by Piper Trace
She placed a hand on Pen’s shoulder and smiled sweetly down at her. “I didn’t have eighteen candles, so I hope eight will do.”
“No worries. I don’t need candles to tell me I’m finally an adult.” Penelope said this while staring straight at Bishop.
He swallowed, his stomach flip-flopping in a way that made his knees feel unsteady. The flame from the candles seemed to make Penelope’s beautiful, warm eyes glow with a heat of their own, though he knew it was only his imagination. He was too far from her to see the details of her face.
He didn’t need his eyesight, though, to pull up her features. They were burned into his psyche. The way her hair, auburn now, the pink faded and clinging stubbornly only at the ends, fell around her shoulders, just past her collar bone. Those collar bones, delicate and straight, exposed when she wore tank tops or an oversized shirt that slipped off her shoulder while she lounged in the library across from him, frowning down at a book.
Her eyes, warm and burnished brown, the opposite of his grey, cold irises.
He swallowed against a rising panic. His ward was now an adult, and all the thoughts he’d dammed up in his head as absolutely forbidden were threatening to come spilling over his mental gates for the first time.
“Now I won’t make us sing,” Ann said, shaking out the last match. “That would just embarrass all of us, I think. Besides, this cake is meant to celebrate your graduation too, and I don’t know a song for that.” She laughed, and Pen smiled up at her.
Not for the first time, Bishop was immensely thankful for Ann. The notice that Pen had passed her correspondence tests and had been granted her high school diploma had come in the mail a week prior. Bishop would never have thought of getting a cake to celebrate, and Penelope deserved special moments like these to mark important events in her life.
Bishop, though, had been dreading this day. He continued to hover in the doorway, afraid to get any closer to the birthday girl.
“I don’t have to think of a wish,” Pen said. “I already know what I want.” She hesitated and then raised her eyes to Bishop’s. Slowly, she pursed her lips and blew out the candles, never moving her gaze from his face.
He wondered what she could read there.
Penelope had said inappropriate things upon their first meeting, things that had made him uncomfortable. What he’d refused to admit though, even in the darkest depths of his poisoned mind, was that those comments she’d made had given him thoughts.
Thoughts that caused him terrible guilt, so he’d worked hard to tuck them away where they could never be acted upon. He’d spent all the years since he was seventeen trying to forget the barbaric evil he’d come from. Trying to convince himself that he wasn’t his father. That even though his dad’s blood ran in his veins, he wasn’t the same kind of monster.
The truth, that Bishop worked so hard to suppress behind walls, routines and control, was that his father trafficked human beings to satisfy his depraved lust and the lust of his wealthy clients. Bishop had discovered this hideous reality when he was seventeen, and had participated, unknowingly, in his dad’s sick business.
It was unforgivable, and Bishop had sworn to spend the rest of his life making up for it. Then Penelope had burst into his life, demanding his attention. Demanding he acknowledge her femininity, her sexuality. Things he absolutely couldn’t do. First, because she was underage, and now, still, because he was her legal guardian, practically her father, from a moral standpoint.
He controlled her finances. Any involvement with her would naturally be wrong. He still had some authority over her until she was nineteen and would receive control of her trust. Until then, and even after then, their relationship could only ever be that of a mentor and mentee. Anything else would violate his personal oath to never again take advantage of a woman.
Professor Sullivan had entrusted Penelope to him as a father-figure. He certainly hadn’t done this so that Bishop would use his daughter to satisfy his naked lust. Out of respect for the professor, Bishop had to keep his hands off his mentor’s daughter.
But lately Penelope had been hell-bent on breaking him. They read together every evening, and it was Bishop’s favorite part of the day, but she’d been dressing in such skimpy clothing that he couldn’t even read anymore. He’d sit on the couch each evening, with Pen sitting across from him, staring at the same page of his book for what seemed like hours as his thoughts fought a war between piety and lust.
Of course, he would never touch her when she was a minor, but he’d known her birthday was coming, and with her full-on seduction campaign as of late, that dam he’d built to contain the inappropriate thoughts about his young ward was full to bursting with all kinds of unclean ideas.
It didn’t help that he hadn’t touched a woman in years. This tactic had seemed like a practical way to keep his oath, but had morphed into a forced penance for the terrible act he’d committed on that girl long ago, on the last day he’d spent in his father’s home.
Unfortunately, his ward dissolved his self-control like tissue paper in water. All of the things he wasn’t supposed to think about were the only things that came to mind, as he stared from her lips to her eyes. Something passed between them in the dim light of the dining room, and Bishop’s mind was suddenly full of indecent ideas about his ward’s pursed lips.
Images of Pen on her knees, hollowing her cheeks around his hard cock, popped like firecrackers through his head.
When the candles were extinguished, he made his escape. “I’ve got to go,” he insisted gruffly. “I’m sorry.” He fled the room, and they both called after him, Ann about eating cake and Penelope about seeing him later in the library. He knew it was rude, but there was no way he could stay. He had rock-hard, straining erection to hide, the evidence of his depravity.
