“Shut up!” Daryl shouted back at her. “I can’t let you go now, Vanessa. You know too fucking much.”
“I won’t tell anyone. I’ll—”
“Bullshit. The second I let you go, you’ll tell the world what I did to your mother, you little whore.”
“That doesn’t make any sense!” Vanessa replied. I could hear that she was choking back tears. “You already thought I knew that you killed her this whole time, and you knew I never said anything to anyone. I never came forward.”
“Yes, and I was wrong. You didn’t know. But now you do. I was stupid. So fucking stupid,” Daryl muttered.
I froze, heart pounding even faster now as everything finally sank in. Shit, Daryl killed Vanessa’s mother? Her death had always been considered a suicide, but if he’d actually murdered her, then this situation was even more dangerous than I’d initially thought—I’d thought he was just a violent ex-junkie who wanted his daughter back and would do anything to get her, including abduction. I had no idea he’d only kidnapped her just to dispose of her after assuming she knew of his true past actions.
But I wasn’t going to let him hurt her. No fucking way.
I couldn’t see him, but I could tell from his voice alone that he was high on something. “Just need to figure out how to deal with you now. Too messy to shoot you…” he went on.
I crept forward and peered just an inch or two beyond the door. Vanessa was sitting on a sofa in what appeared to be a lounge room, hands bound behind her back with cable ties. Her face was pale and tearstained, and there was dried blood on one side of it. Daryl was pacing the room near her, brandishing a gun.
As soon as I saw that, I leapt into action. He had no idea that I was here, so I had the element of surprise on my side for just a few seconds. When he had the gun well and truly facing away from Vanessa, I charged into the room and grabbed his arm by the wrist. Then I immediately twisted his wrist around so that the gun was aimed upwards at the ceiling, where it couldn’t hurt anyone even if he fired it.
He cried out in shock, as did Vanessa.
“Jacob!”
“Don’t worry, baby. I’m here,” I called back to her. “I told you I always would be.”
With the gun pointed away for the time being, I kneed Daryl in the groin and flipped him to the ground, still holding his arm up in the air so that the weapon was facing well away from Vanessa. Then I pulled it out of his hand, even more rage bubbling up inside me as I realized the truth.
It wasn’t even a real gun.
“Think it’s okay to scare my little girl like this?” I snarled, throwing the rubber replica aside. It looked all too real to anyone who wasn’t actually physically touching it, so it was no surprise that Vanessa had thought it was genuinely a gun when Daryl initially accosted her.
Daryl gasped for air, still recovering from the knee to the groin, and he scrambled to his feet. “How the fuck did you find me?”
“It wasn’t hard. Cops are on their way too. You’re going down, you piece of shit,” I replied, my eyes narrowed as I waited for him to fully get to his feet.
I was going to teach this fucking prick a lesson.
The atmosphere was like a flickering match in a gas-soaked building. Tensions were taut, stretched beyond their limit. In a flash, Daryl was on me, hitting, biting and growling like a goddamned rabid animal. He may have weighed slightly more, and whatever drugs he was on had made him more vicious, but I was sober, smart and fast. With every punch he aimed in my direction, I got in two. Every elbow was dodged, every attempted kick earned him a punch to the jaw.
I landed an especially heavy blow above his eye, and he stumbled back, clutching his face as blood poured from near his right eyebrow. I must’ve shattered the bone there, judging by the ache in my hand. For a moment, there was a shocked silence as he realized what I’d done, and then he let out a shout of anger, crashing toward me with a right hook. I saw it coming a mile away and dodged it, smirking as his hand went into the wall behind me with a satisfying crunch.
“You’re pathetic,” I hissed as he sank to the floor, clutching his face and broken hand. “A real man doesn’t fucking hurt women. He protects them.”
“I wasn’t….I wasn’t really going to hurt her. I was just going to scare her into keeping her mouth shut. I thought she knew what I…”
I cut him off. “Bullshit. I don’t give a shit what you were planning, you piece of shit. You did hurt her. She’s sitting there with her fucking head bleeding, scared for her life. She’s been scared for hours.”
