Daddy’s Little Secret (Bratva Daddies #1)

Chapter 1

NATALYA

“So, how big is it?”

I nearly choke on my iced tea. Ilya and I are lying out poolside, just steps away from the pool house on my father’s property—my new home since my graduation. The subject of the day, as per usual, is Andrei.

This is my fault. Ilya was the first person I called after I lost my virginity to him last spring. Ever since, my best friend has seemed to be champing at the bit for any intimate detail of my sexual encounters with him.

“Come on,” Ilya persists. She turns over on her side to face me. “You can’t just tell me that you’re fucking now without any follow-up at all.”

“Keep it down,” I hiss at her, glancing across the still, blue water of the pool to the back door of the main house. “You know what my father will do to me if he ever finds out, right?”

Ilya shrugs. Her cat-like blue eyes turn up slightly as she smirks at me. “Can’t be any worse than how he treats you on a normal day.”

“You have no idea how much worse it can be,” I mutter. I lean back on the lounge chair and pull my sunglasses down over my eyes. “He’s a tyrant when he’s not ignoring me completely.”

I glance down at my bathing suit. I chose my black bikini today.

It’s plain and offers about as much coverage as possible and still be classified as a bikini.

Lately, the only time my father even notices me is when I’m half naked in some way, shape, or form.

Then, all of a sudden, he cares about my virtue and wants me to cover up.

I’ve had to hide five of my other bathing suits because he’d said they were too revealing.

“At least he’s letting you stay home,” Ilya says. “Leni just got home from college break last week and found out her parents turned her room into a home gym. She had to stay in a hotel the whole time she was here.”

Leni. Our high school friend, also known as the ‘pacer’ since every time she got in trouble, the other parents in our neighborhood tightened the reins on us.

I lost count of how many penances we’ve had to pay for her sins.

I sigh and respond with, “I honestly don’t know what’s worse.

I’m dealing with a man who owns a mansion with five bedrooms and he puts me out in the pool house. ”

“I wouldn’t complain,” she says with a snicker. “I mean, if he did give you your old room back, you just know he’d be hovering over you and listening to your phone calls. At least this way, we can chat about Andrei’s dick in semi-privacy.”

I utter a short chuckle and settle in to enjoy the sun. I’m not planning to be out here long, but it’s a beautiful day and I wanted to at least get a little sun. Being a redhead, I’m usually so pale that I glow in the dark. Nice sun-kissed skin suits me better.

Also, it’s nice to hang out with Ilya. Since graduation, we’ve pretty much been inseparable.

The years that I was away at school, I missed her so much.

I thought with our going to different colleges, she’d find other friends and forget all about me.

Now that I’m home for good, that’s all behind us.

It’s like we picked up right where we left off.

“It was a good size, okay?” I say softly so that my voice doesn’t carry over the pool water and to the back door. “Not too big and not too small. Average.”

Ilya shakes her head. “Shame. Your first one had to be average.”

I laugh. “We all can’t be lucky enough to ride horse cock for our first times.”

She laughs with me and says, “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.

Mark was entirely too big for any human woman.

” She’s speaking of her ex, Mark Linniman.

He was the star basketball player in school and had to be six foot seven.

He had gigantic feet… and according to Ilya, the dick of a thoroughbred.

“I don’t know what I would do if Andrei were too big for me,” I say. “I mean… what do you do, anyway? You can’t just… lie there, right?”

“I should have kicked him out,” she says listlessly. “Just not taken it. You know, I thought he broke something inside me after that. I had to wear a pad for days after.”

I snort. “Imagine if you’d gone to the hospital.”

“Oh, my God!” she exclaims. “I’d die. I’d just expire right there in the hospital bed. My parents would have to write, ‘Here lies Ilya Azarin. Her pussy was brutally murdered by a monster cock’.”

We both devolve into laughter, nearly falling out of our chairs. We finally get ourselves together, wiping tears from our eyes. Ilya asks, “So, Andrei’s the one, you think? I mean… he’s the guy you finally gave it up to after all this time.”

“I think so,” I say. “He’s intelligent, comes from a good family, has a bright future ahead of him. He’s attractive and in shape. We’ve got a lot in common.”

