My Heart: A Steamy Standalone Instalove Romance (A Man Who Knows What He Wants Book 284) Read online

  CONTENTS

  My Heart

  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

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Extended 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

  MY HEART

  AN OLDER MAN YOUNGER WOMAN ROMANCE

  _______________________

  A MAN WHO KNOWS WHAT HE WANTS, 284

  FLORA FERRARI

  Copyright © 2022 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.

  MY HEART

  When I lost my best friend in a car accident I wasn’t surprised she donated her heart. She always put others first. I just never guessed she would still be looking after me even after she was gone.

  When a stranger appears at my door saying, “Lisa left a note. She wanted us to take care of you,” I’m shocked.

  He’s talking about him and his daughter – Alexis, the woman who now has my best friend's heart.

  Triston is not the sort of man who’d ever fall for me.

  He’s older, wealthy, with rugged good looks and a savage confidence. I’m twenty, a virgin, and have zero experience.

  It’s good he’s not interested, I tell myself. Alexis and I are becoming friends. I don’t want to complicate that.

  But what can I do when Triston comes to me, a possessive gleam in his eyes as he reaches for me.

  “You belong to me now. Nobody else. You’re mine. Forever.”

  What if Alexis finds out? Won’t it all come crashing down?

  I know one thing for sure. Lisa didn’t anticipate this when she left her note.

  * My Heart is an insta-everything standalone instalove romance with a HEA, no cheating, and no cliffhanger.

  NEWSLETTER

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  CHAPTER ONE

  Triston

  I stand at the back door, watching as Alexis peers at her camera and snaps a few shots of the flowerbeds. Winter has almost gone, the sun is shining and spring is in the air.

  It’s been a tough winter. But, as Alexis pushes her hair from her face, I know it was worth it.

  Only a few months ago, I couldn’t have dreamed my daughter would be out of bed, camera in hand, with her cheeks full of life and a smile on her lips.

  I thought her sick heart would take her, the same way it took her mother.

  But finally, we managed to find a donor.

  The operation was successful and now, a month and a half later, it’s like she’s returning to her old self. Sometimes I even struggle to remember how pale she looked while sick, how weak her voice became.

  My heart pounds when I think of almost losing my daughter.

  She turns, smiling. Even in a baggy dress, nearly falling off her thin frame she looks better. She was always fairly thin growing up, but her illness only consumed more of her, eating becoming too much of an effort. But now I can see some fullness returning to her cheeks.

  “How long have you been standing there, Dad?”

  I smile, or at least I think it’s a smile. Alexis often says I have the male equivalent of resting bitch face, whatever that is. Maybe resting prick face.

  “Can you blame me?” I stroll into the garden. “It’s a miracle.”

  She nods, with that look of deep gratitude on her face. Any time we mention her heart transplant, that same look touches her features. “I know. I can’t believe it. I never thought I’d have the energy to take pictures again.”

  “You’ll be back at college before you know it.”

  Her smile spreads slowly, as though she’s afraid of giving herself permission to be happy. “I think I’ll need to wait until the fall now. There will be too much catching up to do.”

  “Take all the time you need,” I say. “As long as you’re healthy, I don’t care what you do. Become a circus juggler if you want.”

  She laughs. “Yeah, I bet you’d love to see that.”

  I pause, taking a sip of my coffee. I’ve taken the morning off, a rare occurrence for me, specifically because I knew Alexis was going to be home. I need to talk to her about something, but I remember the way her eyes narrowed the last time I mentioned it, the tension in her face.

  “Is something wrong?” she asks, raising her camera to snap a picture of a butterfly.

  “Not wrong,” I say. “It’s… it’s the note.”

  “Oh.” She sighs. “I don’t know, Dad. I want to. But she died so I could live. How am I supposed to look her family in the eye? They might hate me.”

  “She left you that note for a reason.”

  Alexis doesn’t respond for a minute, and I don’t press her.

  Along with her new heart, there was a note, written by Lisa Jenkins, the woman who gifted it to her. When Lisa signed up to be a donor in the event of her death, she wanted the owner of her heart to know her name, and also to visit her family.

  My family lives at the address below. Please go and see them. They’ll want to meet you. And I want to make sure they’re okay too.

