Everything was working out perfectly. Almost too perfectly. I refused to believe that we were meant to be anything other than lovers in love.
I finished worshipping Wilder’s delectable cock and wiped the corner of my mouth before climbing up his body. We slept naked every night, keeping warm by the mixed heat of our bodies under the covers. With my cheek against his bare chest, Wilder traced his fingers along the side of my jaw.
“I’d kiss you right now, but…” he whispered.
“It’s okay.” I gripped him tighter, tucking my hand under his side. “I just want to lay here for a bit.”
He let me linger for a while before gently nudging me off him. “I’m going to hop in the shower.”
I watched his fine ass as he strutted out of my room. He was mine. Wilder Van Cleef was mine.
And every cell in my twenty-five-year-old body was his.
“Oh, forgot to tell you,” he said as he popped his head back in the doorway. “Can’t do dinner tonight. My dad’s in town. I’m supposed to go meet his new wife, or some shit like that.” He sauntered back toward the bed, placing a kiss on my forehead. “Believe me, I’d rather be spending the evening with you.”
* * *
“Why are you acting so weird?” Coco asked as we shared a cab to dinner that night. We were headed to meet our new stepfather-to-be and his son, who coincidentally also lived in the city.
I hadn’t said anything to Wilder. When he mentioned he was meeting his father’s new family the same night I was supposed to meet my mother’s new fiancé, a sickness had settled in the pit of my stomach.
I thought maybe if I didn’t think about the fact that our relationship seemed to be entwined in coincidence, it wouldn’t be true. Stranger things had happened, of that I was sure. We couldn’t possibly be the children of two people who were planning to marry.
Though we were still in the getting-to-know you phase, we’d talked about our parents and found humor in the fact that they were both love addicts, but we’d never talked details beyond that. I knew his dad’s name was Vince, but that was it.
“Hey, what’s Mom’s fiancé’s name?” I asked Coco.
She scrunched her nose. “It starts with a V. Vance, maybe? No. Vince. I think it’s Vince. Pretty sure. Why?”
The words refused to come out. If I didn’t say it out loud, it couldn’t possibly be true. I waved her off, thanking the stars when a text message on her phone stole her attention.
The cab dropped us off in front of a quaint little French bistro in the East Village. From the sidewalk, we saw Mom and her new guy sitting at a table by the window. His thick head of chocolate brown hair was flecked with gray at the temples, and though his paunch gave away his age, his profile was strikingly similar to Wilder’s.
This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening.
My legs threatened to give out from underneath me with each step we took toward the restaurant. I wanted to turn and run. I wanted to pretend this was all a bad dream. An alternate reality. A glitch in the matrix. That I wasn’t about to find out that the man I was falling in love with wasn’t going to be off-limits in every sense of the word.
“Girls!” my mom chirped the moment she saw us. She popped up out of her seat, her blonde hair hanging in loose curls around her face. She looked older since the last time I saw her. I focused on the lines stacked across her forehead as I avoided looking Vince’s way. “Vince, this is my oldest daughter, Dakota.”
Vince stood up and shook Coco’s hand. She smiled like the classy woman she’d become over the years and took a seat.
“And this is my baby, Addison,” my mom gushed. She wrapped her arm around my side and pulled me in. “Everybody says we look just alike.”
I stared at the empty seat next to Vince as my mom rambled on about our identical features. I supposed we did look similar. We were flesh and blood, after all. But Tammy Lynn’s face had been weathered and leathered over the years. She’d lived a hard life. A beauty queen who peaked in high school, she never quite noticed when her looks gradually faded over the years. The only time her age seemed to blur was when her eyes lit up and her full lips twisted into a smile.
Men seemed to gravitate toward her infectious laugh, big boobs, and her ability to morph into whatever the hell kind of girlfriend they wanted her to be. After they got tired of her tofu personality, they usually moved on to something else. It happened every time.
“Hi, Addison.” Vince extended his right hand, and I returned the gesture, forcing myself to look him in the eyes.
Those eyes.
Those aquamarine eyes that matched the very ones I lost myself in on a nightly basis. Two tropical lagoons that made the rest of the world fade away, if only for an hour or two.
“Sorry I’m late,” a man’s voice startled me back into the moment. But it wasn’t just any man’s voice.
“Wilder, my boy!” Vince said, wrapping his son in a big bear hug. He looked at Wilder like he wanted to ruffle his fingers through his hair. “Dakota, Addison, this is my son, Wilder.”
Wilder’s face fell as our eyes met. He offered a cordial smile to my mother as he shook her hand, and we all found our seats as soon as the server brought by a tray of water.
“So,” my mother said, grinning wide and clasping her hands together as she stared into Vince’s eyes. Judging by the way she was acting, it may as well have been Christmas morning. All she ever wanted was a nuclear family, like the ones she grew up watching on T.V. in the sixties and seventies. A modern-day Brady Bunch or Leave it to Beaver. “How about this. Girls, you always said you wished you had a brother growing up. How old are you, Wilder?”