Daddy
I have to end this.
It’s what’s best for her.
It’s the only way.
If you love someone, you’d do anything to protect them. Even if it means living without them. It’s too dangerous, dragging her further into my world. I need to tell her it’s over.
I can’t give her the key, either. I hate to go back on my word, but there’s no way she’ll tell me the truth about what that key leads to and I can’t risk her doing something to hurt herself.
I trust Sheffield. I know he had her best interests in mind. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have taken her in, in the first place. He took good care of her when no one else would. If he didn’t want her to have that key, there was a damn good reason for it.
She needs to go back to her life. Her preschool job, her friends. She’s such a doll—she’ll have a boyfriend her age within a month.
I have no doubt about that.
I’ll still keep her bank account full. I’ll have security posted at her work, at her home. Undercover. She’ll never know, but I will. They’ll protect her until I’m sure she’s safe, that she’s been completely untangled from my web.
Until I know there is no one out there interested in hurting her to get to me.
I try to picture her with a boy her age. Maybe even getting engaged…married…having kids.
But I can’t.
Every image I try to conjure up of her future has me at her side. It’s me slipping the three-carat diamond on her finger. Me reciting vows to her at the altar.
It’s my baby that she carries in her belly.
Fuck, how did I let things get this out of hand?
How did I let things get this far out of my control?
I guess love is the one thing I can’t control.
She’s breathing deeply, her cheek warm against my chest.
I say, “Reece?”
She doesn’t answer. Her breathing is slow and steady. She’s asleep. I pull her close, breathing into her hair, then inhaling her scent.
I shouldn’t say the words—hell—I shouldn’t even be feeling them.
But I can’t stop them from coming. Something in me has to let them go.
I have to put these words into the world.
Just. One. Time.
Then I can let her go.
“I’m in love with you, Reece Bright.”
She sleeps, steady, trusting against me. She has no idea that in the morning when we wake, I’m ending this.
I’m sending her on her way.
I fall into a troubled sleep. When I wake, I reach for her, wanting to hold her close. One. More. Time. My bed is empty. My heart lurches in my throat. She’s not here.
I check the rest of the suite but I already know she’s gone.
Where the fuck is she?
I tear through the closet. Her phone is here but everything else is gone. She must have known I could find her if her phone was on her. Even though I never put that tracker on it, tracing her would have been easy enough.
My only hope in finding her is if she uses her passport or a bank card. My men can trace her then. But she has a ton of cash and I have no idea if she’s planning on leaving the country.
If she doesn’t leave an electronic trail, it’s just a wild chase with no clues as to where she’s gone. If she left her phone, she doesn’t want me to find her… God, she’s out there in the city. By herself. And…she’s left me.
Where did she go? Why did she go?
Why did she leave me? I know—it’s a crazy thought to have because I was going to send her home this morning. I was going to end things with her...
But—I know my own reasons. I love her and I want to keep her safe.
What were her reasons for taking off like this?
My throat closes. My shoulders knot. A creeping sense of doom fills my belly.
Why would she leave?
What could she be doing?
The image of it enters my mind before I even think the word. A small brass key hanging from a red ribbon. “Shit! The key.”
I rush to the closet, digging through the small pocket of the overnight bag I’ve been keeping it in. It’s gone. The key is gone.
The key is gone…and so is she.
I don’t need our tech, our trackers, our security to solve this mystery. Taking the key tells me everything I need to know. She knew her phone would let me track her movements. She knew once she used that passport, boarded that plane, I would know exactly where she was headed.
She’s taken the key and she’s trying to beat me to the cabinet in the back of Sheffield’s office. She just wanted a head start. And she’s gotten one.
I flip through my phone, checking the airport's commercial flight times. I find the most recent flight that’s taken off for New York.
“Fuck.”
It just left. My visions of charging down to the airport and ripping her off the plane and spanking her ass right there in the terminal...dissipate. Reece is somewhere in the air, flying among the clouds. Anger fumes in me.
I literally cannot get to her.
If she took that flight, she had no choice but to use her ID and passport. I need to know if she is on that plane. Luckily, I have connections. I make a few calls to confirm what my gut is already telling me...
She sure as hell is. Bought her ticket at the desk. In cash. She’s flying commercial. I have a private jet that can take off within fifteen minutes of my command. I do the math.