He needed to somehow stop such thoughts about the too-young girl under his authority. But right at that moment, most of all, he needed to relieve his aching balls with the release his body suddenly and desperately demanded because of his wicked fantasies about Pen’s mouth.
In the privacy of his bathroom, almost crazed with shame and need, Bishop fisted a hand around his cock and allowed the dam gates in his head, the ones with his ward’s name on them, to open just a crack. Just enough so that he could come. He let his perversion spill over those gates in small droplets only. An amount he could control.
With the door shut and locked, where no one could witness his deviance, he trembled as he allowed himself to enjoy just a few forbidden thoughts about the young girl.
Penelope, naked and kneeling in front of him, gazing up at him with flashing, wild eyes, her small, pink nipples pebbled hard.
Pen’s hands wrapped around his erection, letting him feed her his cock. Her throat straining to accommodate him like he wanted it. Hard, and as deep as she could take it, her innocent mouth never before having been used like that. Her tongue lapping up his beads of precum when he eased up on her throat long enough to give her a breath before plunging in again.
Bishop had barely stroked himself one full time up the length of his shaft when he pictured his cum splashed across young Penelope’s full, rounded lips and cheeks, and he exploded.
He braced against the mirror with his free hand, his hot release spattering in rhythmic waves into the sink as he made a noise that sounded like pain, but choked in his throat like a sob. He’d needed to come so urgently that the orgasm was nearly devoid of pleasure. He felt only a sweeping and hollow relief.
As quickly as his desire had demanded the sacrifice of a small bit of his soul, just as quickly came the cruel, familiar self-disgust.
His hands shook as he cleaned up. He kept his chin tucked, unable to look at himself in the mirror. He wasn’t a sexual deviant, he told himself. He wasn’t a monster in a fleshy, carnal world of his own creation, like his father.
Bishop took a punishingly hot shower, wanting to feel clean but never succeeding.
*****
Bishop
Bi
shop brushed his hands down the front of his shirt for the third time as he stared at the doorknob to the library. Penelope was inside, waiting for him.
Though they did far more reading than talking, he truly enjoyed her company. She wasn’t a typical seventeen-year-old girl. At twenty-six, he could never imagine relating to a girl so young, but she was deeply intelligent and far more mature than her years should allow. She’d had to grow up fast, he imagined, just like he had.
He’d told her the other day that she had an old soul. What he hadn’t told her was how much he was drawn to her, because his own soul felt ancient and withered after everything he’d been through before he was grown.
His heart pounding, Bishop turned away from the library door and took three steps back in the direction of his room and safety when he forced himself to stop. He couldn’t avoid her. Couldn’t run away from her like a coward. He had to face her and set her straight about this ill-fated crush she had on him, and more importantly, that he had on her. He had to be strong and resist.
Only, he wasn’t sure he could.
He was so goddamned attracted to her in a way he’d never been to any other woman. In a way that went gut-deep and interrupted his every thought. Yesterday she’d gone as far as to wear a ridiculously short skirt, and had bent over to pick something up right in front of him on the couch.
The clichéd ploy should not have worked on him. He should have scowled, rolled his eyes, turned away, something. Anything except what he did.
He’d tried to pretend he was engrossed in the Twentieth Century Russian literature he’d been reading, but Pen had been chipping away at his defenses, crumbling that wall he’d built around his sexual needs for far too long.
That tiny skirt had ridden up high enough to show soft, cotton panties encasing the treasure at the apex of her thighs, so close to his face. So close to his mouth. His lips had parted and he couldn’t look away until she stood back up and looked over her shoulder at him. He’d raised his eyes to hers, sure that the look on his face must have been that of a starving man being offered a buffet of rich delights, because that’s exactly how he’d felt.
She’d smiled, a slight, enigmatic curve of her lips, and had twisted her sweetly curved hips around to settle down on the couch next to him to read. Though for the next hour he’d turned the pages of his book, he had no memory of reading any words.
He’d barely slept that night, trying to chase the grotesquely wrong thoughts out of his head.
Legal adult or not, he was still her guardian, and the position was symbolically too much like that of a father or an older brother for him to believe such carnal thoughts about his young ward weren’t anathema.
Bishop gathered his courage, his hand trembling as he turned the knob to the library and entered the room, closing the door slowly behind him.
CHAPTER SIX
Penelope
PENELOPE STOOD WHEN her guardian came in. She’d barely been sitting anyway, perched on the edge of the couch like a bird ready to take flight. She was wearing only a silk robe, and suddenly, she had a moment of panic.
Why had she thought this was a good idea? Bishop was likely to freak out, possibly even throw her out of the house. She wasn’t a child anymore. If she made his life difficult, there was no obligation for him to keep her around.
But she had no intention of making his life difficult. Rather, her hope was to make his life far more enjoyable, and hers too. The man was nearly thirty, and from what she could tell, had no social life at all. What single guy that age wouldn’t welcome a horny, eighteen-year-old girl living under his roof who was ready to strip naked and please him whenever he wanted it?
She didn’t have any experience with a real sex life, but she was pretty sure she was right about that.
