Seduced By The Single Dad. Yvonne Lindsay

      They were just wrapping up when his cell chimed. A text. From Chloe. The first, he realized, that he’d ever gotten from her.

      That made him smile—initially. And then he had to deal with the words in the little conversation bubble. At least it was only one sentence: Can you come over now?

      Unease curled through him. Something in the starkness of the question didn’t sit right. Chloe was generally so gracious and well mannered, the kind of woman to offer a drink and ask a man how his day had been before ever getting down to what she needed from him.

      Manny asked, “Chloe?”

      “Yeah.” Texting was not his best event. He debated the option of turning up the sound on his text-to-speech app and voice-texting her back. Or he could just call her. But she was only across the street and he felt an urgency to get to her. He rose.

      “Something wrong, Crush?”

      Quinn clasped Manny’s shoulder. “Probably nothing.”

      Manny reached up, patted his hand and let him go without a single wiseass remark.

      * * *

      Chloe must have been standing at the door, peering through the peephole, because she whipped it open before Quinn could raise his hand to knock. One look at her too-pale face and shadowed, red-rimmed eyes and Quinn knew his instincts had been right. Something had gone way wrong.

      “Quinn.” She grabbed for him.

      He stepped inside, gathered her close and shoved the door shut with his heel.

      “Quinn...” She curled against him, tucking her golden head under his chin, her slim arms clutching tight around him, as though she wanted to crawl right inside skin.

      It freaked him out a little to see her so out of control. That only happened when he had her naked in bed. The rest of the time, she was the queen of smooth, hard to ruffle. Something had really spooked her. He stroked her hair and rubbed her back and reassured her with low, soothing words. “I’m here. It’s okay now, all right? You just hold on tight...”

      She burrowed even closer against him and confessed in a torn whisper, “I never, ever had the guts to stand up to her and now it’s come down to this. Oh, I hate myself. I’m such a wuss. It shouldn’t have gotten to this, I should have stopped her a long time ago. I—”

      “Shh,” he soothed. “Shh, now. Take a breath, a long, slow one...”

      Obedient as a cowed and frightened child, she took a long, deep one and let it out nice and slow. “Oh, Quinn...” A sob escaped her.

      He caught her beautiful face between his hands, tipped it up so he could see her haunted eyes again and took an educated guess. “This is about your mother?”

      She hitched in a ragged breath and nodded. “After tonight, she’s out of my life. I never want to see her again.”

      “Whoa,” he said gently. “Come on, now, angel. Whatever she did, she is your mother.”

      Chloe pursed up her lips and stuck out her chin. “Don’t even remind me.”

      “I’m only saying, whatever happened with her, give her a little time. She’ll come around.”

      “Oh, you don’t know her, Quinn,” she insisted. “You don’t know her at all.” She sounded downright pissed off.

      Which wasn’t so bad, he decided. He’d take pissed off over brokenhearted and out of control any day of the week. “Hey.” He stroked her hair some more, brushed a quick kiss across her sweet, trembling mouth. “You gonna talk to me? Really talk to me? Because I need a better idea of what happened before I can do much more than hold you and tell you it’ll be okay.”

      “It was awful. We went at each other. She was like one of those crazed, jealous girlfriends on The Jerry Springer Show.” Chloe shut her eyes and sucked in another slow, careful breath. “And I wasn’t much better.”

      Now, there was an image. Chloe and Linda Winchester going at it on The Jerry Springer Show. “Come on. Make some coffee or something. You can tell me what happened.”

      A few minutes later, they sat on the sofa. Chloe sipped the hot tea she’d made for herself. “She was waiting on the front step when I got home from work, and she was furious.”

      It didn’t take a genius to figure out why. “Someone told her about you and me.”

      “That’s right. She...” Chloe met his eyes then. “I don’t even know how to tell you how awful she was.”

      “It’s okay. You don’t have to give me a blow-by-blow. She’s never thought much of me or of my family and we knew that from the first.”

      “I, well, I want you to know that I didn’t back down, Quinn. I didn’t evade, either. For the first time in my life I stood right up to her. I told her I was seeing you and I intended to keep seeing you and that she’d better accept that.”

      “But she wouldn’t accept it.”

      “No. We yelled at each other. I realized it was going nowhere and I asked her to leave. That was when she let it slip that she’s been in touch with my ex-husband.” Chloe’s gaze slid away. “I hit the ceiling and threw her out.” She fell silent, and she still wasn’t looking at him.

      He waited. When she didn’t volunteer any more, he said, “It’s probably about now that you should tell me whatever it is you’re not telling me about your ex-husband.”

      She did face him then. And she looked stricken. In a small voice, she said, “I don’t even know where to begin.” He took her mug from her and set it on the low table. Then he hooked an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close to his side. She crumpled against him. “Oh, God...”

      He pressed a kiss into her sweet-smelling hair. “It doesn’t matter where you start. I’m not going anywhere until you’ve told me everything I need to know.”

      She let out a small, sad little sound. “All my life, all I wanted was to be my mother’s good little girl. And look where that’s gotten me...”

      Quinn said nothing. He held her close.

      Finally, hesitantly, she told him the story. “I met Ted Davies at Stanford in my sophomore year. He was four years older than me, in law school. And he was everything my mother raised me to want. Handsome and charming, already rich, from a powerful California family, bound for a successful career as a corporate lawyer. I saw him as perfect husband material, and he saw me as exactly the right wife to stand by him as he climbed to the top. We got married in a gorgeous wine country wedding at the end of my senior year and I went to work being his wife, which both of us considered a full-time job. It was all going so well until Ted lost his temper. He’d decided I’d been too friendly to one of the partners at his office Christmas party. We had a fight. We’d been married for a little more than two years. That was the first time he hit me.” She tipped her head up and looked at Quinn then.

      He knew that look. She was checking to see how he was taking it. He met her eyes and stroked her hair and didn’t let her see what was going on inside him. He was a simple man, really, especially when it came to stuff like this. A simple man who wanted to track down that jackass she’d married and beat his face in for him.

      Chloe lowered her head again and tucked herself against his chest. “I left him.”

      “Good.”

      She glanced up again. He was ready for that. Playing it easy and accepting for all he was worth, he kissed the tip of her elegant nose. With a sigh, she settled again. “Ted...wooed me back. He went into counseling for anger management to prove to me that he was a changed man.”

      “But he wasn’t.”

      “I’ll say this. He didn’t hit me again for a long time, though his scary temper was increasingly in evidence as the next four