I nod. “I was a lot more…forgiving back then. Mom left him and remarried after his own business had hit the skids. I felt sorry for him, so I made him a board member of my new company. I also brought in a couple of my college friends’ dads on the board, hoping it’d go some way to making up for the first business going bust.”
“Did it?”
I laugh, and even in the dark I hear the bitterness drenching it. “What do you think, princess?”
“I think you knocked it out of the park a second time,” she replies, her faith in me jerking the breath from my lungs.Christ, this sweet girl.
I tilt her face up and drop a wet kiss on her, just so her sweet taste can wash away some of the acid churning in my gut.
I revel in the way she squirms against me when I lift my head. “Hmm. We broke some serious records in the first two years.”
“So what happened?”
“What happened was my dad tried to take it from me. He got together with the other guys I’d brought in and voted me off the board.” I stop and take a few breaths, because the memory still has too much power over me. “When I tried to fight it, they contrived to have me committed.”
She jerks against me. “What?”
“I can a little…manic when I’m engrossed in work. They used that to say I was unstable. I spent three weeks in a psych facility upstate before I managed to convince the doctors that I wasn’t crazy.”
“Oh, my God! I’m so sorry, Jared.”
Her soft sympathy eases some of the fury inside me but I know it’ll never be completely eradicated. “I had to make my father pay.”
She hesitates for a long time before she responds. “W-what happened to him?”
I smile in the dark and I know it’s not a pretty smile. “I said I was good with numbers, didn’t I? It wasn’t difficult to get the IRS to take a deeper look at some of the company’s financial activity Dad was in charge of. He and his cohorts were found guilty of serious fraud. Dad’s serving fifteen years in prison.”
She gasps, then goes silent.
That silence eats at me until I can’t keep quiet anymore. “I couldn’t let it go. You get that, don’t you, princess? No one takes what’s mine without consequence.”
She needs to know the kind of man I am. Needs to know why I guard what’s mine with violent ferocity.
After an age, she answers. “I understand things a little better now. Thank you for letting me in. But…you need to forgive and let go. The baggage only weighs you down and takes up room.”
I slide my hand down to cup her plump ass. “The only thing I want to take up room in is you. I’m fucking obsessed with you,” I finally admit. Because I can’t not. “Tell me it’s okay, princess, because I don’t think I can stop.”
Her eyes find mine in the dark and clings, her angelic face glowing. “It’s okay, Daddy. Because I’m obsessed with you too.”
Something cracks open in my chest but I ignore it. It’s been a night of far too much emotional excavation. I need mindless oblivion between her thighs.
And when she opens her arms to me, I’m…humbled.
I fuck her for hours after that.
I can’t seem to stop. Now this particular monster is out in the open, I can indulge. I don’t need to make excuses for keeping her in bed, learning and relearning every inch of her body. I don’t need to worry about eating her pussy for hours until she begs for reprieve. I don’t need to stop myself from following her from room to room just to watch her expressions as she talks about everything and nothing. As she pushes herself to the limit under Olsteen’s perfectionist eye, until I’m tempted to toss the old crone out the window.
She’s the purest, most beautiful thing in my life and I’m done denying that I need her to breathe.
That makes it easy to push the conundrum of what to do about her father to the back of my mind as I take the next week off and we just indulge in each other.
Jean-Claude cooks her favorite meals, most of which we barely get through before I’m sliding her out of her chair and onto my cock, my need to be inside her at all times a madness I don’t want to be cured of.
It’s a good thing my staff are well-trained in every eventuality because otherwise I’d have a few complaints on my hands.
Not that I give a shit.
Watching her blush and squirm on my dick when someone walks into the room only makes me harder. And gets her wetter. Enough to make those glorious squelching noises that deepen her blush while driving her out of her pretty little mind.