Valentine's With My Best Friend's Dad: An Instalove Possessive Age Gap Romance Read online

  CONTENTS

  Valentine’s with My Best Friend’s Dad

  NEWSLETTER

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Extended Epilogue

  Extended Epilogue

  NEWSLETTER

  A MAN WHO KNOWS WHAT HE WANTS

  BRATVA BEAR SHIFTERS

  LAIRDS & LADIES

  RUSSIAN UNDERWORLD

  IRISH WOLF SHIFTERS

  Collaborations

  About the Author

  VALENTINE’S WITH MY BEST FRIEND’S DAD

  AN OLDER MAN YOUNGER WOMAN ROMANCE

  _______________________

  A MAN WHO KNOWS WHAT HE WANTS, 228

  FLORA FERRARI

  Copyright © 2021 by Flora Ferrari

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The following story contains mature themes, strong language and sexual situations. It is intended for mature readers.

  VALENTINE’S WITH MY BEST FRIEND’S DAD

  I haven’t told my best friend Kayley that I’ve had a crush on her dad ever since we met two years ago. Having the same class in college, curiosity got the better of me when she told me her dad was an ex-MMA fighter.

  I searched him online and found that he was a ripped, huge fighter in his youth. But he looks even better today, forty-two years old and just as muscular as he used to be. Even better, his hair has turned silver and he looks even more rugged and manly. The truth is I let myself fantasize about him sometimes.

  But it has to stay a fantasy. A man like Liam Larson – rich, successful, handsome – would never be interested in a naïve virgin like me.

  But then Kayla asks me to come home with her for Valentine’s weekend everything changes.

  At first, I think she’s just trying to rope me into singing at her Dad’s club. She’s always saying I need to be more confident with my music and get over my stage fright. I know that’s not going to happen any time soon.

  Then I meet Liam and something crazy happens. It turns out he wants me just as badly as I want him. I don’t know if we’ve been shot by Cupid’s arrow or if we’re both just crazily attracted to each other. All I know is we shouldn’t be doing this. If Kayley ever found out, it would be World War three.

  Yet we can’t stop. I try to fight it. I try to focus on my songwriting. He tries to focus on his work, his businesses. But this tall, muscular alpha is a man I just can’t quit, even if I’m constantly surprised that he wants me to.

  He says he loves my curves. He says he loves my body. He says he loves my singing voice.

  But that’s not all.

  He says I belong to him, and that on Valentine’s night he’s going to claim me in the most possessive way a man can.

  What if Kayley finds out? What if he discovers that I’m a virgin? What if this all blows up in our faces?

  I never knew Valentine’s Day could be so complicated.

  *Valentine’s with My Best Friend’s Dad is an insta-everything standalone instalove romance with a HEA, no cheating, and no cliffhanger.

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  CHAPTER ONE

  Lola

  I lean back in the plush chair, the airplane rumbling beneath me, still struggling to believe that I’m on a private jet. I look out the window and see only darkness, the clouds thick as we glide through the sky.

  “This is crazy,” I murmur.

  “I know,” Kayley says, wrapping her hands around her mug of hot cocoa. “I’m still not used to it. But if your dad offers you a private jet, what the heck are you supposed to say, you know? Is it too much?”

  Kayley’s pale green eyes are wide and tinged with fear. I can read her easily by now. We’ve been friends for the last two years of college, fused together through our love of the classics, discovered when we met in a creative writing class.

  Her major is in technical writing and mine is in performing arts, but that didn’t stop us from becoming best friends quicker than I could believe.

  She’s got a thin build that clothes seem to hang off, a build I do my best not to envy. Her hair is sandy-blonde and she wears it in a bob around her face.

  I toss my head melodramatically.

  “Oh, it’s far too much,” I say sarcastically. “In fact, I’m going to judge you every day for the rest of our lives for having access to such wealth. Yes, Kayley, I do believe I hate you.”

  She giggles, knowing that I’m joking. I’m always able to make her laugh when I go with my over the top voice and facial expressions, properly hamming it up like a 1950s dame.

  She takes a sip of her cocoa and then places it in the holder.

  “But seriously,” I add, “it’s not your fault you were born comfortable. It’s not like you lord it over people. Stop feeling so guilty all the time.”

  “I’m just so excited for you to see my hometown,” she says.

  “Me too,” I smile, meaning it.

  I’d spent most of my holidays with my aunt, but she sadly passed last year. When Kayley offered to host me at her childhood home in rural Maine for Valentine’s weekend, I jumped at the chance.

  What else was I going to do, sit around campus thinking about how I’ve never had a proper Valentine?

  “And for you to sing on Sunday,” she says.

  I give her a no-way look, shaking my head.

  “What?” she goes on, gesticulating wildly, her baggy sweater flapping around her wrists. “What would be so wrong with singing on Valentine’s day? Would the world explode? Would you lose your tongue?”

