Hot Dad

by Whitley Cox

  “My food is great! I know, I thought the same thing. Actually mentioned it to the hostess when I picked up the food.”

  “Oh really? What did she say?”

  “Said that tapas are meant for sharing and that garlic breath isn’t a problem when everyone has it.”

  Harper started to laugh, and I joined her. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed this much or been so carefree with a woman. Even before Landon’s birth, Meegan and I hadn’t gotten along. But after he was born, things got worse. She’d blamed me for her horrible pregnancy and labor. Said it was my idea to have another baby, that her horrific trauma was all my fault. I thought for the longest time she had post-partum depression and suggested several counselors, but she’d sneered at me. Even to this day, I was still convinced she had some form of it and hoped that leaving prompted her to seek help.

  Harper mopped up the sauce on her plate with a piece of pita bread and took a bite. I watched as her sexy throat undulated with a swallow, wishing she was swallowing something else.

  “So, what’s next on the agenda for this evening?” she asked sassily, taking a healthy sip of her red wine and closing her eyes to enjoy the flavors for a moment.

  I grinned and set my plate down on my coffee table. “Next, we watch a movie. Do you have Netflix? Are you able to cast to the television?”

  She nodded.

  Shoveling the last bite of pierogi into my mouth, I bobbed my head. “Perfect. I like a woman who knows her way around technology.”

  Suddenly a big white fluffy thing gracefully bounded up on to the couch beside her and nuzzled its face against her breast. Lucky cat!

  Dear God, I was jealous of a cat.

  “Be right back.” I got up from the couch and carried my dishes to the sink. There was still a bunch of food left over, but I put it away in the fridge—lunch tomorrow. I had a lot on my plate for Saturday. I always went and sparred with a friend at a local martial arts gym Saturday mornings, then I came home, sat in my office until the wee hours and worked. After Meegan left, I’d been forced to leave the fire department where I worked as a firefighter; the long shifts were too tough on the kids. Fortunately, I was able to turn my pastime of doodling and sketches into a career. Now, instead of being a full-time firefighter who draws on the side, I was a full-time free-lance and children’s book illustrator who’s also a volunteer or auxiliary firefighter. I’ve done a lot of free-lance drawing, greeting cards, a few independent, single-title books, newspapers, magazines, that kind of thing. But, the most well-known books I’d drawn for were part of the Harvey the Happy Puppy and Katie the Curious Kitten series. The author of the Harvey and Katie books was working on a new series. She’d yet to advertise about it but wanted me to send her a mock-up of the first book, Billy the Busy Bird: Billy Goes to the Store. I had a lot to do.

  With my phone, I set up Netflix, and within a few moments, the movie popped up on the screen. Had to love technology. Grabbing another beer from the fridge along with a white box from the bag of tapas, I made my way back over to the couch, only Harper wasn’t on the screen.

  I waited.

  It sucked that we couldn’t actually be together, but at the same time, this was better than nothing.

  She was back but unaware that her adjusting the pillows on the couch gave me the perfect view of her taut little ass. She was wearing black yoga pants. I inhaled and had to cover my mouth with my hand to keep myself from choking on my beer. They were the same yoga pants as that first day she’d walked into playgroup. The ones with the hole in the butt. She still had her back, more accurately her butt to me, so I leaned forward to catch a glimpse, see if I could find out what color her panties were. I needed something to tide me over until our next date. But all I saw was flesh color.

  Oh fuck!

  Were they nude-colored panties, or was she in a thong? Or maybe commando?

  The idea that I might be staring at an inch of Harper’s actual ass had me snatching a throw pillow and placing it over my lap. I wasn’t even sure if my lap made it on the camera, but I couldn’t be too safe. She spun around and collapsed with an oof into the cushions.

  “Where’s your dessert?” I asked, hoping for one more view of her ass before she hunkered down for the night to watch the movie I’d picked out.

  “What dessert?” Her head snapped up from where she’d been fiddling with her phone, flipping back her cheek-length hair and exposing some of her highlights. She drew a blanket over her legs and sunk down into some comfortable looking cushions behind her.