“I wasn’t going to—”
“He’s lying,” Vanessa cut in with a trembling voice, obviously still in shock over everything that had just gone down. “The gun might not be real, but he said he was going to kill me. Just like he killed my mom. He was really going to do it.”
I trusted her judgment. I was willing to bet that the only reason he brought her back to this apartment was because the gun wasn’t real—otherwise he could’ve just quickly shot her and run away after she escaped the crash. But killing her by hand out on the street was too time-consuming; he needed to bring her back here to do it without getting caught.
I aimed another kick at Daryl’s chest, totally winding him, and then I went to Vanessa, wrapping my arms tightly around her as she began to sob like mad. “You’re okay now, baby girl,” I muttered, keeping an eye on Daryl the entire time. “No one’s ever gonna hurt you again.”
I could hear footsteps pounding up the hall, and I knew the police had just arrived. Decent response time; I’d only been here a few minutes. Then again, I had no idea what would’ve happened if I hadn’t arrived when I did. Those few minutes could’ve been the short time it took for Daryl to completely snap and beat or throttle Vanessa to death. Just because the gun wasn’t real didn’t mean that his intentions weren’t real, and from what she’d said, they were. He had intended to hurt her.
He’d intended to kill her.
“I don’t know what I would’ve done without you,” Vanessa whispered as cops poured into the room, immediately leaping on Daryl as they gauged what had happened. “I’d probably be…”
“Don’t think about that,” I replied, massaging her back as I waited for someone to come and cut the cable ties off her wrists. “You’re safe now. You’ll always be safe with me.”
“I was so scared.”
“So was I,” I replied. I’d been terrified. Terrified of losing her; losing the girl I wanted to spend the rest of my life waking up with.
“It’s my fault. I got myself into this situation by ever letting him back into my life,” she said. Her eyes widened slightly. “You’re going to punish me, aren’t you?”
My heart broke at those words. “Vanessa, no. Don’t talk like that. You’ve done nothing wrong.”
“I did. I was stupid. I thought he might’ve really changed. Even for just a few days, I believed he might have. I should have listened to you when you warned me about him. I should’ve known you were right. I should’ve never gone to his show.”
She trailed off, and I frowned. “No. Look, you aren’t really a little girl, Vanessa. We like to pretend you are for certain reasons, but you’re not. You’re a woman. A smart, strong woman who is capable of making her own choices. Her own mistakes. You chose to try and see the good in someone. You chose to believe your father when he tried to tell you he’d changed. That’s because you’re a good person. You don’t deserve punishment for being kind and trusting enough to give someone a second chance, even if they didn’t deserve it. I would never punish you for being a good person. All I can do is try to guide you and stop you from trusting the wrong people, and try to protect you. That’s what I’m here for.”
Every inch of her was shaking, and I squeezed her tightly. The next hour seemed to rush by in a blur. Daryl was handcuffed and taken away, Vanessa was tended to by paramedics—Daryl had apparently slammed her head into a wall earlier, in order to subdue her after she tried to escape the car by crashing it—a
nd police wanted to take statements from us.
“Will she be all right? Or do you need to take her in?” I asked an EMT anxiously as she finished checking Vanessa one more time, after the cops had finished taking our initial statements.
She smiled patiently at me. “She’s fine. Looks a lot worse than it is. She’ll just have a bad headache for the next few days, but we’ll give her some painkillers. Other than that, rest and lots of TLC is all she needs.”
She stepped away, and I breathed a sigh of relief, glad Vanessa didn’t have to go into the hospital. After all the shit that’d gone down in our lives today, I didn’t want to be separated from her for a second longer. I knelt down, squeezing her hand, and she smiled up at me; a smile that could’ve lit up the entire world. “I love you,” she whispered. “I knew you’d come. I knew you’d keep me safe.”
“And I love you,” I replied. “More than anything.”
“How did the stuff go with Greg? Is it handled?” she asked.
