AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Like what?”
“No leaving without me. Ever.”
She leveled him in her solemn gaze.
“You don’t answer the door.”
“I have deliveries coming every day.”
“Doesn’t matter. I handle the deliveries from now on.”
She laughed, a tinkling sound that slipped into his cold heart. “No way am I following those rules.”
“It’s for your own good.”
The hard edge snapped back into her gaze, and she narrowed her eyes. “Don’t say that. My father told me that all the time, and none of it was for my own good!”
Fuck. He’d triggered her.
“Please get away from me.”
The pain in her voice punched him in the chest.
There seemed to be no good way out of this conversation. An apology would seem too watered down. How could he make things right with Livia?
Inspiration took hold, and he nodded toward his rum glass on the bar. “The rum needs to age longer. So it has time to gain those notes of nuttiness you want in a rum.”
Livia let out a scream and whipped around on her backside, swinging her legs off the other side of the bar. She stormed off, her cowgirl boots thumping on the floor, and slammed the door of the back room.
He pulled in a deep breath.
He did what he had to do by pissing her off, and it would most likely mean that she’d never see him for what he was—an ally.
It was better that she kept those thick walls. It was how she protected her soft, vulnerable side.
The one thing Carver couldn’t shield.
Chapter Five
All night long, Livia nursed the small throb of pain in her chest that Wolfe put there with his words.
It’s for your own good.
He might have spoken them, but they didn’t have the same meaning as when her father said them.
“Why can’t I come to the bar with you? I’ll be good. I won’t give you or the bartenders any trouble.”
“It’s for your own good.”
That was one exchange between them that she kind of understood. A bar was no place for a young girl. But the next had an undercurrent of meaning behind it that was much, much harder to understand.
“Why can’t I go out with my friends?”
“It’s for your own good.”
It was never for her own good—it was for his. So he could go on working and drinking himself into a nightly stupor. So he could take those women into the back room and have his way with them—the reason her mother had finally given up.
Wolfe couldn’t know any of this when he poked her with the sharp edges of that phrase.
