Girl Gone Viral (Modern Love #2)(64)

“Yikes. Does it ever snow?”

“Once, when I was a kid. So not really.”

“I miss the snow.”

“Tahoe’s not far from here. Do you want to go? The car’s gassed.”

She choked out a laugh, then looked up at him when she realized he wasn’t laughing. “We can’t get in the car and drive to Tahoe.”

“Why not?”

She opened her mouth, but she had no explanation. “Because . . . well, that’s wild.”

“If you want the snow, we can go.”

She ran an internal check of her body. They could go, if she wanted to. “What would we do there?”

“Have a snowball fight.”

“I’ve never had a snowball fight. At least, not since I was a child.” When her mother had been alive.

“I can fetch some mittens from Bikram.”

Katrina smiled, charmed at the thought of tussling in the snow with Jas. “No. I’m too tired tonight, but maybe some other time.”

He ran his fingers up and down her arm, soothing her. “Do you have bad dreams?” she whispered, though she knew the answer.

“Yes,” Jas said, his admission coming faster than she’d expected. “I often have bad dreams.”

“Do you want to tell me about them?”

He puffed up his cheeks. “Not now.”

She wanted to touch his scarred knee, ask him to share, but didn’t want to push him. “I had one.”

“What was it about?”

“I don’t remember. My dad, I think.” All this talk about family and blood. She closed her hands into fists.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

She nodded, then shook her head.

She’d felt so strong and independent. Taking up space. She didn’t want her dad’s memory to taint that.

Then again, whenever she did think about her dad, it was like a boil welling up that needed to be lanced. Her therapist was usually who she went to for that. It wasn’t even dawn yet, she couldn’t call Andy.

It would make her happier to talk right now.

Happiness is a radical act.

“When my mom died in that car accident, they had to hunt down my father. I’d barely seen him when she was alive. That first day, when he picked me up from the social worker, he told me he would provide for me until I could get a job.”

“You were nine.”

She shrugged. “Yeah. I got scouted a few years later, though. He was happy to stick around while I was making money and funding his lifestyle, so long as he could direct what I did and when I did it.”

“What an asshole.”

“He was an asshole. He controlled . . . everything. Where I ate, what I ate, what I drank, who I saw.” He would have controlled who she married if she hadn’t had a brief evening of rebellion the night she’d met Hardeep.

After they’d talked all night and she’d told Hardeep about her dad, the man had leaned forward. Sounds like we could help each other. Marry me, and you’ll get away from your father. You’ll have money, comfort, a doting husband.

She’d stared at him across the few feet that separated them in the library. What will you get out of it? Sex?

He’d snorted. Oh God, no. I have no interest in sex. No offense, don’t take it personally. No, I simply want some companionship, and you seem clever and kind. I don’t plan on ever marrying someone else. I’d like the satisfaction of knowing I can help a young woman.

She licked her lips. “Hardeep paid my dad off, with the demand that he not bother us. I don’t know the exact amount, but I assume it was huge.”

Jas squeezed her waist. “Yes. I knew about that. Hardeep put us on notice to make sure he didn’t show up. I figured your dad must have been a terrible guy, but I didn’t know the scope of the terribleness.”

That had been another big attraction to marrying Hardeep. He’d had people in place to protect her.

A surge of love flowed through her at his memory. Her husband had been so good and lovely and generous in so many ways. Hardeep had assured her the money was nothing to him, and it was a proper quid pro quo, but it was still hard to shake that feeling of being a bother. An expensive bother. “That bribe eats at me sometimes. Like Hardeep had to buy me.”

“Whatever Hardeep did for you, I’m grateful.”

“I only wish I could have done it on my own,” she confessed. Her deepest shame, that familiar bitterness over the fact that she’d needed help. A big strong man to save you.

After the wedding, for a while, she’d tried to join Hardeep on his daily jogs before finally admitting she hated running. The only way she’d managed to get through those three-mile-long hilly jaunts was by concocting elaborate revenge scenarios against her father if he ever came crawling back.

They were dramatic and impressive scenarios where she placed her stiletto heel on his neck and laughed while he begged for money and mercy. She’d filed them away, and now she had a far more rational break-glass-in-case-of-emergency plan, a fund of money to ensure she could pay her dad off again if he ever tried to bother her. Keeping a well-stocked bribery account wasn’t nearly as exciting as, say, forcing the man to eat a bug for every hundred dollars he wanted from her, but it was definitely more grown up.