by Jaye Diamond
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Epilogue
Invitation to Join Jaye’s Newsletter
Rescued by a Daddy
Books by Jaye Diamond
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 by Jaye Diamond
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means (without permission).
Disclaimer: Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book and on its cover are trade names, service marks, trademarks and registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publishers and the book are not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. None of the companies referenced within the book have endorsed the book.
Chapter 1
Wes
Today is the day, and nothing is coming between me and what I’ve dreamt of for a year. I’m the man who is on standby every other day to help others, but this day is mine.
Need a tire change? Call roadside assistance.
Can’t fix the fax machine? Grunt and growl at it while pushing buttons like I do. Eventually something will work.
Cat stuck in a tree? Sorry kitty, but you have nine lives and I have one, and I have to make the most of mine today.
Today, I forget about leafy-green snacks and high protein homemade dinners, and let out my inner fat kid, who hasn’t been seen since he developed sculpted muscles in college.
I used to have a sweet tooth so bad my love for candy was like an addiction to crack. I had to go cold turkey to get in shape, and now I allow myself one cheat day a year: Halloween.
It was my favorite holiday when I was a kid and that hasn’t changed, but I don’t dress up anymore and go out, I just skip straight to the part where I stuff my face with an appalling amount of treats.
I’m so psyched for this year’s candy-binge, I don’t even care that I have to drive across my small town in Sprout Hill, New York’s version of rush hour. I don’t mind that teenage drivers playing on their phones, old ladies in ancient cars, and kids on bikes are slowing me down.
I open my windows in the crawl of traffic and breathe in the crisp autumn air, taking in colors that will never be the same when winter comes. Red-like-wine, burnt-orange, and golden-yellow leaves blanket lawns and walkways.
It’s no wonder why this is the time of year when business booms at my bed and breakfast.
“Well, hello there,” says a busty, middle-aged woman who I’ve never seen before, when I finally make it to the cheap rental car place I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this week. The pretty woman is the only person here and her name tag says she’s Heather. “How can I help you, handsome?”
Weird way to greet a customer, but I roll with it. “Please tell me the vending machines in your break room are working.”
“Uh, yeah,” she says, coming around the counter. “They are—but we could still pretend you’re a maintenance guy who came to look at them, if someone catches us in there.”
Swaying her hips, she comes over to me and grabs my nuts through my dress pants.
“Whoa, I think there’s been a misunderstanding.” I laugh nervously, prying her hand off the family jewels. “You must have mistaken me for someone else, because we don’t know each other.”
“Shit.” Her cheeks go from ivory to pink, then red, in record time. “I thought you were the other Novack—Jeremy.”
“Story of my life,” I say, smiling to show I’m not offended.
People frequently mistake me for my twin. Probably because he’s a cop who interacts with Sprout Hillers all day, while I spend most of my time near the outskirts of our town, interacting with visitors.
“Please don’t tell my boss,” Heather begs, putting her hands on my brawny chest. The warmth of them feels so wrong as she eyes my slim-fit button-up like she wants to know what’s underneath it as intimately as she knows my brother.
I can forgive the initial touching because it was an innocent mistake, but this is hard to excuse. I’m not a man-whore like Jeremy, the king of one-night stands.
“I don’t want to cause any trouble.” I grip her wrists harder than I need to and yank her hands off me. “I just want to grab a snack from your break room.”
“Why don’t you buy it at the store?” she asks, not moving out of my personal space.
Does she really think refusing to take a hint is the way to a man’s heart? Too bad for her the only thing around here that knows the way to my heart is the vending machines that contain my favorite candy. Although, considering the way she went for my balls, I’m guessing love isn’t what she’s after. I wonder if she’s one of those people who wants to fuck identical twins and stack us up against each other. No shame—live and let live—but my cock couldn’t be any less eager about that possibility.
“It’s hard to find,” I say simply.
I won’t go into the embarrassing details of how I tried to find a store that sells it, and eventually tracked down the distributor—who refused to sell the candy directly without me purchasing a huge amount in bulk.
I said “no thanks” and got a list of where the candy was sold. I first tried the sweet, crunchy honeycombs, coated in creamy milk chocolate, in the waiting room of an auto shop. I bought them from that place, and a laundromat, for a long time, but both businesses stopped carrying that candy in their machines. Heather’s break room is literally the only place in this part of New York where the treat is still sold.
“If you’re talking about the bags of chocolate coated honeycomb candy, someone already came in looking for those yesterday, and bought them all.”
“That can’t be possible,” I say, as if I didn’t have the exact same plan.
“Go look for yourself.”
I walk into the dingy little break room and the empty slots in the vending machines hit me like a punch in the face. “Who did this?”
“Relax,” she laughs, touching my shoulder. “You look and sound like someone died.”
“Yeah, I’m overreacting. I’ll come back tomorrow.” I can put my binge on hold for one day.
