Table of Contents
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Copyright
The Hottest Daddy
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
The Hottest Daddy Extended Epilogue
About The Author
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Taylor’s Tryst
(A Dirty Little Secret Extra)
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Some may call it stalking; I called it lining up the woman I would tame next.
Little Taylor Swenson made me hot in ways no one ever had.
Taking slaves had been my way for years.
Taylor wouldn’t be taken as one, and I could see that from the start.
Secrets and lies were a necessity for me.
Could I make her my last secret? Could I bind her to me? Could I silence her, using only my body and special talents?
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©Copyright 2018 by Michelle Love - All rights Reserved
In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights are reserved.
Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.
The Hottest Daddy
A Single Daddy Romance Collection
Michelle Love
Prologue
February, one year ago …
He closed his eyes and listened to her voice, the way he always did when the camera moved from her to the invited guest or flicked to some B-roll of the story she was relating. He didn’t need to know about another school shooting, or the kittens rescued from a storm drain. Just her. That was all he watched the news for.
Marley Locke. Her soft, sweet features, her dark blonde hair, curling to her shoulders in soft waves, her eyes so full of warmth and empathy.
Those pink lips. The swell of her breasts in the stylish, expensive blouse.
Christ, he wanted her. He’d always wanted her. Ever since that day at college when he’d walked into the library at Harvard and seen her.
No one had come close to her … ever. With his looks, his money, his position in New York’s Upper East Side, he could have had anyone, and he’d had plenty.
But there was always that one. The one who got away. The girl in the pink T-shirt. The library at the college had been quiet and peaceful. She had been alone in one of the aisles, reading. She’d looked up as he approached. She had been small, slim, and very young, maybe seventeen, eighteen. She had smiled at him. She was lovely, not merely pretty, but achingly beautiful, her large eyes a deep brown, the pink curve of her mouth warm and friendly. Her hair, a dark brown cloud, hanging almost to her waist, had been soft and messy. She had taken his breath away.
She was the one he’d been looking for. He had stepped toward her.
And just like that, she was gone. A voice behind him had called her and she’d smiled her goodbyes and walked past him. Less than thirty seconds, and his life had been forever changed.
And now she was on his television every night. This evening, though, things would be different. He knew where to find her; he knew where to take her. His place out in the countryside was secluded and secure. She would learn to love it there.
He opened his eyes as he heard the reporter hand back to Marley. He smiled when he saw her beautiful face again.
Tonight, my darling, tonight …
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An Impossible Love: A Forbidden Love Romance
Marley closed out the news with a smile and waited until the camera told them they were off-air. “Thanks, everyone.” She grinned at them as the floor staff clapped her. She was one of the few anchors that treated everyone the same and always was friendly and courteous. Marley laughed off their applause, ignoring her co-anchor when he bitched about them.
Her assistant, Rae, giggled as Marley grabbed her and twirled her around.
“Somebody’s in a good mood.”
Marley put her friend down and they walked back to her dressing room. “You bet I am. Cory’s picking me up and we’re going to have two blissful weeks of nothing but sun, sea, sand, and dirty dirty sex.”
Rae laughed. “I’m not jealous at all. Really, really not.”
Marley chuckled. “I’m sorry, boo. I shouldn’t gloat but God, I have been looking forward to this forever.”
“Listen, you deserve it. Between you and me? I’ve been worried that you’re working too hard.”
“Nah,” Marley grinned at her. “You know I live and breathe the news. Listen, while we’re sharing secrets … when I come back, I’m going to ask Jerry if I can take on some more investigative journalism. I love being anchor, but I miss being out in the field too.”
Rae smiled at her. She was in her fifties, African-American, and the cream-of-the-cream of personal assistants. She and Marley had clicked immediately on meeting a year ago and had been inseparable since. She chatted with Marley now as Marley changed into jeans and a T-shirt and got ready to meet her boyfriend. She and Cory Wheeler had been together for two years now and were as in love as they had ever been. Marley knew he was the one, his fun-loving and fiercely intelligent personality so matching her in everything they did.
Cory arrived soon after and she kissed him, lingering over the embrace. He grinned down at her, his dark brown eyes merry and excited. “You ready, baby?”
“Lead on, gorgeous man.”
They held hands as they walked out of the building to the waiting cab, and it wasn’t until she heard her name being called that Marley turned around to see the man waiting behind them. She began to smile, her automatic response to any fans who waited for her outside the studio.
Then everything seems to slow down, as she saw the gun. She heard Cory’s shout, heard the gunshot, saw Cory’s chest explode. She screamed her rage as the man leveled the gun at her, and she lunged at him.
