Seeking Mr. Wrong by Tamara Morgan

Author:Tamara Morgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2018-01-23T05:00:00+00:00

15

The Conversation

I wait until Lola drifts off into an effortless, exhausted sleep after the party before tiptoeing to my father’s door.

Pressing my ear against the surface, I strain to hear any signs of consenting adult passions. There aren’t any of those purring sounds from last night, and all heavy breathing and laughter seems to be at a minimum, so I decide to go for it.

Knock-knock.

No one answers. I’m not too surprised—it might be bedtime for emotionally drained eighteen-year-olds and their weary twenty-six-year-old keepers, but my father tends to keep later hours.

“Hello?” I call, trying again. “Anybody home?”

Once again, I get nothing but silence. Damn. I was hoping to get a chance to talk to my father—ask him to increase his own security and keep his nighttime visitors to a minimum—but it looks like I’m going to have to prop open the door again and hope for the best. With a sigh, I reach for the handle and twist.

Or attempt to twist, anyway. It’s locked from his side.

“Oh, come on,” I mutter and try the handle again. “Are you kidding me? He’s locking his own daughter out now?”

I hate to draw parallels between Lola’s father and my own, but there does seem to be a certain callousness in putting up these kinds of barriers when there’s so much at stake. I mean, I know my father doesn’t love that I came on this trip, and he dislikes even more that I brought Grant along, but he could be a little more concerned for my welfare.

With a perfunctory glance back at Lola, who’s fallen into the deep sleep of the contented, I slip the master key from out of my bra. I haven’t tested it yet, but from the way it slips in to the lock and easily turns, it’s clearly the real deal.

“What do you think you’re doing, young lady?”

To my surprise and suddenly leaping pulse, my father waits on the other side of the door. His glasses are pulled down to the end of his nose, and he’s staring at me over the top of them, his dad-face impossible to ignore.

“Geez, Dad, you scared the crap out of me.” I hold my hand to my chest, cleverly concealing the key in my palm. “Why didn’t you answer when I knocked?”

He shifts his body so it covers most of the doorway. “That’s what a man does when he doesn’t want company,” he says in his maddeningly controlled way. “Or is that not something you’ve learned in your lifetime?”

The harshness of his tone causes me to flush. I’d like to pretend that had my father been the one to demand I wear the tiara, I’d have stood up against his tyranny, but I wonder if I’d have ended up as meekly compliant as Lola. Dads are a hard breed to thwart. For most people, that’s a good thing, since fathers are supposed to protect their young. For people like us, it’s not so easy to tell.

“Sorry,” I mutter, unable to look him in the eye.

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