Page 6 of Twister

Daniel

What the actual fuck was I thinking, offering to look after him ?

Oh, that’s right. I wasn’t.

Now that Marshall didn’t look like a half-drowned cat anymore, it was all too easy for me to get swept up in the color of his deep sapphire eyes that shimmered with emotion every time he went quiet.

The mop of short black hair was a riot of wavy curls that my fingers ached to sweep away from his eyes and tuck behind his ears.

And his ruby Cupid’s bow lips were plush enough for me to want to draw them into my mouth and suck on just so I could see how much plumper I could make them….

I willed my dick to stand down as I led him back into the store, reminding myself that he was far too young for me. Not to mention that he’d just been through a highly stressful experience, only to discover his Jeep had been trashed in the storm.

Even if the easy way he leaned into me whenever I said anything remotely reassuring to him made me want to pin him underneath me so I could pound into his tight, little—

Nope. Don’t go there. There was no use in tormenting myself with something that would never happen.

Once we re-entered the store, we had a quick chat with Gabe to request his assistance in contacting Kajir.

Gabe seemed to be the only one in town who could wrangle Kajir without wanting to end up murdering him by the end of the usually short conversation.

Kajir was a hulking giant of a man who had a healthy reputation for being foulmouthed and ill-tempered to everyone outside of his immediate family.

And yet Gabe was able to sweet-talk him into almost anything. No one could figure out how he did it.

Thankfully, Gabe agreed to help us out. He pulled his phone out to call Kajir before he pointed us toward the tarps for sale in the store that we could use to cover Marshall’s Jeep over the tree that had impaled it.

Rose and Bucky came outside to help us secure the tarp, although Bucky ended up nosing around Marshall’s car and the tree debris that was scattered all over the place more than actually doing anything remotely helpful. Considering he was a dog, I guessed it wasn’t all that surprising.

Given how tiny she was, Rose was much more helpful.

She was able to make her way past most of the branches and reach through the back window of the old Jeep Cherokee to pull Marshall’s duffel from the rear of the vehicle.

She couldn’t get to what was in the rest of the car, but seeing as we hadn’t even been sure we’d be able to get the duffel, I took it as a win.

“Is there a motel or something I can stay at?” Marshall asked, his arms wrapped around his bag like it was his last lifeline tethering him to sanity.

Hell, maybe it was.

“No!” Rose half shouted as she was working her way slowly back through the branches before her wide eyes locked onto mine, pleading silently with me.

“I mean, yes, there’s a motel in Rockdale,” she continued quickly, her eyes darting between me and Marshall before she focused on him with a faint look of disgust on her face. “But you don’t want to stay there .”

Holding a branch down so she could get clear, I raised an eyebrow at her, my lips quirking at the way she was acting.

“I don’t?” Marshall asked, his brows furrowing in bewilderment. He held his duffel even tighter to his chest.

“Yeah, Rose,” I said teasingly. “He doesn’t?

” I smirked at her to let her know that I knew exactly what she was doing.

She was going to offer one of our spare rooms to him.

Not that I minded. If she hadn’t jumped in so fast, I would have suggested the same thing myself.

Delilah, the owner of the motel, was lovely, but she was one of the worst gossips I’d ever come across.

She’d spend his entire stay talking his ear off about the tornado, grasping on to any tiny morsel that she could excitedly pass on to her cronies in town later.

Nope. It was better if he came home with Rose and me. Even if it did mean that I was tempting fate. Too young, too young, too young. Hell, he was probably closer in age to Rose than he was to me. Far, far too young.

Ducking under the last branch, she rolled her eyes at me. “Nope. You’re going to stay at our house. Obviously.”

“I am?” Marshall asked, blinking his confused doe eyes in my direction.

Grinning, I shrugged. “We have a couple of spare bedrooms always set up for visiting family members and a decent storm shelter. You’ll be safe with us.

” I looked out at the still-lingering dark clouds, and all the cheer I’d been feeling drained away until I was left chilled.

