Chapter 30: Daddy’s Dirty Little Secret: Chapter 30

In my bedroom I shut the door, turned to press my palms against Xander’s chest. His heart was pounding, probably in shock or fear, or uncertainty about the vocalized change to our relationship. No more no-strings-attached sex, this had developed into something we both felt but I had never been brave enough to speak about.

“Kiss me,” I whispered to him, and his hands, resting on my hips, gripped me firmly.

Xander’s lips descended on mine, searching me with stubble and teeth scratching.

My lips parted under his desperate onslaught, teeth clashing lightly as Xander’s tongue invaded my mouth, coaxing me further into the kiss. I could taste hunger in him, and something else, something raw and untamed that unleashed a primal response deep inside me. Moaning softly, I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him closer. He responded by sliding one hand up my shirt to fist in my braided hair, angling my head back. Using this newfound access, Xander devoured me, the other hand roaming down my spine to settle on my butt cheek, squeezing tightly.

I felt like melting into him, but there was too much adrenaline pumping through my veins—pure need and want took over my senses. Breaking the kiss, I bit his lower lip, lingered for a second, then mewled, “Come with me.”

This time I didn’t take his hand. I walked toward my bathroom, undressing as I walked, and started the shower. It’d been days since I felt clean, and the intimacy of being totally exposed with him, lights on, eyes open, was what I wanted.

He followed me. I felt his eyes pinned on me the entire way. By the time the steam was rolling through the bathroom, I was nude, and he was shucking his pants.

As Xander pulled off his socks, the outline of his erection straining against his boxers was readily visible. Eyes locked, I pulled him into the shower with me. The hot water pelted our skin, steam fogged the glass door. Xander cupped my face under the spray, running his thumb around my chin and down my jawline and kissed me softly. “I didn’t know if I’d see you again,” he confessed hoarsely.

His admission, coupled with his heated gaze, sent a wave of liquid heat between my legs. I leaned in closer until our foreheads touched and our breaths mingled together with the steamy air. His hands caressed my back; mine slid around his body and pulled him closer.

“I don’t plan to leave ever again.” The nightmare, as far as I knew, was over. Hayes was a thing of the past, and the threat he posed was over. The only mess left to sort out was being sorted out right now between us. “I meant when I said I love you, Xander.”

His jaw clenched, and rather than saying anything, he kissed me hard, pinning me against the shower wall. My hand slid down to his dick, fingers curling around its girth. Xander growled out a low groan, his hand tangled in my damp hair as I slid his cock against my wet core.

Xander groaned, his grip on my hair tightening as I teased him mercilessly. I rubbed him against me faster and faster, his tip just inside my entrance.

“I missed this,” I mewled out past the pleasure consuming us both.

“Jesus—Amelia,” He groaned helplessly against my ear, his hand cupping my breast and pinching my nipple, heightening the sensation.

“I want you,” I whispered, guiding him inside me with a shaky breath.

Xander obliged, burying himself, his hand shaking with restraint as he pressed against the shower wall to brace himself. “I need you,” he growled as his hips rocked into mine in a primal rhythm as the water rained down on our intertwined bodies.

Eyes locked with mine, he bottomed out, only to pull back and drive in again, and again. Greedily, I took everything he had to give me—every thrust, every groan, swallowed every sweet word he whispered like it was my last meal. The intensity grew sharper as our breathing quickened with each thrust, hands clenched tighter, and kisses became more desperate. Soon enough we were both panting, kissing sloppily between moans and gasps. His hand tangled in my hair had me angled just so his thrusts hit that spot deep inside that sent sparks of pleasure radiating along my spine.

“God—Amelia,” Xander gasped above me, his neck straining with exertion as he pistoned in and out of me, and the way his pelvic bone rubbed my clit, I was on the edge of coming undone.

With a soft keening sound I came apart, and stars exploded behind my eyelids. Xander’s grip on my hair, the wet wall against my back, and then nothing but pure pleasure washed over me like a wave. The sensation of being so completely connected to someone after days of isolation had my vision doubling as I clung to him for dear life.

