Page 18 of Daddy’s Fortitude

And that’s where she was right now. She was being driven into the ground. With no way free.

Suddenly, there was more knocking on the door, and she jumped with a small squeal.

“Aimee, I need to talk to you right away. You can’t just ignore me like this. The yard is a disgrace and so is the house. Something must be done about it. You are bringing down house prices in the area. It is disgraceful.”

To her shock, Ammo turned and quickly opened the door. Shit, she had nowhere to hide. She was going to have to deal with Yvonne.

Sometimes she hated being an adult. There were times where she wished she could just slip into Little headspace and stay there, but she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to do that. She wasn’t even sure she was actually a Little. She just liked to read books about them.

And she slept with a toy at night. And maybe put on the occasional onesie and sometimes sucked her thumb if she was really stressed. But she still didn’t know for sure if she was a Little.

And she didn’t have time in her life to figure it out either.

To her surprise, Ammo didn’t step away to let her deal with Yvonne, which she wouldn’t have blamed him for.

He stood between them both, so she didn’t even have to look at the other woman. “Go away.”

“Excuse me,” Yvonne said with shock in her voice. “Did you just tell me to go away?”

“Yes. Go away now,” he told her.

“You can’t talk to me like that.”

“Just did lady. Leave or I’ll call the cops.”

“Fine, call the cops. Then they’ll have a look at this disgraceful house and be on my side.”

“You’re dreaming,” he said to her. “They’re going to arrest you for trespassing, and then everyone in the neighborhood will see you being arrested. They’ll see you being hauled away in a cop car, and they won’t have any sympathy for you because you’re probably the scourge of the neighborhood. No doubt Aimee isn’t the only one that’s hidden from you.”

Oh my God, he really was very perceptive. Everybody hated Yvonne. She was the person they all tried to avoid.

“And nobody is going to be on your side, lady, because here you are harassing the woman that just lost her husband. She hasn’t even had the funeral yet, and you’re here demanding that she do some yard work and tidy up her house. So how about you leave before I have to call the cops, and save yourself some humiliation, yeah?”

“I’m going to talk to my brother-in-law about this. He’s a lawyer.”

“Good luck. I know a lawyer too. And she’ll be seriously annoyed when I tell her about the way you’ve been harassing a new widow.”

He shut the door again before Yvonne could say anything more, and thankfully, there was no more knocking on the window or the door.

“Wow,” she said. “I don’t think anyone has ever talked to her like that, not to her face, anyway. Everybody talks about her plenty behind her back. I mean, what is with her always being in running gear? I’ve never even seen her run before.”

He didn’t reply, but then she didn’t really expect him to. Ammo didn’t seem to be big on talking, unless he really had something to say.

“Do you really know a lawyer?”

“Sort of. I know she’s good people. If I called her, she’d come in guns blazing. She’d raze this town to the ground.”

Wow. There was a part of her that actually wanted to see that.

“Not a good idea, though,” he said.

That was true. It wasn’t like she could afford lawyer fees.

“Yeah, I couldn’t afford her.” She already had her own lawyer fees to pay with Charlie’s death, and they weren’t going to be insubstantial.

“She wouldn’t charge you.”

“She wouldn’t?”