“As long as our house is still standing, that is.”

Strangely, this was the first time since the tornado sideswiped us that I’d given any thought to where else it would have gone. I hadn’t seen which direction it had come from or where it had been headed, so it was entirely possible that it could have made its way to our place.

But there was no use worrying about it yet. Not until we knew there was something to worry about.

“And we’ll play Twister!” Rose said excitedly, dancing a little jig on her way to my truck before calling Bucky to her. “And have popcorn! And watch movies while we wait for the warnings to stop! Come on!”

“Play Twister?” Marshall asked me while we both watched her guide Bucky into the cab before hopping up into the seats herself. “Doesn’t that seem a little…?”

“On the nose?” I said, chuckling to myself before I shrugged.

“It seemed like a fun way to get her mind off her first tornado warning after my ex and I adopted her. Became a habit.” I turned my attention away from Rose to find Marshall watching me with an intrigued look on his face.

“There’s only so many ways you can keep a kid occupied when they’re locked up in a small room for a few hours. ”

His eyes sparkled and crinkled at the corners as he let out a quick laugh. “True. It’s not just kids. I had the same problem with some of my frat brothers.” He let his duffel down from his chest to swing it gently back and forth as we walked over to my truck.

“You locked up your frat brothers?”

“Only sometimes,” he said, waving his free hand in the air dismissively.

“I was the chapter president, and it was an easy way to dole out punishments when they royally fucked up.” He gulped when he realized he’d sworn, glancing guiltily at Rose, then me before letting out a quiet sigh of relief when I shook my head with a grin to let him know not to worry.

“Take away their phones and shut them in a room with no stimulus for an hour-long time-out, and anyone would think I’d given them a death sentence. ”

I laughed. Sounded familiar.

“Doesn’t always work, though. There was this one guy last year.

Lucas. He had an aggravating addiction of leaving the taps running.

He was put into time-out when he flooded the frat house.

We thought the punishment worked, but then he did it again.

” He grimaced at the memory. “Caused a fair amount of damage the second time. His dad had to pay for a complete renovation of the area that got soaked as well as reparations for the brother whose coursework and computer got destroyed.”

“Ouch,” I said, wincing in sympathy at the presumed expense before opening the door of my truck for him and motioning to Rose to move to the rear seats. “That would have been a costly couple of mistakes.”

“Yup.” Marshall nodded while I began clicking his seat belt into place. “His dad was not happy. He did seem resigned to his son’s shortcomings, though, so I assumed he was used to forking out thousands to get his son out of trouble.”

I noticed him eyeing me carefully as I worked, his hands held up and out of the way to let me get everything connected properly.

After all these years, Rose was used to the many clips and belts each seat of my truck had to cater to the amount of off-roading I did at the farm, but for anyone new to the vehicle, it was very easy to get confused as to what went where. It was simpler to just do it myself.

It didn’t mean that I wouldn’t take the opportunity to run my hands over Marshall’s slim body as I made sure each belt was clicked into place. That was just a pleasant side effect.

And it certainly didn’t mean that I had an up-close-and-personal view of the way his breathing hitched when I ran my fingers along his chest to make sure the belt was in its proper spot.

Or of the way his cheeks flushed in embarrassment when he placed his hands carefully in his lap after I finished up.

Could it be that he was just as attracted to me as I was to him?

The idea was so very appealing, but… he was too young.

After I got in behind the wheel, I waved goodbye to Gabe and Scarlett before we left the pump area. Gabe looked like he was on the phone with someone while Scarlett was fighting with the register that had toppled from its perch during the storm, but both waved back to us as we went past.

It took us a little longer to get back home than it had earlier.

There was debris from the tornado everywhere, and it looked like the worst of it hovered around the freeway that Marshall had been on.

I glanced over at Marshall to make sure he was okay as we went past the destruction, and all the color had drained out of his face, leaving him incredibly pale and wide-eyed.

My lips pressed together in sympathy before I leaned over slightly to rest my hand gently on his knee.

