimed directly at her father.

“Daddy?” She blinked a few times and rubbed her eyelids. “Mommy, are we at Daddy’s house?”

My heart didn’t just sink.

It dropped out of my body and fell onto the wooden floor beneath us.

Ridge didn’t move when he said, “Jana, take Daisy upstairs to her room right now.”

Daisy’s gaze shifted from her father to me. It took a moment and another gentle rub of her eyes before the recognition passed over her face.

When I saw it, emotion didn’t just tear apart my chest.

It completely shattered it.

Nooo.

“Miss Lark?” A second ticked by. “Why is my daddy carrying you?”

TWENTY-NINE

Ridge

Irushed inside my closet, tossing on a T-shirt, reaching for the pile of sweatpants, where there was a pair of gray ones on top, and stepped into them, pulling them up to my waist. Now that I was dressed, I went back into the bedroom, and Addison was standing by the bed, putting on the clothes she’d stripped off before the hot tub, moving as quickly as I had. With Jana upstairs, putting Daisy to bed, Addison and I had a few minutes to talk until I had to address Jana and deal with the fallout of what had just happened.

“Come here,” I said as I approached, holding out my arms.

“I can’t.” She had just zipped and buttoned her pants and was clutching her stomach. “I feel like I can’t even breathe right now.” She twisted her wet hair on top of her head and tied it off with an elastic from her wrist.

What I noticed, what drove my hands to her face, was the tears. The second she released her hair, the first one dripped.

I caught it and said, “Addison, I got this. Don’t worry.”

“It’s too late to fix this.”

“Fuck that,” I whispered, stepping closer to her. “It’s never too late.”

“Your daughter just saw us naked. With me in your arms. The thoughts that are going through her head right now?—”

“Here’s the thing about my girl.” I aligned our bodies. “Once she’s asleep, which I can tell she had been by the way she was talking, things become extremely fuzzy and not easy for her to recall. She’ll remember seeing you, most likely, but I doubt she’ll remember that you were naked.”

With the way we had been positioned, Daisy could only see Addison’s back. Her bare ass, her legs wrapped around me—those were details I wasn’t even sure my daughter had taken in. Since I’d never turned Addison around, Daisy wouldn’t have seen the front of her or any of me, aside from my legs and arms.

And that was if she was even paying attention.

“What about Jana?” Her hands went over her face. “Oh my God, I can’t even imagine what she thinks about me right now.”

Jana was an entirely different story.

Things had happened so fast that I didn’t ask her a single question. I had no idea why she’d brought Daisy to my house, why she’d let herself in, or why the fuck she hadn’t called first. We had boundaries established, and she’d crossed mine.

But as the last few minutes ran through my head, two things were certain. Jana had been shocked as hell at what she walked into—I could tell that by the way she’d said my name. The tone and shrillness of her voice. And her expression had told me she wasn’t pleased by what she saw.

I carefully pulled Addison’s hands away. “I’m going to talk to her now. She needs to understand this—us—and I need to understand why this happened and why I hadn’t known they were coming over.”