Teach Me Daddy: A Mountain Man’s Secret Baby Romance

by Hart, Rye

  I’d marked her in the ultimate way and that worried me.

  I was clean. I had no worries about that. I got checked out multiple times a year by the best doctors in the country, but I never intended to have sex with her without some sort of protection. I wasn’t concerned about catching anything or giving her anything in return, and the mere fact that I let my guard down enough to forget something that important showed the influence she already had over me.

  The influence I never wanted to leave in the first place.

  As I stood there looking over the city of New York, I realized I didn’t even know her name. I’d spilled myself into her and pulled orgasms from her body that covered her in a sheen of sweat, and yet I had no idea what to call her.

  Nothing other than my songbird.

  In the end, it was better this way. I couldn’t see her or talk with her again. I could never reveal myself. With my line of work and the war I’d sunk myself into, there was too much risk for her.

  Too much risk to ruin the innocence she still carried with her.

  My enemies would love to send a message. Something stronger than just petty acts of vandalism and buying up property. I couldn’t give my enemies anything they could use against me or the family I now headed up since my father’s death. If I took this woman under my wing—if I succumbed to her the way I had tonight—she would be the ultimate bargaining chip. The one thing that made me weak in the eyes of my enemies.

  Plus, a woman like her could never love a monster like me; not if she knew the things I’d done in my lifetime. I wanted to remember the look of adoration on her face just before I blindfolded her.

  The glass of whisky I was holding in my hand shattered in my grip. I felt like a piece of shit. I ruined the most beautiful thing to ever step foot into my club. I could never see her again, and that was the vow I made to myself that night. I could never see my perfect princess again.

  My beautiful little songbird.

  I had to focus on my business, on crushing my enemies, and I had to forget about tonight. She was just another woman who satisfied my appetite, and nothing else.

  But even I knew that was a lie.

  My hand bled as I watched the broken glass fall to the ground. My phone rang in my pocket, and I picked it up without a second thought, feeling the warm blood cascade down my wrist.

  Just like her warm, virginal blood had cascaded down my cock only hours before.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey there, brother. How’d the party go tonight?”

  “Lorenzo,” I said. “How are you? How’s that nephew of mine?”

  “Oh, you know,” he said. “We named him after me because he causes just as much trouble.”

  “Good,” I said. “That’s the only thing nine-year-old boys should be doing. Digging in the dirt and giving their parents heart attacks.”

  “It’s all we ever did,” he said, chuckling.

  “Yes, yes it was. To what do I owe this phone call?”

  “I heard about the troubles surrounding the Del Vecchio family. You good?”

  “Of course, I’m good,” I said. “The party was good, and I’m good. I’m giving this matter a bit of… personal attention.”

  “Keep your guard up, brother,” he said. “They’re ruthless. I can’t have you dying off before Junior can tell you the fun little thing he told me today.”

  “And what did that troublemaker tell you?” I asked.

  “He told me you were his hero.”

  I drew in a deep breath and closed my eyes. I allowed the air of my beloved city to wash over me as his words fell deeply into my ears. The day my brother had called me and told me he and his wife were pregnant, I didn’t think I could get any happier. They named him Lorenzo Camillo Moretti, Junior, and I was there in the hospital the day he was born. I didn’t think I could get any happier until the first time I pressed a kiss to that little boy’s forehead.

  Until this very moment.

  “I promise you, no matter what happens, I’ll be around to watch that boy grow up,” I said.

  “Good. Because you’re his godfather. If anything happens to me, I need you alive.”

  “Nothing is happening to any of us, you got that?” I asked. “Quit that bullshit talk.”

  “Just keep one eye open, brother. And if you need me, I’m only a short plane ride away.”

  “I hear you. I’ve got this under control. Talk with you soon.”

  Little did I know that would be the last time I would talk to him, and little did I know the Del Vecchio family would make a liar out of me.

  CHAPTER NINE - ROSE

  THREE YEARS LATER

  The bulk of the dinner rush at the diner had just finished and I was wiping down the disgusting countertops everyone left behind. My eyes were glued to the clock, counting down the seconds until I could finally be free of this place. I had so many things I had to do and so many things I had to take care of.

  Kevin was now thirteen years old, and he had school in the morning, which meant I had to make his lunch beforehand. I was working the morning shift, which meant the breakfast rush just after I dropped him off at school.

  Not only that, but I had to get my three-year-old daughter, Ana, to a doctor’s appointment tomorrow instead of working the lucrative lunch shift.

  At the diner where I now worked, there were two shifts you wanted: breakfast and lunch. The dinner shift—which I’d just worked—was full of people who wanted a cheap meal after drinking at the few bars in town and they always left shitty tips. I asked my roommate to keep Kevin and Ana tonight so I could pick up the extra shift when someone called out sick, but I was ready to get back home to them.

  Ana had never been away from me for this long and I was getting worried that she thought I wasn’t coming back.

  It hurt to give up my lunch shift tomorrow and miss all those tips, but I was adamant about taking Ana to all of her appointments. Cassie had been wonderful watching them for me, but I didn’t want her to do the things a mother should do for her child.