I shrug off her hand and turn to go.
“We won’t get another delivery tomorrow. The machine is filled once per week.”
That stops me in my tracks, and almost sends me into a panic-spiral.
“Please—could you...” I trail off as I face Heather and do my best to make puppy dog eyes at her. I’ve never done it before, but I’ve seen my brother pull that move on dozens of women. “I’d like to know who bought them so I can offer to pay them double for a few of the bags.”
“I’m sure Daisy would be fine with that,” Heather says, pink back on her cheeks as she pulls out her phone.
Those puppy dog eyes really do work!
“I’ll shoot her a text. What’s your number, handsome?”
Or so I thought.
She doesn’t care about my eyes. This is just a way for her to add me to her contacts list. I bet her address book is full of the Jeremys of the world. I’m not interested in being one of them.
“What’s Daisy’s last name?” I ask.
“Thurston.”
“Daisy Thurston.” I take out my phone and begin searching for her profiles. “That’s not a common name. I should have no pr
oblem finding her on social media and having a chat with her about this myself.” So there’s no need for you to have my number, handsy lady. “Thanks for the tip.”
“Wait,” she says, but I’m walking out as fast as my legs will carry me.
When images load at the top of the search page, they suddenly buckle, bringing me to my knees in the parking lot.
If a mouth-watering treat could be turned into a human by some sort of magic, this girl would be the result. The gold flecks around the pupils of her hazel eyes are the fiery gold of honey kissed by sunlight, and those almond-shaped eyes are enhanced by the light tips of her wavy, chocolate curls. Fuck the Honeychoc Bites. I want to bite ever so gently into her butterscotch tan and leave a mark that says she’s mine.
I click on one of the links in the search results and see a recent photo that steals whatever breath was left in my body.
The delicious girl transformed herself into a sexy wind-up doll today, in a short, puffy pink dress.
The white baby doll collar and puffy sleeves would make her look innocent, if not for the white ribboned lace peeking out from the hem. It looks like it was made from lingerie and matches the ribbon bows on her stockings. They fit her slim, toned legs so perfectly I doubt they were bought that tight, and the gray turn-key sticking out of the back of the dress looks homemade. Is she gorgeous and talented? I have a feeling she made this costume herself.
For answers, I check the caption below the photo:
Turn me on and I’ll be your doll.
Heart pumping, cock throbbing, I rise to my feet as I make myself a promise: I won’t just make this girl my doll. I’ll make her my everything.
Chapter 2
Daisy
“Give me your computer,” my older sister says, taking it before I have a chance to ask why she wants it.
“Can’t you use your own?” I ask, as she lays beside me on my bed.
“Nope,” Poppy says with a headshake.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m editing your hashtags. You didn’t tag the Blood Bash in any of the photos you posted today.”
“So?”
“Do I really need to explain why I want pictures of you to pop up when people look through that tag?”
She doesn’t, but I hate it when she uses me to get men to come to our family’s bar. They buy one or two drinks and hit on me the whole time they’re there, until I’m forced to turn them down. And sometimes they get mean and angry before they leave. There have been good guys who took it well and still tipped generously, but those sorts of customers are rare at Angel Spot.
The bar was bleeding money a year ago, before my sister finished her business degree and started running it with my parents.
She’s the one who re-named it Angel Spot, and made all the cute, young, female staff wear angel wings that she paid me to put together.
She also rebranded its image with contests that attracted unmarried women, like “Sprout Hill’s Sexiest Angel.” The winners got their own set of wings and free drinks for a month.
Because of all the hot, available women who are our regulars now, the bar is known as the place where you go when you want to get laid. So horny men flock there, expecting to find easy girls, and get pissed when they strike out.
“Okay, I’m all done here. The trap has been set, and now we wait,” Poppy says, tone dead serious—but I can’t stifle the ugly snort that comes out of my nose.
She sounds like a villain in a Marvel movie.
“Make dorky noises at me all you want,” she says, “but don't do it in front of the rich boys, please. It's your job to be sexy tonight.”
The “rich boys” she’s talking about are guys who live in the Brynn Marr College residence halls. The school isn't far from here, but it’s closer to a couple other towns—and there isn't much to do in ours—so we don’t run into them often. They love coming here for Halloween though. There are a lot of old homes in Sprout Hill that can easily be decorated to look like haunted houses, and it’s fun to host after-dark events in them. A few of those old homes will be our competition tonight, but where the girls go, boys tend to follow. We’re hoping word gets around about the Blood Bash, and the types of girls we expect to be there, so boys who get bored at other parties will stop by tonight.
“That is not my job.” I take my laptop back from her, get up from my bed, and carry it to the black marble island in our kitchen.
“You’re supposed to get them to buy drinks,” she says as she follows. “How else will you do that? With stellar service?” The last part of her question drips with sarcasm.
