Daddy's Worst Nightmare

Just like that, we’re locked in the dark cabana located at the roof’s edge. A place for guests to change or leave their possessions. There are a couple of lit candles flickering—Hawaiian scent—casting shadows on the wall. The atmosphere would almost be romantic, if it wasn’t for the pings of bullets passing through silencers out on the roof, although I can barely hear any of it over the frantic pounding of my heart.

“You’re here,” I murmur, burying my face in his neck. “You came.”

A shudder wracks his wiry frame, the sinew of his arms flexing beneath me. Lethal is the word I would use to describe him. Strong, tall, angular. His body is a finely tuned instrument.

A weapon.

In contrast, he sets me on my feet gently, his palms skating down my arms, over my hips. “She’s not hit,” he breathes, as if reassuring himself. “She’s not hit.”

“You wouldn’t let me be hit,” I whisper, wrapping the front of his jacket in my fists, pulling him close, closer, until his lips settle against my forehead. “I knew you would come. Please don’t disappear again this time. Please.”

“I’m done leaving you, sweetheart.” His tone is made of iron. “You go where I go now.”

“Really?” Warmth, happiness and relief crest over me. “I want that.”

“You’ll be getting anything and everything you want.”

I bounce a little on the balls of my feet and he groans, pressing me against the wall of the cabana, his hands bracing over my head. “Can I see your face now?”

Pain laces his low chuckle. “You’ll agree to come with me, even before knowing what I look like?”

“I don’t care what you look like, I just want to see you when…”

A beat passes. “When?”

“When I kiss you for the first time,” I say in a rush, my cheeks heating drastically. “I’ve wanted to kiss you since I was fourteen and you stopped that man from pulling me into his car outside of the church on Park Avenue.”

He bristles against me, as if physically offended by the memory. “No one is ever going to touch you again, Arya. No one but me.”

I slide my hands beneath his jacket and run them up his hard packed stomach, his chest. “And then again when I was fifteen and that man tried to drown me in the health club pool—”

“Sweetheart, stop,” he chokes out, his mouth laying hard, fast kisses down the side of my neck, across my shoulder. “I don’t want to think about those times. They almost killed me.”

“I’ll stop talking about them when you kiss me—”

He throws back his hood and I’m only given a too-brief glimpse at my wildly handsome, if rough around the edges, guardian angel, before his mouth lands on mine. It’s wetter and more adamant, demanding, aggressive than I could ever have imagined—and I love it. My senses wake up from a slumber and cheer. He kisses me like he’s been craving me since birth, his hands wrestling with my hair, his tongue raking over mine, rubbing sensuously, the stubble of his chin scuffing mine. Low, tortured sounds rumble from his throat and his hips…

Oh, his hips.

This is another part of kissing I didn’t anticipate. How much our bodies would be involved. There is something hard inside of his jeans and he drives it up between my thighs, lifting me off the ground, slamming me against the wall repeatedly, growling brokenly. My butt cheeks slap against the wall and oh God, oh God, the rigid fly of his jeans is creating friction in a place I didn’t realize I needed it. But I do. I need it so bad. So I open my thighs and get more, encouraging him to thrust harder, so hard I’m worried the cabana is going to collapse. “Wanted to take you so many fucking times, Arya.” His words are almost indiscernible, muffled and slurred into my neck. “But had to wait until you were old enough. I wouldn’t have made it five seconds with you under my roof. And I’m not that kind of criminal.”

I don’t understand his meaning, but I trust him. I trust this man with my life.

He doesn’t have to explain himself to me.

“Wait,” I whimper when he gives me a particularly hard pump, his teeth burying in the side of my neck. “W-what is your name? I need to know what to call you.”

His tongue laps at the sting of his bite. “Damian, sweetheart. That’s the name you cry out for now. You’re going to cry it all kinds of ways. In happiness, in lust, in frustration when I’m banging you blind for the eighth time that day. Damian. The last name you’ll need to know.”

A light goes off in my head.

That Bronx accent, the green eyes, the shape of his face…

He’s the boy from the subway steps.

The boy I never stopped wondering about. Worrying for.