Total pages in book: 160
Estimated words: 149137 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 746(@200wpm)___ 597(@250wpm)___ 497(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 149137 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 746(@200wpm)___ 597(@250wpm)___ 497(@300wpm)
He watched her start to show her dads around.
“Seriously, are you okay?” Jared asked.
He’d fallen for the one woman in the world who could handle his current issue, who he didn’t have to protect because she was far deadlier than he could ever think of being.
“I think I am.”
She could handle his now, and he wanted her to be his future.
If only she could accept his past.
Chapter Twelve
Kayla stood in front of the door to Josh’s bedroom almost two hours later. She wasn’t surprised that the lights were out and all was quiet. He’d sat beside her for an hour or so and then kissed her cheek and said he wanted to give her some time alone with her dads.
She kind of thought he’d retreated.
After the day they’d had, she didn’t blame him. It felt like the last few weeks had been spent in a perfect snow globe, the types tourists took home to their kids, showing them how gorgeous the world was. They’d been in the bubble, their days and nights moving in perfect tandem, making her forget all that was wrong between them.
Someone had upended their globe today, and she wasn’t entirely sure where they’d all landed.
Damn but she wanted to wake him up and figure out what the hell he was doing. After that first strangely awkward and entirely thrilling kiss, she’d settled a bit, trying to tamp down the desperate and sudden need to get her hands on a Brides magazine. Before she said yes to the dress, she needed to understand if this was nothing more than Josh’s way of chilling her dads out.
Then they would need to go over the definition of chilling out because her papa had been twelve kinds of freaked upon finding out she was involved in some fairly kinky things. Josh’s new truth resolution had cost her a very awkward conversation with a man who liked to pretend she was still a virgin, even though he knew she’d lived over a BDSM club. Her dads were great believers in hearing only what they wanted to hear.
“Hey, are you okay?”
She turned and Dad had come out of the bedroom that had been hers until tonight. He closed the door and spoke quietly, as though trying not to wake Papa.
“Yeah. I’m good.” Dad was easier to talk to than her papa, perhaps because Dad had been the one who went to work while Papa had stayed home to raise her. Dad seemed more capable of reason when it came to her.
“Are you sure because I know Papa was hard on you,” Dad said, adjusting his glasses. He’d changed out of his traveling clothes and into his pajamas and robe. Still, he managed to make it all look very professorial. Forty years in academia had left their mark. “I might have talked to him about what people have historically considered deviant lifestyles. He wasn’t trying to be hypocritical.”
She blushed. “It’s all consensual.”
“Oh, baby, I know that. What you do with your partner is all up to the two of you. As long as that man is treating you right, I’ve got no problem with him. You’ve got to forgive Papa. I think in some ways he never wanted you to settle down. I think deep down he kept waiting for you to come home and be a proper millennial. He longs for a freeloading child. I told him maybe our grandchildren will need a place to crash someday, and until then he can take away the dog’s dignity.”
She frowned. “Puddles looks good in a sweater. There’s no indignity there.”
“That is in the eye of the beholder, my daughter.” He glanced over at the door she’d been standing in front of. “How much does he know about your past?”
“Enough to probably get me severely reprimanded,” she admitted.
“Does he know about your sister?”
She stopped. “She’s classified, Dad. Her life is literally classified.”
Her life, her death. Jiang Kun was a ghost lost in the machine. Even MSS believed she was dead, killed in a plane crash.
“A lot about your life back then is classified, but you still talk. I don’t blame you. You can’t keep secrets and be happy in life.”
Her gut tightened because she was keeping a lot of secrets. “I don’t know about that. What if you know something that will hurt the person you love, but telling him won’t change anything—except to hurt him.”
He sighed. “Is this spy stuff?”
“Maybe.”
“I rather thought there was more to this than a basic bodyguard job. You’re too smart to follow some actor around twenty-four seven. Is the CIA involved?”
There was only so far she could push the classified talking. “Maybe.”
“Do you love this man?”
That was the million-dollar question, but she couldn’t lie. Not to her dad. “Yeah. He’s frustrating and complex and he can go from sulky boy to incredibly kind man. He’s complicated.”