Pain.
Her vision went black.
In the morning, in the hospital, after hours of surgery, they told her. Cory was dead and the man who had killed him and shot her was gone. Missing. In the wind.
And Marley knew she would never feel the warmth of happiness or the feeling of being safe again.
Chapter One
One year later …
Marley Locke stopped existing the moment she closed out the news that night with a smile at her audience and her usual cheery goodbye. She chatted with Rae as usual, changed into her going-home clothes, and told her friend she would see her tomorrow.
Using the stick that she no longer needed, but kept as a way of misdirection, she hobbled out to the waiting town car, and Marley Locke disappeared.
As the town car, driven by one of
her FBI handlers, sped out into the dark of New York state and to the safehouse, Marley was forgotten and instead, in her place, Sunday Kemp was ‘born.’
At the safehouse, her blonde hair was dyed professionally back to her original dark brown, her brown eyes covered with violet contact lenses, her nose pierced, even a small tattoo was made on her wrist.
Then, the private jet carrying her to her new home arrived, and she knew this was it. The last moment of her old life. She hesitated once more before stepping onto the aircraft. Sam, her handler, who had become a good friend over the last year, put a hand on her shoulder. “You okay, Sunday?”
Sunday. Her new name. She’d chosen it to honor Cory—they’d met on Sunday. Kemp had been his mother’s maiden name. When she’d lost Cory, she’d also lost them. It had been too painful for them to see her, even though Patricia, Cory’s mother, had stayed by Marley’s bedside as she recovered from the gunshot. As soon as Marley was released, though, she had been on her own. Her own family, long dispersed over the world, had sent commiserations, but not one of them had visited. Rae had been her family, and now she had to leave her only family behind.
From New York, the only home she had ever known, to small-town life in the Rockies. Colorado. From news anchor to someone’s typist. They’d found her a position with an artist who lived in the small town near Telluride and she would meet him the following Monday.
Until then, she would be set up in her new home, a small apartment on the main street of the town, high in the Rocky Mountains. She’d brought nothing from home, not even underwear, except for one photograph of Cory that she’d snuck into the lining of her jacket.
The FBI had told her to leave everything that could tie her to her old life. “Everything will be provided for you.”
She’d asked them about her money. “You have to leave everything,” Sam had told her gently. “You show up in town with millions in the bank …”
“I get it,” she’d said. Money hadn’t meant anything but making her life more convenient; she’d never been a money-grubber. But she hated leaving her books, her piano, and most of all, her friends at the station.
The threats to her life were constant. He, whoever he was, was relentless but very well-hidden. But he constantly sent her reminders that he was close, that he would finish the job, make her pay for her ‘betrayal.’
Asshole. Her gut would churn with anger, and sometimes she wished her stalker would show his face. Even if he killed her, she would at least get her chance for revenge. The FBI were troubled and by the time they’d convinced her that they thought her attacker was someone connected to the Mob and that she would never escape him, Marley—Sunday—had almost resigned herself to dying young.
The FBI, and Sam Duarte, in particular, had finally persuaded her to go into protection. “You have so much more life to live,” Sam, a kindly man in his forties, had told her. “You’re twenty-eight years old, sweetheart. Live. Live to honor Cory’s memory.”
He couldn’t have put it in any other way that could have persuaded her. Suddenly, a slower pace of life, and the time to grieve for Cory, sounded more tempting than her career and New York.
In the private jet, Sam smiled at her. “You all set, Sunday?”
She nodded. “I think I’m ready now, Sam. Thank you for arranging all of this, I mean it. And the job too. I’d go crazy without something to do.”
Sam patted her hand. “I don’t know much about your future employer except he keeps himself to himself. Very private.”
“Good.” She was relieved to hear that. She knew her new boss had a large house and hoped they wouldn’t cross paths that much and that she would be left alone to work and think.
The jet landed in Telluride, then she was given the keys to a secondhand SUV. All part of the ruse, she knew, but she didn’t care. It was comfortable and reliable. In the back were suitcases filled with her new wardrobe. Sam made sure she was comfortable. “We’ll follow you to the new apartment,” he told her, “but keep our distance so we don’t attract attention. You look like you’ve arrived on your own. The place is furnished, so you should be able to settle in pretty quickly. There are a couple of bags of basic groceries in the station wagon. You got the burner phone I gave you?”
Sunday dug in her purse and held it up.
“Good girl. Well, I’ll be in touch. Keep that with you, but get a new one to use for your new friends here.”