I twitched and jerked, clung to his shoulders trying not to draw blood. My pussy clenched around him, and he slowed to a glorious syrupy pace that had my insides melting, and his lips covered mine again. His stubble was rough on my skin, but the way I nipped at his lips repaid him for what little discomfort it was.

He let my legs find their composure before he pulled out and turned me around. With my chest pressing against the shower wall, he grabbed my hips and placed soft kisses on the back of my shoulder.

“Jesus,” I panted loudly, “Xander that was⁠—”

“Shh,” he cut me off, kissing each vertebra all the way down my spine, keeping me on my tiptoes as his hand roamed between my thighs, seeking out my wet core.

“I’m not done with you yet.”

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw him kneel. His teeth nipped the back of my thigh and he buried his face there, stubble scratching my most sensitive places.

“Xander,” I gasped out barely coherently. He ignored me and kept teasing me with featherlight touches and slick kisses that had my toes curling and my hands fisting on the wall for support.

“Xander,” I held my breath as he circled my entrance with the tip of his tongue, before lapping up my juices. “Oh God, that feels so⁠—”

He continued to torment me relentlessly, increasing my pleasure. At one point I was sure I would pass out from the sensation of his warm tongue on my core. When his fingers slipped into me and teased that rough patch of skin, I felt a second orgasm crest.

I moaned, my back arching off the wall as he toyed with me. His talented tongue and fingers worked in combination until I was a quivering mess against him, caught up in the devilishly delicious sensations he evoked in me. I grunted hoarsely as I shattered around his fingers for the second time, the aftershocks making me twitch against him.

When my knees threatened to buckle, he held me up. My palms splayed on the shower wall, my hips bucking back into his face. The convulsions were stronger than the last time, and pleasure radiated into each of my limbs, down to my fingertips and toes.

As the orgasm passed, he licked me clean, then rose, keeping his hands on my hips, and guided himself back into me.

“Christ,” I gasped.

“I know,” he growled in my ear, and then the only sound was the water pelting our skin, and our harsh breathing.

Xander drove into me relentlessly, stretching me to the brink and beyond, and my inner muscles clenched around him, milking him greedily. I needed him inside me, needed this connection like I needed oxygen.

One hand left my hip, pressed on my lower back to bend me over, and he backed up as he pulled me toward him. The spray of water hit my hips as he began thrusting into me again.

His increased fervor had me biting down on my lip to stifle the moans, but he sucked the life out of me with each thrust, drawing moisture from my very pores. As if he sensed my surrender, his hands tightened along my hip bones and he thrust roughly into me, as I reached between my legs to rub myself.

“Amelia,” he called out hoarsely above the drumming water.

I felt him pulse inside me and clenched around him tighter before pitching over that precipice for the third time in as many minutes into the abyss of sensation overload. He pumped into me as I came down from my high and when he pulled out and I straightened, he turned me in his arms. My head rested on his shoulder; he washed my back. Then we traded places in the water and he washed my hair.

After we dried off, he led me to bed where I curled up and he coiled around me like a serpent with its prey, not letting me go. His arms wrapped around me, his breath in the crook of my neck as I drifted off into deep thought.

His chest rose and fell against my back, like he was trying to breathe around something heavier than air. I didn’t speak. I didn’t move. I stayed tucked into his chest, waiting for whatever he needed to say. There was a pause before it came, the kind that meant it had been living inside him for a long time.

“I asked her to stay,” he said. “I stood at the door, and I asked her not to go. I didn’t cry. I didn’t yell. I just asked. And she left anyway.”

I shifted just enough to look at him. He wasn’t looking at me. His eyes were on the ceiling, the lines in his forehead soft but drawn. He looked like someone remembering a scar.

“I didn’t see her again,” he said. “No phone calls. No letter. She didn’t just leave the house. She erased herself. My dad never talked about it. I think he thought ignoring it would help, but it didn’t.”

I reached for his hand and found it resting near the hem of the blanket. When I laced my fingers through his, he held on like he needed to.

“I thought maybe I wasn’t enough to stay for,” he said. “That’s the part I couldn’t shake. I think I stopped letting people get close after that.”

