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But what was the solution? She needed him. Even if she didn’t seem to appreciate his bossier ways.

He guessed he could try to ease up on that. He didn’t want her taking off on him simply because she disagreed with something he’d said. He was going to make it clear that that was not acceptable behavior. He just didn’t know exactly how he was going to enforce any rules that he gave her.

But damn he was tempted, really tempted, to put her over his knee.

“Ammo? What are you doing here?” she said. “How did you find me?”

He raised his eyebrows and folded his arms over his chest as he glared down at her.

“I have my ways. I wouldn’t have had to come looking for you if you’d stayed put, like I told you to.”

Her mouth opened and closed in shock. “Stayed put? Are you kidding me?”

“No, I very rarely joke. You should have stayed put, and if you needed to go somewhere, you should have told me instead of coming here on your own. Anything could have happened to you.”

“I’ve been here heaps on my own and I’m fine. Look at me.”

“You look pale,” he said.

“I’m always pale these days,” she replied.

“I don’t like it.”

“Well, there’s a lot of things in life I don’t like, but I have to put up with them,” she said.

He could guess that he was on that list, but she didn’t have to like what he said in order to do it.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “Why did you come here?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Do you know that Charlie used to bring me here each Christmas? Back when we first moved to Greasy Knob. We’d sip hot chocolate and look at the Christmas lights around this park. It used to be so magical. Life was simpler back then. I had hope and dreams, you know? And now, all I seem to have are problems. Makes you kind of wonder what the point of it all is, doesn’t it?”

Okay, he definitely did not like the way she was talking.

Seemed his instincts to stick close to her were the correct ones and he needed to listen to them.

“Do not talk like that.”

She shrugged. “How else am I meant to talk? It all seems impossible, you know? Like I just don’t know how to keep going.”

Oh, he really didn’t like that at all. And he remembered feeling like that himself at one time in his life, and how Zander had pulled him out of it, how he’d given him a purpose, a place to live, a place to belong. Maybe this was coming full circle. Zander had helped him, and now he was helping her.

“Listen to me.” He grasped hold of her chin, tilting her head back. “I once felt a bit like you do, like there wasn’t any point to being here. That all my problems were insurmountable.”

Her eyes grew wide. “You did? You really felt like that?”

“I really felt like that,” he repeated.

“What did you do? How did you stop feeling like that?” she asked.

“Zander helped me. He gave me a purpose, something to do, something to live for, a way to see clear of all the darkness surrounding me. I’m not saying it happened overnight or that it was necessarily easy, but it happened, and I found my purpose again.”

Well, he thought he had. Now he was starting to wonder if his purpose in life was to take care of her. Maybe he’d been put into Charlie’s path so that later on, he could find his way into Aimee’s life and help her.

All right, now he was just thinking crazy. Ammo didn’t believe in fate or destiny or any of that kind of mumbo jumbo.

“Maybe I need Zander in my life,” she said.

He instantly felt a surge of jealousy, which he pushed down because that was ridiculous. He wasn’t jealous of Zander, and Zander had his own woman. Plus, Aimee didn’t belong to him, so he had no right to feel possessive of her.