Page 35 of Written with You (The Regret Duet 2)
I sucked in my lips, biting them as I tried and failed to hold the emotion back. Tears sprang to my eyes, and my chest clamped down until I feared that my ribs were going to break.
He’d told her.
He’d told her and they were standing on my front porch.
Both of them.
And while my whole body ached at the sight of Caven Hunt, I didn’t give the first damn that his eyes were boring into me with a contempt that would have made Ian proud.
He’d brought her. Knowing everything. He’d brought her.
“Hey, Rosie,” I managed to choke out, dropping into a squat.
She wasted exactly zero seconds before throwing her arms around my neck and squeezing tight.
I was going to die. That was all there was to it. I was going to burst into tears and cry until there was no moisture left in my body and then I was going to die from dehydration.
With her red waves tickling my nose, it was a hell of a way to go.
She leaned away. “Daddy said we can only stay if you aren’t busy. Please don’t be busy.”
Oh, God, they were staying. I slanted my head back to look up at Caven, but he had his hands shoved inside the pockets of a pair of khaki shorts and was blankly staring at the brick exterior of my house.
Every instinct I had told me to dive into his arms, but every instinct I had had been wrong more than once recently.
Instead, I looked back to Rosalee and croaked, “I am actually free every day for the next twenty years.”
“What do you have to do in twenty years?”
I shrugged. “Probably get dentures since I didn’t go to the dentist for two decades. But it’ll be worth it. Come on in.”
She did not need a second invitation. I’d barely risen to my full height before she’d squeezed past me.
“Oooo, your house is pretty!”
“Thanks,” I called over my shoulder, unable to tear my eyes away from her father.
The hum I felt when I was with Caven was as present as ever, but when his steely gaze finally came to mine, it was my nerves that buzzed the loudest.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
“Don’t thank me,” he said tersely. “I didn’t do this for you. It’s Wednesday and she wanted to see you. I told her about Hadley. I told her about you lying. But I haven’t mentioned anything else about our past together. I’d appreciate it if you would do the same.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Of course.”
His face remained hard and stoic. It was the angry man from her birthday party who could barely look me in the eye, not the man who’d held me and kissed me and made love to me.
I’d come to terms that that man was gone forever.
But this was agony all the same.
“I gave you Mondays as a part of the deal for the painting,” he continued, gruff and to the point. “I’m a businessman. I’ll keep my word. Pick another day of the week that suits your schedule and I’ll bring her over for you to teach her art. I don’t want you at my house. I don’t want you texting me. I don’t actually want anything to do with you. But she does. And despite your absolutely asinine stunt over the last four months, I love my daughter. So here we are. No need to thank me. No need to even acknowledge that I’m here at all because I assure you I wish like hell that I wasn’t.”
And with that, he followed his daughter into my house, sliding past me without so much as an excuse me.
Half of my heart was singing grand hymns of praise.
The other half was withering into nothingness.
This wasn’t about Caven. It wasn’t about the way I longed to curl into the safety of his arms. It wasn’t about the way I missed his smile or his tender touches.
I’d gotten what I’d wanted: time with Rosalee. And while I was grateful beyond all measure for his generosity, two days a week with Caven sounded like absolute torture.
But, for her, there was nothing I wouldn’t endure.
Closing the door, I squared my shoulders, pasted on a halfway-real smile, and said, “At my house, we paint, Rosalee. Fingernails, toenails, pictures, and all.”
She let out a loud squeal that immediately transformed that halfway-real smile into something so genuine that I felt it in my bones.
This was enough.
This would always be enough.
“That’s me!” Rosie exclaimed as I walked her into my spare bedroom studio—Caven only one step behind us. “Daddy, you used to have that picture in your room.”
Used to. I didn’t know that my stomach could sink any lower. I’d wondered if he’d kept it. Clearly, he had not, and I had no idea why that hurt as much as it did. I should have been immune to the pain by that point. But not when it came to Caven.