He said it simply—no drama, no attempt to draw sympathy—just the bare truth. I swallowed the knot forming at the back of my throat and leaned in a little closer.

“I’m not going to make promises I can’t keep,” I said. “But I’m not the kind of woman who gives up when things get hard.”

He didn’t answer. His thumb moved slowly against mine. “Then why’d you quit?” he asked. “No warning. No call. Just gone.”

I expected the question. Still, it landed harder than I thought it would. I pushed myself up a little and turned toward him so I could see his face clearly.

“Because staying started to feel like lying to myself,” I said. “I was pretending it didn’t mean anything when it did. I was in love with you, and you made it clear from the beginning that it wasn’t supposed to be more than sex. I didn’t know how to keep showing up like it didn’t hurt. And then the baby …”

His brow furrowed, just slightly. He didn’t speak, so I went on.

“I wanted you to be happy, even if it wasn’t with me. I saw how it bothered you—when I was around Godwin, when we left meetings together. You didn’t want anything more from it, but it still got under your skin. You said you had zero feelings for me.”

He exhaled through his nose, the corner of his mouth twitching like he might argue but couldn’t.

“And then I found out about the baby,” I said. “That was the last thing you needed. If I’d told you, you would’ve stepped in. You would’ve felt obligated. And I didn’t want that. Not from you. Not when I didn’t understand what you felt at all.”

He looked down at the space between us, then back at me. “What was going on with Godwin?”

I smiled for the first time since the conversation started. I had to fight back a chuckle, but the snicker still escaped, and the grin came despite my reluctance. “Godwin is so gay, Xander,” I said, and a quiet laugh slipped out. “He came out to me over microwave popcorn in the break room a month after he started. He makes playlists for his boyfriend’s cats. There was never a threat there.”

Xander let out a quiet, embarrassed laugh. “I hate that that makes me feel better.” I loved the way his smile reached his eyes.

I traced a small circle against his shoulder with the pad of my thumb. “You don’t have to be jealous. It was always you. Even when I didn’t want it to be. Before we even had this dumb agreement.”

He looked at me again, his expression unreadable. “You love me?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yes.”

“I don’t know how to do this,” he said. “I’ve been single for a long time. I don’t know what it means to share space with someone—really share it.”

“You don’t have to figure it out all at once,” I said. “We can take this one decision at a time.”

“I’ve never had to think about anyone but myself.”

“Well, that’s definitely over,” I said. “There’s no version of this that’s going to be NSA from here on out.”

That pulled another real smile from him. He leaned back, eyes still on me, and for the first time since we crawled into this bed, he looked a little lighter.

“And you can be patient with me while I figure it out?” He searched me with his eyes and I nodded at him.

“Gotta practice having a mother’s patience sometime …”

We didn’t say anything else for a while. He pulled me close again, my cheek against his collarbone, his hand smoothing along my back like he was still making sure I was real. And I stayed there, wrapped in the quiet, wondering how something that had started as casual could have ever felt small.

Xander slept beside me, one arm resting across my ribs. I lay awake, watching the shadows shift across the ceiling. My body ached in the way that came after fear had drained out and left something hollow behind.

I kept thinking about my father.

He had tried to fix it. He’d walked into that house with a suitcase full of money and the look of a man who already knew it wasn’t enough. I didn’t know how he would repay Xander. I wasn’t sure either of them had thought that far ahead.

It wasn’t just the money. That part could be counted. What Xander gave me was harder to name. He’d come for me when I didn’t ask him to. He had done it without conditions, without waiting to be needed. That wasn’t something my father could ever return.

And now there was the baby. The silence between us when we parted earlier had said more than anything. I didn’t know how Dad felt about it. I didn’t know if he saw it as a burden or a second chance. I didn’t ask. I wasn’t ready to hear if he was afraid of what it meant for me, or worse, ashamed.

I couldn’t forget that he was the reason I ended up in that room at all. Even though I’d forgiven him, I still didn’t know how to carry it.

There was love between us. I believed that. But love didn’t erase the things we had to face.

And there were still so many things left to face.