His Young Maid: A Forbidden Boss Age Gap Romance Daisy Jane (love letters to the dead TXT) 📖

us away from what I thought we were both feeling right now, which was the intense and overwhelming feeling that this is more.

“Anything you don’t like?” I ask. I watch her eyes move over the vegetables on the counter. She breezes past the items and looks to the eggs then up at me. She takes a bite of her dahlia pink lips as she thinks.

“I like it all,” she says finally, a shy curl in her lips. “I’ve never had an omelet actually.” Her cheeks flash a pop of color and I realize she’s embarrassed. Still gorgeous.

“No?” I slice the peppers and scoop the seeds out, her eyes steady on my hands, mine on her. She watches me and the way she looks at me is like I’m her hero, though I’ve done nothing to deserve it, it fucking feels good. Tossing chopped vegetables into the bowl, I realize she’s saving me. Bringing me back to life. And I’d do anything to chase that feeling. I try to push away the fact that I have to tell her about Darcy, because it will likely be a hurdle.

“I grew up a cereal kid,” she rested her chin in her palms, elbows on the counter, and I have a flash of taking her there yesterday, my fingers curled to the knuckle inside her tightness. My cock stirs as I turned the omelet over in the skillet.

“Is your father alive?” I’ve not heard her mention him, and I want to slowly pull all the details of her existence from her.

She shrugs casually, though when she looks down to her plate, I see a dip in her brows, just for a moment, and I know there’s more there.

“Don’t know him,” she admits, and I let it sit. I just want her to feel good when she’s with me and let those admissions come organically, so I don’t press her. Instead, I tell her about myself. As her chest lifts and her eyes come back to me, I realize she’s very interested.

I tell her about my first and only wife, Lucy.

We married when I’d just started working with my dad, making small investments while under his wing, to get my name out there. Lucy was working in a law-firm, trying desperately to make partner, but finding herself exhausted and overwhelmed. She and a handful of other associates there were spending a lot of hours together on briefs, vying for perfection, trying to stick out of the bunch. Because we both worked so much, the time we spent together was limited. A lot of dinners in the car, conversations in the dark, rundowns of our days over a quick cup of coffee. With that, I still loved Lucy very much. She was fun, bright, intelligent, and caring. But after our first year of marriage, she told me that she didn’t love me. She had, in fact, fallen in love with another man at her firm. She didn’t want to work it out with me and she almost immediately wed him once our marriage was annulled. It destroyed me. For many reasons. I didn’t love investing but I did it for us to have the life she’d wanted, the life my dad told me I needed. And I stuck it out because I knew once we got through the difficult years, we’d have time together and that time would be more enjoyable by being financially comfortable. Without her and the dream of our future together, I lost the drive to do anything.

I took a full year off of work, living in the house we used to share together, though she’d paid me for half of it so she could be completely done with me. I wrote a ton. A lot of poems, loose thoughts, some short stories. Finally, after wallowing and wondering what life is about, I decided enough was enough.

My broken heart healed as I devoted myself utterly and totally to work, growing Bennett and Barrow into a thriving investment firm, building my current home, and taking vacations whenever I pleased. I dated and fucked a myriad of women but never felt emotionally connected to a single one. Never had a single fucking butterfly in my belly since Lucy.

Not until I met Britta.

And I shared that with her, which caused her to grow silent, pink-cheeked, a smile on her lips. It was true, though, and as hard as it was to admit out loud, I hadn’t thought I’d ever be in a relationship—a real one—again, until Britta.

I tell her my parents were married many years before my dad had a heart attack and passed away, over fifteen years ago. High-stress investments, lots of booze and cigars, little exercise and lots of indulgences—I explain, made him a prime candidate. Ripe for the cardiomyopathy picking.

“So that’s why you take good care of yourself?” she says, blowing on a bite of hot food. The way she eats and moans with pleasure after nearly every bite makes me never want to eat another meal without her.

“That and exercise helps combat depression.”

It’s true. A long run always puts a good chip in the mounting darkness I feel when the loneliness feels all encompassing.

“You’re depressed?” her eyebrows lift and she stops eating, and the empathy that drips from her face nearly melts me. My chest pulls at her expression. How can this person be so young and yet converse like a woman twice her age?

“I’ve been depressed,” I rake a hand up the back of my head and take a seat next to her on the bar, picking up her fork and passing her a bite. Her lips wrap around the metal then I kiss her as she chews, the taste of peppers and eggs mixed with her sweetness.

“Seems silly, right?” I smile to her, dropping my head into my hand resting on the counter, watching her eat.

She chews a bite thoughtfully and stretches her legs out over mine and I rest my hands across her knees. I could do this every