Her Sensual Protector: A Navy SEAL Romance (Night Storm Book 5), Caitlyn O'Leary [uplifting book club books TXT] 📗

She looked up at him, her expression confused. What? Was she not used to being touched by a man?

“Leo?” she began.

“What happened then?”

Her breath shuddered.

“Mom didn’t look like Mom. She was so thin and gray. I wasn’t allowed to hug her, and she kept crying a lot. I remember being so scared. Mom ended up lying down in the backseat of the jeep on the drive out of the jungle. Usually, I sat on her lap, but I wasn’t allowed to do that either. My father tried to get me to sit on his lap up front, but I screamed and pulled away from him. I did everything possible to stay with my mom. He had to let me stay in the back, and I sat on the floorboards of the backseat. I got to hold her hand, even when she was asleep. On the entire two-day drive it seemed like I never slept once. I know that can’t be true, but even thinking back on that time as an adult, I think it was true, ya know?”

God, it was so heartbreaking. He nodded at her, willing her to continue. When she didn’t, he asked another question.

“What happened when you got out of the jungle?”

“Dad got Mom to a real hospital. This time I didn’t have a choice but to be separated from her. Again, I thought she was dead. But I didn’t cry, I didn’t make a scene. I just let myself be taken away from the big white building and accompanied my father to some room he had rented. I never talked. I remember him trying to make me eat, but I refused. He must have talked to me. He must have tried to get through to me that Mom was okay and in a hospital to get better, but nothing penetrated—in my four-year-old brain she was dead and gone. I was in shock. I wouldn’t eat, I wouldn’t talk, I wasn’t present.”

“How long did that last?”

Big hazel eyes looked up at him. “I don’t know. I never asked that question as I grew up. It seemed like forever as a child. But one day my father forced me into a car and we went back to the big white building that had eaten my mother. She came back out. I couldn’t wrap my head around it. She looked like my mother again, but I wasn’t the same little girl. I didn’t talk. I didn’t cry. I just clung to her. It was that way on the entire flight back to the United States. Finally, we got to my grandparent’s house and everything was better.”

She gave a false smile. “See? Happily ever after.”

Leo snorted. “I can just see the traumatized baby that you were.”

She pulled her hand away and put it into her lap, foregoing the food on her plate.

“Really, it was fine after that.”

Leo nodded to her water. “Take a sip, you need it. As for the fact that you were fine after that, if that’s what you need me to believe, then I’ll believe it.”

He nudged her water glass closer to her.

“You’re kind of bossy.”

He threw back his head and laughed. “I believe you were the one who slapped the table at six men in a conference room and told them to get their shit together. I’m a pussycat.”

“Yes I did, so what are you going to do about rescuing my father?”

“We’re doing it. Right now, my team is doing reconnaissance. There are a lot of facets to this operation. Me getting information from you is just one angle. They’re going to ping me when they have more news. In the meantime, I’m going to continue to ask you questions.”

“Like what?”

“Like how you had the gumption to stand up to all of those men. I gotta tell you, you made quite a picture slapping that table. You say I’m bossy? Well compared to you, I’m a pussycat.”

Daisy’s lip lifted. “I might could remember doing that,” she said as she picked up her water glass.

“Might could? I recognize that turn of phrase. What part of the South did you call home in the States?”

“My mom’s dad worked for the state department. He and grandma have a big house in Ashburn Virginia. That’s where Brian and Karen had been staying while Mom and I were in the jungle. Jim was already attending college at Georgetown University.

“When Grandpa Eddie found out about everything that happened in Brazil, he went ballistic. At least that’s what Karen told me. I wasn’t there when it happened. He didn’t allow my father to stay at the family house. He closed ranks around Mom and us kids. Apparently, he hired the best lawyer in D.C. for his youngest daughter, and had the marriage dissolved in less than two months.”

“I’d like your grandfather,” Leo said with a smile.

“Just so long as you never got on his bad side,” Daisy nodded.

3

“I’m surprised that after everything your mother went through, she would be willing to get married again, especially so soon after the divorce.”

“So was she.” Daisy was eating her food again. She had a sparkle in her eye. “Alistair was everything my father wasn’t. She met him when he came to visit Granddad at the house. He had been working for him at a mid-level cabinet post when he met my mom. According to Alistair, it was love at first sight. He put my mother and me first in all things. We were treated like the sun and moon in his universe. He hadn’t been angling for an