His laughter rumbled against her, his growling bite at her throat making her smile deepen. She was so happy. “It’s my turn to help close up the library tomorrow,” she said, trying not to worry about the inevitable flip side to this painful happiness, “so I have a later start. We can have a nice breakfast.” She didn’t want him to go, wanted to hold on for every minute, every second that he was hers.

Fox brushed aside her hair to bare her cheek. “About your father.” He stroked his other hand over the bare curve of her hip. “I’m sorry you went through that.”

Molly had been hoping he wouldn’t want to discuss the topic, though she’d known the hope was a foolish one. “It happened a long time ago.” She’d quietly begun to use her mother’s last name at eighteen, instead of her father’s, closing the chapter on that part of her history.

 “You turned me down for dinner today because of it. It matters.” Wrapping his arms around her until she felt warm and safe and shielded from the cruelty of the world, he said, “You matter.”

Her barriers shattered. “It was all so sordid.” Swallowing the jagged rock in her throat, she fisted her hands against his chest and lifted her face to his. “All my life, I grew up with people idolizing my father—youngest politician ever to hold such a critical post, part of the ruling party, landslide victor of a major seat he continuously held through multiple elections, active in charities, smart, handsome, witty.”

Molly, too, had adored him—until she’d grown old enough to see through the illusion and her mother’s desperate fantasies, begun to understand that Patrick Buchanan cared only about himself. “Then he was busted with that girl my age, from my own school, in the back seat of his car, and I saw the other side of fame.”

Patrick Buchanan had been charged with statutory rape, though the girl, the child, had insisted it was consensual. “They released him on bail because he was a ‘pillar of the community,’ but the press hounded him.” She’d often wondered if her parents would both still be alive if the judge had made a different decision. “They camped out in front of the house night and day.”

Fox’s arms tightened. “Ah, hell, baby.”

“At least he deserved it, but they also hounded my mother. Asking her how she felt. How did they think she felt?” Her voice rose as old anger, old pain, had her thumping her bone-white fists against his chest. “I was in the car one day when a reporter shoved a microphone through the window as we left the drive and asked her if my father made deviant sexual requests in the bedroom.” Molly had almost thrown up.

Fox muttered some brutal words, cradling the side of her face with one big hand, his other arm steel around her.

“I was protected from any direct questions by the fact I was a minor,” she continued, the words shoving to get out after having been suffocated for nine long years, “but everyone at school knew.” Name suppression had been pointless when the photos of her father with the girl had been plastered across the Internet, the original images taken by a jealous boy who’d followed his fifteen-year-old girlfriend to the assignation.

“That’s when I learned how cruel people can be.” The boy who’d originally posted the photos had ended up in serious trouble, too, for distributing sexual images of a minor, but the damage was done. “I didn’t defend myself at first—I knew it was that poor girl who continued to stick by my father, saying they were ‘in love,’ who was the true victim.” Instead, Molly had taken blow after blow in penance, her soul bruised black and blue.

“Then”—she took a shuddering breath and buried her face against his shoulder, the memory vicious—“someone set up a page about me on a website we all used, calling me a slut and a whore and saying I’d probably had something going on with my father.” Nauseated, she’d curled over in the computer lab, dry heaving as her classmates stared… or sniggered. “I’d never even been kissed, but boys I didn’t know started posting that I’d done sexual things with them, that I was a ‘freak.’ I knew I had to fight back then or they’d break me.”

“Hey.” Fox’s hand on the back of her head. “The shitheads don’t matter.”

Shaking from the ugliness of the memories, she tried to curl impossibly deeper into him. “It wasn’t the bullies who did the real harm, it was the way the people I’d thought were my friends joined in.” The exclusive all-girls private school her father had insisted she attend, because that was where the child of a man of his “stature” should go, had turned overnight into a toxic hothouse.

Furious her tears wouldn’t stop falling, she swiped her hands across her cheeks. “Suddenly I wasn’t being invited over for sleepovers and birthday parties, and even the people who didn’t join in with the bullies looked uncomfortable when I walked by.” Charlotte alone had never turned her back, Molly’s small, fierce, loyal defender.

“I heard the other students gossiping about how I groomed my friends for my father, even though I didn’t know the girl at the center of it all.” The two of them hadn’t had a single class together. “Then the media reported children’s services had been to the house to see if I needed to be removed, and it was read as confirmation of the rumors. It was ugly.”

“Fuck, baby, you must’ve been strong as hell to stick it out,” Fox said, his voice holding a taut, angry tension. “Most kids would’ve left school for home study.”

“I did that later, when I was told I was being transferred to a public school.” Traumatized from her parents’ deaths after a horrific year, she’d had no resources left to deal with a whole new set of bullies. To their credit, children’s services hadn’t argued with her decision, instead helping her enroll in an accredited correspondence course.

“But back at the start,” she continued through a throat that felt as if it had been shredded by a steel grater, “I was determined to show them all.” It was teeth-gritted rage that had driven her. “Now I look back and wonder why it was so important to me when I hated most of my schoolmates by the end of the first week after it began.”

“No, I get it.” Fox kissed the side of her face, his embrace a living barrier against the darkness. “Part of the reason I raised so much hell as a teenager was to show my mother I didn’t give a shit.”

Fox never spoke about his mother beyond the obvious, but when Molly raised her head, wiping the backs of her hands over her eyes to rid herself of the remnants of her tears before touching her fingers to his face, he knew she was about to ask for more. He would answer. After the brutal honesty of what she’d shared, to do anything else was unthinkable.

“Your mother, you were mad at her because she left you as a baby?” Her own eyes were yet bruised from the ugly memories of her teenage years, but her voice was painfully gentle, as if she was afraid of hurting him.

Fuck, what the hell was he going to do about this? Because no damn way was he walking away from Molly. “That was the best thing she ever did for me,” he said. “My mother was young, couldn’t handle a child.” He shrugged. “Gramps and Grammy might’ve been old-fashioned, not overly expressive, but I was safe, healthy, happy.”

One of his earliest memories of his mother was of her telling him to “Behave,” because his grandparents had been very good about putting off their retirement plans to look after him. So he’d always known he wasn’t a choice his grandparents had made—but that hadn’t mattered. Not when they’d never treated him as if he was just a responsibility.

 “My mother used to come by now and then.”  His muscles tensed, anger a dark burn beneath his skin. “She’d bring me gifts, play a game or two, then be gone.” For days afterward, her perfume—floral and rich—would linger in the house. That was how he knew she came to visit other times, too, while he was at school or with friends. He hadn’t been jealous about that. “I knew she was my mother,” he told Molly, “but to me, she felt more like a distant aunt, so I never felt neglected or treated unfairly. Gramps and Grammy were my parents.”