Total pages in book: 9
Estimated words: 7418 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 37(@200wpm)___ 30(@250wpm)___ 25(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 7418 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 37(@200wpm)___ 30(@250wpm)___ 25(@300wpm)
I twisted to look up at him, setting my tablet aside. “Do you ever wonder if things would have been different? If she’d stayed?” He knew what I was asking.
His eyes met mine, steady and warm. “Sometimes. But not in the way you think. If she’d stayed, I might never have realized how much I needed you in my life and not just as my daughter I was raising alone but as... this.” He gestured vaguely between us, the words inadequate for what we’d become.
I shifted, moving to sit beside him in the chair, curling into his side like I had a thousand times before. His arm came around me immediately, pulling me close. “It started so innocently,” I murmured, tracing the veins on the back of his hand. “That summer when I was nineteen. The kitchen thing.”
He huffed a soft laugh. “Accidental, my ass. I knew exactly how close I was standing.”
I elbowed him gently. “Liar. You looked like you’d been caught doing something illegal.”
“I felt like it,” he admitted. “I was, sweetheart. You were home from college, all grown up suddenly, and I reached over you for that damn glass... and everything shifted. That brush against your back,” he exhaled. “It was nothing, really. But it felt like everything.”
I remembered it vividly. There had been a spark that had raced up my spine. My breath caught, and a flush crept up my neck. I’d spent the rest of that summer hyperaware of him and of his presence in a room. I noticed the way his eyes followed me when he thought I wasn’t looking.
We’d danced around it for months, polite, awkward distance masking the growing tension.
“Then, during winter break the next year,” I continued softly, “the power outage. Candlelight and that stupid blanket.”
His body was tense, his fingers tracing the back of my hand. “The night we stopped pretending,” he finished. His fingers finally threaded through mine. “I told myself it was wrong a thousand times. You’re my daughter. Society has rules for a reason.”
“But it didn’t feel wrong,” I said, echoing words we’d spoken to each other in the dark many times since. “It felt... inevitable.”
He pressed a kiss to my temple. “It felt right, and that scared the fuck out of me. After your mom left, it was just us against the world. I poured everything into being the parent you needed. But as you grew up... God, Casey, you became this incredible woman right in front of me. Strong, kind, beautiful. And I was terrified of what that meant.”
We sat in silence for a moment, the fire crackling the only sound. Outside, the sleet intensified, but inside, it was warm and our sanctuary.
“The kinks came later,” I said, a small smile tugging at my lips. “That Halloween party when you wore the mask as a joke.”
He shifted, and I glanced down, noticing his cock hardening beneath his slacks. “And you looked at me like you wanted to be chased,” he finished, voice roughening with the memory. “We realized pretty quickly that the danger and anonymity… the forbidden aspect fed something in both of us.”
“The masked stranger games,” I murmured. “Pretending we didn’t know each other. The risk of getting caught. You took what you wanted no matter what.”
“It’s like... reclaiming the wrongness,” he said thoughtfully. “Taking what society says we can’t have and making it ours, anyway. On our terms.” He dragged his palm over his raging hard-on, squeezing it and groaning.
I exhaled, feeling my arousal climbing. The mask-play, the public encounters, and the forceful claiming… they weren’t just about thrill. They were about owning our love in a world that would never understand it.
We turned the taboo into something beautiful between us.
“Do you ever regret it?” I asked what sometimes haunted my darker moments.
He turned me to face him fully, hands framing my face with infinite gentleness. “Not for a second. You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Casey. Right or wrong, labels don’t matter. What we have is real.”
Tears pricked my eyes, but they were the good kind. I leaned in, pressing my forehead to his. “I love you. All of you. The man who raised me. The man who loves me now.”
“And I do love you,” he whispered back. “Always.”
We stayed like that until the fire burned low, wrapped in each other and the quiet certainty that, whatever the world might think, we’d found something rare and true.
Forbidden and taboo, yes. But ours.
EPILOGUE
TEN YEARS LATER
The cabin sat at the end of a dirt road that no map remembered anymore, tucked against the mountains where the pines grew so thick the stars had to fight to get through.
We built it ourselves, log by log, every nail hammered in between kisses and filthy promises. There’s no cell service, no neighbors for twenty miles, and the only law that mattered here was his.