  I gave her a chastising look. “Didn’t you look in all the boxes? Tsk, tsk, naughty girl. Go take a peek. See what you find.”

  Something, I’m not entirely sure what, glimmered in her eyes from my playful admonishment. A new twinkle glowed back at me accompanied by a small, subtle smirk on her lips. Her back went ramrod-straight before she tossed the blanket off her lap and stood up, giving me one more chance to check out her butt as she went to the kitchen.

  She was back in less than a minute, a piece of chocolate peanut butter cheesecake, the same as mine, wobbling on her plate as she made herself comfortable on the couch.

  “This looks wicked,” she said, humming and licking her lips.

  “Wicked can be good.”

  Beautiful light brown eyes flared wide and red flooded her high cheekbones.

  “Yes, wicked can be good,” she said slowly, letting the edge of her fork glide down into the tip of the creamy cake. She brought the fork to her mouth and opened her lips, pulling the sliver of cake off with enough eroticism to make an entire frat house blow its load.

  I swallowed as I stared at her lips, her throat moving as she savored the cake.

  “How is it?” I asked, thankful that my voice hadn’t cracked. I was thirty-five years old, but that didn’t mean my inner fourteen-year-old didn’t burst forward at the most inopportune moments.

  Her tongue darted out between her lips, languidly roaming the seam. “Wicked.”

  Holy. Fuck!

  Afraid I might let the fourteen-year-old inside me out and either say something I shouldn’t or explode in my pants, I dove into my cheesecake with the vigor of a starved dog. I was starved. Just not for food.

  “Can I ask you something?” she asked.

  I looked up. Her tongue was making its way up the back of her fork.

  Oh, for crying out loud. Come on!

  “Shoot!”

  I needed to get a grip. Maybe it was a good thing we weren’t in the same room.

  “Where is Gemma and Landon’s mum?”

  So, Amy hadn’t told her. Huh. Respect to Amy for not overstepping too much. She’d asked me herself and then set Harper and I up, but she knew it wasn’t her place to spill my beans.

  “Can I ask you where Carly’s dad is?” I asked, wanting to make sure the playing field was level.

  She lifted one shoulder. “He was a one-night stand if you can even call him that. I was drunk, heartbroken and angry, having just been dumped by my fiancé. It was New Year’s Eve, there was champagne … a lot of champagne, masks, an empty room and enough pheromones to knock up an elephant. We used protection, but, well, nothing is one hundred percent.” She took another bite of her cake. “This is really fucking good. Holy God, I’m having an orgasm in my mouth right now. A mouthgasm.”

  I sat there slack-jawed.

  Wow!

  She eyed me over the rim of her wine glass, lifting one sexy eyebrow. “Your turn.”

  But I couldn’t move my lips. I was in awe of this woman. Such honesty. She owned her predicament and wasn’t ashamed or shy about sharing it. Some women, most women I knew would be too embarrassed to admit they’d gotten pregnant on a one-night stand. How could I be anything but impressed? Yes, nothing is one hundred percent. Gemma was proof of that. Meegan had been on the pill and yet she’d still gotten pregnant.

  Harper’s brows furrowed. Worry and possibly even dread filled her eyes, clouding the vibrant gold-flecked light brown. “Wh
at’s with the look?”

  I shook my head, snapping my mouth shut. “No, sorry, no look. I—I … wow!”

  Pulling the wine glass from her mouth, she leaned forward and looked me dead in the eyes. “Are you judging me, Sam?”

  “NO!”

  Oh fuck, now I’d gone and yelled at her. Could we get back to the cheesecake talk and her licking the fork and rolling the word “wicked” around on her tongue like it was the head of my cock?

  “I—I’m not judging you at all. I’m … shit … I’m impressed. I respect that you didn’t shy away from the explanation and were just honest with me. Gemma is the result of faulty birth control. My ex and I hadn’t been together for more than a few months when she found out she was pregnant. And Landon, he was an attempt to fix something that had been broken since the first date.” I let out a huff, my eyes fell to my beer, and I tipped it up, draining it in less than five seconds. “Meegan is in Toronto. After Landon was born she realized she didn’t want to be a mother. Didn’t want to be a wife. She gave up her parental rights, we divorced—well, separated, we were never married—and when Landon was three months old, she left.”

