“I will most certainly not. Unless he leaves the property and never shows his face near my daughter again.”
“Like I said. Overprotective.” Kim smiles at him and pinches my side. Hard.
Bloody fucking hell.
“Please join us for dinner.” My wife actually leaves my side to usher the arsehole into the dining room. I follow after, still holding on to Cecily because I don’t trust him in my house and can’t allow him to be in the company of the two most important women in my life.
“You can freshen up,” Kim speaks to him in her affectionate, motherly tone. “Did you just arrive?”
“I landed in London half an hour ago.”
“You must be tired then. You can rest upstairs until dinner if you prefer?”
“I’m not, actually. It wasn’t a long flight.” The bastard has the audacity to smile at my wife with straight white teeth that I’ll knock right out of his mouth. “I’d rather help if that’s okay.”
“Why, of course! Cecily wasn’t much of a help in cutting vegetables and sliced her finger instead.”
“Yeah, she does that sometimes.” He throws a knowing glance at my daughter, then promptly focuses on my wife after he briefly meets my gaze.
“You guys cook together?” Kim asks with a dreamy grin as if this is some happy occasion.
“Most of the time, we do, yeah.”
“That’s so sweet. Hear that, Xan?”
“I see nothing sweet about him exploiting my daughter to fill his stomach. That’s called free labor.”
“Oh, please. Is it free labor if I cook for you?”
“That’s different. You don’t have to.”
“I don’t have to either, Papa.” Cecily strokes my arm. “I just like cooking with him.”
“That’s called Stockholm syndrome.”
Cecily laughs as if I’m being ridiculous. “He didn’t kidnap me.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. He looks like the type. Also, there doesn’t need to be a kidnapping for the syndrome to happen.”
My daughter shakes her head, Kim rolls her eyes, and the fucker pretends like he didn’t hear a word I said.
I take a deep breath and try to remain calm when Kim fawns over him, shows him where he can wash up, and even gives him one of her green aprons that only Cecily and Kirian have had the honor to wear.
She even has the boldness to whisper, “Would you please stop with the long face and be a bit more understanding?” to me after I change my clothes and sit opposite their workspace in the kitchen, glaring the fucker down.
He doesn’t take the hint to piss off and takes his job as Kim’s sous-chef very seriously.
“Papa.” My daughter touches my arm, forcing me to slide my attention from the soon-to-be ex-boyfriend to her. She’s sitting beside me on the cozy kitchen bench, since I was deemed not helpful by her mother. Or maybe she sent her on a mission to keep an eye on me so I don’t start any funny business. “Don’t you watch the economic news at this time?”
“I can see a recap later.” I take her hand in mine so that we’re facing each other. “Honeybee, you know you can tell me if he hurt you, right? Is he blackmailing you? Forcing you to do anything? I know boys like him well. They’re little twats wrapped in sophisticated charm, and I’ll be damned if I let him play around with you.”
Her eyes slide to him, and they widen, brighten, and explode in a rainbow of fucking colors that burn in my chest. She looks at him like her mother looks at me sometimes, and I know, because I’ve been searching for this type of expression in her eyes for years. Whether when she was with Jonah or when I thought she had a crush on that tool Landon—thank fuck that was a false alarm. Captain, Levi, is my friend, but that son of his should’ve been in a mental institute along with Aiden’s son, Eli, the moment they were born.
Point is, this is the first time she’s looked at someone like this, with warmth and adoration. Respect, even.
Is it too late to execute my plan B which consists of murdering the fucker in his sleep, hiding his body, and pretending he left in the middle of the night?
“He’s not playing around with me, Papa.” Cecily finally looks at me, this time with a blush on her cheeks. “Also, you raised me better than that. I wouldn’t allow anyone to ridicule me or step on my pride.”
“That’s my girl.” Though I’m fucking gutted at the prospect that whatever shit she has with her soon-to-be ex-boyfriend is actually real and could be unstoppable. “You can still have someone better than him.”