Wild Heart: MM Mafia Daddy Romance (Dangerous Daddies Book 2) by April Jade

Author:April Jade [Jade, April]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

Ivan

My boy fought a war he was begging to yield to, one that kept him on the cusp of broken and brave. He got lost sometimes… pretending to be okay.

“Solnyshko.”

He looked up at me through lowered lashes, tongue between his lips in a display of concentration.

“You doing okay?” I asked him.

“Better now.”

The couch dipped when he shifted, and he wiggled his hips until he was comfortable. I grunted when he planted his ass firmly on my stomach. The marker he held was a deep purple, and he tapped it once against his cheek before pressing it to the tip of my skin. It was cold as it moved, but I didn’t fucking mind.

“Can I color your grandma’s cross? Or is that too personal?”

“You color whatever you want, baby. Nothing is too personal for you.”

He smiled and slipped the purple marker behind his ear, searching the couch cushions for another. The markers were scattered everywhere, on the floor and across the carpet. He’d stuffed some in his pockets and instructed me to hold others. My boy clearly had his favorites, and it always came back to a particular shade of blue.

A sound of triumph blew past his lips when he found what he was looking for, and then he shoved his elbow in my gut, trying to reach the cross on my bicep.

“Sorry, Papa,” he mumbled, but it was only an afterthought.

It was intense—his focus.

His mind had screamed for an escape, and the second he uncapped that first marker, all his attention honed in on what laid in front of him.

Me.

I’d always been an observer, cunningly so. My eyes picked up on the details that made a person, and for Marcos, his anxiety was a part of that.

His body shook with an energy he didn’t know what to do with, and he tugged on his hair like the weight of it was too much for his scalp. His eyes, my goddamn kryptonite, searched wherever he was for a distraction.

A sliver of peace.

Somehow, he’d found that within the lines that made my tattoos. Tracing them assuaged his panic. He’d confessed, not too long ago, that the mindless action combined with the warmth of my skin calmed him down long enough to breathe again.

I’d done a lot of reading that day, researching anxiety and learning what I could about the way his brain worked. Coloring, I’d found, was one hell of a distraction, so I bought him every goddamn marker I could find in Seattle and stashed them until he needed them.

Most of my tattoos were large, detailed pieces with lots of room for color. He could take as much time as he needed, and use my body until his mind was ready to come toe to toe with whatever had sent it into hiding.

“Manny and I used to color a lot,” he said, and I had to hold my breath just to hear him. “It was one of the only things my mama ever let him do.”

“You miss him.”

“All the time. Manny and I never really had a chance to be brothers.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.