I’ve always been an in-charge kind of guy, but when Stan died six years ago in a work accident that turned all our worlds upside down, my need for control multiplied a hundred-fold, especially when it came to his daughter.
“Well, I’m here now, and you know what I always say about hunger, right?” I sniff, run my hand down my thighs, and catch movement through the window next to the side door. Themuscles down my back tighten when I see Catrina making her way toward the bar along the back wall of the kitchen.
“Hunger makes a good gravy,” Winona says on an eye roll, her cute as fuck little black bangs brushing on her lashes. They’re chopped in crooked chunks because she refuses to go to a salon. That’s a story for another time, but the one time she let Catrina cut her hair, it ended in tears and a screaming match, because her mother insisted on giving her ‘long layers’, whatever the fuck that means, and Winona wanted a ‘blunt cut’. Again, I have no fucking idea what any of that means, except that it resulted in the two women in my house making my life hell for two fucking days while they fought over hair.
It was the fucking hormones, too. Never let a fucking mother and daughter, both on their periods, do fucking anything together. Let alone one try to cut the other’s hair.
Jesus, the things I’ve learned being the new man of this family would have brought me to my knees if I wasn’t so fucking ass over teakettle for Winona.
I order organic cotton feminine pads from a specialty website in France every month, to be sure whatever is touching her pretty little virgin cunt is grade-A. And no fucking tampons, either. That was a selfish as fuck rule I made up because the thought of some inanimate object possibly interacting with that tight little cherry hymen turned me fucking feral.
I’m not proud, just honest.
Catrina can get her shit from the grocery store for all I care. I told Winona to keep her own products in a select few of the ten bathrooms in the house we share, and hope like fuck Catrina’s tendency to be self-absorbed keeps her from noticing that not all period products in this house are created equal.
“I’m coming in, baby. The potstickers are still hot, and the dumpling soup smells like ass in here, but what my girl wants, my girl gets. Is the table set?”
“Yes, for anhour!” She sneers, and my chest cinches.
“Don’t be a brat. I’ll be in in thirty seconds, can you wait that long?”
She lets out a loud groan. “I guess I have to.”
“Good girl. Now, hang up and get my drink ready. We’ll eat right out of the containers to save time.”
“Bye, Daddy.” She hangs up after adding a kiss to the screen, and cum flows freely into my jeans as my balls draw up.
I take a deep breath. This evening is going to be like all the others.
The best and worst time of the fucking day.
Chapter Two
Reuben
As soon as I cross the threshold of the back door carrying her favorite Thursday meal from The Golden Pagoda take-out, a punch of shame hits me in the gut. To Winona, I’m the guy who has been her second father since she was 12. I never intended to take on a kid. In fact, I kind of thought I’d be the world’s worst father, but life doesn’t always work out the way you expect.
When your own parents give you up, and you end up shunted around from foster home to foster home, it changes you. It’s something I wouldn’t wish on any child in the world, but when it’s someone I care about, it hits different.
My best friend Stan knew how I felt about that. It’s why he made sure to ask me in his will if I’d take on his daughter even with her mother still in the picture. He knew she’d need me, and that duty is the single most important thing in my life.
I’m pretty sure Winona sees me as a giant teddy bear. Emphasis on giant, unless you are actually a bear, then maybebeing six foot seven and two-seventy doesn’t make you stand out.
But what she doesn’t see is the other side of the man who gives her whatever she wants with the flash of a smile, the pout of a bottom lip, or a simple fucking ask.
The company her father and I started when we turned eighteen is not for the faint of heart. We both arrived at the Madison house at fourteen, having both been through the foster system for enough years that we were obnoxious, hell-bent on pushing away anyone and everyone, and one misdemeanor away from juvie.
But Burt Madison wasn’t the typical foster father. He was quiet, but fair. He put hammers in our hands and taught us how to build things. How to take out all that pent-up anger in a way that no one else had. We gave him a hard run for his money, but he never wavered. He just kept teaching us and showing us we were worth something until we started to believe it ourselves.
That led to starting our own handyman business when we were both seventeen and barely able to graduate high school. From there, we got our builder’s licenses, got jobs working for a big cement contractor, learned that business, and grew into what I have today.
But it’s cut-throat, and you don’t grow in those trades by being a cinnamon roll. I’ve burned down my share of competitors’ buildings and made house calls with a direct message about just how far I will go to win a bid or chase down the competition.
But using my size and physical prowess to nearly decapitate a classmate of Winona’s a month ago may have been going a little too far. She doesn’t know what happened, and he’s not talking. As a result, he’s still alive, albeit attending another school two states away.
All she knows is that the asshole who thought it would be funny to tape a sign on her back that said ‘Caution: Wide Load’ is no longer around.
When I picked her up from school that day, it took me two seconds to know she’d been crying. I didn’t press her for too much, just enough to give me the basics, then I did some digging on my own and found not only the asshole that made the sign, but also the recording of her when she finally figured out why her classmates were laughing at her walking down the hall.
