We chatted on the trip home. When I saywe, it was more a case of her asking questions and me either eluding them or giving her a response that contained some truth. She began by asking about me and her father. They were easy to answer with honesty. We had met as young boys at boarding school and become the best of friends. Together we had grown into young men who both joined the military and then both left. I briefly thought how similar we had been, yet very different. We had shared similar starts in life, made similar choices and ended up in very different places. While I had been musically gifted and had remained single, Glen had embraced his talent for words and ended up as an award winning, bestselling author under a pen name which was in everyone’s best interests, but his greatest achievement in his mind had been his family.
When she asked why she had never met me, or at least remembered meeting me, she stopped short of saying before that night, and for now, I didn’t push that conversation, I had been more elusive and deflected those questions with responses citing my career and stories of meeting up with Glen in various parts of the world we were in at the same time. She had looked dubious but when I referenced specific places and time frames, she seemed to accept what I was saying. It was true that the best lies contained some truth. Reminiscing about my friendship had been bittersweet, knowing that it really was over, but it was good to talk about Glen and the times we had shared withsomeone who had known and loved him. I think Clover had been further reassured when I had shared details from her life growing up, holidays they’d been on, birthdays and Christmases she had celebrated, gifts she had received. The blue bike with a bell for her eighth birthday, that had brought a huge smile to her previously sad face.
She considered me to have been a stranger but there really was nothing I didn’t know about her with the exception of who she had been in that bloody club.
We hadn’t yet discussedusas Clover had fallen asleep and had only woken a few minutes before we pulled into the underground car park where we currently sat in silence. This was it.
I moved to her side of the car where she sat frozen in her seat. Opening the door, she looked startled to find me there. Holding out my hand, I gestured for her to take it and step out of the car. She did, slowly and cautiously, but she did it. I really needed this ridiculous reaction to her touch to stop. If I was going to care for her as her guardian and not keep replaying what did and could have happened between us, I needed to not have my dick stiffening and images of what she might look like naked and writhing beneath me running through my mind to the soundtrack of her breathless gasps of arousal.
With a couple of her bags in one hand, I used my free hand to cup her elbow and guide her across the car park to the lift. I felt her tense when I scanned my thumb print to open the elevator door and then entered the security code to prompt it to move to the top floor that I occupied.
“Don’t worry. This is the most secure building in the country.”
She nodded.
“I’ll arrange for your prints and stuff to be added tomorrow.”
She looked at me with nothing but fear in her eyes, and why wouldn’t she? She’d lived in a sleepy village where they probably left all the windows and doors open . . . actually that would have been a step too far for Glen, I knew that, so the doors and windows would have been closed and most likely deadlocked. However, fingerprint security, retina scans that she hadn’t encountered yet, were rightfully alien and as such frightening for her. Maybe I needed to review security, downgrade it, well, not downgrade, but modify it so that from the outside at least, it looked a little more conventional.
Once inside the apartment, I showed her around and smiled when she stopped at my piano that took pride of place in the living area. She ran her fingers along it, lightly dragging them along the edge of the dark wood, raising the keylid and gently tapping across the keys. I didn’t like people touching it normally, but she did so with such innocence and reverence that it genuinely warmed me. I did draw the line when she appeared to be preparing to sit at it and went to place her phone down on top of it.
“Erm, don’t. Nothing is placed on the piano, ever.”
She nodded and moved away. I stepped closer and once I had closed the keylid, I handed her a pen and note pad and asked her to write a shopping list of anything she wanted and to record anything she didn’t like so my housekeeper could ensure she had everything she needed and wanted. The air was heavy, loaded. She looked up at me and her eyes shimmered with unshed tears which wasn’t surprising considering everything she’d been through in just a few weeks.
Her mouth opened and closed several times before sad, broken words were uttered. “Can I have a hug?”
How the fuck could I refuse her that? Comfort. Love.
My reply was to pull her close and hold her, swaying slightly, but I was unsure who was comforting who really. We remained that way for some time and when she eventually broke free, she looked up, her lips slightly parted, allowing her pink tongue to show before she slowly licked across her full bottom lip that I imagined biting into.
Her hands rested against my chest that was rapidly rising and falling, as was hers judging by the heave of her sweatshirt covered body.
“We can’t.”
“But you were going to, when we met.”
I shook my head and repeated those two words. “We can’t.”
She stared up at me, silently pleading.
“You’re too young.” She was. I knew that she was over the age of consent, but she wasn’t yet an adult in my head. She couldn’t join the armed forces or marry without consent, or vote, or even buy alcohol, so too young.
“Dom.”
That name representedus, and that wasn’t on the cards. I retreated, not stopping until I was dropping her bags into her room and left as quickly as I’d entered. I allowed her some time to settle in and made my way to my office where there was a picture on the desk of me with my original regiment, including Glen.
Pouring a generous measure of scotch, I addressed him. “Well, isn’t this a fine fucking fix you’ve gotten me into?” His laughter echoed within my head and I joined in with it. “Bastard. At least I had the decency not to have a child, but she’s mine now, brother.”
CHAPTER
THREE
Clover
Ihad slept surprisingly well considering I was in a strange bed in a strange room in an even stranger home. My home. This was messed up. Last night I had dreamt of him again, but this time rather than replaying the memory of the club, it happened here, in my bed. He had taken my virginity in a heady mix of passion, pleasure and sensation. I could have sworn my lips were enlarged from the imaginary kisses that had bruised and swollen them in my imagination, if nowhere else. I pressed my finger against my full bottom lip then traced a path across them both, remembering Dominic’s tongue doing exactly that.
Guilt washed over me and it was two-fold. How could I allow myself to indulge in these fantasies, enjoying the pleasure and happiness of them and the memory of that night when my father was dead and would never experience happiness or pleasure ever again. It had been the very day he had died that I had gone out and experienced that pleasure and happiness for the first time. The other side of that guilt was that the man who made me feel all of these things, who helped me to forget the painand ache was my father’s best friend. The one person my father had trusted his prized possession with. Me. I was certain that when he had asked Dominic to be my guardian in the event of his death that being my first kiss, the subject of my dreams and fantasies was not what he had intended. I couldn’t even consider my virginity in this scenario.