I’m not looking at her, but I can tell she’s staring at me with those skeptical cat’s eyes. “Why does it sound like you’re trying to sell him to me? I don’t need convincing.”

I shrug and look up at the passing clouds through the pink tint of my sunglasses. “Just practicing, I guess.”

Ilya goes quiet, then she sits up in full understanding of the thing I’m not saying. “Nat.”

“I’m going to tell him,” I tell her. “I was planning on it.”

“I know. You said after you graduate. That was almost a month ago.”

A heavy feeling settles in my chest and slides down to my stomach. Instinctively, I put my hand over it. The warm, soft flesh of my abdomen grounds me a little. “Yeah.”

Ilya doesn’t respond. She just looks off toward the house, a pensive look in her eyes. “It’s possible that he’ll like him, you know. If he’s everything you say, who wouldn’t like a man like that for their daughter?”

It’s an excellent question, one I’d been asking myself once I realized that Andrei and I had gotten serious.

In school, everyone who had met him told me how lucky I was.

Andrei has designs on becoming a surgeon and he’s been accepted into the best medical school in the country.

His family has connections among the elite, high-ranking political officials and tech billionaires.

His is the kind of bloodline that most fathers hope their daughters link up with.

But most fathers are not Vladimir Petrov.

Most fathers don’t chase away every man that their daughters bring home, regardless of their financial or social standing.

The worst part of that is just that I’m clueless as to what the problem is.

I honestly don’t even know what kind of man would pass muster with my father.

“I think it’ll be okay,” Ilya says. “I mean, all the other guys you brought home were scrubs who didn’t have a future ahead of them.”

That makes me laugh. “Lee, most of the guys I brought home were in high school. What were they supposed to be? CEOs of their own companies?”

Ilya shrugs. “Maybe?”

It’s ridiculous. My father is ridiculous.

When I think back to every boy I brought home…

Jack Galland in my freshman year, Nakia Volkov in my sophomore year, Dmitri Williams in my sophomore year…

I got it the worst about him because he was half black.

My father stopped talking to me for a month.

After Dmitri, I just stopped bringing them home.

I decided that if there wasn’t any definite sign that I might marry them one day, then it wasn’t worth it.

“You know what I think?” Ilya says. “I think you should bring Andrei over out of respect, but no matter what, you should keep things going with him. Fuck your dad and his opinion. You’re a twenty-three-year-old woman now. You can make your own decisions—”

The back door opens suddenly, making us both jump. Ilya shuts her mouth so quickly that her teeth clatter.

My father stands in the doorway. He’s wearing a black tracksuit with the zipper pulled down to display the graying hair over the tattoos on his chest. His bald head is covered in beads of sweat, a sure sign that he’d just been working out.

His well-trimmed white beard glints like silver in the sunlight.

His glare travels out to me, intense blue eyes striking me across the face. “Natalya,” he says. “I’m about to go into a meeting. Go and put some clothes on. Both of you.”

Without another word, he disappears back into the house. I sigh and sit up. I wasn’t going to be out here for long, anyway. “Come on. I’ll make us some drinks.”

We grab our things and walk back to the pool house. Inside, the cool air conditioning greets us. Ilya walks across the front room, making a beeline for the bathroom. “I had to pee anyway,” she says as she disappears behind the door.

The pool house is, for all intents and purposes, about as close to having my own apartment as I’m probably ever going to have.

It has a little living room with a couch and flat screen television on one wall.

The door leading out to the pool has a sliding door that overlooks the whole back yard.

I’ve got a little kitchenette with a sink, stove, and refrigerator.

And right down the hall are my bathroom and bedroom.

It’s not very much, but it’s bigger than my bedroom in the house and much bigger than my dorm room. Makes it kind of easy to forget that it’s still my father’s property.

I go to my bedroom to change. As soon as I walk in, I catch a glimpse of myself in the full-length mirror on my door.

This plain black bikini is probably the most conservative one I possess, with which I can still get a reasonable tan.

It doesn’t have any frills or sequins. It’s not cut too high in the hips or low in the bra.

It’s just black with strings to hold it onto my body.

But even with that in mind, I guess I can understand why my father wanted me to cover up.