  I giggle. “And I thought I was the dramatic one.”

  “Seriously,” she says, looking firmly at me. “You have an amazing voice. Surely you wouldn’t have chosen performing arts if your stage fright was that bad.”

  “I know, I know,” I say. “But having a small part in a musical and being the sole performer on a stage, in a packed club, are two very different things.”

  My hands get sweaty just thinking about the brightness of the spotlight, the way it would highlight every single drop of sweat on my forehead, on my upper lip. That’s all I’d be able to think about, how everybody’s secretly laughing at how much I’m sweating and stressing.

  Of course, that would just make me sweat and stress more.

  “It’s Dad’s club, anyway,” Kayley goes on. “So if anybody says something I don’t like, I’ll have them out of there like that.”

  She snaps her fingers.

  “Maybe next year,” I tell her. r />
  She sighs. “You were the star of the show at Christmas,” she says, referencing the musical rendition of A Christmas Carol we performed on campus. “You were the best singer on that stage.”

  “I was a background singer,” I laugh. “I was hardly the standout performance.”

  “Yes, you were,” she says passionately. “If I didn’t know you better, I’d swear you were fishing for compliments. But I do know you. I know that fishing for compliments just isn’t your style. I know that you genuinely believe that your voice didn’t rise above that chorus.”

  I turn to the window, looking out at the darkness we’re soaring across. My belly gives a lurch that has nothing to do with the passage of the plane.

  “Like I said,” I murmur, “maybe next year.”

  Kayley lets it drop and leans back in her recliner chair, taking her Kindle from underneath and popping on her hipster glasses.

  I lean back and close my eyes, trying not to think of Valentine’s day and all that it entails.

  I remember peering through the library window one rainy afternoon as the head cheerleader sat in the quad, casually tossing her unopened Valentine’s cards to the ground until she found the one she was looking for. She just left them there for somebody to clean up. I almost went out there and scooped them up, pretending that they were for me.

  But that would’ve been too sad.

  I try to force my mind away from Valentine’s day, telling myself it’s just a day like any other.

  It doesn’t matter.

  It’s not the end of the world.

  Yet when I think about Sunday, my belly gives an uncomfortable warble.

  I’ll be at Kayley’s father’s club with her, and I just know I’m going to end up on my own, imagining a world in which I’m the girl who gets swept off her feet, in which I’m the girl with the heart-red envelope.

  Kayley has been talking excitedly about seeing her boyfriend the whole semester, so I can hardly blame her if she does end up off someplace with him.

  It’s not her fault I’m alone.

  Then my thoughts flit to Liam Larson, Kayley’s dad, and my belly does something else entirely.

  Tingles start to dance around me, moving down to my inner thighs, creeping close to my panties. I’ve never met him before, but I’ve seen photographs online, and I’ve watched recordings of his MMA fights.

  He was a fighter in his twenties and early thirties, and now – at forty-two years old – he’s a businessman who owns bars and combat gyms all over Maine.

  In the videos of his MMA fights, his heavyweight body is tight with muscle, a seven-foot giant carved of marble, tattoos covering his arms and his chest and all the way across his back. His hair oaken brown, now mostly silver, and left a little long, smoothing over his forehead.

  But that’s not the image I did something bad to last night.

  No, the image that made me crawl beneath my covers and prop the laptop on my bedside table – the image that guided my hand down between my thighs to still the pumping need there – was one taken a few months ago.

  It was an article about his help coaching the children at Crest Fall Combat Gym, the gym in Kayley’s hometown. It was of him standing at the front of the class in baggy shorts and a tank top, his arms exposed and glistening in the stark lights of the workout room. His hair was silver and cut shorter than it had been in his youth. His face showed the subtle sheen of a five o’clock shadow, his strong jaw covered in iron.

  He was staring seriously at his charges. But I felt like he was staring seriously at me.

  I zoomed the image in, cutting out the children until only Liam filled my screen.

  I touched myself.

  I couldn’t stop.

  It was like some crazy compulsion had taken hold of me, something beyond my control.

  I imagined something impossible.

  I imagined Liam grabbing me by the shoulders and shoving me up against the wall, bringing his lips to mine and kissing me savagely.

  A silly girl’s fantasy rose in my mind, something far too immature for a woman of twenty years old.

  I imagined him whispering to me in his gravelly voice, a voice I’d heard only in interviews online.

  “You’ll never have to spend Valentine’s day alone again,” he’d snarled in my mind. “You’ll never have to feel alone again. I’m here for you, Lola.”

  I snap my eyes open, the fantasy becoming far too vivid and compelling in my mind.

  My sex tingles with the remembered pleasure, the way I squirmed between the sheets, as if for a moment Liam’s manhood was between my legs, plunging, owning.

