Page 48 of Lesson In Forgiveness

“But for now… I think it’s time for you to have some fun.”

Tabitha made a swishy motion with her hand. “My kind of fun?”

“Ah, no.”

The look she gave him brought a laugh, rich and rolling, from the depths of his belly. Wary, disbelieving, and one hundred percent suspicious.

God, she was delightful.

Chapter Six

Tabitha

This was not her idea of fun.

Sitting in the living room of her former target’s hotel room, just a couple of doors down from Grit’s, Tabitha continued her staring match with the sleepy-eyed Little sucking quietly on her thumb.

Callie wore a panda onesie, the eared hood pulled up over her dark hair. Owlish gray eyes watched Tabitha’s every movement as though she might go postal and start hacking the nearest person to death with one of the crayons on the table between them.

That wasn’t her style, of course; she’d been taught better than that, other than if she needed to make a gory statement or make an example of someone. It was a rarity—she preferred the art of carving clean lines with a flourish—but ruthlessly utilizing a living body as an oversized pin cushion was on her resume.

It wasn’t the first time she’d been in this room, however briefly. A quick pass through to the bedroom, where she’d hidden and done recon on Elias when he’d been set firmly in her sights.

The amount of toys scattered around was slightly disturbing to her sense of self. Part of her wanted to pick up those crayons and lose herself in the monotony of filling random line drawings with color. The rest of her was just perturbed by the notion a woman—one her own age, no less—voluntarily regressed into her most vulnerable state.

Tabitha often faced this conundrum whenever she was in Alicia’s vicinity. Atticus’s wife fully encompassed the word Little despite being mother to a horde of children and a doting spouse to her husband.

From across the room, she felt the uneasy tension radiating from the two men talking with Grit. One was a giant Nordic-looking God; the other looked as though he permanently walked around with a stick lodged somewhere in his rectum.

Evander and Elias.

Evander—ridiculously tall, blond, and built—had welcomed her into his temporary home after a brief, intense study. His lips had quirked behind his beard as he took in her oversized shirt and the boxer shorts peeking out from under the hem, then her bare feet.

“I said comfortable,” he’d said to Grit with a chuckle, then waved them in.

She definitely wasn’t feeling comfortable. In fact, she was trying to decide if this was some sort of payback for taking the hit on Elias, or a ploy to let her guard down so they could drug her and ship her back to Arizona to her brother.

Grit would have already done it, she tried to reason with herself. He’d had enough opportunities to slip a needle under her skin when she was sleeping, or something into her drink. God, she’d left herself completely open to attack by surrendering to him.

The thumb popped out of Callie’s mouth. “Someone paid you to kill my Daddy?”

Hmm, as far as opening conversations went, she’d heard worse. At least they were skipping the inane small talk. “I don’t get paid until the job’s done.”

“Are you going to kill him?” There was hostility there, simmering under the childlike tone, revealing the adult beneath.

“No.”

Callie pulled her lip between her teeth, worrying it with her teeth for a moment. Her whole demeanor changed then, brightening as she leaned forward to push a coloring book across the table. “My Daddies let me play if I’m a good girl and take a nap without arguing. Does your Daddy make you nap?”

Her gaze flicked over to where Grit drank from a bottle, the cords in his neck standing out as he tipped his head back. “He’s not my Daddy. I’m not…”

“A Little?”

“Yeah.”

A crayon zipped toward her, almost shooting off the table. Callie giggled and picked up a yellow one, flipping open her book and getting to work. “That’s okay. Not everyone is. Daddy Vander was the first person ever who let me be me.”

“You’ve always been Little?”

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