8. Chapter 8
Inside the truck, my dick is a metal flag pole. I squeeze the steering wheel, looking around for a place to park the truck and sink my meat into my brave little girl as a reward.
"I think I just came a little." She giggles, threading her fingers together and pushing them out in front of her, cracking her knuckles. "Violence is such a turn on."
I choke. "Jesus Christ, Wren. Just when I think you can't get any hotter, you do."
"I'm dead serious." She's grinning and hot as fire. "The way you picked him up. His feet were dangling. His little feet were just—"
She makes this little finger gesture like a kid's legs swinging back and forth.
"They were not dangling."
"They were dangling-adjacent and you know it.
" I click her seatbelt on and she settles back with a satisfied sprawl.
"Bea's going to lose her entire mind. She's been wanting someone to do that since freshman week when he told her she was fat.
And, the kiss? Daddy," She gives me a mock, disappointed pout, "That kiss was so hot. "
I start the truck and check the mirrors more than I need to. My heart rate is still elevated and it's not entirely because of the kid I crumpled against his own wall. It's the way she's looking at me. Like I'm something she won. Someone she's proud of.
I don't deserve that look but I'm keeping it anyway.
Her shoulders slump. "What if he calls mom?"
I nod, already reaching for my phone. "I'm not going to give him the chance. I'm going to take care of this, right now."
"Wait." Fear rounds her eyes but I smooth a hand down the back of her hair.
"No, baby. I'm taking care of this. If your mother has a cockroach up her ass about it, she'll get over it. When she can be civil and polite, she can come talk to you, until then, everything will go through me."
***
A half hour later, we've had an interesting conversation with Linda.
Wren is stable and understands that I'm now the wall between her and her mother for the time being.
The TLDR version is, if she wants her daughter in her life, she needs to be fucking polite, accept our relationship or kick fucking rocks.
She loves Wren. She's not evil. She hates me at this point but my shoulders are broad and I know she'll calm the fuck down once she gets her expectations and ego out of the way.
Now, it's time to get back to the good stuff.
"You good, baby?"
She nods. "Yes. I have you. I trust you."
I press her palm to my lips, then flatten it over my heart.
"I need to make a stop before we go back to the house," I say.
"Where?"
"You'll see."
Where we're headed is twelve minutes from campus but the drive feels like it goes on forever.
I'm pretty sure she figures it out before I turn onto the street. Her brow furrows. Smooths. Furrows again. She knows me better than I'd like to admit.
She smacks my arm. "What did you do?"
I pull into the driveway. It's a white craftsman, deep porch, big back yard with enough space for the garden she doesn't know she wants yet.
I spent the week on the phone with contractors and agents. Snuck out one day to do the walk through, transfer the money and set up everything needed to make this happen and keep her safe and me sane.
The house has four cameras exterior, motion-activated, alerts to my phone. New deadbolts. Security system she can run from hers. Not because anyone's coming — because I wasted time already and I'm not leaving another fucking thing about her or us to chance.
But that's not what matters.
What matters is the reading nook I built into the bay window of the second bedroom. She mentioned it once. Once. Passing comment years ago. I kept track of it all.
I put bookshelves in the living room because she owns more books than clothes and has been stacking them on the floor like she doesn't believe she deserves furniture.
Kitchen with real counter space because she's been teaching herself to cook from YouTube videos at two in the morning and she thinks I don't know.
I know. I know everything about this woman.
I've been paying attention since she walked through my door, wrecked and furious and so beautiful it felt like a lens flare straight to the chest.
"Grant." Her voice has gone strange. Thin. "Whose house is this?"
I turn the engine off. "Yours."
Silence. Then, "Mine," she repeats.
"Yours and Bea's. Sort of, it's ours baby.
Four bedrooms, three baths. Master's set up for you.
Second bedroom has the reading nook. There's a full apartment over the garage for Bea to destroy however she wants.
You said she had a shitty apartment and an asshole landlord and you care about her, so I do too.
We'll stay here until you finish school, then you can pick out whatever you want, wherever you want.
Your pussy has Daddy by the short hairs, baby.
I'll burn down the world for you then rebuild it however you tell me to. "
Wren is staring through the windshield, her throat working. She looks like a little girl trying to puzzle through how to express all the new feelings she's discovering.
"You bought me a house."
"I bought us a house." I turn to face her.
"I move in soon. I'll get things settled at my other place.
The security is installed. Neighbors are a retired couple on the east side and a family with a golden retriever on the west, and I've already introduced myself to both and told them my fiancé lives here while she's going to school and I'll be moving in as well. "
She exhales. It sounds like it's been trapped in her body for weeks. Maybe years. "You talked to the neighbors."
"Background checked them."
"You background checked the—" Both hands press to her cheeks. She's making little choking sounds like she's laughing or crying. That thing she does where the two crash into each other and I can't tell which is winning. "Grant Sullivan, you absolute psycho. I love you so much."
"Did you not hear what I said?" I grunt, reaching over to grab a handful of that hair I love to pull so much. "Fiancé. Did you grasp that?"
I tug at the roots, pulling her mouth over to mine and shoving my tongue through her lips until she's panting and twisting in the seat.