  I reach under my chair and take my Kindle from my bag.

  I need to calm down before we reach Crest Fall. I have to get rid of these crazy notions whirring around my mind ever since I first laid eyes on Liam Larson’s photographs online.

  Putting aside the fact that he’s Kayley’s father and I’d never do that to her, the cold truth is that he’d never want a woman like me.

  I know that he and Kayley’s mother are separated and haven’t spoken in years, but despite that, he still wouldn’t want me.

  He’s a millionaire.

  He’s a ripped-as-hell ex-MMA fighter.

  He probably has women lining up around the block for him, sleek, stylish, socialite women who know all the best ways to please a man.

  What do I have to offer him?

  I spend the rest of the flight trying to focus on Wuthering Heights, but every time Bronte tells me, Heathcliff, I see Liam instead. I imagine myself being swept into this turbulent romance, only in this story there’s a happily ever after. I push those thoughts aside each time they arise, but that’s the problem.

  They won’t stop.

  We’re landing in Maine late Thursday night, which means I only have to get through Friday, Saturday, and Sunday before we fly back to school. Surely I can do that without losing my mind, without torturing myself with impossible fantasies concerning my best friend’s dad.

  I’ll just lock it all away.

  Even if the thoughts flutter through my mind from time to time, I’ll console myself with the certainty that he’d laugh in my face if I ever voiced them aloud.

  Finally, we land, the plane giving a slight judder as the wheels make contact with the landing strip. I grip the arms of my chair and take in deep, slow breaths.

  Kayley smiles across at me.

  “You killed it,” she says. “For your first flight, you were surprisingly not a complete mess.”

  I laugh, slowly releasing the arms of the chair as we come to a complete stop.

  “Thanks, Kay.”

  We get our carry-on bags and then head for the exit.

  The icy cold of Maine in winter blasts us the second we step foot on the metal stairway, my cheeks stinging with the February gust.

  “Oh, how nice of him,” Kayley says, as we descend the stairs.

  I’m so focused on gripping the handrail – I’m still a bit wobbly from the flight – that I’m not sure what she’s talking about.

  “Huh?”

  “Dad came to pick us up.”

  I almost miss a step when she tells me this, my heart starting to race in my chest.

  Okay, this is it, my moment to be invisible, to keep all my secret desires locked tight inside of me.

  We walk across the strip toward a jet-black sedan.

  Liam Larson approaches as he sees us coming, dressed in a suit the same shade of his hair. The closer he gets, the more stunned I am.

  He’s so much more handsome in real life than he is in photographs. His green eyes are sharper. He’s so much bigger as if all seven feet of his muscular form couldn’t be contained in photography.

  He looms over us, a subtle smirk playing on his lips when his eyes flit over me.

  Or am I imagining it? Wishing for it?

  “Hey, Dad,” Kayley says, moving forward for a hug.

  He embraces her. “Hey, sweetheart,” he says. “Good flight?” br />
  “Not too bad,” she replies. “Dad, this is Lola. Lola—Dad.”

  “A pleasure,” he says, with a growling sort of rumble beneath his voice.

  He reaches out his hand, uncovered despite the cold. I’m wearing gloves, slipped on as we landed, but even through the material, I can feel the savage strength of him. He shakes my hand and then gestures toward the car.

  “Go and get yourself warm,” he says. “I’ll see to your bags.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” Kayley says, looping her arm through mine and leading me toward the car.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Liam

  I work my hands on the steering wheel as I drive from the airstrip through the pine-tree forest, the only illumination coming from my high beams and the winter night sky.

  I can’t stop myself from glancing in the rearview, my body going tight and hungry every time I lay eyes on her.

  Lola’s wearing a woven sweater, leaf-green here and earth-brown there, the weave of the knitted work making it easy for me to imagine tearing it off and revealing the curvaceous landscape of her body.

  She wears her brown hair in waves down to her shoulders, sweeping across her forehead as though she wants to shield parts of herself.

  I don’t know why she’d ever dream of hiding those dark blue eyes. They’re so captivating, the sort of eyes that’d look perfect as they grow wide with shock, my manhood sliding between those full lips.

  Her body is curvy, her large breasts drawing my eye over and over, imprisoned within that sweater. Her thighs are thick and juicy-looking in her jeans, and in the quiet of the car – I think both of them are tired – I can’t stop myself from morphing her breathing noises into quaking sounds of pleasure.

  I squeeze the steering wheel harder, flitting my eyes from the rearview back to the road.

  The last thing I need is to cause an accident because I couldn’t stop staring at my daughter’s best friend.

  I’ve heard about Lola, of course, but I never took much of an interest in the particulars. As long as Kayley had a close friend at college, I thought, then that was all that mattered.

  But now my manhood is rock solid and a crazy urge keeps rising up within me.