“Oh, honey, you shouldn’t be worrying about that. Not after what just happened.”
“I want to talk about it. I could kind of use the distraction after all this,” she said, gesturing around us with one hand. There was still a slight tremor in her voice. “Daddy,” she added softly.
I smiled gently. My little girl needed comforting, desperately, and if she wanted to talk about anything other than what had just occurred, then that was what I’d do for her. “It went well. Really well. He’s been arrested,” I said.
She smiled again. “Good. And your company?”
“I think it’ll be fine once the dust settles. That’ll take a few weeks. Maybe months. But I’m stepping down as CEO anyway. Not because of Greg or the media scandal or anything like that; I just want to spend more time with you and Tommy.”
Vanessa’s eyes widened. “Really? You’d really step down?”
I nodded. I’d never been more certain that I was making a correct decision. “Yes,” I murmured, gently pulling her to her feet. “Now, come on, baby girl. Let’s go home.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Vanessa
Eight weeks later
I dabbed Tommy’s face with a tissue, wiping off the Nutella he’d ended up smearing all around his mouth while eating a snack, and I stifled a yawn. After everything that’d gone down in the last few weeks, I’d been feeling tired quite frequently. I felt like I’d cried a million times, and my eyes had been feeling puffy and weird. It wasn’t bad, though. It felt cathartic to get it all out, every single tear, every single feeling.
And god, there were a lot of feelings.
My mother’s death had been no accident, and I knew the whole truth about that now. My father had never really beaten his lifelong addictions. He’d only ever pretended to in order to rise to fame and exploit people for money, and when Mom saw through that and refused to let him near us, she paid the price with her life. It was an unimaginably awful thing to try and comprehend, but at least we had one thing on our side now. We had justice. After my father abducted me a couple of months ago, he’d been arrested, made a full confession, and was now sitting in jail awaiting trial.
Because he’d been a successful motivational speaker and life coach, the case had blown up in the media. It’d even overshadowed all the sex scandal bullshit that had tainted my and Jacob’s life for the last few weeks, and most people seemed to have moved on and forgotten about us entirely.
The case surrounding Greg and his dodgy actions had been quite big in the media as well, and Jacob’s company’s reputation was beginning to recover despite everything. Thanks to Damon Schwartz, everyone knew and believed that Jacob had nothing to do with the fraud scandal, and it was common knowledge that he’d been set up by Greg. This garnered sympathy for him, which helped restore his reputation even more.
He was still stepping down as CEO, though, and he’d named a successor today—an up and coming young businessman who’d worked for the company for a few years now. He was a relative nobody compared to some others who’d been tipped to take over as CEO, but his work was solid, and Jacob said that he reminded him of himself at that age. He’d once been a nobody, too. He’d always be a ‘somebody’ to me, though—he was the most important person in my life.
“All done,” I said as I finished wiping Tommy’s face.
“Thanks, Nessa. Can I go watch TV?” he asked.
I nodded. “Half an hour of cartoons, and then time for some homework. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He dashed off, and I watched him go with a smile, wondering how different my life would be if I’d never applied for the nanny job. I would’ve never gotten to take care of such a sweet little boy, and I would’ve also never had anyone like Jacob to take care of me in turn. It was weird, really—I’d taken this job to take care of a child, and I’d been taken care of like I was a child myself.
Weird, perhaps, but it still felt right. Jacob and I had been through so much together, and I knew he’d always be here to take care of me. I also knew I could take care of him in my own way, too—all I had to do was take care of his needs. Give him what he wanted. What he needed.
And that was all I wanted and needed myself.
I felt a strong, wide arm slip around my waist from behind, and my smile grew wider. “Hi, daddy,” I said teasingly. I hadn’t heard Jacob slip into the kitchen, but I knew it was him. I knew his scent, his touch, his taste. I knew everything about him.
“Hi, baby. Did I just hear you tell Tommy that he can watch TV for half an hour?” Jacob asked, lips dangerously close to the shell of my right ear. Goosebumps prickled my skin, and I nodded.