  Three years ago, I’d had an amazing night of passion. A few weeks later, I’d started feeling nauseous and I had to keep calling out of work. I took medication to try and stave off the nausea so I could work and take care of Kevin, but Cassie was the one who dragged me to the drugstore. She bought me the ninety-nine-cent pregnancy test that changed my entire life and she held me while I cried that night.

  She was there for every single doctor’s appointment and held my hand through every single ultrasound. She stayed up late at night, abating my fears and reassuring me that I could do this. She held my hand as I gave birth to the most beautiful consequence that could’ve ever come from that night I shared with my dark prince and, now, Cassie was my trusted babysitter when I needed to pick up other shifts. She had been there from day one with the revelation of my pregnancy and she held me up when I couldn’t hold myself up on my own.

  Every time I looked into the beautiful blue eyes of my sweet baby girl, I was reminded of him, but I couldn’t let the ache overshadow the beauty that man had brought into my life.

  The beautiful child he had given me was the best thing that ever happened to me.

  Putting my life on hold for this little girl hadn’t been easy. Any dreams of returning to culinary school got tossed out the window. But there wasn’t a second that went by that I regretted any of it. I loved my brother and my daughter with a fire I hadn’t known I was capable of, and when Cassie and I teamed up to get through these tougher days, there was nothing that could stop us.

  My shift finally ended and I raced home in my rundown car, anxious to wrap my arms around my makeshift family and pull them close to my chest.

  “I’m home, you guys!”

  “Cassie’s upstairs with Ana,” Kevin said. “She threw up on herself.”

  “She threw up? Is she feverish? Rashy? Constipated?”

  “Yes, no, no, and no,” Cassie said as she came down the steps with Ana. “She ate too many hot dog.”


  “Hot dogs, yummy!” Ana exclaimed.

  “Ah, we overate again,” I said as I plucked a naked Ana from Cassie’s arms. “Why do you always do that, hmm? Last week, you ate too many Cheerios.”

  “I want Cheerios!” Ana said.

  “Of course you do,” I said with a sigh.

  “Wanna know how things at the bookstore went?” Cassie asked.

  “I didn’t realize there was much to tell,” I said. “What’s up?”

  “They want to promote Cassie to full-time employment,” Kevin said.

  “Thanks for spoiling the surprise, dork,” she said.

  “Cassie, are you serious?” I asked. “That’s awesome!”

  “I guess,” she said, shrugging. “I’m not sure if it’s what I want to do for the rest of my life, but it’s money.”

  “That’s what happens when you don’t think about the direction you want your life to take,” I said as I put clothes on Ana. “You end up in jobs you don’t like.”

  “Hey, it helps with things around here, right?” she asked.

  “But I also want you to be happy,” I said.

  “Cassie says happiness is a choice, not a destination,” Kevin said.

  “Cassie also says ‘bottoms up’ to whole bottles of tequila on a Wednesday night,” I said.

  “And it sure tastes good going down,” she said.

  “But not as good coming back up in our bathroom,” I said, grinning.

  “Pee pee,” Ana said.

  “You need to pee pee?” I asked.

  I put Ana down, and she ran for her little potty in the corner. I was in the middle of potty training her while trying to get Kevin comfortable with school. He was going through that awkward stage where he didn’t really know where he fit in and I was trying to get him to open up a bit more. We talked a lot, and he and Cassie really bonded, but I think that’s because he thought Cassie was pretty more than anything else. For a thirteen-year-old boy, sitting next to a curvy girl with long brown hair and deep blue eyes was the equivalent of propping open a Playboy magazine.

  “Ana is doing well with her potty training,” Cassie said.

  “She is,” I said as Ana ran back to me. “I’m proud of her.”

  “Now, we just gotta get her pooping in the potty. Then she’ll be ready to get a job, too!”

  Kevin laughed while I shot her a look. I could see the playful smirk playing on her face while her and Kevin started up a game of Minecraft. It was something Kevin had become addicted to after playing it at a friend’s house, so Cassie and I saved up all our money and got him a gaming system and that specific game last Christmas.

  “You sure you don’t want me to take Ana to her appointment tomorrow so you can catch the lunch shift?” Cassie asked.

  “I’m sure,” I said. “I really want to take her to this appointment, especially with there being shots involved. You’re welcome to come, but I’ve already got someone covering my shift.”

  “If you contracted your shifts out, you could probably scoop up some of their tips as payment,” Cassie said.

  “You’re the weirdest person I know, you know that?” I asked.

  “Oh, I make it a point,” she said, winking.

  “Wanna build a castle?” Kevin asked.

  “We built a castle last time,” she said. “Can we blow up this one?”

  “Only if we build it with bricks,” Kevin said. “They scatter farther when you blow ‘em up.”

  “I’m gonna go lay Ana down to bed and then I’ll be back to watch the festivities,” I said.

  “Better hurry up! Countdown to explosions in T-minus twenty minutes!”

