Page 84 of My Big Fat Daddy Issues

The house has four cameras exterior, motion-activated, alerts to my phone. New deadbolts. Security system she can run from hers. Not because anyone's coming — because I wasted time already and I'm not leaving another fucking thing about her or us to chance.

But that's not what matters.

What matters is the reading nook I built into the bay window of the second bedroom. She mentioned it once. Once. Passing comment years ago. I kept track of it all.

I put bookshelves in the living room because she owns more books than clothes and has been stacking them on the floor like she doesn't believe she deserves furniture. Kitchen with real counter space because she's been teaching herself to cook from YouTube videos at two in the morning and she thinks I don't know. I know. I know everything about this woman. I've been paying attention since she walked through my door, wrecked and furious and so beautiful it felt like a lens flare straight to the chest.

"Grant." Her voice has gone strange. Thin. "Whose house is this?"

I turn the engine off. "Yours."

Silence. Then, "Mine," she repeats.

"Yours and Bea's. Sort of, it's ours baby. Four bedrooms, three baths. Master's set up for you. Second bedroom has the reading nook. There's a full apartment over the garage for Bea to destroy however she wants. You said she had a shitty apartment and an asshole landlord and you care about her, so I do too. We'll stay here until you finish school, then you can pick out whatever youwant, wherever you want. Your pussy has Daddy by the short hairs, baby. I'll burn down the world for you then rebuild it however you tell me to."

Wren is staring through the windshield, her throat working. She looks like a little girl trying to puzzle through how to express all the new feelings she's discovering.

"You bought me a house."

"I bought us a house." I turn to face her. "I move in soon. I'll get things settled at my other place. The security is installed. Neighbors are a retired couple on the east side and a family with a golden retriever on the west, and I've already introduced myself to both and told them my fiancé lives here while she's going to school and I'll be moving in as well."

She exhales. It sounds like it's been trapped in her body for weeks. Maybe years. "You talked to the neighbors."

"Background checked them."

"You background checked the—" Both hands press to her cheeks. She's making little choking sounds like she's laughing or crying. That thing she does where the two crash into each other and I can't tell which is winning. "Grant Sullivan, you absolute psycho. I love you so much."

"Did you not hear what I said?" I grunt, reaching over to grab a handful of that hair I love to pull so much. "Fiancé. Did you grasp that?"

I tug at the roots, pulling her mouth over to mine and shoving my tongue through her lips until she's panting and twisting in the seat.

"Fiancé." She finally breathes against my lips.

"Yes, my daughter is going to be my wife. Fuck the world. I'm going to be happy and the only thing that will make me happy is making you happy, so fuck it. We're doing this baby. I've put enough cum inside your little tight girl pussy to make a flock of babies already. So, you'll be my baby, making my babies and I'll handle it all. Your job is to take care of my cock and be happy."

I lean across the console and pull her hands down from her wet cheeks. Mascara migrating south. If I had my camera, I'd shoot this moment and print it twelve feet wide. The most beautiful portrait I'd ever take.

"Come see the inside."

***

She laugh-cries at the reading nook. She sits in it and runs her hands over the built-in shelves and the cushion I had upholstered in a green I picked because it matches her eyes.

She cries again in the kitchen when she opens the cabinets and finds them full. Peanut butter. The specific crackers she likes. Chocolate cherry coffee.

Vitamins and supplements and a printed schedule of when and what to take because I know she forgets to eat when she's stressed and that shit ends under my roof.

She screams the fucking roof down when she sees all the bottles of her Pomegranate Sunrise scented shit in the bathroom cabinet.

She skips around and calls Bea from the living room. I lean against the kitchen counter and let the shrieking wash over me — Bea's voice through the speaker, a string of profanity that would make a sailor blush, and somewhere in there, unmistakably, the phrase I knew that man was daddy as fuck.

Wren shoves the phone against her chest giggling. Too late. I heard it and it's fucking true.

I am daddy as fuck.

When she hangs up, she struts back to me like a pimped-out peacock. That look on her face — the one that's equal parts wonder and want, tells me everything in my life has brought me here and it's all fucking perfect. She stops a foot away and I hook my fingers into her waistband and drag her against me.

"You did all this in a week," she says.