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My jaw dropped and I looked to Blaze. This wasn’t my call, but I hated to put it back on him; his expression left no doubt that he did not want Paisley helping me.
“Oh, I don’t think you want to do that. It’s really messy and sticky and boring, but if you want to come visit the bees—” Her pained whimper stopped me cold.
“But I want to help,” she said softly, and it felt like I’d just taken her whole world and crushed it in my palm.
“Oh, I know you do. But you have other important things to do like school and hanging out with your dad—”
“But we can hang out here,” she insisted and turned to Blaze, taking the ball squarely out of my court. “Right, Daddy? We can hang out here when I’m done with school, so I can help Harper? Please.”
The way her lips quivered, there was no person on earth who was going to say no to her.
But the way Blaze agreed, no actor in the world was good enough to hide that what he’d said yes to was the very last thing he wanted to do.
Chapter 5
Blaze
The first rule of sobriety—or at least mine—was to not put myself in the vicinity of temptation. Yet, that was all I’d fucking done for the last two weeks: spent my afternoon hours watching my daughter smile and laugh and open up for the one woman I should not want. Could. Not. Want.
“Daddy, did you know all the bees in the hives right now are sisters?” Paisley asked, her focus homed in on Harper who was carefully filling another glass jar with honey.
Who the hell would’ve guessed it would be bees that interested my daughter? Not me, that was for sure. But Pais couldn’t get enough of them or her time here on the farm.
And that meant I was getting far too much time around Harper.
“I didn’t know that, pumpkin,” I said from my seat in the corner of Harper’s living room.
The century’s old farmhouse wasn’t an open concept. The kitchen had a morning room attached, the small table completely covered in three-dozen jars to be filled with cinnamon honey. At first, I’d tried to sit there while they worked, but that quickly turned out to be a shit idea; the room was too small and I could only stand to be bumped, brushed, and bombarded with Harper’s presence—and her damn lavender scent—so many times before my chest threatened to explode from all the attraction I was forced to bury.
So, I’d moved to the chair just over the threshold of the living room. Close enough to keep an eye on my daughter and far enough away so it wasn’t obvious when my attention veered to Harper.
Today, she hazarded a pair of black yoga pants that would’ve been the end for Degenerate Blaze the way they hugged her ass. Thankfully, Daddy Blaze was determined to pass the ‘keep my hands to myself’ test. With them, she wore a light purple shirt that had an illustration of a bee followed by the word kind. Yesterday, she’d worn a violently yellow tee that read ‘Bee the good.’ Every day, she had a different pun-riddled graphic tee.
I was tempted to ask if she owned any other clothes that didn’t reference bees, but I was afraid of the answer. Afraid the only alternative was the damn cropped top that just barely covered her tits the one day Pais and I got here early. Harper had been working outside, weeding around the wildflowers, and every inch of her bared skin glistened. It wasn’t indecent, I reminded myself. My irritation had nothing to do with reality and everything to do with the fantasies I tried to fight.
Fantasies I diligently battled every night—with my right hand in the shower—yet somehow, I was still losing the war.
Fuck.
I pushed out a tight exhale and rubbed my eyes like I could physically force my brain to focus.
“Here, Daddy, have a bite.”
I opened my eyes to Pais standing next to me, holding out a cracker with a glob of coarse red-gold honey sitting on top.
Raw—real honey wasn’t smooth. Another bee fact that my daughter had learned from Harper…and taught me.
“I’m good, pumpkin.”
My daughter frowned. “Why don’t you want to try Harper’s honey?”
I jerked, my teeth slapping together as a rough sound barreled from my chest. That was why I didn’t want to try it: the erotic idea right there of tasting Harper’s honey was like a line of coke injected straight into my frontal cortex.
My stare drifted, and I found Harper staring at me. As soon as our eyes locked, lust clawed through my veins, primitive and starved. Fuck. I snapped my attention back to Pais.
“I told you, pumpkin. Daddy doesn’t really like cinnamon, and I don’t want to waste it,” I repeated my excuse even as my traitorous mouth watered. “You can have Daddy’s bite.”
Her pout withered—as did most pouts in the face of anything that contained sugar, and then she crushed the whole cracker in her mouth and moseyed back to the table where Harper busied herself to avoid looking at me.