  I shook my head and walked up the stairs as I headed to Ana’s room. She was already falling asleep on my shoulder as I laid her down in her crib, and the moment I covered her with her blanket, she was closing her eyes. I stared at her for a while, admiring the hairpin curve of her lips as she drifted off to sleep. She looked so much like him. It was uncanny. I’d pick her up in the morning and be hit with those big blue eyes and, suddenly, I’d be thrown back to that night.

  That night I spent with my deep, dark prince.

  I rubbed my neck, feeling the spot he’d marked three years ago. Back then, I’d covered it up for two weeks while it faded. But now? I’d give anything for it to be back.

  I bent down and kissed Ana one last time before I ventured back downstairs. As I watched Kevin and Cassie giggling on the couch, I realized I wouldn’t trade this for anything. No matter how much of a surprise Ana was and no matter how much it hurt to lose my parents, I had the family I wanted.

  The family I’d pieced together from the remnants of my life.

  There wasn’t any part of it that I would change, no matter what.

  CHAPTER TEN - CAMILLO

  THREE YEARS LATER

  I chopped up the vegetables and threw them into the pot while the water came to a rolling boil. Junior was sitting at the table, playing some sort of game on his handheld gaming system, lost in the world that was unfolding before him while I made our stew for the night. I threw the rest of the vegetables into the water before I started trimming down the meat, removing all the gristle while I watched him out of the corner of my eye.

  The day my brother died was the worst day of my life. I’d walked into his home and found my brother and his wife slaughtered, with their blood coating the walls. I’d heard Junior crying out from the closet, urinating on himself in fear as he clutched a very bold knife. I scooped him up into my arms at only nine years old, wrapped him in my jacket so he wouldn’t see the carnage, and carried him away from that house.

  In the past three years, he’d gone from a lively, vivacious young boy to a closed off, angry little man. That first night that I kept him in my New York City penthouse, he’d cried himself to sleep on my lap. He’d yelled out for his mother in the middle of the night and screamed for his father. The only thing I could do was hold him close to me while his little fists pounded against my chest. It was in that damn moment I’d made a decision to take him the hell away from this lifestyle. I was no longer willing to allow this legacy to bury any more of my family.

  I was fed up with the horrific system my nephew was being exposed to. It was the same system that ripped my entire family away from me. My mother. My father. Countless cousins and my brothers. In that moment, with Junior wailing against my chest, I knew I had two choices.

  I could stick around and watch my nephew suffer the same fate, or I could put an end to it all and begin a new life for him.

  A new life for us both.

  The decision was harder than it should’ve been. Every cell in my body wanted revenge for what had happened. I wanted to lay waste to the entire Del Vecchio family with my own two hands for what they’d done to my brother and his wife. I wanted to seek revenge for the little boy I cradled in my arms night after night, who cried for his mother and pleaded with me to take him home.

  Everything in me screamed to spill the blood of that disgusting, ruthless, piece of shit family and line the city streets with their corpses.

  But I couldn’t. I couldn’t risk putting my nephew in harm’s way any longer. I had no idea what he saw that night—he still wouldn’t talk about it—but I knew I had to get him away from it all. I knew I had to do what was right by my brother as his son’s legal guardian and get him away from the same nightmares that still woke me up from a dead sleep in the middle of the night.

  My only choice at making a new life for us was to get off the grid. I had to move someplace secluded in order to get away from all my connections to the mob. I sold off my penthouse and gave the club over to someone else. I liquidated all the assets I could and stored it in offshore investment accounts. I funneled the money through various investment firms to clean it up before purchasing a cabin in an isolated area of Pennsylvania. It took longer than I’d have liked but, finally, after two and a half years, we moved into an isolated cabin.

  A place near the Poconos. The only place
I’d ever known to have any sort of beauty.

  Back during my empire days, I’d taken many trips there to ski. I ate at many of the diners and sampled many of the homebrews in the bars that peppered the area. It was beautiful in the wintertime and it was the first time I’d ever gotten a good look at how secluded and isolated some people could live. I encountered people who were completely self-sustained. People who’d cashed in their riches and their businesses to live a slow life, out from beneath the prying eye of the public. At first, I thought they were insane for leaving behind their fancy lives of opulence.

  But when I purchased that cabin under a random alias near the mountain side of the Poconos, the only thing I could think of was my songbird.

  That beautiful woman who talked of a place she loved like it was the only place she ever wanted to be.

  The cabin was completely off the grid. I kept a gas generator going for electricity during the winter months, but the solar panels on the roof kept us going during the summer months. The kits were easy enough to purchase and install and the few weeks of summer we had experienced here proved I’d installed them correctly. Every other day, I’d go outside and chop up firewood, storing it inside for the cold winter months to come. The fireplace in the cabin was the only source of heat in the house, but the air ducts that shot off and lined the ceiling poured heat into the other rooms while casting the smoke outside.

  Where we were, I could hear anyone and anything coming. We lived off the beaten path and I took to homeschooling Junior, which was fine with him because he didn’t seem to trust people anyway. For now, we had to venture into town to get fresh vegetables to eat, but once we got past this first winter in the Poconos, that wouldn’t be the case. I’d been making plans to plant a garden in the backyard and, coupling that with the hunting I did, we’d be completely self-sufficient.