Page 10 of Untamed Heart

Ever since Dakota Riley came back into my life with the force of a goddamn hurricane.

Christ, she’d taken my breath away. There hadn’t been a day in the past sixteen years where I hadn’t thought about her atleast a thousand times, yet I still managed to forget just how beautiful she was. When she stepped off that elevator I thought I was hallucinating. My jaw practically hit the floor as she moved down the hall like an apparition, and as she passed me, it felt like she’d reached right inside my chest and ripped my goddamn heart out, taking it with her.

The girl I’d loved with every single piece of me was all woman now. Her hips were rounder, her tits and ass fuller than they had been. What hadn’t changed were those mile-long legs I used to spend hours tasting every inch of. And all that thick, long, golden hair that always reminded me of a wheatfield swaying in the breeze beneath a cloudless blue sky.

I recognized the freckles that dotted across her nose and cheekbones. There were so many nights we’d lie in the bed of my old truck where I would trace those freckles with my finger and eyes while she mapped the stars above us. Dakota might have loved to stargaze, but those freckles were my own personal constellations.

Aside from her beauty hitting me in the gut like a sledgehammer, it was the look on her face when she basically told me she hated me that had burned itself into the backs of my eyelids. She thought she hid it, but I saw the pain in her eyes. The sky blue swam with so much it left me gutted, bleeding out on concrete as she walked away. Again.

She could think I didn’t still know her well enough to see behind that mask she’d been wearing, but she was dead wrong. Sixteen years didn’t change the fact that the woman’s entire being was etched into my bones. She was a part of me. Time and space hadn’t changed that.

Although, those were thoughts for another time. When I had a moment to myself to get lost in the past for a bit. When Cassi came into this world, everything changed. She healed the broken pieces of me left behind. They might not have fit togetherperfectly, but it was the imperfections that made it even better. Creating a beautiful mosaic that was somehow even stronger than before.

Dakota might have been in my bones, but my baby girl had my soul in her tiny hand and always would as long as I was drawing breath. I made a promise the very first time I held her in my arms that when she was with me my whole life would be about her.

I arched a brow, making exaggerated faces at her in the mirror, hoping to distract her from the pain as the hairbrush caught another knot. For Christ’s sake, my girl had the thickest head of hair in existence. “You were fighting bad guys in your dreams, huh? That’s supposed to be my job. You tryin’ to get me fired as your protector?”

Her giggle lit me up. “Silly Daddy.” She rolled her eyes at me like I was an idiot. “Princesses save themselves. That’s why they’re so strong.”

My eyes went wide. “Who taught you that, baby girl?”

“Auntie Lennon and Marigold.”

One corner of my mouth hooked up as I chuckled. “Of course.” It couldn’t have been anyone else. My best friend Pope’s woman might love it when he treated her like a queen, but she would also shove every single person she loved out of the way of a bullet if it meant taking it in their place. When his niece, Marigold, was taken, it was because of Lennon that we’d been able to get her back before anything seriously bad could happen to her.

She didn’t believe in sitting back and waiting for someone else to do the protecting, and now that Marigold was living with them full time, Lennon was teaching her the same lessons. I couldn’t think of a better example for my girl.

“Auntie Lennon’s right. Princesses don’tneedanyone else to save them, but how about you let your old man do the job for a little while longer, yeah?”

She turned on the stool she was standing on to face me. Her eyes were squinted as she tapped her chin in thought. My heart still jumped in my chest every time she looked into my eyes. “Would it keep you from bein’ sad?”

Christ, my daughter had a way of cutting me off at the knees without even trying. I never knew something so little could have a heart so big. Truth was, I didn’t have much faith in the world before she came into it. I’d seen some nasty shit and lived through worse. But then she’d say something like that and remind me that there had to be more good than I thought if she existed.

“Yeah, baby. Being your protector for a few more years would keep me from being sad.”

“Okay then.” She lifted her shoulder and spun back around, simple as that. Conversation over. “Can you do sparkly braids, Daddy? It always makes Poppy happy when my hair’s sparkly.”

She was speaking about Pops. When she was about a year old she’d dubbed himPoppy,and that was what he’d been to her and only her ever since.

The irony wasn’t lost on me that my daughter’s hair was sifting through fingers that were covered in tattoos, most of the ink a tie to the club I’d given and taken blood for. If someone told me seven years ago that these hands would be winding his daughter’s hair into her favorite braids, then spraying them down with fucking aerosol glitter, I would have laughed in their face.

But the bachelor/biker esthetic I’d lived with most my life had been overrun by pink unicorns and glitter rainbows, stuffed animals, and every color of hair tie and clip in existence. And I didn’t give a single fuck.

“Yeah, baby girl. We’ll do sparkles for Poppy.” Because she wasn’t wrong, they’d definitely make him happy.

FOUR

DAKOTA

Leaning closer to the mirror,I blended out the dab of concealer beneath my bottom lip to hide the bruise that had formed there. I thought I’d trained the tears away, but apparently they’d only gone dormant, springing back to life the instant I drove over the Ashland town limits. I’d practically gnawed on my poor lip to keep them at bay. If I didn’t find a healthier way to deal with my emotions, I was going to cause permanent damage. The dark circles under my eyes weren’t so easy to hide.

I spent most of the past two days at the hospital, sitting in a statically charged room with a practical stranger because of some inexplicable need to make sure he was okay no matter how badly he’d hurt me in the past.

Everything I felt for years, the resentment and animosity, was closer to the surface than it had been in a very long time, and having to force it down was draining. I could feel it stirring within me. It all needed to come out, but I couldn’t bring myself to start the conversation we needed to have while Ezra was laid up in the hospital.

I caught a few sporadic hours of sleep in the sorry excuse for a recliner the hospital provided, dozing off and on while Ezra slept, because if he caught me he’d try to kick me out, insisting I needed to take care of myself more than him. The hospital had been blessedly free of bikers, but I had a feeling that was only because, after my run-in with Pope, he’d ordered them to give me a few days. I was sure the reprieve would be ending soon.

If I wasn’t at the hospital, I was catching a bit of restless sleep in the room I was renting in Redemption. Redbud Inn was a great little B&B one town over—close enough that it was still familiar to me while being far enough from the past to keep it from swallowing me whole.