The Daddy Dilemma

by Tia Siren

  We finally left to return home, the others heading back to New York tonight. They all had things to attend to in the morning and I wanted to get Elle to bed. I wanted to sit on my balcony and take in the ocean breeze with my fiancé. I wanted to be home.

  We pulled into the garage to park and both took Elle to the bassinet in our room. Ryan pocketed the device that we used to listen to her and told me to go outside and that he would meet me there.

  I changed into leggings and a large shirt to sit in due to the wind. I grabbed a water and moved to sit in the large chair that we often shared, looking out into the dark where the water was. I’d never felt such peace as I did living near the ocean.

  I heard the door and saw Ryan come out in some sweats and a T-shirt with something in his hand. It was just the monitor. I smiled as he sat down beside me. “Good night?”

  “I loved every moment of it. I love that your family is growing back together and close again. I love that Elle will have them as she grows up. I am so happy with our life.” I smiled as he nodded. “Do you really want a small wedding?”

  “I have been to so many that have hundreds of people in attendance. There’s no intimacy. I just want it to be about our vows and not business. I don’t want all of that to affect our day.”

  I nodded lovingly in agreement.

  “That sounds perfect.” I leaned against him and felt him dig into his pocket.

  “I have something for you. I was going to do this at the restaurant, but I thought it should be when we were alone.” Ryan shifted and turned to face me as I smiled at him. “I’ve had this for a little while but the timing was never right, and when I did ask you, I just didn’t plan it well. That or I wanted a private moment for both of us.” He smiled and reached for my left hand as my mouth dropped open.

  Ryan slid a ring onto my finger, kissing it when he was finished. I lifted my finger to see it in the light from the living room, crying as I looked at the ring. It was a delicate band covered in diamonds with a larger one as the focal point, all set in square shape. It shimmered in the light, nearly blinding me as I sniffled.

  “It’s beautiful. I thought that we were going to go shopping for one or something like that.”

  “I had it when I got the house, but Elle’s arrival kind of shook things up for me. I did everything out of order, it seems. I also wanted to give this to you alone since everything else has been with others. Again, not my intention.”

  “I think everything is perfect the way that it happened.” I leaned in to kiss him slowly, desire pooling between my thighs. He returned it, his tongue meeting mine. When he pulled away to kiss my neck, I smiled. “Does it feel different to make love with something like this on my finger?”

  “I think we should find out,” he whispered before kissing me again. We continued that for as long as we could stand it, and then Ryan pulled me up by my hand to take me into the house. He locked the door, and we ran upstairs to the bedroom as I moved to take my leggings off. Ryan undressed and pushed me back onto the bed as I gasped, knowing what was coming next. His lips kissed up my legs slowly as I groaned with need. He moved up bit by bit as I reached for his hair and tried to tug on it.

  “This is getting long, you know,” I teased him, and he chuckled, sending vibrations over my skin.

  “Someone told me once that the messy look appealed to the girls,” he said as he nipped at my upper thigh, making me whimper.

  “Mmmm, that is very true,” I agreed as he started to head to where I needed him. His mouth covered my core as he slicked his tongue over me, and I cried out. By now, Elle was a better sleeper, so I knew she could handle some noise. Ryan ate away at me hungrily as every nerve ending in my body responded. It was so much more than just a release with him. It was an entire bodily experience. I felt the pressure releasing from deep inside as my mouth dropped open.

  I came for him, his fingers inside me and his tongue on my clit. I moaned his name, and he gripped my hips as he drank me in, keeping me from moving.

  Ryan pulled away after what could have been minutes or hours. He crawled over my body to kiss me deeply, my taste all over his mouth. He dropped between my weakened legs and pressed against me as he slid inside, our bodies touching everywhere as he filled me.

  “Ryan, I love you,” I murmured as he moved slowly, deeply.

  “I love you so much. I can’t wait to make you my wife,” he said as he kept thrusting inside me. I wrapped my legs around him and gripped his back as I breathed to our rhythm.

  We’d started this as an arrangement. We’d had sex to create Elle for monetary purposes. But that seemed so far removed to me right now.

  “I can’t wait to be your wife,” I murmured back as I memorized the feeling of him inside me.

  Ryan started to move faster, and I tightened around him. I knew I was going to come again and clawed his back as I did. Ryan jerked against me one more time and came, filling me as he moaned my name.

  We pressed together afterward, touching completely as he held me against him. “That first time that I saw you, I noticed your eyes. They were beautiful but missing something, Brea. You were beautiful, but your worry about life showed through those eyes. Once I got to know more about you, I understood. I felt your pain because I have been living a lot of it myself for years.”

  “Maybe that is what connected us, our pain and suffering.” I closed my eyes and kissed his chest. “I thought you were just another gorgeous man who was so far out of my league. Maybe I was scared since I had given all of myself to other people or things. I didn’t know how to give myself to anyone else. Then you asked me to dinner and you did what I wanted. I had some hope.”

