 by Dani Wyatt.jpg)
Total pages in book: 28
Estimated words: 26514 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 133(@200wpm)___ 106(@250wpm)___ 88(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 26514 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 133(@200wpm)___ 106(@250wpm)___ 88(@300wpm)
I never thought my solitary life on my farm was lonely. I swore off women long ago, so children were never on my radar. But when the big city attorney showed up in a limousine with Ruby in the backseat, hugging a Louis Vuitton teddy bear, I knew my simple, small-town life would never be the same.
As the years passed, we worked the farm side by side, her life of luxury long forgotten. Her eighteenth birthday has come and gone, and my feelings have turned sinful. Out in the open, she calls me Eli, but alone in her room at night, she calls me Daddy. Her sweet smile and feminine curves call to me in ways I can no longer ignore.
I fear one day she will want that life back. She will spread her wings and try to fly away from here. From me. But when the forbidden fire between us ignites, there’s no turning back. I will do whatever it takes to bind her to me here forever before she finds out the truth.
Whatever. It. Takes.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
CHAPTER 1
Ruby
Uncle Eli would not be happy right now.
And more and more, all I want to do is make him happy. In ways I know I shouldn’t.
He’s a quarter mile away in the east dairy barn, the sky a warm pink and orange above the spinning metal cupola as the sun brushes lower in the fluffy clouds above. From my place on the window bench Eli built for me just after I arrived here, to my new life a decade ago, I focus on the burlap-covered bulletin board that’s stuck with photos, ribbons and other tokens of the last ten years.
At the bottom, yellowed newspaper clippings about the disappearance of Reginald Morton, millionaire playboy and businessman, who was lost in the Amazon Rainforest when a treasure hunt turned into tragedy, seem a sad footnote to my life now.
Reginald was my father. What happened to his presumed millions, no one knows for sure, but the newspapers stories and other investigators so much as told us my father’s so called ‘empire’ was really just a house of cards. A shell game. And in the end, there was no money, only debt for which he paid with his life.
Over the years, I stopped caring about finding out the truth. My life here on the farm isn’t limousines and Louboutins, but you can’t plow the field with a limo and you certainly can’t work the farm in Louboutins, but I love my clogs and the 1967 rusty Chevy truck Eli rebuilt for me for my sixteenth birthday.
It’s not Park Avenue but I’d rather have a poor, rural farmer for a dad than a rich, dead playboy.
I press a finger to my lips, urging Marcy to shush as her voice rises.
“I’m eighteen. I can have sex six ways ‘til Sunday and twice on Tuesday with whoever I want!”
She sits crossed-legged on the antique quilt that covers my bed, applying tiny white polka-dots to the tips of her jet-black nails with the head of a pin.
“My parents can’t forbid me from seeing David any more than they can forbid me from having the baby.”
I can feel the heat on my face, part embarrassment and part annoyance on my uncle’s behalf.
It’s not that Eli thinks sex is bad. Or shameful. At least, he’s never said so much. But, I remember he and my dad talking when I was little, before I came here to live. We always spent holidays together and I remember my dad prodding Eli for information on his female conquests. My dad seemed to love to share that sort of thing, but Eli?
Not so much.
I’d usually be hiding around the corner or in a closet, always hanging on every minute and word with my handsome Uncle Eli, who seemed so mysterious and strong with his patched up blue jeans and snap up plaid shirts. When my dad was into the whiskey the conversations would turn less…family friendly and there would be talk of things a little girl shouldn’t hear. Back then my grandfather and grandmother were still around as well, but as farmers do, they were early to bed and early to rise, so they missed out on a lot of the less savory conversations.
Eli was sort of adopted by my grandfather, but they weren’t related. Not by blood, anyway.
Eli’s mom married my grandfather after his first wife, my dad’s mom, passed away. Then Eli’s mother ran off with a traveling salesman and was never heard from again, but my grandfather still cared about his stepson.
I think he would have happily kept Eli around, but when he remarried again his mom’s father Dennis asked to have him to help out on the farm here in Mumford.
Uncle Eli stayed with his own grandfather after that, but my grandpa was his only sort of father figure and he was always just Uncle Eli to me. Grandpa Norman, my father’s father, always made it a point to make Eli feel just like family, step or not. Grandpa was a good man. Worked hard. Had his own farm and went to church holding hands with Grandma Ginny every Sunday until she passed away when I was six.
He gave away extra food from his crops when he could. Never uttered a bad word about anyone as far as I can remember, and as I got older, I sort of wondered how my father fell so far from the tree.
But, those nights when dad was into the drink and pushing Eli to spill about women or sex or whatever, all he would ever say was they were all cheaters and liars and he wanted nothing to do with them. It made me sad, even as a little girl, that he felt that way. But deep inside, shameful as it was, I was happy he didn’t have someone in his life.
A little girl crushing on her tall, dark and handsome uncle was perfectly normal, right?