Daddy Issues

by Wyatt, Dani

  “Fuck,” I grunt under my breath as I run my hand over the freshly shaved top of my head and stare upward into the fluorescent lights. The girl I’ve just taken stewardship of lived with her grandmother at my sister’s property in Holly, Michigan a small touristy down north of Detroit.

  The grandmother was Emily’s housekeeper, and from what I know now, they were each other’s best and only friends for more than twenty years. I remember seeing the housekeeper on a couple visits to see Emily over the years, but the encounters were uneventful, and I never remember seeing the girl there.

  “I like the new look by the way.” Gerald points to my clean-shaven scalp, something I started last year on my last deployment. “Mr. Clean meets Bradley Cooper and a hint of Grizzly Adams. Sort of hot.”

  I drop my chin with a furrowed brow, shaking my head. “You realize you calling me hot is fucking creepy?” I squint, and Gerald rolls his eyes.

  “Yeah, I knew my man card was in jeopardy as soon as I said it.” He shoves the papers into a folder, and I stretch my left leg, trying to ease the gathering pain. “I’ll get you copies of everything and file the necessary final agreement with the court.”

  We’ve known each other for about a decade and what started out as a professional relationship has developed over the years into a strong bond. When I first deployed, I had him draw up my will and estate planning stuff. Not that I had much of an estate to plan for back then, but Mom and Dad always taught me to keep my life in order best I could. They taught me so much. What love looked like. What a happy life together looked like. Ironic I don’t believe in any of that anymore. I hope they are not looking down at me, they’d be hella disappointed I’m afraid.

  I shift again, and the pain shoots up and down my spine. Gerald eyes my grimace with sympathy, and it only serves to harden my already surly mood. Getting injured in my line of work was always a possibility.

  What I didn’t anticipate were the ancillary injuries for which I was completely unprepared. The physical components and pain in my body parts are by far the easier to manage.

  He lifts the receiver on the desk phone and punches a button. After a pause, he speaks. “Send her in.”

  My heartbeat speeds. No fucking way did I plan to be taking on an adolescent orphan right now. As a matter of fact, my plan was to recoup somewhere on the beach in a fucking hut and have as little human contact as possible. Instead, I’m about to become some sort of pseudo-father for a girl with no one else.

  “This is crazy,” I mumble, doing my best to hide the struggle as I stand.

  Gerald lumbers from behind his desk toward the office door. I’m big, but he’s a mountain of a guy, standing several inches above my six-foot-five, and he has at least a hundred pounds on me. I put on a good twenty in pure muscle working out while I’ve been away the last few years and I was no joke to begin with.

  I run my hand down my chest smoothing out the wrinkles in my denim shirt. Wondering if I should have dressed more the dad part. My olive-green cargo pants are threadbare around the hems, and my black boots haven’t been polished since I got home. I’m a little scary looking truth be told.

  “I’ll let her in, then I’ll leave you two to get acquainted.” Gerald turns the knob and the dark wooden barrier swings open. “Try to be nice, okay? She’s had a damn rough time too. You do remember her name is Brinna, right?”

  “Yes, I know.” I grouse glaring at him then turning to see what is waiting for me behind the door.

  She stands just on the other side, teeth pressing into her bottom lip and arms crossed over her chest like she’s afraid she may fly apart at any moment.

  The world around me instantly evaporates. The ringing in my ears turns to a violent thunder as my muscles twitch. With my next breath, I fight the reaction from below my belt, filled with crazed guilt.

  Looking back at me are the same eyes that pleaded with me from under the black veil. The sight of this girl with the same golden irises shakes me back to that dusty street and nearly drops me to my knees.

  “Brinna, this is Ace.” Gerald eases her into his office with a guiding hand. “Your new guardian.” His words echo in my head, but all I see are the eyes of the girl that not only just stole my heart but somehow found my soul.

  She’s too young. And she’s just lost everyone she cares about. This is wrong. I’m wrong. How the fuck am I going to do this?