“Is that okay?”
“Of course,” he murmured. “I was just making sure we definitely had half an hour of him being safe and distracted.”
I spun around to face him, feigning an air of innocence. “Oh? Why’s that?”
“I think you know why,” he growled, tightening his grip around me. I squealed as he picked me up, threw me over his shoulder and started to carry me upstairs. We stopped outside of his bedroom door instead of mine, and my eyes widened as he kicked the door open and carried me inside.
“In here?”
“Why not?” he asked, raising a playful eyebrow. “I think it’s time we started doing things properly, and we sleep next to each other every night anyway. And to be honest, that damn pink and white bed of yours has been doing a number on my back.”
I giggled as he set me down on the floor. “Okay. Take me to bed. Our big adult bed.”
“Gladly,” he growled, arms encircling me. His hands moved down to my ass, squeezing it tightly, and a frisson of pleasure shook me to my core.
He brought his hungry lips to mine, big hands grabbing and pulling at my clothes as his mouth devoured me in a kiss hot enough to set every nerve ending on fire. After finding my zipper and yanking down my pale pink dress in one movement, he let the fabric fall between us to the floor, leaving me in nothing but a pink bra and soaking wet pair of panties. They soon vanished, too.
My hands focused on tearing his clothes off as well, and when we were both naked, Jacob picked me up as if I were lighter than a feather, mouth moving down my body and pressing kisses on me as he walked us over to the bed, my legs wrapped around his hips. His tongue lashed at my nipples, making them stand to attention, and then he threw me down on the bed, making my head spin with urgent need.
He settled his weight over me and moved lower, tasting me, inhaling deeply as his tongue traced a hot line over my belly, across my hips and down my thighs. When his mouth reached the area between my legs, he groaned, the sound combining with the wanton moans spilling from my lips.
“Fuck, you taste good,” he said in a husky voice, pushing my legs further apart. His tongue dipped inside me and then moved up to my swollen clit, mouth feasting on every inch of me.
One hand moved underneath me, curling under my ass and gripping it tightly. The other remained between my legs, and I moaned again as I felt
the press of a finger at my entrance. It pushed deeply inside me, and he pulled his mouth away and looked up at me, eyes darkening and lips curling into a smile as he watched my mouth fall open.
“Please, I want more,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper as I jerked my hips up against his touch. “Please, daddy. Fuck me.”
My whole body tingled from the urgency of my desire, and Jacob responded to my begging by pressing another thick finger inside me. I clenched my inner muscles around him and moaned, rocking my body against his hand as flames of desire licked my skin. Jacob lowered his head to my pussy again, tongue circling my clit as his fingers massaged the sweet spot inside me. My body arched off the bed, hips bucking against him, and my eyes flew open with shock as his tongue moved lower, circling the tight pucker of my ass. Jacob had once told me he wanted to fuck me there. But we hadn’t done that yet.
Could this be the day?
I hoped so. I really, really hoped so, because it was suddenly all I wanted. I wanted him to claim me in every hole.
He pulled his fingers out of me and replaced his tongue with one of them, the tip stroking circles around my asshole, and his mouth moved back to my clit in teasing lashes as I moaned and shuddered beneath him. His fingers were still wet from the slickness of my pussy, and when he finally slid one inside my ass, slowly and gently, I let out a throaty groan of pleasure.
Jacob pumped his finger faster and moved his tongue in harder circles. The sounds spilling from my lips were unstoppable now, fervent moans, rumbling hisses, breathless gasps. When I came, I almost screamed, but Jacob quickly moved back up the bed, muffling the sound as his lips took my mouth like he owned it.
And he did. Every inch of my body belonged to him now.
Before I could even recover from my climax, Jacob pulled away and roughly spread my legs again, stretching me out on the bed. I groaned with anticipation, needing to see the fire in his eyes as he drove in and out of me. I needed to push him closer and closer to the edge, needed to fulfil his every need.
Daddy's Toy-Box (A Daddy's Best Friend Romance) Page 39