Page 9 of Lesson In Trust

“Repent to your God!”

Her father roared the demand as though he, Gregory Goldman, had the power to invoke the Lord through voice alone. The fury in it, the disgust, was fierce enough to embed beneath her skin, burning like an open wound yet invisible to the eye.

Leather rained down on her until false truths spilled from her cracked lips. Tears soaked the bedspread as inhuman noises accompanied the lashes.

When she was hardly coherent, her throat raw, and her father stopped beating the evil out of her, the screams were still ringing in her head.

*

Callie

“Callie. Callie, wake up now, there’s a good girl.”

Chest unbearably tight, her skin crawling with pain, Callie whimpered through the tenderness of her throat. Was she sick? She must be, because when she swallowed, it felt as though claws had raked the inside of her trachea.

“Breathe, sweetness. Daddy’s got you.”

The traumatized child inside her shuddered, mixing up Daddy and father into one incomprehensible being. Once, her father had been her daddy—at least until she’d grown old enough to learn right from wrong, good and evil, and Gregory’s paranoia eclipsed anything resembling love from what should have been a lifetime bond.

But Callie the woman wasn’t completely lost in the chaos of the flashback. This part of her knew there was warm skin beneath her cheek, damp with her tears. A heartbeat thudded under her ear; not panicked, but not steady either. She smelled a familiar fragrance, earthy and smooth, and all masculine.

One hand was on her back, stroking from her nape to mid-spine and back up again, while another was on her bare butt, fingers tracing the evidence of how cruel the men in her life could be.

She tried to do as Evander asked, but her body was tangled in the miserable web of nightmare and reality. Almost twenty years down the line, it still remembered how badly a belt wounded when wielded in fanatical rage. The leather hurt more than she’d ever be able to explain, but when the emotion behind the blows was so intense, those lashes cut to the soul.

“Come on, babygirl. It was just a horrible dream.” Lips moved against her hair, and she felt it catching slightly on the trimmed bristles of his beard. “Blow out the anxiety and let your lungs work.”

She was still crying, she realized as mortification swept through her. In bed with one ofthemost gorgeous men she’d ever seen in her life, sprawled naked on top of him, and she was smearing tears and God knew what else all over his ridiculously hunky, carpentry-crafted chest.

Another whimper wrenched out of her, only to be soothed immediately by those callused hands. He petted and comforted her as though he did it every day, but he’d admitted to her on their first night together in his hotel room—after their very intimate and exhausting shenanigans at Roulette—that his experience as a Daddy Dom was non-existent.

Unbeknownst to Evander, she’d heard him on the phone the next day when he thought she was asleep. He’d asked for advice from someone called Atticus, who’d apparently given her new lover all the ammunition he needed to fortify himself as a Daddy.

Ammunition he hadn’t really utilized yet because she’d tried so hard to keep that part of herself tucked away where she wouldn’t scare him off. Seeing glimpses of her was one thing; facing the whole manic Little in her full, off-the-leash glory might be enough to send him running.

Callie wasn’t even that well acquainted with herself yet. The few slips she’d made with Daniel had been met with disdain, irritation, and no small amount of disgust. Eventually, those emotions became corporeal, and he’d demonstrated his utter contempt for her childlike side with vicious strikes of the cane.

No, it wasn’t safe to let Little Callie out.

Not even if Evander gave her the warm and fuzzies when he called hersweetnessorbabygirl.

His hands were twice the size of Daniel’s. God knew he outweighed the dick by maybe one hundred and twenty pounds, if not more, and all that extra weight was pure muscle. At six-feet, seven-inches tall, Evander was massive, and perfectly proportioned.

She was a gnat in the fur of a grizzly bear in comparison.

If he ever lost his temper with her, he’d break her in so many worse ways than Daniel. Not only was he capable of crushing her into an unidentifiable paste physically, but he also possessed a piece of her heart, gaining more of it by the day.

She almost moaned when it dawned on her that they were only on day four of knowing each other, and she was so enamored with him that she didn’t care if the entirety of her heart rested in his palms.

Still, she exhaled softly, using the gentle pressure to press her alter ego back into her hidey-hole for a while. Her entire system needed to settle after that godawful memory relived itself, and she had holes to shore up in her defenses before Evander sensed them and delved into what she wasn’t ready to put into words yet.

“No, don’t do that, Callie. Don’t hide any part of you from me.”

How did he do that? Did he have magic powers that let him see her internal thought processes? CCTV cameras inside her head, watching her every move before she made it?

Maybe he was a lucky guesser?

Suddenly, the hard lump of man beneath her shifted, easing into a half-sitting position as he reached over to the bedside table. She hummed in approval, snuggling into the new angle of his chest.

---