Malta with My Best Friend’s Dad by Flora Ferrari

Chapter Nine

Kelly

We sit at the small table in the corner of the apartment, Kane resting his forearms on it and making it look like a toy. After my revelation, he turned away as I silently put my panties back on, and now here we are, waiting for the other person to speak.

“Well?” I blurt eventually when I feel as though too much time has passed.

Oh, he’d said. What the heck sort of response is that? What am I supposed to do with that?

“When I said you belong to me,” he says, his eyes burning into me, his whole body bulging so that every tendon and muscle strains against his skin, “I meant it. I meant…”

“What?” I urge.

“The second I saw you step out of the taxi, Kelly—”

“Wait, you were watching us then?”

He smirks. “Why, you like the idea of me studying your curvy body when you don’t know about it, eh?”

A shiver moves through me, sensation whispering over my pussy, still raw from what we did, from how he made my wildest taboo fantasies come true.

I make myself nod even as ridiculous nerves move through me – ridiculous because of what we just did, of the stickiness between my thighs and the feeling of burning heat moving endlessly through me.

“I knew I had to have you,” he growls. “I didn’t know who you were at first. I thought Lena must’ve come to Malta with some friend. The last time I saw you, you were a kid with braces and a shy look on your face. Now you’re… Fuck, Kelly, now you’re twenty and you’re curvy and you’re so damn womanly you make me want to roar.”

I grip the edge of the table to stop my hands from shaking, to try and stop the lust from making a scorching path through me, but it’s difficult as all my nerves start to pulse.

Signals flare in my mind, telling me to leap across the table and sit on his lap, grind my still-wet sex against his manhood, let him feel how desperately I want to give myself to him.

“But it wasn’t just lust,” he says firmly. “It was so much more. I can’t explain it. I’ve never felt anything like this before.”

I stare, captivated, the sunlight resting on his face, making his eyes glint with even more feral fury.

“What else?” I whimper, my voice shivering as much as my body, as my resolve.

It’s difficult to keep Lena at the forefront of my mind, to remember all the thousand moments we’ve shared that should make this impossible.

I remember how she wept when her mother died, how I held her on the playground and made a daisy chain to try and cheer her up.

“I knew I had to own you.”

He clenches his fists, leaning forward like he’s ready to hurt any man who’d try to come between us.

But what can he do about Lena?

“It wasn’t just my need to claim you, to push inside of you until I can feel how hungrily your body wants to cream for me. It wasn’t just my desire to bend you over and stroke my cock against your clit until you’re begging for it…”

His smirk twitches when I make a moaning sound, squeezing my legs together.

It’s like he triggers something inside of me every time he speaks, as though he’s reaching into my mind and tugging at the threads of my fiercest desires, repeating them back to me in a way only my lifetime lover could.

My forever man.

Mine.

Does he want the same?

“It’s so hard not to get carried away with you.” He sucks in a shivering breath. “The second – and I mean the moment – I laid eyes on you, I knew we were going to be a family. I knew we were going to be together forever. I knew we were destined to have children and… and it’s a fucking compulsion inside of me, Kelly. It’s like something ancient and primal is roaring at me to paint your womb with my seed.”

He trails off, laughing, shaking his head.

“Does that make any goddamn sense?”

“Yes,” I cry, nodding firmly. “It does. Of course, it does.”

“Of course?” He raises an eyebrow. “It doesn’t seem so obvious to me. And that, and that…”

His chest is heaving, every part of him primed like a hunter from thirty thousand years ago, stalking a shadowed forest as though he’s getting ready to take down a giant beast all by himself, as though he’s getting ready to drag a fresh kill back to the cave and feed me, us, our family.

“And what?” I whisper.

He reaches across the table and takes my hand, squeezing it as softly as he’s able. But even so, I feel all the pent-up pressure in his touch, as though any second he could drag me back to the couch and bend me over.

Then he’d drive up inside of me, even as I tell him I’m not ready, even as I tell him I don’t want to disappoint him.

Even as I tell him we’re betraying Lena.

The messiness of this situation thunders into me as he stares, eyes intense and dreamy, pinning me in place.

“Your virginity makes me want you more,” he snarls. “It means no other man has ever got to feel your precious pussy. It means that when I take you – hard, like the fucking beast I am – I’ll be the only man you’ll ever feel inside of you. When I say I’m claiming you, sweet Kelly, I mean it. I mean you belong to me. And your slit most of all.”

I gasp and squeeze down.

“This is the part where you call me crazy,” he says.

“No.” I shake my head firmly. “Those thoughts, those crazy thoughts you say you’ve been having… I’ve had them too. It’s like this swirling need inside of me. It’s like my body is sending me messages. How crazy is that, Kane?”

“I would’ve thought I was bat-shit before I laid eyes on you.” His thumb strokes tantalizingly across my knuckles. “But now? Not so much. I don’t know what’s happening between us, but it’s big. It’s important.”

I try to fight the tears that spring to my eyes, that rise and start to slide down my cheeks. But it’s impossible as a thousand memories of Lena swell up inside of me, as I relive the million moments that made us best friends.

“Kelly, Kelly.” Kane drags his chair around the table, wrapping his arm around me and squeezing me close to him. “What is it?”

I cry into his firm chest, the sobs tearing a jagged path through me, tearing me up inside. “I’ve had a crush on you for so long. I’ve always dreamed of this moment…”

“You have?” he growls, his fingers moving through my hair.

“Forever.” I sob. “But I always thought to myself, well, it can never happen because he’d never want me. And then you went missing. But now you’re telling me my dreams could come true.”

“They can.”

I throw myself back, staring up at him. “How can you say that? Do you think Lena’s going to throw us a freaking parade when she finds out? And you said you couldn’t even tell her you were alive. Which means – what – you’re going to leave Malta and disappear back to God knows where again? Is that it? You haven’t explained how any of this could work, Kane.”

“Kelly, calm down—”

I leap to my feet, slicing my hand through the air. “Don’t tell me to calm down.”

He follows me and grabs my shoulders, pushing me up against the wall and kissing me with rough force, kissing me so that I have no choice but to listen to the lust inside of me and kiss him back. Even now, in the midst of my anger and sadness, I find my body tingling at his touch.

Groaning, he slides his hand up my leg, further and further until he’s almost at my sex.

It takes everything I have to break it off and spin away from him, turning with my hand raised.

“No, Kane. You don’t just get to kiss me and stop my questions. None of this makes any sense.”

He sighs darkly. “I know, Kelly. I fucking know that. But it doesn’t change how I feel.”

“But what about your daughter? What about my best friend?”

He runs a hand through his hair, a gesture I recognize from my lifelong crush on him, a gesture that means he has no freaking idea how to answer the question.

Returning to the table, he drops down with another sigh, shaking his head. “All I know is I can’t let you go.”