Chapter One
Reuben
Coming home is the best and worst part of every day.
It wasn’t always like that, but the last six months have been a horror show.
First, it’s because Winona, my deceased best friend’s daughter, who, for all intents and purposes, I’ve raised for the last six and a half years, has turned into sin incarnate. I want to spend every fucking second of every day near her, but she’s pushing me damn near to a nervous breakdown, parading around the house in just a t-shirt and panties most of the time. No matter how many times I tell her to go put clothes on, she just smiles and does what she wants.
Fucking brat.
But the more she pushes back at me, the harder my dick gets, and at almost forty years old, I’ve never sported a boner bigger, harder, or more deviant in its fantasies than I have the last few months.
But, it’s not just Winona that’s making it hard to come home to the house I built for us four years ago, it’s her mother, too, and for totally different reasons.
Rage-filled and a fan of Diet Coke and Southern Comfort, Catrina thinks the world is her oyster, but expects me to be the one funding her lavish lifestyle.
I take a moment to breathe as I wind up the driveway to the house, scanning the back acreage of the two hundred and sixty that’s my safe haven from the world outside. I bought it to bring some fresh perspective to Winona and to selfishly give her everything her heart desires hoping she would never think to look to another man for anything.
My phone buzzes as I pull my Denali into the carport attached to the side of the house next to the door, and Winona’s face appears on the screen with her tongue stuck out. I let her choose her ringtone and the contact image, and little does she know I’ve put that image with her tongue out onto my fucking dick several times a day ever since, imagining what it would feel like to have it licking up my shaft for real.
“Yesssss.” I tap accept on her FaceTime call and squeeze my temples in a silent plea to my already-hardening dick to keep things under control.
“Daddy!” She chirps, and any hope for control sails out the window and disappears on the early Spring Michigan breeze.
“Daughter.” I take a breath, hating myself for playing this little game with her, but knowing I have zero control.
It was her idea to call me Daddy when she was still in pigtails. Her father, my best friend and brother in all ways except blood, was “Dad”to her, and I was around all the fucking time, so she started to tell everyone I was her second father. Then, she branded me with the Daddy title, and there was no fucking turning back.
But since she turned the corner on adulthood, it’s taken on a whole new meaning.
“Joey says you told him to go home for the day. Is that true?” I do my best to glare at her, but when she nods and grins it’s pretty much fucking impossible.
“He was sick, Daddy. Sneezing and coughing. He needs to rest.”
I grunt in reply.
Only fucking bodyguard in the world who takes orders from the eighteen-year-old girl he’s supposed to be protecting. Well, bodyguard is stretching it. Joey used to work security at my construction company, until I needed someone to drive my little girl to school and back. He’s the only motherfucker in the world I trust with her, because he’s both enormous and intimidating, and when it comes to romantic interest, he’s a man’s man if you know what I mean.
Her pink cherub cheeks are more flushed than usual, and the immediate urge to ask her if she’s feeling okay catches in my throat as she smiles and points both her index fingers to her lips.
“See these?”
I don’t only fucking see them, I fucking dream about them, little girl. “Yes, baby. What about them?”
“They’rehungry,and you said you would be home anhourago.” She pokes out that bottom lip, and God help me, cum seeps from the tip of my now painfully swollen dick.
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. The muscles 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.