"Fiancé." She finally breathes against my lips.
"Yes, my daughter is going to be my wife.
Fuck the world. I'm going to be happy and the only thing that will make me happy is making you happy, so fuck it.
We're doing this baby. I've put enough cum inside your little tight girl pussy to make a flock of babies already.
So, you'll be my baby, making my babies and I'll handle it all.
Your job is to take care of my cock and be happy. "
I lean across the console and pull her hands down from her wet cheeks. Mascara migrating south. If I had my camera, I'd shoot this moment and print it twelve feet wide. The most beautiful portrait I'd ever take.
"Come see the inside."
***
She laugh-cries at the reading nook. She sits in it and runs her hands over the built-in shelves and the cushion I had upholstered in a green I picked because it matches her eyes.
She cries again in the kitchen when she opens the cabinets and finds them full. Peanut butter. The specific crackers she likes. Chocolate cherry coffee.
Vitamins and supplements and a printed schedule of when and what to take because I know she forgets to eat when she's stressed and that shit ends under my roof.
She screams the fucking roof down when she sees all the bottles of her Pomegranate Sunrise scented shit in the bathroom cabinet.
She skips around and calls Bea from the living room. I lean against the kitchen counter and let the shrieking wash over me — Bea's voice through the speaker, a string of profanity that would make a sailor blush, and somewhere in there, unmistakably, the phrase I knew that man was daddy as fuck.
Wren shoves the phone against her chest giggling. Too late. I heard it and it's fucking true.
I am daddy as fuck.
When she hangs up, she struts back to me like a pimped-out peacock.
That look on her face — the one that's equal parts wonder and want, tells me everything in my life has brought me here and it's all fucking perfect.
She stops a foot away and I hook my fingers into her waistband and drag her against me.
"You did all this in a week," she says.
"I've been planning it longer."
"How long?"
"Since the night I snuck into your room and violated you in your pretend sleep."
She tilts her head back. "You're a bad daddy."
"The best ones are."
I kiss her. She melts into it, palms slapping my chest, rising on her toes. I grab handfuls of her ass and savor it all.
We're home.
When I pull back, her pupils are wide and that sexy, lusty little girl look makes my dick fucking weep. "I want to christen every room."
"We will." I land my forehead against hers. "But first."
I reach into my pocket.
Three days. I've been carrying this ring for three days everywhere. Art deco, rose gold, a vintage, pristine pink diamond from a New York estate sale I found online. The once in a lifetime kind of design that understands beauty is structural, foundational, not just decorative.
I saw it and heard her voice in my head saying, 'Yes, Daddy' and bought it without a second of doubt about the price or our future.
Now, I've been waiting for a moment that felt honest instead of staged. And here it is — her tear-streaked face in a house that made her smile, afternoon light cutting through windows and no camera in sight.
She sees the box and goes absolutely still.
"Grant."
"That's not what you call me now."
"Daddy." She whispers and the world stands still. Her pussy flavor is still on my tongue from this morning and I know my load I deposited earlier is also leaking out of her tight little breeding hole right now.
I pop it open. The stone catches the light and does what I knew it would.
Her hand flies to her mouth. More fucking laughing tears.
Her eyes narrow as my heart lodges in my throat.
What if she says no?
I shake my head, doesn't matter. She's not fucking getting away.
Her hands flutter around her throat as she quirks her lips into a playful smile, nose crinkled. "Get on your knee, Daddy."
"I'm forty-four. My knees have been through two deployments and a—"
"Get. On. Your. Knee. Daddy."
"Bossy brat."
The corner of my mouth lifts just enough for her to know I was always going to do it.
Then I drop onto one knee on the hardwood of our home, the ring between us, looking up at the woman who showed up on my doorstep like a hurricane and blew away every moral and ethical reason I thought I had for staying away.
"Marry me, Wren."
"That's not a question."
"No. It's not."
She stares at me. Then she sinks to her knees and takes my face in both hands.
This girl, this woman, my whole goddamn future in a pair of hands that I held when I walked her to her first day of school for so many years.
Read her stories and taught her how to scramble eggs and humped her body one night while she slept like a lecherous old fucker.
She kisses me. It's the kind of kiss that doesn't need words because it is the answer.
"Yes." Against my mouth, barely a breath. "Obviously yes, you impossible man."
I slide the ring on.
She holds her hand up. "It's art deco. Vintage like Taylor's ring."
"It is."
After a while, she lifts her head. Wipes her eyes with the back of her hand.
"Bea's going to scream so loud the neighbors call the police."
"Good thing I already introduced myself."
"You thought of everything."
"That's a Daddy's job."
She loops her arms around my neck, settles against me.
Afternoon sun tracks across the floor. A dog barks next door. Down the street, a kid bounces a basketball, the rhythm steady and ordinary and so goddamn beautiful it could make a man religious.
"Daddy?"
"Yes, baby."
"Take me to the bedroom. I want to break in that master suite."
I pull her up against me. Easy, the way it's always been with her, the way nothing else in my life has ever been before her and carry her down the hall.
She's right.
We've got rooms to christen.