Eager Housewife: a smutty free-use romance (Filthy Scottish Kingpins Book 2)

2. Duncan

I gaze into the face of my daughter’s best friend in mute horror and rising desire.

My cock is thickening, despite the impossibility of this. Blythe wants to be my convenient free use housewife?

“You should forget about it.” I curse myself that I typed out my longing for companionship and family when Blythe was so fresh in my mind. I listed what I wanted—someone exactly like her—with the awareness that I couldn’t fall in love with my potential wife because my heart belongs to Blythe.

The result? A sordid mix that Blythe should never’ve seen.

“I’m not going to,” she insists in that sweet voice that floors me every time and makes me feel like a perverted old man.

I’ve never had any hint of attraction to any of Ainsley’s friends before Blythe. Even now, I urge myself to look at her and see what I did when she first appeared on my doorstep. A young, pretty girl who was just my daughter’s new best friend.

Last year, when Ainsley told me about the study partner she’d met and asked if Blythe could come for Christmas, because she would otherwise have spent it alone, I said yes. Of course I did. It didn’t occur to me that it would cause me physical pain to keep myself decent.

Then Ainsley was delayed, Blythe arrived on the doorstep, and I was cut off at the knees by emotions as known to me as the surface of Mars, and just as survivable. Forty years on this planet and I’d felt nothing like the two of us having dinner that night. She made me laugh. She was beautiful and funny, and I kept having to tell myself that it wasn’t a date.

Because I swear she liked me too. And she’s come back with Ainsley for every university holiday since. Sometimes, when Ainsley isn’t looking, I catch Blythe peeking at me from under her long lashes, and I indulge in two seconds of crazy that she is as compelled by me as I am by her.

And when they graduated, and Blythe had no one with her to tell her they were proud of her or cheer when she was on stage collecting her degree, I filled the gap, telling myself it was just fatherly. I said that as I bought her the expensive formal photos and clapped extra hard for her, and nodded when Ainsley asked if Blythe could come home with us and help her pack for her round-the-world tour.

“I can meet everything on your list of requirements,” Blythe adds eagerly, jerking me back to the present where this twenty-one-year-old girl has read my dirtiest fantasies.

Of course she can fulfil the specification. It was written with her in my mind.

“No.”

I turn and walk away.

“Mr Blackstone.” She’s having to trot to keep up with my longer strides and instinctively I shorten them. Internally, I groan. “I know I’m young, but?—”

“The answer is no, and that’s final,” I snap, and immediately regret it when I see her kicked-puppy expression from the corner of my eye.

“Okay,” she says in a small voice.

I stop and rub a hand over my forehead. “What’s happening next for you, Blythe?”

“I’ll be fine.” At my side, she wrings her hands.

Oh fuck. Nothing is more of a red flag to me than the word fine. She might as well have said “miserable” or “inadequate”. Fine is shit. No one I love—and I love Blythe more than my tattered soul—will ever be just fine. And she sounds so unhappy.

“Come with me.” I keep walking out of the airport towards the car park, and she trots behind. I’m being an arsehole, but I can’t look at her. I can’t stop, or I’ll cave.

“It’s fine?—”

That word again. My hand has darted out and caught her wrist before I can stop it and I drag her out to where the SUV is parked.

“Get in.” Being in an enclosed space with this girl I want in every way is a terrible idea. Really, really bad. But I cannae leave her at the airport.

She obeys and her obedience eases the tightness in my chest. A bit. “Where are you going to work? You said you had a plan?”

“I don’t know.” She’s curled in on herself in the passenger seat beside me as I drive us out and into the London traffic.

I sigh. “When you rejected my offer to pay for you to go travelling with Ainsley you said you had a job.”

I should have insisted they travel together. Then Blythe would be safely on a plane right now, with no worries, and not next to me, like temptation incarnate.

“I didn’t. I said I would prefer to have a job. I put a deposit on a house share, but they’ve all ghosted me.”

“They’ve what?” I accelerate as we join the motorway, but I can barely see the road for the rage clouding down over me.

“They kicked me out of the group chat, and when I went to the house we were renting together, there were students living there.”

