Total pages in book: 197
Estimated words: 199143 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 996(@200wpm)___ 797(@250wpm)___ 664(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 199143 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 996(@200wpm)___ 797(@250wpm)___ 664(@300wpm)
“Why would wearing makeup give me pimples?” Liliana demanded.
“Well, ‘cause if you don’t wash it off your face, and give your skin time to breathe, I guess. Ask Ma,” John said, shrugging, “she wears makeup all the damn time.”
“Language,” Lucian muttered.
“I don’t wear it all the time,” Jordyn said.
“Okay.”
“Ma!” Liliana swung on her mother in all her eight year old glory, looking like someone had just betrayed her, and she would never forgive them. “Is that true?”
“Well,” Jordyn drawled.
“I am never wearing makeup!”
Just like that, Liliana spun on her heels, and stormed out of the room muttering something about washing her face right now. Lucian managed to keep a straight face until his third child was gone from his sight before a slow, sly grin spread over his face, and he turned back around in his chair at the table. Across the way, Jordyn simply shook her head.
“Battle won,” he said.
Jordyn nodded. “For now.”
He lost that smile.
Fuck.
*
“I mean, it’s not that hard to just tell the boy, right?” Cella asked. “That’ll make him stop, won’t it? She should just tell him she doesn’t like him, that’s all.”
Lucian glanced over at his oldest daughter of the three—out of all his kids, Cella, at ten, looked most like her mother. And already, she was all arms and legs, with a long torso that told him she had taken his height. Same with her sister, really.
The last thing any man wanted to be doing at eight at night was listening to a ten year old girl gossip about her friends, but Lucian didn’t mind. Sometimes, these chats were all he got out of his kids, but especially his girls as they got older. It seemed like he blinked once, and overnight, his kids just turned into mini people. If that made sense. With lives and interests of their own, and only occasionally was he let inside their tiny worlds.
Like at night.
Now.
Before they went to sleep.
“You know,” Lucian said, “if that’s how he shows that he likes her, by pulling her hair and taking her things ... that’s now a very good way to like someone, right?”
Cella made a face. “No, I guess not.”
“I mean, you wouldn’t hit me or Ma to tell us you love us, would you?”
“No.”
Lucian nodded. “So, we shouldn’t let other people do bad things to us, just so they can say it means they care about us. That isn’t how it works. It’s a bad excuse for people to do mean things, that’s all, Cella.”
She nodded.
“And your friend,” Lucian added, climbing out of his daughter’s large canopy bed so she could finally go to sleep under her white and pink blankets, “should let her own daddy know that some boy is doing things he shouldn’t.”
Cella peered up at him. “I’ll tell her.”
“And you’ll me, won’t you? If someone acts that way with you?”
“I will.”
Lucian smiled, pleased with that answer, and the conversation as whole. With kids whose minds were easily distracted, and prone to jumping from one thing to the next before they even absorbed what they had just been told, he figured they needed to have these conversations with their kids, but especially his daughters.
Again and again and again.
Until they remembered.
Until they got it.
“Night, Daddy,” Cella said, rolling over in her bed, “love you.”
“Ti amo, principessa.”
He closed her bedroom door without a click, heading past Liliana’s which was already closed, and hopefully ... if he was lucky enough, she was asleep after their storytime an hour ago. Down the hall, he turned to head into his youngest child’s room just to check. Lucia went to bed, no excuses, at seven every night. She should already be asleep, but he just wanted to make sure.
Pushing the crack in the door wider, he found the light was spilling out into the hallway from the lamp set up next to her toddler bed. Lucia wasn’t asleep, but only because she was currently wrapped in her favorite pink blanket, and sitting on her brother’s lap while John read from her favorite book.
The Princess and the Pea.
That kid could have that book read to her fifty million times, and she would still ask for one more. He bet, no doubt, she had woken up to use the bathroom—training her had been easy, but he attributed that to the fact she had such older siblings to help out—and found John awake in his room. Lucian didn’t know what it was about those two ... John and Lucia, that was.
They just ... fit.
Best friends.
It didn’t matter that there was twelve years between them. The fact that John often struggled with outbursts and his emotions never really bothered or affected Lucia like it did his other girls. It didn’t matter that she liked those ugly dolls with the big heads, and he listened to grungy punk bands that hadn’t been popular in two or more decades.