  “Hi.” Her soft voice and plump lips do nothing to ease the ache she’s broken open inside of me. “Um, nice to meet you, I guess. I mean, I wish it was under different circumstances, but I can’t thank you enough for agreeing to let me stay on at the house and...” Her voice trails off, her eyes darting from side to side and I see the glint of tears she’s fighting to hold back. My heart almost breaks. “I just...have no one else. I promise I won’t be any bother to you. I’m quiet and clean. I can cook. I’m a good girl.”

  The sorrow and catch in her words make me want to pull her into me and keep her safe from the world for the rest of her days. There is a glow around her like I’ve never seen around a person before and I wonder if I’m the only one that sees it.

  I’m momentarily frozen. Her eyes remind me of sunflowers. Huge and round with feathered, golden edges outlining deep brown rings and black pupils. Something about her binds her to me in that instant, and it’s more than just those papers I signed. It’s more than the fact that she reminds me of the young girl who would still be alive if not for me.

  She’s mine, legally yes, but in another way, I’d not before considered.

  Her hair falls down in a split over her shoulders, silky straight and the color of chocolate diamonds. The contrast with the faded green Mountain Dew tank top, along with white shorts that hug curves fit for a woman, not a girl, have my eyes devouring every underage inch of her.

  I grit my teeth and draw a long breath through my nose, inhaling a scent that is swirled with pure innocence and the first hint of spring.

  Gerald disappears mumbling something about leaving us to it, and the door closes behind him, leaving me here with my filthy thoughts about a girl that is now in my care and custody.

  I will do right by her.

  I vow at that moment never to touch her.

  To shove down into the depths of my pain all the wrong and depraved things that are playing over and over in my mind right now. To use her to right the wrongs that leave me afraid to sleep, lest the nightmare faces of those that I let down visit me over and over.

  What would her lips feel like on my cock? Heaven, I’m sure of it.

  Stop. I’m a depraved monster.

  She swipes the back of her hand across the tear that crests her lower lid. “I’m sorry. I’m just—"

  “Hey, it’s okay. I’m nervous too. I’m sure we’ll figure it out as we go. You call me Ace.”

  Her eyes twinkle, and a sad smile brushes across her lips as she speaks. “Yeah, I guess calling you Daddy doesn’t quite work.” She forces a laugh, and I note the cross hanging on a delicate chain just above the rounded cleavage where I shouldn’t be staring. The pendant isn’t new. It’s elegant, rose gold, and expensive looking; encrusted with what looks to be emeralds and I wonder if it was from her Grandmother as it glimmers, resting against her olive skin.

  The pain in my leg and head that’s been my constant companion since the explosion is suddenly gone. Or maybe it’s just masked by the flood of other, before unknown feelings that have me on the verge of cumming in my pants and erecting walls and towers around her, so the rest of the world knows to whom she belongs now—and that they better stay the fuck away.

  “Guess not.” I step forward, shoving my hands into my trouser pockets, hoping to casually adjust my hard-on so as not to send her running to CPS within the first minutes of our meeting.

  “Well.” She licks her bottom lip, and I wonder what her kiss would taste like. Her eyes tell me the soul inside this girl is as sweet as she appears. “I feel like everything has been crashing down around me, but right now you’r
e sort of my life raft. Emily always said you were something special. An American hero. I mean, in the thirty seconds I’ve known you, you seem nice. Is it all right to hug you?” Her words spill out in one long, breathless trail, and I’ll follow that trail anywhere it may lead.

  The previously forced laugh turns to a soft, authentic giggle. She’s vulnerable right now, afraid of what the world holds for her. She’s not asking for a hug, she’s begging, because she needs a lifeline and that lifeline is me.

  My very real doubts about my ability to navigate this new charge come over me in a deluge.

  You can’t do this. You don’t have what it takes.

