The Daddy P.I. Casefiles: The First Collection by Frost, J (great novels .txt) 📕

“All right, Emily. You keep that up and I’ll be back in a bit.”

“Yes, Benjie, sir.”

The orderly snorts again and pats my head as he passes me.

I glance up the bed to make sure Logan isn’t set off by Benjie touching me.

He’s asleep. A small smile creases his battered face.

My daddy.

I move quietly to the other side of the bed and start working on his left foot. His skin is cool. I rub with my palm to warm it first, before I begin digging into the tendons and muscles. Within a few minutes, his skin’s nice and pink, and his toes flex when I work on his instep. That gives me hope the damage isn’t too bad. My daddy’s going to be okay; I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure he is.

I rub until my hands cramp. I’m going to have to get some of those little squeezy balls to strengthen my hands if I’m going to massage him until he’s better. How long will that be? No one has said anything about his recovery, but I’m guessing it won’t be overnight.

Benjie doesn’t come back. There are no chairs to wait in, so I climb up onto the bottom of the bed and curl up along Logan’s right leg, careful not to disturb the leg that might have nerve damage. I straighten out his hospital gown and the sheet over his lap as best I can without waking him, before wrapping my arm around his thigh and pillowing my head on my hand.

A warm hand in my hair wakes me out of a doze. I know it’s Logan before I even open my eyes. I don’t know how I know. I just do. Logan’s touch isn’t like anyone else’s in the whole world.

“Daddy,” I whisper.

“Come up here, little girl. I need to hold you.”

Oh, he sounds like my daddy again.

I wriggle up the bed, which is a tight fit between Logan’s big body and the bed rail, but I squeeze in until my head’s resting on his chest. His hard arms close around me and everything else goes away. The hospital. His injury. The exhaustion making my eyes scratchy and my head thick. None of it matters because I’m back in Daddy’s arms.

I feel his warm breath on my forehead, then his lips. His breath smells really bad but mine probably does, too. I breathe through my mouth and ignore the smell when I hear what he’s whispering.

“Had to get back to you, little girl. I promised to make a safe place where you could be little all the time. What kind of shit daddy would I be if I left you before I fulfilled my promise, huh?”

A mortal daddy. A daddy who died.

The thought makes a tear slide from my eye and drip onto his hospital gown, but I push it away before I start bawling. He didn’t die. He’s here, and he’s going to be okay.

“I should have told you before I went to track down the brick. I should have told you. There are reasons. It’s too soon. I don’t want to scare you off. Those reasons are shit. The first thing I thought when I woke up was you were all alone and I hadn’t even told you I love you.”

I squeeze his chest as tightly as I dare. “I love you, too.”

“You don’t have to say it back. I know it’s too soon. I just needed you to know I love you and I wouldn’t ever leave you by choice. I was prepared to do anything to get back to you, even beg for my life, and I’ve never begged for anything. I couldn’t leave you alone when I hadn’t said it and you didn’t know.”

“I know, Daddy.” And I do. Not even my hateful internal monologue can make me doubt this. “I love you, too.”

“You don’t have to say it back,” he repeats. “It’s okay if you don’t. It’s too soon.”

His rambling makes me smile. “I still love you.”

“Oh. Yeah? That’s . . . that’s good.”

It is good. All good. He’s quiet for a long minute. When I lift my head to look into his face, I see he’s fallen asleep again. My poor, wounded daddy. I’ve never had an injury more serious than a broken ankle, but I’ve had the flu and I remember that feeling of not being able to stay awake. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is he’s alive and we’re together again.

And he loves me.

Benjie wakes me and he’s not at all happy about me being in the hospital bed with Logan. Once I remove my unwanted presence, he makes a show of checking all of the tubes going into and out of my daddy before he growls at me, “Keep up.”

“Yes, Benjie, sir.”

Benjie scowls at me but doesn’t say anything as he unlocks the wheels of the hospital bed and pushes it out of the room. I trot along after him. I can’t have gotten much sleep, but I feel refreshed. Everything’s okay now that I know Logan will recover.

Benjie glances at me as we ride up in a big elevator with Logan’s bed between us. “Someone took her happy pill,” he grunts.

Someone’s daddy loves her.

“You said that if I massage him twice a day there’s a better chance of him making a full recovery. Is there anything else I can do? It doesn’t matter what it is. I can do it.”

“Lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. Kale, broccoli, greens. Juice them if you have to. Whatever it takes to get them down him. Essential nutrients. That’s the way athletes recover.”

“Massage, fruits and veggies. Got it.”

“Stick with the physical therapy. He’s gonna feel like it’s not helping at first, but it does. Gotta stick with it, though.”

“Okay.”

“Give him lots of, you know, attention. Touch. Like you were doing. Not that you should be crawling into hospital beds. Don’t do that again, you could pull out his I.V. or his catheter. But once the tubes are out,