Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE

Mila

Isit on the double bathroom vanity wrapped in a towel, watching Joseph draw us a bath. The room is beautiful, white and gray marble, clean. New. Unlike the bathroom I’ve been bathing in since childhood. Sighing as the steam curls around me, Joseph stands—nude and glorious—and I feel like a princess. One that’s been rescued by a knight in shining armor and brought back to the castle.

My husband is not the traditional storybook knight, though, is he?

A shiver courses through me when Joseph faces me in the thickening steam. Dark hair curls around one eye and he smiles like a wolf, making my womanhood clench. Shame ripples through me, but I ignore it and smile back. There’s no room for anything but love between us. The lessons my mother inflicted on me might take some time to evaporate, but I don’t think it’ll take long. Not after Joseph gave me my most secret fantasy, as if he knew it line by line.

He’s my Daddy and I’m his little girl. And he makes that right, somehow.

It feels right. More right than anything I’ve ever imagined.

As Joseph comes toward me slowly, I let my gaze track down his body. Over the tattoo of the grim reaper, the coffin, knives and gore. The words Death is Your Only Escape. My husband has a lot to tell me. But no matter what he says, I know I’ve found the other half of my heart. Whatever he did in the past, we share a soul now. We are one, bound together in love and marriage. There’s nothing that could drive me away…

Although I feel a spark of apprehension when I notice the sudden hesitance in his expression. His eyes cut to the side, away from me, even as his hips settle in between my thighs. “It’s time for us to talk, Mila.”

“I know,” I murmur, leaning it to lick condensation off his inked collarbone. “Don’t be scared. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Damn right you’re not,” he rasps, unknotting my towel, peeling it from my body and tossing it away. “You need to understand, Mila. If you ever leave me, I’d dismantle this world, country by country, until I found you and brought you home.”

“You won’t have to do that. Ever.” I settle my hands on his chest. “I promise.”

Joseph’s jaw clenches as he scrutinizes me, but he seems satisfied with whatever he finds and nods. “Come on.” He picks me up off the counter with ease and I eagerly wrap my legs around his waist. “We talk in the bath.”

“Why, Daddy?”

He groans over my use of his title. “I feel unclean when I think of the past,” he mutters, stepping into the white, oversized porcelain tub. “If I get any dirt on you, I want to be able to wash it away.”

Joseph sits and I snuggle close to his chest, giggling when his chest hair tickles my nipples. “You’re talking in metaphors, like you do in church.”

“I’m lucky I was even making sense up there on that stage,” he murmurs, tucking hair behind my ear. “You were the only thing I could think of. There was only Mila in her pretty purple dress.”

I grin into his chest hair. “Even if you didn’t make sense, everyone in this town would just pretend it was the smartest thing they ever heard.” I trace a circle around his nipple. “They think you’re the second coming.”

“I’m not, Mila.”

With a swallow, I look up at him. “Tell me.”

Joseph is silent for a moment. “I left my home in Boston when I was fifteen and another family took me in, only it’s not the kind of family you’re thinking. They’re a family whose sole purpose is to make money through intimidation, illegal gambling, extortion. They collect money from local businesses in exchange for protection—and if those businesses don’t pay up…sometimes they pay with their life.” He wraps his arms around me and pulls me close, burying his face in my hair. “I had no guidance growing up, Mila. Never saw anywhere or anything outside my neighborhood. This was how the world worked. You paid your tribute or else,” he says. “I started working as muscle for this family, intimidating people, collecting money…taking care of rival family members who tried to run an operation on our turf. These hands that dare to touch your skin, Mila…they’ve killed.”

Some part of me knew that. Some part of me suspected. But I can only think of a lost fifteen-year-old boy with nowhere else to go. I can only find sympathy in my heart. “Why did you leave?”

His throat works against my temple. “I have a brother. Younger than me. When I joined the family, my only condition was that my brother be kept out of that lifestyle. He was smart, doing well in school. I didn’t want him anywhere near it.” He shrugs his big shoulders. “They didn’t listen. They thought he knew too much about what I did on their behalf, so they pulled him in. Made him complicit. I told them, Mila. I told them I didn’t want my brother involved—and they didn’t listen. So I took down the boss.”

Even though I know nothing about this world Joseph is describing, I reckon from his tone that killing a boss is a very bad thing. “So you ran?”

“Yeah,” he says, hoarsely. “My brother went one way, I went the other. I’m not sure where he ended up, but he’s smart. They won’t find him.”

“They’re looking for you?”

Joseph nods. “What I did is unheard of. An unforgivable transgression.” He pauses. “They’ll be searching for the rest of my life.” He pulls back, holding me by the shoulders. “I won’t let anything happen to you, Mila. Do you trust me?”

“Yes,” I say, without hesitation. “Of course I do.”