I’ve been fired from every job I’ve had, and I’ve tried out multiple lines of work. I swear, I did my best at every one of those jobs, but everywhere I go, men get fresh with me, and I can’t bite my tongue and smile through it. My father has no idea, because he’d try to hunt down every man who smacked my butt or called me sugar tits. And I can’t tell my mom because she’d tell him. They think I have bad luck, and don’t ask many questions about why I’ve been fired, because they’re thrilled whenever I go back to working for them.
Poppy’s the only one who knows about the disgusting behavior of men like Mr. Ernst, the guy who hired me to take care of his birds when he was on business trips. He gave me a bikini for my nineteenth birthday and said he’d triple my pay if I modeled it for him. Then he had the nerve to badmouth me to other potential customers, after I slapped him with the bikini top and stormed out of his house.
My sister thinks I handled him the right way, but she doesn’t see why I can’t “play nice” with pushy flirts and get what I want out of them—whether that’s a big tip, a raise, or expensive gifts. But I don’t want to dangle the possibility of sex with me to get ahead at any job and I think it’s cruel to lead people on. Even assholes.
I’m a romantic. Despite all the evidence I’ve seen to the contrary, I know men who are worth a damn exist. Somewhere in the sea of guys who wish they could order a girl like a pizza—and then toss her out after they’ve had their fill of her—I believe there’s a man swimming against the tide of the joke that the current dating scene can be. He’s looking for someone to woo and win, and when he sees me he won’t think: How can I get one night out of this hot piece of ass? He’ll think: There’s my forever.
I want to save my flirty and affectionate side for him. The only thing I owe a customer is a polite smile and a correct order.
“Be nice,” I tell my sister. “Or I won’t do that interview tonight.”
A local journalist is stopping by Angel Stop with a film crew to report on how the bar went from nearly bankrupt to booming success.
“Then I’ll do it,” Poppy says with a shrug. “And I’ll look better than you in my hotter costume.”
“You won’t look better if I don’t put the final touches you asked for on that hotter costume.”
I’m very good with a needle and thread, so people always ask me to help them with their Halloween costumes. Poppy wants me to change the material on her devil horns, so they’ll match the burst of red she sprayed onto her dark bangs. I still have to do my makeup to complete my look for tonight, but she gave me all the materials I need, so this should be quick.
“Don’t even joke.” The way she glares makes me afraid to find out what would happen if my warning wasn’t an empty threat. “You better fix it now—before you finish the costumes for April and Ned.”
“I finished them yesterday, after I picked up their favorite snack from Heather’s break room,” I say, although I have to stop and do a mental check of the items I worked on the previous morning.
I completely forgot April and Ned’s mom, Joy Tapper, didn’t pick up their costumes that afternoon like she said she would, so if there was anything I rushed, I have time to go back and perfect their dinosaur suits.
I love those ornery little monsters, and I want them to love their costumes. Their mother is my mom’s best friend and she’s a labor and delivery nurse. She has to work on non-offic
ial holidays to get a guaranteed time off during official holidays, so my dad and I are watching her kids this Halloween until her shift ends, then we’re heading over to the bar. They usually stay with their grandmother when their mom is working, but the eighty-year-old woman isn’t in the best shape for trick-or-treating with an energetic seven-year-old girl and nine-year-old boy.
“So hurry up and do my horns,” Poppy says. “I have to get to work soon—and I have to look perfect when Hollis stops by.”
Hollis is her broke ex, and she’s pretty sure he’ll show up at the bar tonight because she owes him money. She doesn’t want him back. She just wants to make him regret losing her.
“I’m doing them now,” I say, before returning to my bedroom.
I shut the door, lock it, and check my phone. It’s blowing up with notifications from guys who liked or commented on my photos, probably while browsing the tags #halloweenparty, #halloweenbash, and #halloweenevent.
My face burns red hot when I notice my perfectly innocent caption is missing, and has been replaced with: Turn me on and I’ll be your doll.
What the hell, Poppy? All these horny strangers are going to think I’m a slut! Some of them are asking for nudes in my messages. I know none of them are my forever guy and it’s exhausting thinking about weeding through them tonight to find him.
These wealthy players do nothing for me—even if they have marriage on their mind. I don’t want to compete with other girls to be the winner who he eventually takes home to mom and dad. I can see the appeal of the five-figure rings these men offer as a prize for the lucky ladies who prove themselves to them, but I want a guy who feels it’s his job to prove himself to me.
It seems like those men are in short supply these days. Men like my father, who married later in life, but when he did find the one he didn’t hesitate or play games. He locked my mother down fast and bought her the house of her dreams when they were planning their wedding.
I have friends who dated a dozen guys and didn’t come across one who was husband material. Some of them think we’re too young to be looking for that, but I envy the girls who settled down with strong, loving, protective men early in their lives. Most of them married older men, just like my mother, who is ten years younger than my dad.