“Fuck!” My knuckles are white where I’m gripping the steering wheel. But noticing that only makes me remember what I’ve done for people I love. I’m going to quietly punish whoever fleeced Blythe. Maybe a few punches as well, for good measure. My scars could do with a refresh.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers meekly.

“Not you, not you. Them,” I hasten to reassure her. “But I’ll sort you out. You can stay at a hotel until you get yourself settled.” The words stick in my throat like a sharp chicken bone. I want her with me.

“You don’t have to?—”

“I do.”

“Thank you.” Her voice is so soft and high, and the tremble in it causes my heart to resonate painfully.

There’s a long, awkward silence during which I think about things I could say.

I didn’t mean to describe you in that advert, it just happened because I’m obsessed with you. I’ll buy you a home in London. Don’t house share again, and don’t live outside my London territory. I’ll find you a job. If it weren’t for my daughter, I’d take you up in a split-second on accepting my marriage-of-convenience proposal. You’d have your knickers ripped off and my cock in you before you could blink.

“I’m too old for you.” I didn’t realise I was going to say that, but it’s true. “You should be with someone your own age.” The words grate over my tongue.

“I don’t like boys my age.”

“You don’t want… Marriage.” I refuse to glance across at her and settle for that euphemism, when we both know I mean, “to be the sex toy of a man twice your age”. She’d be my secretly-cherished wife though. Not convenient, but adored.

“I do.” She sounds so earnest, it breaks my heart. “I’m no good at studying or most things, but…”

Jealousy grips me at the thought of her unspoken words. Not excellent at studying, but great at sex. Don’t get me wrong, I’m certain she’s amazing in bed, but there’s so much more to her.

This time I can’t hold back. I flick my gaze to the side and she’s biting her lip, staring ahead at the windscreen.

“I’ve always wanted a home and children of my own.” Her tone is wistful. “It would be really fun to have a big, loving family. So different to…” There’s longing in the tilt of her head.

She doesn’t need to add that. I remember. During that evening at Christmas, she told me about her childhood in the care system, flipped between foster homes until she aged-out at eighteen and was on her own.

“Really?” I ask. “You truly want to have a family so soon? No adventures first?”

“Babies are all the excitement I need,” she says with a firmness that belies her twenty-one years.

A spark of potential flares. If she wants a family, and I want her, would this be so wrong? The age gap between us is filthy, yes. But if I could genuinely provide Blythe with the life she’d like…

The job advert was written on a whim. I didn’t really intend to post it. But the more I imagine the scene, the more I want more kids. Watching my daughter pack up to spread her wings and become an adult made me realise I missed the vibrancy of having children in my house. I miss the noise and mess and chaos. I used to curse Ainsley, especially when she threw tantrums or asked where her mother was. Because I couldn’t tell her that her mother dumped a wee fiery-haired three-year-old lassie on my doorstep and hasn’t been seen since.

Ainsley going to university three years ago left an empty place in my heart. Then Blythe cracked it entirely open, and it’s a chasm. Filling that aching gap with Blythe and our children is too perfect to be believable.

“I did childhood studies at university because I want to be with kids,” Blythe adds. “This isn’t a whim.”

“What if I set you up so you could have your own house and childcare centre.” I can afford it. I manoeuvre us through the London traffic, my thoughts racing. “One that you owned, and ran exactly as you liked.”

There’s a pause.

“Why would you do that?”

“To help you. Or…” I cannae believe I’m going to offer this. But you’re a long time deid, as my Scottish grandfather used to say. “You can have the marriage of convenience. Like I set out in the advert you read.”

I’ve lost my goddamn mind. I’ll go to hell for this. I’ll be rightly judged a class-A arsehole. I’ll risk losing my daughter and that’s a pain in my heart… But what I could gain? Blythe.

“I’ll have marriage,” she replies promptly, as though there’s no question which is better.

“There’ll be a prenup.” It would have terms more generous than any standard divorce settlement, but she’s not to know that.

“I don’t care. I don’t want your money.”

Her sweet voice ruins me, and as I pull up at the Blackstone house, I recognise I’m not strong enough to say no.

“There’s one more thing.”

“Yes?”

“We’d have to both be faithful.” Not an issue on my side, for certain. “I don’t share. If you’re my wife, you’re mine.”