Parental Guidance (Ice Knights #1)(65)

His chin trembled just once before he firmed it. “We both know I wasn’t the greatest dad when you were growing up. I’m still not.” He came over and sat beside her on the couch. “When your mom left, it hit me hard. It killed my hope, and that had been the one thing that had filled me since we brought you home from the hospital. Once we had you, I was sure that everything was going to work out.”

How many times had she heard that as a kid? Don’t worry about the light bill; it will work itself out. Don’t worry about the landlord; the rent will work itself out.

“But it didn’t,” she said. “Not with Mom or your business plans or anything.”

He let out a long sigh and then gave her a sad little shadow of a smile. “You know what I learned from all that failure? That you can’t force it.” He reached for her hand, curling both of his around her one. “You can’t force things to go your way just because you want them so badly that it shakes your whole world, and you can’t force it away when it breaks something inside you that you thought could never be broken. That’s what I learned from your mother.” A bone-deep hurt filled his eyes, and it was raw enough to steal Zara’s breath. “Your mom, well, I always said she was troubled. The truth was that, after you were born, she developed a drinking problem, and I thought if I loved her enough, I could help her beat it. I hadn’t realized yet that you can’t change people. They have to want to change themselves.” He paused, turning away from her for a minute so she couldn’t see his face as he lifted a hand up and wiped something away before turning back to her. “And once she was gone, I saw how it affected you. God, you were the happiest girl when you were little. No fantasy was too big, no dream too unlikely. But after she left, all of that changed.” He squeezed her hand as a tear spilled over onto his cheek. “All those schemes and crazy ideas, they were all an effort to bring that spark back to you. I thought that if you could feel that sense of hope just one more time, that it would stick. That what had been broken would be repaired. In reality, I just ended up doing more damage, didn’t I, Button? I’m so sorry.”

It was a shift in paradigm and perception that she couldn’t wrap her head around, but what she could do was give her dad a hug. It wasn’t much. It probably wasn’t enough, but she did it anyway.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, tightening her grip as he hugged her back. “I never realized.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t exactly do a great job of communicating,” he said as he sat back, already sounding more like himself. “I just tried to do instead of talking.”

Ouch. That hit close to home. “That kinda sounds familiar.”

“You want to tell me about it?”

All of it came in one huge run-on sentence punctuated by sniffles and the occasional blowing of her nose. She’d just gotten to the part where Helene Carlyle showed up outside her apartment when Gemma came back with Anchovy. Her bestie sat cross-legged on the floor while petting the dog’s belly for the rest of the story, adding in the appropriate gasps and tsk-tsk noises when necessary.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Gemma said, cringing back just a bit. “But, oh, honey, you just might have overreacted a bit. He did the wrong thing, but he really was trying to help.”

Coming from anyone else, that little bit of truth telling would have rankled. However, she’d been friends with Gemma for so long that there really wasn’t anything they couldn’t say to each other—especially when it was an oh-honey moment.

“I know, but I don’t know what to do about it.” Regret burned a hole in her belly as she contemplated her options, which basically came down to null and nada. “He’s never going to talk to me again, and who can blame him? I was a total bitch.”

“Don’t you think you owe him the opportunity to make that decision for himself?” her dad asked. “Dig deep into that Ambrose heritage and go big with hope.”

“I do still have tickets to the ball tonight,” Gemma said, a wide grin erasing the worry from her face. “And you know the Ice Knights are one of the major sponsors, so I bet he’ll be there.”

It was a ridiculous idea, almost as out of the bounds of reality as falling for the man who answered an ad on an online dating app calling for someone to clean out her vagina cobwebs. Oh my God, when this worked out, she was going to have to do whatever it took to make sure that ad was deleted from the app’s servers. When it works out. Oh yeah, she, the woman who never dreamed, was going to make that happen. She just couldn’t do it on her own.

She turned to her soon-to-be knights in shining armor. “Which one of you is going to be my fairy godmother, because I’m going to need help turning this fantasy into a reality.”

“I do believe that’s my calling,” her dad said, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. “Let me work my magic, and then you can go win back your Prince Charming.”

All she needed was a trusty steed. Anchovy let out a happy woof.

It turned out that doing almost everyone in the neighborhood a favor every now and then meant Jasper was able to send a call out for help that was answered almost immediately.

Jasper tapped into his line of contacts, and within a couple of hours, she was sitting on a stool in her kitchen while Andrea from The Hair Bar did alchemy-level magic turning the rat’s nest on Zara’s head into some kind of dreamy updo that involved braids, waves, and enough bobby pins to pick a million locks—if Zara had that skill.