“Only about how beautiful you are,” he replied without a missing a beat.
“Mhmmmm.” She stared at him. “Here.” She got up and tapped the top of his head. He ducked it, and she placed a daisy chain necklace around his neck with quiet tenderness. “There you go. Now you’re a little prettier than before.”
I looked down, hiding my mouth behind my hand. God love childhood bluntness.
“And Miss Lani.” She put another over my head before I could do anything.
The soft petals of the daisies tickled against my collarbone. “Why, thank you, Miss Hilaria. It’s beautiful.”
She grinned, showing a missing top tooth. “My mommy taught me forevers ago. She doesn’t always make them now, but I like to.”
“I have an idea,” Brett said, taking her tiny hand. “Why don’t me and you make your mommy one?”
Hilaria tilted her head to the side. “Yes. Mommy would like that.” She immediately walked past us. “We need the long daisies. They’re the bestestest ones.”
“You got it.” Brett got onto his hands and knees and scoured the grass for the best daisies.
Yep. I should have left hours ago. Could I handle Brett Walker on his knees, helping a six-year-old little girl search for daisies?
I didn’t think so.
In fact, as I watched him pluck one from the grass, I knew I couldn’t.
Oh, lordy, lord, lord.
My heart, my soul, everything. It burst as he placed it in the palm of her hand without crushing a petal.
He was so crude and forceful sometimes. How could he be so tender too?
“I win!” Sy screamed, almost crashing into the porch.
Eliot came up a second later. “You’re right. You did. Good job, buddy!”
I smiled as the older boy patted Sy on the shoulder. Then he grinned at me and winked. With two eyes.
Seriously. My heart.
If it survived today it would be a goddamn miracle.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
BRETT
Lani hadn’t said a word since we left the shelter.
I could see on her face that she was trying to process what she’d seen. Confusion flitted across her face in the form of a furrowed brow and wrinkled nose every few minutes. I didn’t know what to say to her to help her, mostly because the conversation that was coming had to be driven by her.
She was curious. She always had been. She always had to know every little thing in the world. Everything had to be explained right down to the letter. Even the letter itself had to be explained.
She had a million questions for me. I just knew it.
And I was fucking terrified.
Back there, she looked at me like she didn’t hate me.
Like I wasn’t total shit.
Like I wasn’t nothing.
Like I was somebody.
Somebody she respected.
And fuck, it was her, wasn’t it?
Her opinion. Always her opinion. She was all that mattered. Fucking hell, why did it have to be her? Of all the people that could matter to me it was her, even now, eight years later.
Shit.
I ran my fingers through my hair as I sat on the beach next to her. My toes dug into the soft, hot sand. If it weren’t for the blanket we were sitting on, my ass would be burning like a damn liar right about now.
“So that’s where you go,” she said on a quiet exhale.
“Yep. That’s where I go. My good deed. My little secret.” Because the big one, The Thing was fucking destructive.
Lani reached up and pulled her hair out of its tie. It fell down around her shoulders in one big wave. The kink from where she had it tied up looked strange, but she didn’t care as she ran her fingers through it. “I can’t say I ever would have imagined you there,” she quietly admitted. “I don’t know what I thought, actually. But not that.”
“Yeah.” I looked out as the sea crashed against the sand in sprays of pure white. “But we’re done now, so you get what you want. Ask me whatever you want to know.”
“Are you sure?” She looked over at me, tucking hair behind her ear. “Because...you don’t have to.”
“No, I made you promise. I’ll answer what you want about the shelter and me. Anything.” I met her gaze. “I swear, Lani. Ask me whatever. It’s yours to know, and then you can write your article and tell everybody that I’m actually the kind of person they don’t think I am.”
She looked at me long and hard for a moment, her long, dark lashes like thick curtains every time she blinked. “Why?” she asked. “Why do you go and do what you do?”
“Why do I do it today or how I started?”
Her eyes narrowed the tiniest bit. “Everything.”
I took a deep breath and looked back out at the sea. “When I was twenty-three, I hit probably my lowest point in what the people in this goddamn town would call my spiral into nothing. I had no limits. I drank every night, I really didn’t respect women at all, and on occasion, I smoked pot.”
Her inhale was sharp.
I couldn’t look at her. She was looking at me, but I couldn’t do it back.
“Drugs are big here. You might not think it, but they are. At least they were more then.” I rested my elbows on my knees and dove my fingers into my hair. Focusing on a small, cracked shell buried in the sand, I said, “I had friends then who were into it. I wasn’t big on it and it was never a real issue for me, but for them, it was. They needed it. One night, I was driving to a party in Miami and we got stopped just before we left town. There was two hundred dollars’ worth of pot in my trunk.”
Lani said nothing. She didn’t move either.
“My uncle gave me a warning. He let me off easy. He didn’t tell my parents either, and I don’t know why he didn’t. But he said if I did it again, he would. That was a bigger threat than going to jail.” I paused.
“You did it again, didn’t you?” she whispered.
“Not intentionally,” I said honestly. “One of the guys got bail, and we were headed into the center of town for a few beers. My uncle and the rest of Whiskey PD were in the habit of stopping me randomly to check I wasn’t carrying drugs. That happened to be a night I got stopped. The guy I was with had enough cocaine on him that he couldn’t claim personal use.”
“Did you go to jail?”
I shook my head. “They saw my innocence. For some reason, the officers that stopped us believed I wasn’t involved and it was just timing. But my uncle told my parents about both times. Mom cried, and Dad was so mad he ordered Uncle Sam to lock me up. He refused, but he said I had to do something good or he would. He told me to find some good I could do in the world within two weeks or he was arresting me.”
“Oh my god,” Lani whispered. She didn’t seem capable of talking loudly, and I didn’t blame her.
“I was looking for charities when I found Hope Building. Sali was trying to fundraise online. She needed new plumbing, and I thought a donation to cover that would be enough.”