His eyes close with gratitude, then reopen. “I don’t know how long I can keep up this town preacher act. You bring out something in me, Mila. Lust, jealousy. You make me a possessive son of a bitch. I love what you do to me. I’ve never felt more fucking alive. But it’s impossible to hide those things.” He leans in and kisses me. “I’m going to try, but we might have to move on soon.”

I nod solemnly. “I’ll go with you anywhere.”

A corner of his mouth ticks up. “Maybe even the ocean.”

A smile spreads across my face and I feel his manhood spring to life against me. I look down into the bath and watch in fascination as his shaft unfurls and grows thick, the head lifting out of the water’s surface. Fullness blooms in my tummy and I feel a little zing in that little pebble of flesh between my thighs. “Is it playtime again, Daddy?” I whisper.

Joseph’s hands find my bottom and flex, molding the flesh roughly. “It’s always playtime when we’re alone, little girl.” His finger presses to the hole between my backside cheeks and I gasp. “Shhh. We need to be quiet. I’m not supposed to be in here while you bathe.”

I almost come then and there. Thank God I have a name to call it now. Coming. That place I’ve been building toward for so long, but not achieving. It’s now the place Joseph takes me by playing pretend with me. That’s what we’re doing, even though it feels so real. I can’t explain the deep, abiding desire inside me to play house with Joseph in this way. To pretend what we’re doing is against the rules. As if my mother is downstairs assuming me and Joseph are behaving the way a father and daughter would. But we’re not behaving. We’re too drawn to each other for that.

“I promise to be quiet,” I say, arching my back and lifting my breasts out of the water. Joseph’s eyes darken so rapidly, his breathing turning shallow, that I grow in confidence, leaning back and shaking my breasts for him. “Do you like that, Daddy?”

His hand disappears below that water and begins to disturb it immediately, his fist traveling up and down his big trunk of flesh. “That’s right. Shake them right to left. Give me a dirty, little show, baby girl.”

A giggle sails from my mouth, as natural as breathing. “You can play with them if you want to. I won’t tell.”

Daddy’s head falls back on a long groan, his hand moving faster and faster. “Come over here and sit on my lap. Give me a special hug with your little pink pussy, the way I taught you.”

Lust rains down on me with such force, locking my muscles, I wonder how I find the strength to straddle Daddy and let him angle his big shaft against the opening hidden away inside my folds. I bite my lip to stay quiet and hold on to his solid shoulders, letting him push me down, inch by inch. When it becomes too much, I let out a sob and Daddy puts a hand over my mouth.

“Quiet as a mouse, remember?”

“Sorry,” I whisper, when he takes his hand away.

Daddy leans down and sucks one of my nipples into his mouth, making me squirm and gasp. “Do you remember what to tell her if we get caught?”

He’s letting me decide how far to take our game and I have no fear or reservations—only incredible, building excitement—when I say, “I tell her it’s my fault. You tried to resist me, but I kept teasing and teasing.”

His chest shudders and his hips start to roll beneath me, his manhood dragging in and out of my private hole. “That’s the truth, isn’t it? She left me alone with you too many times. After school, while she’s off at church. And there you are, sprawling out on your Daddy in nothing but T-shirts and panties, so he can’t concentrate on the ball game. There’s only so much a man can stand.”

That delicious build up is happening inside me again, partly because of Daddy’s forbidden words, but mostly because in this position, I can bear down hard and rub my pleasure spot on the base of his thickness. And oh God, I do. I start out slow, but in the end, I ride my Daddy so hard, water splashes over the side of the bathtub. Our breath rasps between us, both of us trying hard not to make a sound. Joseph’s grip on my bottom is so tight, he’s going to leave marks behind and I love that. I love it so much, I lean in next to his ear and say, “Bruise me, Daddy. I’ll tell her you spanked me for being bad.”

“Fuck,” he pushes through clenched teeth. “You’re making me come.”

On instinct, I tighten up the muscles cradling his pulsing rod. “That’s what little girls are for,” I whisper innocently. “Right, Daddy?”

I grind down one more time on his ample girth and let myself fly. Coming. I’m coming. Freefalling through a star studded night sky, my eyes rolling back in my head and everything below my waist squeezing hard, pulsating, pulsating and then I can do nothing but shake while relief courses through me, adrenaline still whipping in my blood stream. And love. My heart won’t let me forget about that.

I watch through half-mast eyes as the man who embodies love to me groans through the throes of his own peak, his hips jackknifing up and lifting me out of the water, his hands yanking me up and back, up and back on his lap, forcing me to ride him straight through to the end, the warmth of his spend jetting inside me.

“Daddy,” I sob, collapsing on his chest a moment later. “Daddy, I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he says gruffly, laying kisses on my hairline. “You are mine. Nothing and no one is ever going to take you away from me.”

That doesn’t mean someone wouldn’t try.