“Yet you left me with a tiny piece of furniture clearly inadequate for my frame. Was this some plan to cause me physical distress as a form of revenge?”
Finally understanding his attitude, Kylie rolled her eyes. “Get over yourself. You got the bed I had, plain and simple. A queen size is perfectly adequate for one person, even an escapee from steroid camp like you. I have the same size in my room upstairs.”
“Adequate for some. You are less than half my size, little human. You could be comfortable on a chair cushion. I require more space than that.” Without another word, the Guardian stepped forward, turned around, and flung himself backward onto the bare mattress. Stretching out his arms and legs, he easily occupied the whole space with a smug smile. “There. You see?”
Kylie just stared, wondering if maybe she’d been wrong about the possibility of a concussion after all. Or maybe she needed to revisit her original theory about the entirety of the last week being the product of a coma, hospital-grade drugs, and a vivid imagination. The only other choice appeared to be acknowledging that the Duke of Dour was actually smiling at her.
And being playful.
Her psyche couldn’t cope. It went completely fartshadikt. She may as well have been oxygen deprived all over again.
Crossing her arms over her chest, she took a cautious step forward and frowned down at him. “I’m not buying you a bigger bed. We don’t even know how long you’ll be here.”
Something sparked in his black eyes, but he just kept smiling and ran a hand across the smooth fabric of the mattress. “But you bought Wynn and Knox a new bed.”
“No, I bought them a bed. As in, first one. It was either that or make them sleep on the floor, and I’m not that bad a hostess. My bubbeh would never forgive me.”
Dag’s smile faded. “You speak often of your grandmother, but never of your parents.”
The quiet observation caught Kylie by surprise. And here she’d thought he tuned out most of what spilled out of her mouth. “Yeah, well, I’m closer with her than I am with them.”
“Why is that?”
The question still niggled at her, even though it had been asked before. Dag wasn’t the first person to notice how tight she and her parents weren’t. Still, she never liked answering it, so she gave her pat response. “Just different personalities. We don’t really get each other.”
And some of us never tried. But Kylie never said that part out loud.
The Guardian seemed to digest that answer, but instead of moving on, he reached out to grasp her hand, pulling her toward the side of the bed. “Explain. What is there to ‘get’ about being family?”
Whoa, he wanted to go there?
She shook her head. “I think some people related by blood aren’t suited to be family to each other, and some people who meet by chance and start out as strangers can be better family members than the ones you’re born with. That second kind, Bran was that for me. Wynn, too.”
“And your parents were the first.”
Persistent nudnik, wasn’t he? He asked so calmly, though, and sounded so genuinely curious that she couldn’t quite bring herself to just brush him off.
“Definitely the first.” She sighed and perched warily on the edge of the bed. “They didn’t have me until they were older than most first-time parents. Only-time parents, actually. They never intended to have kids. I came as quite the shock when they found out. I’m not sure they ever really adjusted to the idea. They had careers they both felt really passionately about. Maybe they just didn’t have a ton left over, especially not for a precocious kid with a thing for electronics who didn’t take well to being told to keep quiet and not bother the adults.”
“What careers do they have that took priority over their child?”
“Mom’s a finance type. CFO of a venture capital firm where I grew up, in Connecticut. Her head is always buried in numbers; and Dad is a law professor. Civil rights issues mostly. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or of the daughter.”
She delivered the line with a smile. After all, she’d been using it for years.
“I would think two such accomplished people would have been proud of having a child who succeeded in so much at such a young age,” Dag said. He’d heard the story of her early acceptance to Boston University, of her big invention and sale, as well as of her decision to drop out and pursue her own interests instead of getting her degree.
Kylie grimaced. “I guess in some ways they are. Mom likes that I impressed the tech world enough to earn a big paycheck, at least, but she seriously balked at the dropping out. Dad, too. And he’s always wished I would use my skill to do something more serious, something to ‘better the future of mankind.’ He thinks of that program I wrote as a toy. Like I said, they just don’t get it.”