  I know it’s probably just the emotion of the moment, but I feel like I’ve known her forever. She’s waiting for my reply, and the slight glimmer I noted in her eyes is turning to embarrassment, like maybe she’s gone too far, and I want to spend every day telling her that she doesn’t ever have to fear me or hold back. “Yes,” I manage to say, “I’d like a hug very much.”

  With that, we step into each other as she throws her arms around my neck, a soft sigh escaping her as she melts against me. As her soft body connects with mine, my cock jerks upward, full and ready. Something about her touch tells me she feels safe even though I’m practically a stranger to her. That somehow, I’ve arrived to save her from something, and the possessive fire inside me is lit.

  I will save you. From anything. Anyone. Everything.

  I won’t fail you. I won’t ever hurt you.

  The words pound in my head. The face of the girl from the street that day in Kabul blending into Brinna’s, and I squeeze my eyes shut, forcing it away.

  I fight the urge, but my arms lock around her waist, and I never want to let her go. She belongs right here, and the direction of my thoughts shocks me. I feel like I just won the fucking lottery.

  The promise I made to myself just moments ago to never touch her may just be what kills me...

  Chapter One

  Ace

  PRESENT DAY

  “It’s our anniversary. And your birthday, you big grouch. That’s why.” She presses her tiny fist into a womanly hip and narrows those golden eyes in my direction. The platinum hedgehog ring I had made for her for last Christmas catches the light. She wears it on her middle finger, and I remember when I gave it to her thinking I’ve never seen a bigger smile on her face than when she opened that package.

  She’s fuller now in the years that have passed, but her girlish innocence never wavers. Her hair is longer, nearly to the center of her back and her neck still is graced by that cross I learned was actually Emily’s. It had been in Emily’s family for a hundred years, passed down to her by her own grandmother at a time in her life when she was lost as well. Not knowing her own father when she was a young girl left her with a soft spot in her heart for Brinna.

  Emily gifted it to her the day she arrived here at the tender age of seven after her own mother, Anna, left to go out one night with one of her many man friends and never returned. Brinna managed to get herself to school for a week before she fainted in class from lack of food. The state finally tracked down Brinna’s grandmother who was unaware she had a granddaughter at all. No father was even listed on Brinna’s birth certificate and the one thing for which I am thankful is her mother kept her safe from so many of the possible horrors that could have befallen her in those years with her mother.

  Brinna’s mother ran away from home when she was just fourteen with a boyfriend who had so kindly introduced her to meth. Miriam, Brinna’s grandmother, did what she could over the years to find her daughter, but after a few futile attempts to bring her daughter home and get her help, Anna disappeared for good and Miriam did her best to move on with her life.

  Now, our life is so very different, and here we are in the kitchen, where we are having this all-too-familiar battle, and it is fit for a master chef. An expanse of stainless steel forms the professional range and oven. There’s a large, glass-fronted refrigerator and freezer, along with everything else a trained epicurean would need. The enormous space is filled with the scent of chicken soup and everything my dreams are made of.

  The house is pushing on a century in age, stone outside and the feel of an English country estate all around. Emily kept things classic yet updated here. When I moved Brinna into a room closer to mine from the small apartment on the third floor where she and her Grandmother had lived before the accident, I insisted on her redecorating her space the way she wanted it.

  In the end, she succumbed to my insistence, allowing me to have the walls painted in her signature favorite colors of lavender and green with tulip bedding and hedgehog stuffed animals and accents. But other than her room, we’ve not changed much in the house over the years.

  The warm hickory cabinets in the kitchen sit in contrast to the cool, black granite that covers the flat surfaces. Clean white paint hugs the walls and the soaring ceiling. In such an opulent space it feels cozy.

  Like a home should.

  She’s pouting, but I know exactly what day it is. I pretend every year I have no idea the significance of April 28th.

  “You’re making a mess.” I grouse, and my surly demeanor is a pathetic defense mechanism.

