Page 53 of Written with Regret (The Regret Duet 1)
“Her dad is also essentially sending her dentist’s son through Yale. So there’s that.”
“What?”
I waved her off. “Nothing. Why don’t we just stick with ‘oh my goodness’ for a while?”
“Can I say oh em gee?”
I lifted my gaze to her. “What? No.”
“Is it a bad word?”
“No. But it makes you sound like you’re thirteen and I’m thirteen years away from being ready for that. Stay four until you are at least twenty-one. Okay?”
I glanced at Hadley, who had her head down, a pencil in hand. Her shoulders shook with silent laughter.
Rosalee’s second “art class” was well underway, and as if the melted-crayon crap wasn’t enough, Hadley had brought glitter this time. It didn’t matter that she’d laid a drop cloth down on the floor beneath them. If I so much as stepped foot at that end of the table for the next month, I was going to look like a platinum member at the strip club. Glitter was only one step above the plague in my house. But I had a little girl. So, as long as she wasn’t using it as body lotion to work at the aforementioned strip club, then I was going to have to get over it.
What I couldn’t get over, though, was how much she loved Hadley.
From Wednesday to Saturday, all I’d heard from Rosalee was Hadley, Hadley, Hadley.
And it fucking sucked because my brain was already stuck on Hadley too.
How the whole damn room lit up when she smiled.
How she always managed to find a way to touch me.
And, worse, how I always managed to find a reason to let her.
The last two times I’d seen her, she’d been in jeans and a T-shirt. But there was no hiding that body. She couldn’t have been over five-five, but her legs were long and her ass was round—not that I’d been looking or anything. That would have been fucked up on epic levels, considering how I felt about her.
Or how I was supposed to feel about her.
And let’s not forget how goddamn cute she looked in those ridiculous overalls. They should not have been sexy.
Then again, she should not have been sexy in my mind, either.
Though I guess there had been a reason she and I had made a baby together. Attraction had never been our problem. I could still remember seeing her from across the bar.
I’d spent years avoiding redheads.
They all reminded me of that shattered little girl the day of the shooting.
But Hadley had been different. Come to find out that was probably because she had been on a mission to steal my computer, but whatever. It’d happened and it had given me the greatest gift of my entire life, who was currently covered in what had to be a gallon of glitter while decorating a unicorn she and that same gorgeous redhead had drawn together.
“Daddy, look!”
I lifted my head from my laptop. “Oh, wow! That’s awesome, baby.”
“Look at its horn. I did its horn all by myself.”
“Well, duh. The horn is my favorite part. Of course you did it.”
Glitter fell everywhere as she shook the picture at me. “Look at its butt. Hadley did its butt. Isn’t it a good butt, Daddy?”
It was. It really fucking was. Not that I’d looked one of the four times she’d bent over to get something out of her bag that night.
Also, not that I’d been counting how many times she’d bent down or anything.
Christ. I had to get laid. This was ridiculous. I hated the woman. Kinda.
My sex life had both changed a lot and not at all since I’d become a father. Interactions were limited to one-night stands. But they were so infrequent that they were more like once-a-year stands. And it was starting to feel like we were creeping up on day 364.
“Tail,” Hadley corrected. “She’s talking about its tail.” She laughed, trapping her teeth between her lips.
My phone started ringing, Trent’s name flashing on the screen. Standing up from my chair, I looked back to Rosalee. “It’s almost three. Hadley should probably start cleaning things up.”
“Noooooooooo,” Rosie cried. “She just got here. We were going to make a Pegasus next.”
I flicked a pointed look to Hadley, and she quickly backed me up. “You know what? I have to get going anyway. What if I outline the Pegasus for Wednesday? That way, we can spend more time decorating it.”
“Without the horn. I wanna draw the horn.”
She smiled at my girl, who immediately smiled back—the whole damn room becoming ten watts brighter. “Okay, so I’ll just draw its butt and wings, then. Deal?”
They continued talking, but I gave Alejandra a chin jerk as I lifted my ringing phone in her direction. She was standing at the sink, washing dishes for the tenth time. She didn’t usually work on Saturdays, but I could tell she was worried about Rosalee, so I hadn’t said anything when she’d popped in minutes before Hadley was slated to arrive.
