just—”
“Adores you?” I finished for him, biting back a smile.
“Wears me out. All that horoscope nonsense she babbles about. It hurts my head.”
I laughed. “Well, I don’t see you turning down the cookies and muffins she keeps bringing you.”
“No,” he said wearily. “I guess not. I’m weak when it comes to good food. Your mother knew that, too. Any time she had bad news to tell me, she’d make my favorite dinner.”
“Yeah, I remember,” I said. “Roast and rice and gravy.”
“Got to where I wanted to turn around and come back to work when I’d walk in and smell that,” he said. “It always meant the toilet was backed up or you or Lily broke something.”
“Usually me,” I said.
“Usually.”
I chuckled and then fiddled with my keyboard. “So, speaking of Lily, she told me something earlier.”
Dad met my eyes with a nod. “About that boy?”
“That boy?”
“That other McMasters boy,” he said. “Jim’s brother.”
My jaw dropped a little that he already knew. “Well, Dad, he’s my age, so boy probably isn’t really an apt description.”
“You’re all kids to me,” he said, standing and waving a hand absently in my direction. “So he’s coming back here.”
“That’s—that’s what she said. When did you find this out?”
“Day before yesterday,” he said.
I pushed back in my chair. “Seriously?”
His brows came together. “What?”
I held up my hands and gave him a look. “Hello? No one thought to tell me?”
“She told you this morning,” he said, like that fixed it. “She was just worried about how you’d take it. That you’d obsess over it or—”
“Excuse me?”
He held his palms up to ward off whatever I was going to throw. Not that I’d throw anything. But he might have questioned that for a second.
“Honey, that boy messed you up for a long time,” he said. “Personally, I was never so glad to see him go.”
Slam to the gut. “Thanks.”
“He was a thug.”
So was I, Dad. “There was more to him than that,” I said, really perturbed to be put in the position of defending him. “He practically ran the butcher shop before Jim took over.”
“He was trouble,” he reiterated. “And you turned a blind eye to it every time you hooked up with him. That was not a healthy thing you two kept falling into. Like following Satan straight to hell.”
Once upon a time, I would have followed Ian anywhere, and pretty much did. Into stores to steal meaningless crap, into houses that weren’t ours, cars that weren’t ours, and sometimes even beds that weren’t ours. We both knew how to pick most locks by the time we were twenty. It was all part of the rush of being with Ian McMasters.
“Okay, I—remember, but still.” I took a deep breath and physically shook it off. “I’m not that person anymore. Y’all don’t need to protect me or whatever the hell you’re doing. I’ve done just fine.”
“You don’t date anyone,” Dad said.
My jaw really did drop that time. “That is such a lie.”
“For longer than three weeks,” he amended.
I blinked a couple of times and decided on a redirect. “Let’s talk about you,” I said.
“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” he said, waving as he turned.
“Oh, most definitely so,” I said. “How many women have you dated in the last ten years?”
“Plenty,” he said.
“Exactly,” I said. “And how many for longer than three weeks?”
“Mrs. Sullivan,” he said matter-of-factly.
I tilted my head. “Please.”
Dad walked back to my desk and leaned over it, trying to be intimidating, but it wasn’t working with the little smirk he had going. “I had my great love, little girl. I don’t need anything for longer than that.”
He always knew where to hit me with the Mom darts. Took all my thunder. “Well, maybe I had mine, too,” I said, looking away at the nearest focal point. A hot firemen calendar. Probably not the best