Every promise I’ve ever made, I’ve kept. Every line I’ve drawn, I’ve held.
Until her.
Faye Bennett. My stepdaughter. Twenty-three years younger than me, with jet-black hair and cerulean blue eyes that cut straight through the walls I spent a lifetime building.
I married her mother over foreclosure papers…
a business deal, nothing more. There was never love, never heat, never a single night that made my heart move the way one look from Faye does.
Evelyn’s will chains us together for one growing season. Pruning to harvest. Side by side, dawn to dusk. I tell myself I can manage the vineyard and keep my distance.
Then Faye slides a contract across the table with her signature already on it, giving me permission to come to her while she sleeps.
Something possessive and starving tears open inside me, and I stop fighting it.
Now I go to her room every night. I watch her sleep, and I take what she offered. I edge her until she whimpers my name without waking. She calls me Daddy, and it makes me want to breed her until there’s no doubt she belongs to me.
I’m not a gentle man. I’m not a patient one. But for her, I’ll be whatever she needs — protector, provider, the hands that hold her together when the world tries to tear her apart.
Anyone who threatens her will answer to me.
And I will never let her go.
