Written with Regret (The Regret Duet #1)(57)

“But it will be your zoo, so you can have whatever animals you want.”

She stopped rubbing my scar and contemplatively tapped her chin. “But then where will Hadley keep her guinea pig? I bet the elephants would step on it.”

“Ah. Excellent point. Maybe stick to the farm.”

“Yeah. Okay.” She went right back to rubbing the scar. “Daddy?”

“Right here, baby.”

“I love Hadley.”

I closed my eyes, feeling the all-too-familiar squeeze in my chest. I had to clear the emotion from my throat before I could reply. “Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah. She’s kinda weird sometimes. Like, she told me she dips her brownies in ranch dressing and she wraps her chicken nuggets in pickles.”

“Say what?” I laughed.

“But she’s really funny and good at art. And she always has her toenails painted. She told me that maybe soon we could ask if you would let her paint my toenails as long as we did it outside. And she told me not to let Jacob kiss me on the playground at school anymore because he might have cooties.”

I sat up enough to look down at her. “Jacob kissed you?”

“Yeah, but don’t worry. Hadley gave me my cootie shot.”

This time, I bolted upright. “She gave you a shot?”

My girl took my hand, serious as a heart attack, and traced her fingers over my palm. “Circle, circle, dot, dot, now you’ve had your cooties shot.”

I breathed a sigh of relief and fell back against the bed. “Don’t scare me like that.”

She was quiet for a second. “Hadley was scared tonight.”

“Yeah. She’s okay now though.”

“What was wrong?”

I ruined her life. “She just doesn’t like blood.”

Rosalee and I had these types of conversations a lot. Not necessarily about Hadley, but since she was old enough to talk, we’d lie in her bed and shoot the shit. The conversation would start at point A and then jump to Y before heading back to J. Majority of our chats zigzagged through every letter of the alphabet before she got bored of cuddling with her old man and got up to play. This one would be no different.

I just didn’t realize she’d jump to point Z so fast.

“Why don’t you like Hadley?”

My chin snapped to my chest, where I found her peering up at me. “What? Who said I didn’t like her?”

“When she came to my birthday party, you yelled at her. And then when she came to teach me art, you used to sit at the table and give her the mean daddy face. Now, you look sad when you look at her from the couch when you pretend to work.”

Jesus. Kids noticed everything.

I rolled to my side and dragged her up to share the pillow. “I don’t hate Hadley, baby.”

“Then do you love her? Because tonight you called her babe. That’s what Jacob calls me sometimes.”

I blinked “Okay, first of all, I need Jacob’s last name because toddler Rico Suave and I are going to have a long talk.”

“Who’s Rico Sway-vay?”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t matter. Listen, I don’t want you worrying about me and Hadley. I like her just fine.” This included her body. Her hands. Her lips. Her… Son of a bitch. I had to get my shit under control when it came to that woman.

“Are you friends?”

Shit. I had no idea how to answer that. Things had been going well with me and Hadley; we were casual and courteous with each other. Despite the urge to rip her clothes off, I wasn’t sure that would categorize us as friends.

But Rosalee didn’t need to know any of that.

“Yeah. Hadley’s my friend.”

She suddenly sat up and crisscrossed her legs. “Oh, good. Then can you invite her to my awards thing at school? She told me she had to work. But if you ask her, I bet she’ll come. She always looks at you like this.” She folded her hands in front of her chest and stared dreamily into the distance while batting her eyelashes. “I think she likes you.”

It shouldn’t have mattered. After all, my kid was four. She was hardly qualified in deciphering human emotions attached to expressions. But tell that to the spike of my pulse like fucking Jacob on the playground.

“She looks at me like that?”

“Yep. When you look at your computer, she looks at you. And when you look at her, she looks at me. And then, when you both look at each other, her cheeks get pink and she looks down at the table and smiles. Jacob told me at snack that she probably loves you.”

My jaw slacked open. “You were talking to Jacob about me and Hadley?”

She gave me a duh side-eye that did not bode well for me during her teenage years and replied, “He’s a love expert, Daddy.”

Fuck. I was going to have to find a way to convince Jacob’s parents to have his lips surgically removed—or at the very least pay for his tuition at the preschool across town.

I toyed with the replica of my mother’s heart necklace around her neck. “What if we make a deal? You stop worrying about how Daddy and Hadley look at each other and I’ll invite her to the awards ceremony.”

“Yessssss!” she hissed, all but diving off the side of the bed.

Clearly, our conversation was done and she was off to other caffeine-induced shenanigans. But as I stared up at her ceiling, my mind drifted back to Hadley and the way she’d breathed my name while stroking the curve of my jaw.