  “I wanted to do everything your way to make you smile. I haven’t been like that before. I feel like a bit of an ass for suggesting that arrangement to you in the first place, but you needed to have a chance to live your dream. I needed my own dream. It worked out, but I started falling in love with you early on. I knew it was more and denied it until I couldn’t anymore.”

  “And now we’re getting married,” I said with a smile. “And we’re not using anything for protection.”

  “So what? We can have another baby. We have money and this house and we can do it if you want. Elle can have a sibling,” Ryan told me, stroking my back. “Unless you don’t want that?”

  “I want everything with you,” I assured him. He lifted my face to kiss me. We stayed like that until we fell asleep, waking up together to bring Elle to the bed so I could feed her as Ryan stroked her hair. Then he put her back and pulled me against him, telling me how much he loved me.

  ***

  END OF THE SECOND STORY

  Daddy To Be

  My best friend’s little sister wants a baby.

  And she wants me to be the daddy.

  It comes with being rich.

  Women always come on to me.

  But never like this.

  It’s all so… wrong.

  I watched Hanna grow up as the little girl next door.

  Now my filthy mind is all over grown-up curves.

  Her brother would kill me.

  I won’t agree to knocking her up.

  But I’ll f*ck her anyway…

  Secretly.

  In my car.

  In my office.

  In her room when her parents aren’t home.

  No one will ever hear her scream my name.

  But sh*t.

  Accidents happen.

  And there’s nothing secret about a baby bump.

  Chapter 1

  Hanna

  I braced myself for a family onslaught before knocking on the door of my childhood home. Everything looked the same in the dim evening light typical of an overcast Seattle day, but somehow it felt different. Or maybe I felt different. My insides jittered when the door swung open.

  “So, have you met any men yet?” My mother didn’t miss a beat. She was forever asking the same damn question. Part of me wanted to laugh because I could have been a
random delivery guy standing at her door, but somehow she still recognized my knock although I’d been away at Stanford since last summer break.

  “Geez, Mom. I haven’t even made it through the door yet.”

  “Oh, now, come on. You can tell me.”

  She beamed at me, and I tried to focus on her joy. Instead, the lines on her face, the pained limp as she stood back to welcome me in, and the brittle gray hair shrouding her expression kicked the middle of my chest. Something inside me grew dark at the sight. A familiar urgency nipped at the edges of my thoughts, making my heart race and my hands shake. Time was my enemy.

  “There’s my girl.” The deep, booming voice slashed at my growing anxiety, thankfully.

  “Hi, Daddy.” I smiled. My father wrapped me in his arms, standing between my mother and me. The understanding smile he gave me was his way of telling me not to listen to Mom.

  “Top of your class. I’m so proud of you, honey,” he murmured in my ear.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “You know, I had your brother a month before I turned twenty-one,” my mother said.

  “Sweetheart,” my father warned.

  “Well, she’s not getting any younger, honey.”

  Well, thanks, Mom. I wasn’t getting any peace, either, not since she felt free to feed the beastly fears already pushing me to desperate measures.

  “She’s also one of the smartest girls in her class.”

  “The smartest.” I wanted credit for all my hard work.

  “Well, tell her to use those smarts to find herself someone to settle down with,” my mother said.

  “Mom, seriously. I can’t even drink yet.”

  “I just know how much you want to be a mother, Hanna.” She sighed. “And I want that for you. I want you to fall in love and have a house full of children. I see all the books you try to hide from us. I know you aren’t reading those for school.”

  She was right. I wanted a child right now more than anything, but not for the reasons she thought. Yes, I wanted someone to dedicate themselves to me. I wanted the full Norman Rockwell, white-picket-fence lifestyle, a house with a yard and a strong, brassy man who would come inside, sweating and panting, for lemonade before I handed him a glass. But those desires didn’t mean anything. They were just fantasies I let myself indulge in while I read.

  I didn’t have time to find and build the right relationship with someone, but that wasn’t going to keep me from starting a family. This was the part my parents wouldn’t understand, not even Mom.

  “You know we love you, honey, and we are so proud of you,” my father said.

  “Thanks.” I smiled, but it was more of a reflex. The number of times he’d spoken those words was staggering. Most people would kill to hear them from their parents, so it was tough to admit they often felt like a noose tightening around my throat.

  My dad was wonderful, and he only wanted the best for me. Stanford was challenging. You really had to stand out if you didn’t already have connections. That was why he had pushed me so hard, always putting something extra in my schedule or making me take a harder class. In the end, it had paid off. Not only had I gotten into Stanford, but I’d developed a work ethic that had gotten me to the top of my class. Next year I’d be awarded my degree with Distinction, the highest honor Stanford bestowed.

  Yeah, something to be proud of, but how would his feelings change by the end of my visit? Just wondering made my heart hurt, because I was bound to disappoint him. The whole family, too, because I was taking control of my life this summer, no matter the risk to my familial relationships.

  “Honey! Wanna help me set the table?”

  “Coming, Dad!”