  Now it was Harper’s turn to sit there slack-jawed. “Holy shit!”

  I needed another beer.

  “I need more wine,” she said.

  I nodded, she nodded, and then we both got up to replenish. I hadn’t expected the conversation to get this deep this quickly, but in a way, I was glad we were getting it out on the table now rather than later.

  I popped the cap, then sank back down into the dark brown leather of my couch. Harper wasn’t back yet, so I stood up again to turn down the heat in the fireplace. It made me miss my parents’ cabin in the Snoqualmie Pass and the real fireplace there. Nothing like the real thing. But at least this way I didn’t have to worry about obtaining firewood and cleaning the chimney.

  I was one of the lucky ones. My parents were well off. My father had invested in the dot-com boom at exactly the right time, continued to invest and managed his money wisely through the years. He’d worked as an electrical engineer as well, meeting my mother, a fellow engineer, when they were in college. Both had worked for the city of Vancouver for many years but managed to retire at fifty with a sizeable nest egg. The house I lived in was one of theirs. They owned many residential properties and rented them out. Only I was slowly paying them in a rent-to-own situation. Hopefully, by the time I was eighty-five or ninety, I would own the house.

  I’d been in the house before Meegan moved in, and although I said she could decorate as she saw fit, she didn’t really go crazy changing things. It’d been easy to erase most traces of her within the first few months. No painting or wallpaper-peeling necessary.

  My sister, Daisy, had called it a bachelor pad to the Nth degree when we were younger and I’d just moved in. She’d come over with paint swatches and fabric samples one day, and the next day the painters were over and completely overhauling the place, making it “manly but livable and homey” as she’d described it. And as much as I’d grumbled at the time, I had to admit, she’d done a bang-up job. Lots of greens and browns, earth tones and minimal “decorations” as I’d instructed. I didn’t want knick-knacks or tchotchke shit collecting dust. And she’d listened, instead picking up beautiful prints of the West Coast, where we lived. All by local artists or photographers. They hung around the house, enhancing the warm but open and “nature” vibe I’d been wanting.

  “Ah, that’s better.” Harper was back, so I made my way back too. I assumed she had hit the washroom but was too polite to tell me.

  She curled back up onto the couch and tucked her legs under her before draping the black knit blanket on her lap. “Let me get this straight,” she started, “she just decided she didn’t want to be a mother anymore and took off?”

  I nodded. There was more to it of course, but at the end of the day, that was gist of it.

  “But what about her kids?”

  “What about them?”

  “Doesn’t she love them? Want to watch them grow up? Help shape their lives?”

  Were Meegan an ordinary woman, an ordinary mother, yes, she would have. But Meegan is a vapid narcissistic immature child, who, when the going got tough, rather than work to fix it, she got going.

  Of course, I couldn’t very well say all that to Harper, so instead I just brushed over the truth. “I think she still loves her kids, but she realized that for everyone to be happy she had to leave.”

  “Did you guys try counseling?”

  I nodded. “She wasn’t interested.”

  “Was it postpartum depression?”

  “I think in the beginning, yes.” Harper had been honest with me, so I was going to be honest with her. There was no need to paint my ex-wife as the horrible self-absorbed child that she was. She was still the mother of my children, whether it be by simple egg donation or not, therefore I would never truly speak ill of her because that would mean speaking ill of my children. I went on. “Meegan is troubled. I should probably mention that while I was thirty-one when we met and started dating, she was twenty-two. She wasn’t ready to be a mother or wife.”

  “Too fucking bad.”

  Her heated response jarred me, but it also made me smile. She was a feisty one. Spoke her mind, didn’t pull any punches or beat around the bush. It was refreshing. I never knew where Meegan’s head was. She always seemed to be playing one game or another.

  She took in my wide eyes and immediately started to backpedal. “What I mean is … uh … ”

  I laughed. “Don’t apologize. I like how candid you are. Yes, that had been my response as well. Even though I was thirty-one, I wasn’t in any frame of mind to be settling down. I liked my life. I was a full-time firefighter, doing illustrations on the side. But when Meegan left, I had to leave my job. The twenty-four-hour shifts were too hard on the kids. So now I’m a volunteer or auxiliary firefighter and a full-time dad and illustrator.”