She nodded. “Thank you, Sam.”
“You’ll be good here, Sunday. I know it.”
She drove to the small mountain town of Rockford and down Main Street, parking her car outside the small apartment block and sitting for a time, getting her bearings. She saw, with relief, a small diner, still open even after 1:00 a.m., a gas station and convenience store, brightly lit along the street, and various other small stores. A cute little coffeehouse was on the corner of her block. Yes. She could see herself being settled here.
It didn’t take long to unpack. The apartment itself was small but comfortable. The open-plan kitchen and living space had a bay window overlooking Main Street, a small table and chairs nestled into it. A brand-new laptop sat in its box, and Sunday was touched to see that Sam had snuck some of her favorite books onto the bookshelves—not her own well-worn copies, perhaps, but the that fact he’d taken the time to make things homelier for her was a sweet thing to do.
Sunday—her new name really would take some getting used to—unpacked her things and made herself some tea. It was almost 3:00 a.m. by the time she sat down at the small table and gazed out over her new town, but she didn’t feel tired at all. Instead, she took a deep breath in … and burst into tears.
Chapter Two
On the other side of town, her future employer stared at a blank canvas in his studio, seeing in his mind’s eye the swirls of color that would cover it, pinks, blues, purples, green, yellow. He could almost reach out and touch the texture of the paint he would load onto his brush.
The piece would be vibrant, exciting … and he would see very little of it. The colors had started to change a few months back and today, his best friend—and his optometrist—told him why.
He was losing the ability to see color. Him, River Giotto, the wunderkind of the painting world for the last few years, the natural successor to Rothko or Hans Hofmann. Celebrated, feted, and admired and he was losing the colors. The cruelty of it took his breath away.
“Riv?”
River turned to see Luke, his best friend, standing in the doorway of the studio. “I didn’t know you were still here.”
Luke half-smiled at him. “I was talking to Carmen. She’s worried about you. We all are, Riv.”
River turned away, not wanting his friend to see the pain in his eyes. “I just need to adjust.” He sighed. “Goddamn it, Luke, of all the things to happen.”
“I know, buddy. Look, you’re only thirty-six, still young. With care and the right treatment, there’s no reason you can’t …”
“I’m already losing the colors, Luke. They’re not as sharp or as rich.” He went to a stack of canvases in the corner of the studio and found what he was looking for. “Look at this. When I painted it, the greens popped, the reds were sumptuous. You know what I see now? Watered down. Faded color. It’s not the same painting.”
“It is to everyone else, buddy.”
River shook his head. “But if I can’t express what I want to, paint the way I have, what kind of artist am I? What do I have left?”
Luke took a deep breath in. “River … I’m going to say this because I’m your best friend, your brother, and I love you. Art … while it may be a part of you, isn’t all you are.”
River gave a humorless laugh. “Then why I am I so terrified that it is?”
Later, when Luke had gone, unable to cheer his friend, River went to his bedroom. The house, a piece of art itself, felt hollow and empty, ringing with silence. His housekeeper, Carmen, no longer stayed at the house at night, wanting to be with her husband, and he cou
ldn’t blame her. He hadn’t been good company for anyone for he didn’t know how long.
River stared back at his reflection. His large, bright green eyes didn’t look any different. They had always been his best feature, he thought, and now they were failing him. His dark, shaggy curls were wild about his head, three days of beard on his handsome face. There was a crease between his eyes that, along with his heavy brow, always made him look brooding and unapproachable and, being as reclusive as he was, he’d used that to his benefit.
He’d also used his good looks to sleep with some of the most beautiful women around the world without ever getting too involved. Except one time, and to his chagrin, in that case he’d broken his one rule—never get involved with women in his hometown.
Aria Fielding still lived and worked in Rockford, and although River didn’t often go down the hill into town, he still felt bad about the way he had treated her. The sex had been good, but emotionally he had felt nothing. Aria had deserved better, and from what he heard, she still held a grudge about the way things had ended between them, even after almost a year.
Now, since his eyesight had been failing him, myopia as well as the colors fading, he had become more reclusive, by choice. His father, a man River had adored, a second-generation Italian immigrant, had passed ten years ago, fifteen years after River’s mother, and had left his billion-dollar fortune to his son, rather than his spiteful, much younger stepmother.
Angelina Marshall-Giotto love to portray herself as a saint. A charity maven in New York, she had wasted no time after her husband’s death in trying to seduce his son. River, who had always loathed her, rejected her without thinking twice, and since then Angelina had made it her mission to destroy his life.
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