But it was all too perfect.
Wrapped up in a pretty red bow.
An illusion.
I knew it.
Was betting Grace knew it in a way that made my guts curl.
“You’re going to need to let me in on that.”
She breathed out a shaky sound and slumped into the wooden chair beside me. “I’d like to avoid using that if at all possible.”
“He won’t hesitate to destroy you, Grace.”
And that made me want to destroy him.
Her head shook. “I just . . . need to figure out how to do this with him thinking he’s getting the best thing for himself. For his campaign. For his life. I think he’d much rather keep this on the downlow than have the whole thing explode on the media.”
“I think you’re fooling yourself. I think you’re a threat to his pride, and that’s something he won’t settle for.”
“It’s more than that. He’s afraid if I’m outside of his control, I’ll expose the things I know.”
Anger boiled. “Has he ever hurt you before? Physically?”
Wounds streaked through her eyes, and I was half a second from flying to my feet and out the door.
Fuck the case.
The asshole could die by my bare hands.
“Once,” she said, her voice a tremor. “I’d left him back before Sophie was born. He didn’t take so kindly to it.”
She coughed out a horrified sound, like she was taken back to the memory. “He . . . forced me back into the house. Forced himself on me. Made it clear if I ever left again, I was going to regret it.”
That lump throbbed in my throat, my chest squeezing too tight. I really didn’t know if I could stomach any of this. Not when there was this ugly, nasty part of me that wanted to claim her as mine.
Take her and keep her.
My hands fisted. “He forced himself on you as in—”
The hostility on my tongue was cut off when a shouting voice broke into what I was going to say. “Mommy, Mommy!”
Grace’s face split into a forced smile when a little girl came bounding around the corner and into the kitchen.
The child skidded to a stop when she saw me sitting at the table.
My heart got scrambled in my chest.
Big, blue eyes stared back at me. The same color as her mother’s. Kid exuding nothing but love and hope and excitement.
Bile worked its way around that lump.
This . . . this was what I couldn’t reconcile. The fact this woman I wanted to own, to take, had three children.
Three children she was responsible for.
For their safety and their happiness and their wellbeing.
Foolish.
That’s what this was.
Part of me couldn’t help but hold it against Grace. This recklessness on her part. Bringing these kids into this world and then turning around and dumping them into this mess.
“Hey, mister! Who are you?”
She was holding a big brown drawing pad, two times wider than the width of her entire body, little arms stretched around it. Blonde hair straight as a pin and perfectly trimmed at her shoulders, short bangs framing her curious face.
There was no hesitation when she rushed forward and climbed onto the chair on the other side of me. She set the thick pad in front of her on the table.
Instantly, I had the weight of the two of them bracketing me on either side.
My collar felt too damned tight.
Grace stood and moved around me to the little girl and ran her palm over her head. The child tipped her head back, grinning up at her mother like she was the sun.
Grace glanced at me, so much tenderness in her expression that it nearly knocked me from my seat. “This is my Mal Pal. Mallory Paloma.”
Mallory gave an extravagant wave of her hand in her mother’s direction, like she was some kind of gameshow hostess. “And this is the best mommy in the whole wide world. She loves me to the sun and the stars and back again because she has a super-fast spaceship.”
She threw open the heavy cover of the pad and flipped through a ton of scribbled on pages.
It looked like . . . like some kind of storybook.
Picture after picture of the same characters with words written across them, some in children’s hand and other’s in a scripty font that my gut instantly told me belonged to Grace.
Mallory pointed at the last page with a drawing. “I just colored this one right now. Mommy’s spaceship goes a million miles an hour and uses fairy dust for gas and can find all of us in the night if she is looking for us because it has super-secret seeking powers.”
She ran her index finger over the lines of the picture she’d drawn, completely excited when she looked up at her mother. “I need you to put in all the words, Mommy. Just like I said. Exactly like that. Don’t mess ’em up. See that fairy dust right there?”
On her knees, she leaned toward me, her voice lowering like she was letting me in on a secret. “I don’t know how to spell it because it has way too many letters and my teacher hasn’t taught me yet. But I’m still a writer even if I don’t write the words.”
The last was absolute.
No room for interpretation.
The child was like a bottled soda that had been shaken and opened under the pressure. Everything flooding from her at the speed of light.
I gave her a tight nod. “I’ll remember that.”
“You better.”
I choked back a laugh.
Okay then.
Grace stifled one too, her smile going soft when she angled her head toward me. “Mallory, this is Mr. Jacobs. He’s going to help us talk to your father so that you’ll be able to sleep here most of the time. He needs to ask you a couple of questions.”
I could hear the air rushing down the kid’s throat as her eyes grew round. “You mean we got our hero?!”
She rammed her hands together, threading her fingers and pushing them up under her chin like she was thanking God for an answered prayer.
Then she got serious. “Guess I got a lot of work to do in the story, Mommy.”
Good God. How was I supposed to handle this child? The fact that they were relying on me for something so important? Her presence alone was about to bowl me over, and there she was, tossing ball after ball.
Those big blue eyes were on me. “Mr. Jacobs, what is your hero name? We got to get it right.”
I cleared the roughness from my voice. “Ian, I suppose.”
Her brow twisted up in some kind of abject horror. “Ian? That’s a terrible hero name.”
Of course, it was. Maybe the kid was reading me clearer than I thought.
She tapped her chin and looked at her drawing before she gasped out a thrill. “I got it! How about Ian-Zian the Great?”
“I’m not sure Mr. Jacobs wants to be a part of our story, Mal Pal,” Grace hedged, that knowing gaze bouncing between the two of us, almost apologetic every time it landed on me.
I kind of wanted to shout at her. To tell her to quit calling me that. To tell her this was all going to be too much.
I’d made a mistake, coming here.
Hell, I’d made one that first night. Chasing after a girl when I didn’t play chase.
Mallory looked at her mother like she had lost her mind.
“Why would he not want to be a part of our story? Our story is the funnest, most best adventure in the whole universe.”
Her attention darted to me, voice so matter-of-fact that this time there was no stopping the laugh. “It’s going to be a bestseller.”
“I have no doubt,” I told her.
She shrugged a little shoulder. “Doubts are for worriers.”
This child was something else.
Grace suddenly shrieked. “Gah, Sophie, no!”
She flew around, and I shifted just in time to see a child who wasn’t more than a baby running into the kitchen, three crayons fisted in her chubby hand.
All three tips were being dragged across the wall.
She squealed with laughter as her mother chased her.
“Sophie! No. Coloring is only for paper.”
She swiped the kid off her feet, but not before she’d left squiggly lines of blue, red, and orange on a quarter of the wall about a foot from the ground.
“I cowar.” She was all grins and small teeth.
“Yes, you can color, but only on paper.”