  “You’re a firefighter?” Flames ignited in her eyes.

  I offered her a cocky smile, happy that we were organically drifting away from the topic of my ex. “I am. Do you like that?”

  Her nostrils flared. Oh, she liked it all right. “Were you in any of the charity calendars?”

  Laughter, free and wonderful, rumbled through my chest. I nodded as I brought out my phone, found a link and sent it to her. It was a few years old, but I didn’t see how that mattered.

  All I saw was the top of her head as she hunched over her phone, her fingers flying across the screen. Suddenly, her head snapped up, and she gaped at me. She turned her phone around to show me a photo of myself from four years ago.

  “This is you?” The cat beside her lifted one eye but then closed it again. Obviously, I wasn’t that impressive.

  It was the image of me, shirtless, covered in ashes, with the firefighter pants on and suspenders over my naked torso. I had the hat on and was, of course—because why not?—holding a golden retriever puppy. It was a charity calendar for the local animal shelter, so they had us all pose with animals. Despite how corny the whole thing was, it’d been a lot of fun to shoot and was for a good cause. The calendar brought in a butt-load of money, too.

  “Don’t sound so surprised,” I scolded. “I haven’t put on that much of a ‘dad bod,’ have I?”

  She sucked on her bottom lip, shaking her head as her eyes coasted back down to her phone. “Have you put on any weight? I’d say you look the same … damn fine. Hello, Hot Dad.”

  I’d just taken a sip of my beer and choked.

  Her eyes flew back up to me. “Whoops! Did I say that out loud?”

  Heat flooded my abdomen, and my cock jerked in my jeans. “Did you come up with that nickname?”

  “What nickname?” Her face was as innocent as could be, meanwhile her soft brown eyes glimmered with challenge and dirty secrets.

  I fixed her with a bored look. “Hot Dad.”

  “You know about that?”

  Scoffing, I
took a sip of my beer. “None of you are overly quiet when I walk into playgroup. Particularly Connie. The way she gasps, grabs your arm and says, ‘Hot Dad,’ and then proceeds to eye-fuck me from here to kingdom come, isn’t exactly subtle.”

  Her lip twitched. “I didn’t come up with it, no.”

  “Well, I call you Hot Mom.”

  Her sexy pink bottom lip dropped. At that moment all I wanted to do was sink my teeth into it and tug until she moaned. “Y-you do?”

  “Mhmm.”

  She swallowed. “Oh.”

  “So, I guess we’re Hot Mom and Hot Dad then, eh?”

  She sucked on her bottom lip again, her eyes glowing. “I guess so. Though, you’re Hot Dad for two reasons. You’re a firefighter, and you’re sex on a stick.”

  Goddamn it, her candor was sexy.

  “And you’re just sex on a stick.”

  Even with the mediocre video feed, I could see red rush across her cheekbones.

  “Are we going to watch this movie, or what?” I asked, deciding to cut her some slack. “I have work to do in the morning, young lady.”

  She stowed her phone and snapped to attention. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. Right away, sir.”

  My cock jumped again, and my balls tightened.

  Yes!

  “Permission to speak, sir?”

  Oh my freaking God. She is bloody perfect. Does she know she’s turning me on something fierce with her “sir” speech, or is it all just a game?

  I nodded. “Yes.”

  “You have a tattoo?”

  Ah, so she’d noticed. Shrugging, I unbuttoned my blue and white plaid shirt, pulling it off one shoulder to expose my right bicep and the top of my shoulder.

  She tilted her body forward and squinted. Then she picked her phone back up and began to scrutinize my picture. “It’s bigger now.”

  I wanted to laugh. Even though she hadn’t intended it, my head immediately went to a sexual innuendo. But instead, I simply nodded. “At the time Gemma was only a few months old. I had her birth date and flower tattooed on my bicep. Now I have Landon’s too, along with some flames and the Wright family crest.”

  There was that tongue again. God, I wanted to suck on that tongue.