1. Chapter 1
Iknow it's her before I open the door.
Tap, tap, ta, tap, tap.
A smile ticks at the corner of my lip and a rush of blood pumps into my dick.
Tap, tap.
Wren has always knocked like she's bringing you a gift. Which, if she's the one knocking on my door, that's exactly what she's doing.
Except, it's after ten on a Thursday and something isn't right. I'm one bourbon down, doing Photoshop magic because the groom in fourteen ceremony shots blinked in every single one.
Other people's love stories…I record them.
I retouch them, color-correct them, deliver them in leather-bound albums nobody opens after the first anniversary.
I save the file I'm working on and nearly launch myself over the back of the chocolate brown oversized sofa Wren helped me pick out when I moved here after the official split with her mother.
The flood of forbidden feelings I've buried for too long claws straight up my throat.
She's standing on my porch in a green, cropped Eastern Michigan University sweatshirt and cutoffs that have no business on a body this late in October. Her lime green and pink polka dot duffel bag drags one shoulder low.
Her espresso-colored hair is shorter than I remember. It looks hand hacked to her jaw line, blunt bangs framing those ridiculous brown eyes that I don't miss are red-rimmed and swollen.
The porch light hits her from the left in a hard side-light, half her face blown out, the other half crushed in shadow.
She looks like a car wreck and a centerfold and a cheap bottle of tequila ready to convince you to make a lifetime of bad decisions in the blink of an eye.
"Wren." God, if she knew how many times I choked out her name while beating off... "What's wrong baby?"
"I didn't know where else to go."
She slips past me and her shoulder drags across my chest and the smell hits. I know it well. Pomegranate Sunrise from Bath and Body Works.
It's no longer in production, but I have a permanent search set up on eBay so whenever a bottle comes up for sale, I snag it. No discount, no haggling.
I paid two-hundred and seventy for the last one I bought. It's sitting in my hall closet along with another ten bottles I'll dole out to her for birthday, Easter, Halloween or because it's Tuesday.
Whatever my daughter wants, I'd get her.
Okay, step-daughter but before I married her mother, I had a talk with Wren.
With a sperm donor of a father from a drunken bad decision her mother made one night at a concert without so much as a name, I told her, if she gave her blessing for me to join their family, I would never treat her less than my own flesh and blood.
My heart thuds against my sternum—blood rushing through every vein in my body. I fucking helped raise her, what kind of a sick bastard am I standing here rock hard and thinking of that night I had her under me. Unconscious.
I traced her lips with my tongue, used her body for my wicked pleasure. Sure, there was fabric between us, and she was eighteen but I'm still a bastard for thinking about turning all her holes into my own personal cum receptacles.
She drops the duffel and hugs herself in the middle of my living room, shaking as my dick seeps cum down my fucking leg, and I shut the door and silently recite all the reasons I need to keep my hands to myself.
I'm her mother's ex-husband. Forty-four years old. A man with no business noticing that her shorts are frayed high enough to show the crease where thigh meets hip. That her sweatshirt is thin enough to confirm she skipped a bra.
"Sit down." My hand finds the small of her back.
The cropped sweatshirt's ridden up and my palm lands on bare skin and the jolt locks my jaw shut as I guide her to the couch, letting go is like trying to release a live two-twenty line.
"I know you're not old enough, but it looks like you need a drink. "
I pour a finger of bourbon for both of us but it's mostly me that needs it. The bottle clinks against the rim of the skull shaped crystal rocks tumblers she gave me for Christmas last year.
One of the best gifts I've ever received.
Although, I'd say that about every gift she's given me since she was ten years old when her mother and I married and she gave me that horrible Looney Tunes tie for a wedding present.
It only took a few months before the marriage hit the skids like I knew deep down it would. It was a weird time in my life. Just out of the Navy, drifting. My parents had both passed within six months of each other while I was deployed.
They left me their house and it felt so fucking empty. No matter how much I renovated it, hung out with my friends, told myself I didn't need someone, I couldn't help but want what they had.
Love. And passion although the latter I tried to pretend I didn't notice, but it was always there.
They met at a school dance when my dad was eighteen and mom was sixteen.
Back then, sixteen wasn't considered illegal and they were married by the end of that summer and spent the next fifty-six years as happy as any couple I ever knew.
So, in my idiocy, I figured, if they could carve out a happy life after knowing each other for a couple months, why couldn't I? Turns out, there's a huge fucking 'X' factor involved in love and marriage and Wren's mother and I did not have that going for us.
The faded anchor on my left forearm catches the light. My tattoos fascinated Wren from the moment we met. I still remember how she used to trace them with her index finger when we'd sit and watch Lilo & Stitch over and fucking over.
When I bring her the glass, she wraps both hands around it with a fake smile, sips and winces.
"What happened?" I ask on my own stinging swallow of the alcohol, trying not to focus on my daughter's nipples that are clearly hard under the fabric of the sweatshirt.
She's just cold asshole, don't flatter yourself.
She looks up at me from the couch. Those brown eyes draped by those horribly cut bangs. "Dylan cheated."
Dylan.
Hatred boiled inside me at the first sight of him on her Instagram. I told myself it was protective fatherly instinct. It took every ounce of my control not to wait for him outside that shitty off campus apartment of his and take him for a ride to the train station so to speak.