He flinched before he remembered where he was and who he was with.

As he relaxed, he slowly burrowed his hand underneath mine, then interlaced his fingers with my own, allowing me to sit up more naturally while we held hands over the center console of the cabin.

Every time we passed some of the more extreme damage, he would inhale sharply, and his fingers would tighten.

I squeezed back until he let the breath out, and the tension would ease from his body.

Poor guy. I could only imagine the kind of shock and guilt he must have been feeling to have come through it almost unscathed. I wondered if he had a good support system where he could talk about what he’d gone through today. I hoped so.

Thankfully, the closer we got to home, the less damage we saw. It looked like the tornado had missed our place entirely. There was still the danger of more touching down for the rest of the day, but we’d been lucky so far. Hopefully, the luck would continue to hold.

After I pulled into the graveled parking spot next to the barn and turned the engine off, Rose and Bucky jumped out of the cab and ran for the house, leaving the rear door wide open.

“Hold up, Marshall,” I said, grumbling a little at Rose’s actions. “Let me come around and undo those seat belts for you. They can be a bit tricky.”

“Okay.” He sat there patiently while I walked around the truck, closed the rear door, and opened the front passenger door, then began working on the many clips. “Thank you.”

Still working on one of the belts, I raised my head to look at him quizzically. “For what?”

A barely there smile passed his lips before it faded as quickly as it had appeared. “For being so kind. Not many people would be as caring as you and your daughter have been to me today.”

My eyes softened at his words. It wasn’t so much what he was saying, more how he was saying it. It was obvious his nerves were still frayed after what had happened, but there was a resigned longing to the tone of his voice that made me wonder how much kindness he’d been shown in the past.

“You’re very welcome.” I shrugged as I unclipped the last connection. “You’ll find that most of the people in town would have done the same thing. Rockdale’s decent that way.”

He quirked an eyebrow at me. “Are you sure? I got the distinct impression that the workers at the gas station—”

“Gabe and Scarlett.”

“Right. Gabe and Scarlett.” He scrunched his nose in thought. “The way they were talking in the shelter made it seem the opposite.”

I huffed a chuckle. “That was just them being stressed out. They’re both honestly really nice people. You simply caught them on a bad day.”

“Ah.”

A deafening crack of thunder from immediately above us jolted us both, and we looked up at the sky to see the dark clouds getting heavier.

I heard Marshall suck a deep breath in at the sight, and I kicked myself because he was probably still shaken from his experience at the gas station. “Come on. We need to head inside. This storm isn’t done with us yet.”

When I heard a dismayed groan, I looked back down to find Marshall’s shoulders hovering around his ears as he stared at the storm above us.

Sympathy filled me as I pressed my lips together and grimaced.

Marshall didn’t strike me as the type to be typically timid, not with the way he’d left his car to gain access to the inside of the gas station, but the day had seriously rattled him to the core.

To try to lend him some of my strength, I lifted my hand and gently pinched his chin between my thumb and forefinger to hold him in place so I could meet his wide eyes.

“Hey, now. None of that. You’re safe, I promise. ”

A large part of me wanted to lean forward and press my lips to his forehead, but I held back.

Too young, too young.

Plus, he probably wouldn’t even be interested anyway.

I was a single father, which meant that even if he was showing any signs of attraction to me, he wouldn’t only be dating me; he’d need to take Rose into consideration as well.

We were a package deal. There wasn’t a man out there at his age that would possibly be interested in a much-older man and his almost-teenage daughter.

Right? Not that I’d ever looked, but I knew what I’d been like around his age.

Playing the field, hooking up every weekend at random bars, staying up all night dancing.

Being a father figure had never been on the list.

Sighing in resignation, I stepped back to help him down from the cab of the truck.

And yet even with all those damn thoughts running through my mind, I couldn’t bring myself to let his hand go while I picked up his duffel from the cab and led him toward the house.

Maybe Rose’s optimism was rubbing off on me, no matter how misplaced it was.