  The address is in the city, in the poorer area of town. I’ve looked up the apartment block on the internet, using the street view, and the front of the building was covered in graffiti when the view was captured some years ago but I doubt much has changed in the area since then.

  “I don’t know if I want to,” Alexis finally says. “But I’ve been thinking. Well, this isn’t the first time you’ve brought this up.”

  I nod.

  Turning, she fiddles with her camera, sliding her thumb across it. I recognize the gesture from when she was a little kid. Even as a child she’d fiddle with her camera whenever she was nervous or unsure, even when the camera was just a toy camera. Her camera even if it was a toy would never leave her side.

  “Why don’t you go? At least at first. That way, you can gauge their reaction, see if they’d be interested in meeting me. I just can’t stand the thoug
ht, Dad. What if I knock on the door and her mom answers? What if she’s angry? How can I go on living with this heart if I feel like I’ve stolen it?”

  “I’m sure—”

  “Dad,” she interrupts. “Just because Lisa wanted me to meet her family, it doesn’t mean they want to meet me.”

  “I’ve been thinking about what she wrote,” I say. “She wanted to make sure they were okay. They might need help.”

  “What, money?”

  I shrug. “If they need money, I’ll happily give it to them. It’s the least I could do. But I’m not going to come outright and say that. I don’t want to cheapen Lisa’s death.”

  She tilts her head. “It sounds like you’ve been thinking about this a lot.”

  “I have,” I admit. “I was going to ask you, actually, if you wanted me to go first.”

  “So you’ll do it?”

  “I feel like I have to. They need to know how grateful we are. And if there’s anything I can do to help, I want to. I want to show them that Lisa’s death wasn’t for nothing. That girl did an amazing thing. She brought you back to me.”

  “Oh, Dad.”

  Alexis moves in for a hug and I wrap my arms around her, holding her tight, not letting myself imagine a world where I lose the only family I have left.

  “When are you going?” Alexis asks when she pulls back.

  “Today. There’s no point waiting.”

  She grits her teeth for a second and then releases the tension a second later. “Let me know how it goes. Let me know if they want to meet me.”

  “I will,” I tell her, and turn for the door.

  As I drive from the suburbs towards the city, I think about what Alexis asked me last night. It was a typical night for us. I was sitting in the armchair, my laptop open, handling a few business-related matters for my chain of outdoor clothes and equipment stores. Alexis was on the couch, swiping on her iPad when she looked up at me.

  “Dad.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why haven’t you ever moved on?”

  It took me a moment to realize what she was asking.

  She was talking about her mother who’d died when Alexis was only five years old, and I hadn’t been with anyone since her.

  There was no special reason why I hadn’t moved on to someone else.

  But I wasn’t getting any younger.

  If I was ever going to find a woman who made me feel, a woman I had to claim, I had better start looking. But I’d tried dating over the years, at the urging of a couple of my friends, and it had never ended well.

  Nothing bad had happened, but nothing good had happened either.

  All the dates never ignited any feeling in me.

  In the end, I felt guilty for continuing to go on the dates when I knew I wasn’t going to give these women what they wanted.

  “I guess I’m just waiting for the right person,” I said quietly, not wanting to let my loneliness color my voice.

  “I just want you to know I’ll support you if you ever find someone. Unless it’s one of my friends.”

  We both laughed at that. There was little chance of me hitting on one of Alexis’s photographer buddies or any of her childhood friends. They were all half my age and, even if they weren’t, I’d never thought of them in any way other than my daughter's friends.

  I pull up outside the apartment building, feeling a tugging at my chest when I see its condition has worsened since the street-view photo was taken. Part of the exterior is crumbling and there’s even more graffiti. The main door is busted, swinging lightly on its hinges.

  I stride up the stairs, over dried chewing gum and trash, with a vague stink reaching my nose.

  Outside the apartment door, I take a moment, preparing myself to meet with Lisa’s mom or her sister, or her father. She only gave us her name and the note. Everything else is a mystery.

  Knocking, I wait.

  There’s movement behind the door.

  It opens.

  And I stare. I stare hard.

  My body tightens and my heart drums and I know that this is the moment, right now, where everything changes. Nothing is ever going to be the same again.

  The woman has long wavy dark brown hair going down past her shoulders, framing full flushed cheeks and innocent wide tempting eyes. Her body is imprisoned in tight black pants and a shirt, tucked-in, giving me a mouth-watering outline of her shape.