"I should have called Mom but I can't — " She presses her lips together. "He cheated because I wouldn't — " She stares into the bourbon as my cock pulses and I hate myself for salivating thinking how sweet her pussy will taste. How, if I get my mouth on her, I'll take my fucking time.
Fuck, I take a deep breath and try to stay on track.
"Wouldn't what?"
Her jaw tightens. "He'd grab my hair and try to shove my face into the pillow.
Tell me to be good." She says it with a curl of her lip.
"And when I didn't go along with it, he told me I was frigid.
" The flush starts at her cheeks, crawls down her throat, disappears under the neckline.
"And it's not that I didn't — like, the idea wasn't — I mean, with the right — Never mind.
" She flutters a hand in the air, then presses her fingers to the bridge of her nose.
Everything in my world turns red and I back away until the edge of the granite kitchen bites into my ass. I barely heard anything after "shove my face into the pillow" but the rest of it seeped through my rage and murder is back on the table for this fuck.
"Did you fuck him?" The question blasts out of me like a torpedo.
"No." She shakes her head so hard her hair sticks between her lips. "He almost made me…once. But, I didn't let him."
Fuck. Letting her go away to school was her mother's idea and I went along with it because I had no legal power.
Madness heats my core and like she always does, she says the one thing that will keep my head from flying off.
"I never let anybody do…I never went all the way. With anyone. I've barely done anything."
Relief lifts the ten tons of bricks from my shoulders and I force myself to re-center the conversation to what she needs from me.
"It's not that you didn't want that rough, dominance from a man, baby." I start, knowing where this is going and unable to stop. "It's that you didn't want it with a boy. With him."
She gives me a look like I've reached into her chest and pulled out the thing she's been choking on for months.
"There's nothing wrong with you." I grip the counter edge hard enough to whiten my knuckles. "A kid who calls you frigid because you won't perform on his schedule isn't dominant. He's a brat with a porn habit."
"You know the difference it seems." There's a shift in her hips. Did she just clench her thighs together?
Fuck yes, I tell myself whether it's the truth or not. I think of the times I stood outside her bedroom. She'd turned eighteen and any restraint I had inside of me took off like a rocket.
I'd play it out inside my head in the middle of the night. Sneaking into her room, pushing her sheet down, laying on top of her and just humping myself to relief while she slept.
There was one night, it wasn't just something I played out inside my head. That's the night I knew I had to leave. I came right on the crotch of her panties, whispering for her to be still, Daddy's almost done, while she slept under my assaulting body.
How she slept through it I'm not sure, but it's likely the only reason I'm standing here with her trust still intact.
I hadn't touched her mother in years. It was a sham from the jump but the Navy taught me honor and tenacity so I stayed in, more to protect and make sure Wren had a good life.
At least, that's what I told myself.
So, I filed for divorce that next day, Wren seemed relieved when I told her, except that she thought I would disappear from her life. I made sure she knew that was not going to happen.
She left for college during the worst of the mess that followed and that was likely for the best except that I missed her like fuck and started giving in to my fantasies of all the things I wanted to do to her.
I have a drawer full of her panties that were still at the house and some of her other things as well that I use on the regular to jerk off and imagine her soft little body yielding to what I'm shoving inside of it.
Now, there's just ten feet of hardwood between us and I'm going to eat that up in three fucking steps.
I could come right now inside my damn pants. My balls are tightening as I think about taking my cock out, how her mouth is at the perfect height to give it a little kiss on the tip then gag her with every thick inch before hammering into my daughter's tight pussy.
Step-daughter I remind myself. Eighteen years old.
Does any of that make it right?
No, but the way I can't stop thinking of her on her knees, ass up in the air, pink slit dripping as I feed her womb all my hot, sticky seed tells me I am so far beyond right and wrong at this point, there's no finding my way back.
"A man who knows what he's doing doesn't call you names when he doesn't get what he wants.
" I say, taking another sip of my drink, knowing I should stop fucking talking.
I don't. "He reads you. Knows what you need before you've figured it out for yourself.
If he gets it wrong, it's his fault, not yours. "
The kitchen clock ticks behind me. Her lips open and her chest rises and falls.
"I should go." She sets the bourbon down on the coffee table next to my laptop. Fuck, I scared her. "I can call Bea. This is stuff you should go to your friend with, not your Dad—"
We both freeze. Eyes connected.
"This is exactly what you should come to your Dad with." She's called me that for years but hearing it now with my balls weighted down like ten pound stones and her wearing a scrap of denim that barely passes as clothing, the title hits different.
Her eyes, her tits, her ass…every part of her is calling to me. I want to suck and fuck and teach and guide and bruise.
Then, I want to give her a bath, brush her hair, listen to her sing and cuddle her with a book and a blanket until she falls asleep on my chest.
The thought of her walking out this door and looking for what she needs in some boy's fumbling hands turns me into something I don't have a polite word for. Possessive is too clean. Jealous is too small.
"Stay." I heave on a painful exhale. "Dad wants you to stay. I've missed the fuck out of you baby bird."
She squeezes her thumb between her teeth. I've not used her nickname for a while. When she was fourteen, she said it was too 'babyish' so I stopped, but from what I see in her eyes right now, that's changed.
"Okay. I'll stay."
Boom.