Flying private, I can beat her there.
Just barely.
When she shows up at his office with his key in her hand, I’ll be there waiting for her. If I can make it.
I stand to pack my bags, but a lead weight in my stomach slows me down, making me drag my feet. If I can beat her there, should I? What’s best for her? I mean, just last night I decided I was getting out of her life for good. My whispered I’m love with you was my goodbye, thinking that what is best for her is to be completely uninvolved with me.
Now?
I'm not so sure. I’m finding out that saying you're going to quit someone and actually having them out of your arms are two very different things. She's gone and I'm sitting here, aching for her.
The moment I realized she was gone, it felt like my heart had been ripped out of my chest.
Like a piece of me was missing.
The very best piece of me.
I have a choice to make. I could do what I set out to do this morning and let her go, let her leave my world, my tangled web. Let her live her life and find happiness with a boy her age—even though the thought makes me want to kill any and every boy that might try—let her find whatever it is that she wants so desperately in that cabinet…and…
Let her go.
Or do what this tugging in my chest is telling me to do?
Go to her. Take her in my arms. Keep her safe the best way I know how to.
By making her my wife.
I made the promise before I even really knew her. One to a man I very much respected. Sheffield’s voice rings in my head. The last words he said to me never left me.
His hands were cold, but his eyes were warm. “Look, I’m having some health issues. I might not have long and I need you to do me a favor. When the time comes…when I pass, a friend of mine is going to bring you a brass key on a red ribbon. Promise me you won’t give Reece the key. Promise me.”
He looked so desperate I answered without asking questions. “I promise. I’ll keep the key.”
He breathed a sigh of relief. “I just want her safe. She means the world to me. You having this key… if you have the key, I know she’ll be safe…” His words trailed off.
A few weeks later, when he passed, a mutual friend brought me the key.
At first, I didn’t think much of it. I just kept it locked away in a drawer inside my desk. But then I heard that Reece had been prowling around Sheffield’s office, asking after the key. It piqued my interest. I kept tabs on her.
That’s around the time she moved into that hovel of an apartment across from The West. She started her little panty window escapades.
She started to stalk me.
I knew there was more to the key—that it really meant something to her. That if she was willing to try and seduce a strange man twice her age to get to it…
She was desperate for it.
I just didn’t know why.
Once I meet Reece and saw the desperation in her eyes, how badly she wanted that key, the lengths she was willing to go to get it, yes, I had ties to Sheffield but he was gone and Reece was right there in front of me, flesh and blood with a heart that was beating for that key.
I gave her the key, once, knowing I would take it right back, which I did, telling her she had no pockets in that silly little dress of hers. I showed it to her, even let her hold it. I did this, hoping she would tell me why she needed it, what was in that cabinet that she so badly desired. But she didn’t.
Instead, she lied.
Making up some story about how she thought ‘her father’ died of foul play and the cabinet held the truth about his death. I knew it was a lie. He was my lawyer and he had the Bachman family protection behind him. No one would touch him.
His secretary confirmed he’d not been feeling well, that he had had some chest tightness in the past but refused to seek the help of a physician. He died at his desk. As we do any time a Bachman-friendly employee dies, I investigated his death. There was no foul play. I saw the autopsy report with my own eyes. Heart attack. Ventricular fibrillation, the most common life-threatening arrhythmia. It’s an erratic, disorganized firing of impulses from the heart’s lower chambers and the heart is unable to pump blood.
Death occurs within minutes.
Why would she lie? Sheffield must be right. She shouldn’t have it, I decided. I never gave the key back. I told her I’d hold onto it for safekeeping. I held onto it and kept my promise. The key was safe and so was she… I thought.
If I go and hunt her down and rip that key out of her pretty little hand, I’ll have kept my promise to Sheffield. I’ll keep her safe from whatever danger that key opening that cabinet is going to bring her.
But I’d be pulling her back into my world. If I go now, if I make it in time and see her again…
There’s no way in hell I can leave her.
The moment I see her, I know I’m going grab her in my arms and make her mine.
I line up the jet. I call my driver. I pack my bags.
And I wait…
The next ten hours are going to be absolute hell. The waiting… god.
It’s going to kill me.
What happens with Reece and Daddy’s love story?