  She’s captivatingly curvy, her large breasts causing my fingers to twitch, her hips looking like they were made to be grabbed and massaged and caressed as I hammer into her.

  She looks young, in her early twenties at the most. I try to tell myself that’s too young. But my manhood doesn’t give a damn. It hardens to steel, the tip tingling, as I struggle to find my words.

  “Hello,” she murmurs. “Can I help you?”

  I clear my throat, forcing the words out, trying to push the desire away.

  I fail, badly.

  “I’m here about Lisa,” I say. “She…donated her heart to my daughter.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Tamia

  We sit on opposite ends of the coffee table. The apartment is tidy and clean, but there’s no hiding what poor state it’s in, with the faded carpet and half the fixtures looking like they’re ready to fall off. I normally try not to think about it, but it’s difficult when the man of my dreams is staring back at me.

  I fire a warning signal into my mind at the thought.

  The feelings haven’t gone away, the ones that washed over me when I first laid eyes on him. When I opened the door, my chest went tight and a film of sweat covered my body. My sex giving an urgent pulse.

  A deep-within place trembled, as though my womb was telling me this was it, him, the man I’m going to be with for the rest of my life.

  I look across at him now, even as a blush makes my cheeks burn.

  He’s at least six and a half feet tall, broad shouldered in a suit jacket the same shade of silver as his hair and a pair of dark very expensive looking jeans. His features are strong, his icy intense eyes narrowed.

  His body looks like it’s about to burst out of the jacket, his arms massive.

  How old is he?

  At least forty, I’d say by the mature way he holds himself and the fact he has a daughter. The man is handsome enough to be on a magazine cover.

  I bet he’s got the most beautiful wife. Or, if he’s not married, he’s probably got the hottest girlfriend.

  There’s no way he’d be interested in a girl like me.

  I have to remember that.

  “I’m not sure how to start,” he says after a pause.

  I reach for my coffee.

  After we exchanged names, I almost ran into the kitchen, needing a few moments to compose myself before we went on.

  Losing Lisa was painful enough. Being visited by the woman who owned her heart would’ve been even more painful.

  But being visited by her father, who just so happens to set my heart racing and my whole world ablaze?

  That causes nerves to flare, my belly swirl, and a voice to scream from within that I can’t act on these feelings, no matter how deafening they become.

  “Me neither,” I admit.

  He’s staring at me like he hates me. His forearms resting on his knees, his muscular body hunched over, his muscles flexing, it’s like he’s debating leaping across the coffee table and throwing me to the floor.

  My sex sizzles at the thought, my core growing warm. But I’m sure his rage wouldn’t take the shape I achingly want it to.

  He wouldn’t leap at me, his strong hand gliding up my thigh, pressing the heel of his hand against my core as I twitched my hips in time with his movements.

  No, no.

  I can’t let my mind go there.

  “Are you Lisa’s sister?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “She was my best friend. We grew up in the orphanage together and when we were old enough to leave, we did it together. We considered each other fami
ly. I guess that’s why she wanted us to meet.”

  “My daughter’s worried you’re going to hate her,” Triston says, with a gruff rumbling in his voice.

  “What? No.” I shake my head. “Your daughter didn’t take Lisa away from me. An icy road did. Bad luck did. I’m happy her death meant something. Well, not happy. But you know what I mean.”

  I’m babbling. It’s difficult to keep my thoughts in order, my grief for Lisa warring with this primal feeling flowing through me, as though trying to take possession of my body.

  Jump into his arms, a voice whispers. Hold on to him tight and never let him go.

  I sigh, picking up my coffee, bringing it to my lips, and softly blowing on the steam. I need to distract myself.

  Triston’s eyes snap to my pursed lips, his eyes narrowing. It’s like he’s disgusted.

  Maybe his daughter asked him to come here on her behalf. He probably doesn’t even want to be here and resents having to speak with me.

  “I’ll happily meet your daughter,” I say, averting my gaze, his eyes are so intense. “If she wants to. How is she doing?”

  “Much, much better.” His lips twitch, as though trying to smile, but something tells me he doesn’t quite know how. “This morning she was in the garden, taking pictures. It’s been ages since I’ve seen her do that.”