Page 3 of Eager Housewife

So I screw up all my courage.

“I saw your advertisement,” I croak.

He turns his head oh so slowly and stares down at me. “What?”

“The one for a wife.” My heart flutters, a caught wild bird.

The blood drains from his face. “You weren’t supposed to see that.”

No. Obviously. And neither should I be doing this. I swallow hard.

“I want to apply.”

2

DUNCAN

I gaze into the face of my daughter’s best friend in mute horror and rising desire.

My cock is thickening, despite the impossibility of this. Blythe wants to be my convenient free usehousewife?

“You should forget about it.” I curse myself that I typed out my longing for companionship and family when Blythe was so fresh in my mind. I listed what I wanted—someone exactly like her—with the awareness that I couldn’t fall in love with my potential wife because my heart belongs to Blythe.

The result? A sordid mix that Blythe should never’ve seen.

“I’m not going to,” she insists in that sweet voice that floors me every time and makes me feel like a perverted old man.

I’ve never had any hint of attraction to any of Ainsley’s friends before Blythe. Even now, I urge myself to look at her and see what I did when she first appeared on my doorstep. A young, pretty girl who was just my daughter’s new best friend.

Last year, when Ainsley told me about the study partner she’d met and asked if Blythe could come for Christmas, because she would otherwise have spent it alone, I said yes. Of course I did. It didn’t occur to me that it would cause me physical pain to keep myself decent.

Then Ainsley was delayed, Blythe arrived on the doorstep, and I was cut off at the knees by emotions as known to me as the surface of Mars, and just as survivable. Forty years on this planet and I’d felt nothing like the two of us having dinner that night. She made me laugh. She was beautiful and funny, and I kept having to tell myself that it wasn’t a date.

Because I swear she liked me too. And she’s come back with Ainsley for every university holiday since. Sometimes, when Ainsley isn’t looking, I catch Blythe peeking at me from under her long lashes, and I indulge in two seconds of crazy that she is as compelled by me as I am by her.

And when they graduated, and Blythe had no one with her to tell her they were proud of her or cheer when she was on stage collecting her degree, I filled the gap, telling myself it was just fatherly. I said that as I bought her the expensive formal photos and clapped extra hard for her, and nodded when Ainsley asked if Blythe could come home with us and help her pack for her round-the-world tour.

“I can meet everything on your list of requirements,” Blythe adds eagerly, jerking me back to the present where this twenty-one-year-old girl has read my dirtiest fantasies.

Of course she can fulfil the specification. It was written with her in my mind.

“No.”

I turn and walk away.

“Mr Blackstone.” She’s having to trot to keep up with my longer strides and instinctively I shorten them. Internally, I groan. “I know I’m young, but?—”

“The answer is no, and that’s final,” I snap, and immediately regret it when I see her kicked-puppy expression from the corner of my eye.

“Okay,” she says in a small voice.

I stop and rub a hand over my forehead. “What’s happening next for you, Blythe?”

“I’ll be fine.” At my side, she wrings her hands.

Oh fuck. Nothing is more of a red flag to me than the word fine. She might as well have said “miserable” or “inadequate”. Fine is shit. No one I love—and I love Blythe more than my tattered soul—will ever be justfine. And she sounds so unhappy.

“Come with me.” I keep walking out of the airport towards the car park, and she trots behind. I’m being an arsehole, but I can’t look at her. I can’t stop, or I’ll cave.