  I wasn’t sure if it was the West Coast culture or just the modern times, but a woman couldn’t pronounce motherhood as her primary goal in life without enormous backlash from all directions. My parents did great with my dad working one job and my mom being a stay-at-home mom, yet Dad rejected even the thought of me following that path. My brother, Marcus, would be even worse if I so much as hinted at it. It was a career or the psych ward in their book, because you had to be crazy to abandon a traditional career or to be a single parent with one.

  Mom was a different story, though. I watched her shuffle around the stove putting finishing touches on my favorite, pot roast with garlic mashed potatoes. Despite the marriage pressures, she loved me, and she lit up with it every time I saw her. It would kill her to know how jealous I’d been as a child, how I’d watched videos and seen pictures of Marcus doing so many fun things with Mom and Dad. He’d gotten the best of them. It wasn’t their fault I’d been born so late in their lives, eleven years after Marcus, but I refused to let that happen to my children. I had a plan, and the lack of the right man in my life wouldn’t end it. I just needed a right-now man.

  “So, have you called Stacey? She’s called here four times in the past two days lookin’ for ya,” my dad said.

  “Not yet. I’ll call her after we set the table.”

  “Why don’t I just tell your mother you set it.” He winked.

  I threw my arms around him before I ran up the stairs. Stacey was my best friend and everything I wanted to be. She’d married her perfect man two years ago, and right off the bat, they had tried for a baby. Things hadn’t gone the way she’d wanted, though, and staying pregnant had proven difficult. I flew in when they lost their first baby and stayed up night after night letting her cry. She had called me, ecstatic and petrified, when they were pregnant again. I’d told her that this was going be it. She was finally going to be a mom.

  Then she knocked on my dorm room two months later with tears in her eyes. She’d lost weight, she wasn’t sleeping, and they had lost their second child.

  I used to tell her how much I wanted her life, how much I wanted a husband and the potential for children. Now it was hard. Every time I brought up kids, it hurt her deeply. When I’d been home last, she had mentioned they might start trying again. I’d never heard anything else about it, and I hadn’t pressed.

  “Hey, Stace.”

  “Hanna, you’re home! Finally, dear Jesus. When can I see you? Can I come over now? We have so much to catch up on.”

  “Well, we’re about to have dinner. Then I’m sure Mom wants to berate me more for not being pregnant already, so what about lunch tomorrow?”

  She fell silent a second too long. Damn my mouth sometimes.

  “Don’t let your mother pressure you into something like that, Hanna,” Stacey said, her voice soft.

  “Stace, you know that’s not what she’s doing . . .”

  “You still want a baby?”

  Her lack of emotion worried me, and, as usual, it was a difficult subject to discuss with her. I shamelessly used avoidance. “So, lunch tomorrow?”

  “Hanna. Are you seeing someone?”

  “Well . . . not right this second,” I said.

  “Then what’s the point of having a child?”

  “Are we not doing lunch tomorrow?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “Stace, look. Yes, I want a child, and yes, I want to date. But you know as well as I do that having a baby is about so much more for me than just being a mother.”

  She sighed, and I wanted so much to go back to making lunch plans. I wanted to look forward to throwing my arms around my best friend and holding her close. I wanted to look forward to all the sex stories we would share with each other after promising to never speak about them again. I wanted to look forward to ordering two desserts instead of just one.

  “You know I love you unconditionally,” Stacey said.

  “And that’s why you’re my best friend.” I smiled because she’d basically declared a truce. I could probably expect another round in person, but for now I didn’t have to explain myself or hide my plans for this summer.

  “So, yes, lunch tomorrow,” she said. “Any particular place?”

  “Do you really have to ask?”

  “Small Caesar salad with
a full-sized chipotle salmon panini—”

  “—with two orders of strawberry cheesecake on the patio,” we both said in unison.

  “I can’t wait to see you, Stace.”

  “I’ve missed you, too, Hanna.”

  I hung up just as Mom yelled up the steps. “Hanna! You have guests!”

  “Where is our Hanna?” A voice called out through the house.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Marx!”

  I flew down the stairs and ran straight into their arms. Mr. Marx picked me up and swung me around. Mrs. Marx wanted me to spin so she could get a good look at me before she started doting on everything about me.

  “Oh my god, you’ve grown so much! I swear, you change every single time we see you. Are you growing your hair out?”

  “Yes, I am.” I smiled.

  “Well, it looks beautiful.”

  Marcus and I had grown up beside the Marx family. Their son, Kason, and Marcus had been best friends growing up, and they’d kept in touch even after Kason had left town and gotten rich. I’d been the nerdy girl with braces and glasses who’d had a massive crush on my brother’s best friend. It was so cliché that remembering it made me queasy.

  “So,” my father said in a booming voice, “do the two of you want to stay for dinner? We have more pot roast and whipped potatoes than we know what to do with.”

  Dinner started off relatively predictably. Dad went on about me acing all my classes and being at the top of my class. Mom smiled and told them how well I was doing with swimming and how they wanted me to be the head of the team this year. Mr. Marx was all too happy to share his own swimming experiences from college.