Besides, she wasn’t looking for commitment or a relationship. She just wanted her hot guardian to usher her into the world of adulthood with some down and dirty fucking, a lot of experimentation, and as many orgasms as he could provide.
He studied the female sexual response for a living. What more could a carnally curious girl ask for? Pen wanted him to teach her about her own body and the body of a man, and how to bring the ultimate pleasure to both.
Now she just had to convince him, and not get kicked out of the house in the process.
She recalled the look on his face when she’d bent over in front of him right where she was standing now. There was definitely something there. She hadn’t imagined it, had she? He’d looked half ready to pull her down on the couch and crawl on top of her.
That look she’d seen in his eyes had been pure, animal lust, and after she’d seen it, she’d been a little concerned that her skirt was so short she might leave a wet spot on the couch next to him. She’d been so wet around him lately, she was surprised she wasn’t dehydrated.
And then the way he’d run out of the room today, when she’d tried to seduce him from afar while blowing out her candles. Yes. There was something there. She just hoped she could get him to let his guard down.
She fiddled with the sash of her robe and watched as he went straight to the desk without looking at her, and began rummaging in a drawer. She used his distraction as an opportunity to go lock the library door before padding back to the center of the room, waiting for him to notice her.
Finally, he pulled something from a drawer and came out from behind the desk toward her, his eyes examining what she saw was an envelope in his hands.
“Your birthday gift from your father, Penelope.” He looked up as he drew closer, and stopped short, directly in front of her, his eyes scanning her from neck to toe, then back to her face.
“You’re not dressed,” he practically croaked.
She waved a hand in dismissal. “I just got out of the shower.” Then, purposely, she smoothed her hands down the curves of her hips, sliding her palms against the satin fabric of the robe. “It’s not like I’m naked.”
Bishop cleared his throat and looked at his hands. “You’re a young woman now,” he murmured. “You can’t just go around half-dressed.”
Before she could respond, he thrust the envelope toward her. “Your birthday money from your father.”
“Thanks,” she whispered, taking the business-sized envelope and fingering the flap. Just a check. No card. Just like every other birthday.
She sensed Bishop was going to retreat, so she blurted out something in an effort to keep him in front of her. “I spent his money last year on those drugs.”
Silence stretched as he didn’t respond.
She peeked up at him, and his eyes looked pained. “I won’t this year,” she hurried to add. “Because of you.”
He gave her a resigned look before reaching into his pocket and pulling out a key fob bearing the logo of a luxury brand. He picked up her hand and pressed the key into it. “From me,” he said. “Happy birthday.”
She gaped down at the item in her hand. That one present from Bishop was worth more than every birthday present her father had ever given her, combined. Her voice went high-pitched. “You bought me a car?”
He shrugged. “You need to get out more. A girl your age shouldn’t sit at home with a boring college professor and read every night.”
“Woman.”
He blinked at her, confused.
“You called me a girl, but I’m not anymore. I’m an adult now. A woman.”
“Yes.” He half smiled. “Of course. Happy birthday, Miss Penelope.”
“Thank you, Professor Cole,” she said flirtatiously, mocking his formality.
His chest rose and fell, his pectoral muscles at level with her eyes. “I assumed you’d want to run out and see the car.”
She shook her head, imagining brushing her naked breasts across his powerful chest as she straddled him, naked, feeling small on top of his large frame.
“Not yet,” she breathed. A chill passed through her, and she shivered, knowing her nipples were as hard as diamonds.
Bishop lowered his eyes to her ch
est and seemed to stop breathing for a moment.
“You should go put some clothes on.”
She shook her head again, realizing they were talking only in murmurs now. Whispering to each other like lovers. “I’m excited about the car, Bishop, but right now there’s something more pressing I want to talk to you about.”
The hammering of her heart drowned out the ticking of the grandfather clock. She stared at his chest, watching the expansion and contraction of his ribcage grow quicker as his breaths became shallower.
She tilted her chin up, meeting his shadowed eyes. He leaned in closer to her.
His irises looked purely black now, as he stared down at her with an intensity that was as familiar as it was jarring. Was it lust? Fear? It was a look that should frighten any young woman, she thought. But it didn’t frighten her. It turned her on.
What did that say about her? She’d seen that same look in his eyes earlier when he’d retreated from her birthday celebration. She had to make him stay now.
“I must seem greedy, but there’s something else I want from you for my birthday.” She licked her lips, wondering if her nerves could survive the conversation.
He shook his head, his forehead nearly touching hers, his lips parted. “I can’t give you anything else.” His voice trembled, barely audible. “I can’t.”
But, as if he couldn’t stop himself, he reached out and stroked up the silky fabric on her arm with the back of one finger.
With the odd sensation that she was outside her body and watching it happen, Penelope didn’t break eye contact with him as she untied the sash of her robe with shaking fingers. She slid her hands up the neck of the garment, pulling it apart and letting it slip off her shoulders to puddle on the floor.
“Penelope.” His desperate tone made the word a plea for mercy, but she would give him none.