Page 28 of Daddy's Girl

So I tell him—about fossil hunting with my father, about the geology classes I took in the summers, the books I read about how the earth formed, about the dream I'd once had of working in natural history museums. He listens with surprising interest, asking questions that show he's truly paying attention.

"You could go back to school," he says when I finish. "Online, maybe. Or at the community college in town."

"Maybe." The possibility feels distant but not impossible. "I'd need to figure out the debt from my dad's medical bills first."

Jack's expression shifts. "How much debt?"

I tell him, the number still staggering to me. He doesn't flinch.

"We'll figure it out," he says simply, like erasing six figures of debt is a minor inconvenience. "Together."

The word settles between us as I let his heartbeat carry me away from the problems of the outside world.

"Together," I agree, the stuffed wolf still clutched in my hands, a talisman against all the shadows that might come for us.

And for the first time since my father died, the future doesn't look like something to run from—it looks like something to build. One stone, one day, one rule at a time.

Eight

Jack

"It's just ice cream, Jack. Not a firing squad."

Delaney's voice floats up from beside me, almost childlike in its lightness. Her hand—Christ, so fucking tiny—disappears completely in my grip, her delicate bones fragile enough to snap if I'm not careful.

We're walking down Wildfire’s main street, and I can feel every pair of eyes on us. It’s like they know.

You fucked that little girl rotten, you filthy old man.

She’s still filthy with me. Sore and red and walking with a slight trepidation.

But she looked at me like I’d just given her a lifetime pass to the amusement park. Her legs wide, ‘more, more,’ she’d rattled in that sex rough voice, calling me Daddy and giving me the keys to the fucking kingdom with that title.

Clearly, I’d do anything for this girl, because she dragged my ass not only off the mountain but into town. God, I fucking hate town. Small towns aren’t the fodder for romance novels most think.

They’re incestuous and judgmental. Quirky, yes. But they’re full of people who seem to think we’re all one big found family and instead most of them are just a pain in the ass.

It started with a question over breakfast—"Is there anywhere to get ice cream around here?"—and suddenly I was making a list in my head of everything she needed. Clothes. Toiletries. All that female shit I've never had to think about before. Practical necessities. Because if she is staying—and sheisfucking staying, even if I have to chain her to my bed—she can’t keep living out of that one pathetic backpack and my shirts that swallow her whole.

Two hours in Wildfire's only boutique, watching her eyes go wide as I told the saleswoman to give her one of everything. Panties. Bras. Jeans that actually fit her tiny waist. Sundresses because I want to flip up that hem and let my hands roam any fucking time I please.

Tampons and whatever the hell else she tried to whisper to the clerk until I growled that she didn't need to hide anything from me. The woman's eyebrows had nearly hit her hairline when I pulled out a roll of hundreds thick enough to choke a horse, but she was smart enough not to comment.

Nine bags sit in the back of my truck now. Nine bags of things that say she's not temporary. That she's mine to provide for.

The sundress she wore out of the store is the color of the mountain sky, barely covering the tops of those creamy thighs. She fought me as if her protests were going to stop me from giving her everything she needed to settle in next to me in this life.

“It's too much, Jack"and"I can’t pay you back"—until I growled in her ear that the money means nothing to me. What matters is marking her as mine with something other than the bruises my fingers leave on her hips when I'm buried inside her.

The plastic spoon in her ice cream cup scrapes against the bottom as she chases the last melting swirls of strawberry. Pink, like her nipples. Like her pussy when I've worked it raw with my mouth and fingers.

My jaw clenches as Bill Carson from the hardware store pauses mid-sweep to stare at her legs. His eyes are hungry, starved. I imagine my boot on his throat, pressing until cartilage pops. Maureen from the diner whispers something to her daughter behind the counter as we drift by, Delaney chirping on about how the ice caps pushed the granite down from Canada into Michigan. Their eyes track her movements, and I don’t like being on display.

"Your face is doing that thing again," she says, bumping her hip against my thigh.

"What thing?"

"That'I'm calculating how many bodies I can bury before sundown' thing." She tilts her face up, eyes sparkling with mischief. "It's hot, but maybe not for ice cream."

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