“I’d touch your skin. I’d spread your legs wide. I’d enjoy the way you shiver for me. The way you beg for me. But I’d force myself to take it slow. I’d get to know that sweet body of yours with my hands and my tongue.”
My breath hitches. My fingers speed up before plunging into the most intimate crevice of my body. My spine curls. Everything inside me clenches.
“Then, I would lick you, baby. Relentlessly. I wouldn’t stop until everyone in my cell block could hear you scream my fucking name.”
Those last words of his always get to me. At the height of pleasure, I turn my face into my pillow. I cry out and the soft bedding muffles the sound as Eli’s words undo me.
Yes. Eli. Eli Kingston.
My criminal penpal. Callie’s father. A man who has no freaking clue who I am.
Every girl deserves a fairytale. Unfortunately, my own fairytale is oh-so-complicated.
2 Eli
Syrup,” I grunt.
Ma startles next to me. “What’s that, dear?” She blinks in my direction.
“Pass the syrup?” I repeat, my hand outstretched, my chin gesturing toward the plastic bottle just out of arm’s length.
Cannon and Jude both pounce on the bottle at the same time. Jude grabs it up first.
My youngest brother rushes to hand over the bottle. “Here you go, man.” He grins victoriously like he’s expecting a participation ribbon.
Jude was always the goofy one.
Dad watches me carefully as I pour the sticky sweet stuff over my waffles. He hasn’t let me out of his sight since I showed up here unannounced a few hours ago. I’m starting to wonder if he’s monitoring me to make sure I don’t swipe the coin jar from the den.
My parents prepared a breakfast to ‘welcome’ me home and two of my three brothers showed up. It’s been oppressive as hell, trying to ignore the prickly awkwardness in the room.
“You want to throw a ‘please' or ‘thank you’ in there, son?” my father mumbles, reminding me that I lost all sense of etiquette while I was behind bars.
Well, guess what? Niceties weren’t really part of my daily prison routine. The whole ‘gentleman’ act has no place in jail. You say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ at every turn, and I can guarantee you won’t be winning awards for congeniality. Instead, you might find yourself on cold asphalt, in the fetal position, as a bunch of amped-up jailbirds kick the fuck out of you in the prison yard.
“Thank you,” I say to my brother, avoiding my dad’s gaze and letting the sarcasm drip from my syrup-sweet tone.
My mother sighs despairingly and gives a tragic, little where did I go wrong? head shake. She’s been walking around on eggshells. Like this is a straight-up hostage situation. Like I’m some terrifying stranger who just blasted through the inn’s front door with a heavy body bag over my shoulder and blood splatter on my T-shirt, demanding room and board.
They’re treating me like a stranger. That’s suddenly what I’ve become. A stranger.
Do they not remember that I’m their son? That I lived on this very property for decades before getting locked up? I guess this is what our relationship is going to be like from now on.
If my family keeps tiptoeing around me like this, no doubt it’ll be easy living up to my new reputation as the Kingston family asshole. They’re driving me crazy.
Despite them looking after my daughter these past couple years, I can’t help but resent them. They had all this time with her, when I didn’t.
It’s not fair. Not much is. Not anymore, at least.
Some days, I think this is life’s way of punishing me for having shit too good. I was running the family business. I was married to a beautiful woman, and had an adorable baby girl. My little family never wanted for anything. Money was rolling in, and we were happy. We had it all.
Until we didn’t.
Three years ago, I pled guilty to a laundry list of white-collar crimes. I surrendered my dreams, my plans, my future at the prison gates and let a concrete building swallow me whole.
Less than twenty-four hours ago, that same concrete building spit me out. Into a lonely parking lot, under a gray sky, with no one waiting for me. And all I could think about was getting back here, getting back to my daughter, and picking up the pieces of our broken life.
Now I’m here, ready to start over. But judging by this awkward-as-hell breakfast at my parent’s kitchen table, my family is not going to like hearing my plans.
Time to bite the bullet.
I clear my throat. “I’ll be taking Callie back to the house tonight,” I announce. “It’s time to get back to normal, and that starts with her living with me.”
Ma’s fork clatters to her plate. Dad’s coffee mug hits the table with a thump.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Eli,” Dad says warily, his voice tight.
Excuse me? “What do you mean, it’s not a good idea?” I crack my knuckles, anger already building up in me.
My brothers share a look.
There’s restraint in Cannon’s voice when he speaks. “Callie’s a great kid but sometimes it takes her a little while to warm up to people.”
I shoot him a glare. “I’m not ‘people’. I’m her father.”
He huffs out a breath. “You know what I mean.”
I sure as shit don’t.
Ma grips her cloth napkin between her hands, twisting it as she speaks. “We just think doing that would be too disruptive for Callie. She doesn’t know what’s happening, and we were thinking that maybe it would be good to move slowly on this. Introduce you two and slowly build up to her moving in with you full-time.”
My neck rears back.
