Page 21 of My Silver Fox Savior

“I don’t know how I can just ignore this,” she says.

“It’s easy. Focus on another kid who needs your help. You’re not abandoning them, Lily. I’m going to handle this.”

“But …”

“Say it,” I tell her.

“Are you?” she asks as we glide through traffic. “I don’t want to offend you, but you’ve worked as a divorce lawyer for years, right? And you haven’t done any more of this Good Samaritan stuff?”

“What’s your point?” I say coldly.

“I don’t know.”

“You do,” I say. “You just don’t want to offend me. Trust me, it’ll take more than this. Tell me, Lily.”

“What if you get a big case at work or something? What if you can’t stay on this? What if you lose interest?”

“I won’t be able tolose interestin this,” I growl, realizing we’re pulling up outside her work far too soon as if the city has conspired to get us here as quickly as possible. Usually, the traffic is terrible, but not today. Maybe I’m feeling morbid, but the whole damn world’s a joke. “How could I? How could you even think of melosing interest? No man could look away from this sort of thing.”

“Hmm,” she murmurs.

“What’shmm?” I ask.

She looks up at me bravely, her eyes full of sass. Or maybe my thinking of it assassis undervaluing it. She looks fierce and ready. She looks like a woman who will put her case across and doesn’t care what anyone else says. I see her suddenly as a lawyer or the operator of an entire social work division. She’s going places.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she says brusquely.

“Like what?”

She bites her lip.Fuck. There’s nothing staged or rehearsed about it. There’s something so hot about how natural it is. “It doesn’t matter.”

It unquestionably does, but she doesn’t want to speak about it. “What were you going to say?” I ask.

She reaches for the door handle. “It doesn?—”

“Yes, it does,” I growl. “Itdoesmatter.”

She flinches again. I need to calm the hell down. It’s like death is hovering over my shoulder. It’s making me so tense.

“You said you can’t lose interest. The thing is, stuff like this has been happening since you stopped helping, Landon. It’s not like it just stopped. You worked all those years as a divorce lawyer. There was still stuff going on. There were still little girls with psychos for dads and junkies for moms. They’re still waiting for their knight in shining armor.”

Am I the knight she’s talking about?

“It didn’t stop,” she goes on.

She angrily pushes the door handle. I watch her go, thinking about running after her and grabbing her arm. It’s the sort of impulsive thing a logical man would never do. A natural block in me forever prevents me from overstepping the line like that, but not anymore.

I’m out of the car suddenly, walking after her, taking long strides to catch up with her. She gasps when I take her elbow and turn her toward me. She stares with almost fascinated eyes. She looks curious, too, but something’s holding her back. Maybe the fact we’re standing outside her workplace.

“What are you doing?” she hisses.

“I’m not the jackass you think I am,” I tell her gruffly. “I’m not some selfish asshole.”

“I didn’t say you were,” she says. “Landon, please …” She gestures at her building.

“I just … need you to know that.”

I turn away, feeling lame and ineffective. I don’t even know what I was trying to do there. She’s right. There’s no way around it. I stopped helping because I stopped caring. Maybe I stopped believing a man like mecouldfeel anything other than cold, hard facts. Perhaps it has something to do with my childhood. I don’t know, and I don’t care.

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