  And those defenses are in full force, because every year, every day, it becomes more and more impossible to fight off the urges that tear at me.

  “You love my messes.” She twirls on a bare-footed toe, stirring the chicken and dumplings she’s made in a giant steel pot, and I swallow hard, trying to tell my hard-on to behave. “Oh.” She turns her pout into that perfect smile. “And thank you for my present.”

  “I’m predictable,” I grunt, watching the swell of her ass shift back and forth and thinking about how my hands would fit there so perfectly.

  “You know I love it. Today, four years ago, is the day I won the lottery.” Brinna leaves the spoon in the pot and reaches over to where she’s set aside the stack of the fifty scratch-off tickets I left on her nightstand, wrapped in a lavender ribbon before she woke. “Maybe the lucky one is in here.”

  “Could be, Little Lamb,” I agree, stabbing glances at parts of her that an honorable man shouldn’t.

  In the four years, we’ve been together, I’ve bought her lottery tickets on the day we celebrate me signing the papers to become her guardian. Just so happens to also be my birthday. So, my pretending I don’t know the significance of this day is bullshit, and we both know it.

  The day I signed those papers taking on her guardianship, I asked her a lot of questions. Just little things to break the ice. Who was her favorite cartoon character, what music did she listen to, what was her favorite thing to do.

  She giggled her way deeper into my heart as she told me how her grandmother loved playing the lottery. It was something they did together, and she’d missed it since losing her, as she wasn’t old enough to buy the tickets herself. I stopped on our way home and bought her a stack of scratch-offs that day. From there, the tradition has continued.

  She doesn’t know it, but I’ve never taken more joy in anything than I do in seeing her win even just two dollars on one of those stupid tickets. I know she doesn’t care that much about the money. If she won a million dollars, I doubt she’d show much more glee than she does when she wins a couple bucks.

  “I don’t know what I’d want different about my life if I did win.” She fingers the stack of tickets and brushes her hair off her forehead with the back of her other hand. “Maybe open a hedgehog sanctuary,” she giggles. “Are there enough neglected and suffering hedgehogs in the world they need a sanctuary do you think?” The way she stands with one hip against the counter and that dreamy, faraway look in her eyes has me wishing I could give her everything she wants in this world.

  I could give it to her, not the inheritance. Not the circumstances that put us together.

  Me. The man. Taking care of her on my own. As my own.

  She should be out in the world finding her own life, not here taking care of me, but I’
m selfish. Every morning when I wake up and know she’s here, sleeping in the next room, it brings me peace.

  It also brings me an erection, of course, but that is my near constant burden. Each morning as I lie in my bed, I try to ease the ache that started in me the day we met, but it is a temporary distraction at best. I dream of my release coating the walls inside of her. I dream of eating her sweet cunt until the only word she knows is what drives me to near insanity every day.

  Daddy.

  In every dream, she calls me Daddy.

  “You should have everything you want in life, Lamb.”

  “What more is there? I mean, look at our life. It’s what most dream of.”

  My heart clenches in my chest, knowing a twenty-year-old girl like her shouldn’t be here with me nearly 24/7, but her fate is sealed. I can’t help myself. She is my obsession every second of every day.

  An hour ago, as I listened to her sweet singing in the kitchen, I found myself unable to stop thinking about the flavor of that sweet as fuck pussy she keeps between her legs. I retreated to my workshop, which is an old stable a short walk from the main house. Behind the locked door, I leaned a straight arm on the worn brick wall, released the hard length with her name on it from my pants with my other hand and fisted myself, hoping to ease the ache even just for a moment.

  The image in my head had me sitting her plump swell of an ass on the kitchen counter, stepping back to admire her, commanding her to spread her legs for my view. In my fantasy her face turned pink with embarrassment as she pulled her white panties aside at my bidding, exposing her slippery gash. Guiding her with my voice to do everything as I ask. One finger lightly teasing her outer lips until I’m ready for her to spread herself and show me how wet she is.