Possessive Stepdad Series by Stella Stepp

The last person I want to call is my stepfather. Sterling is forty-three, six-foot-five, and sounds like he's already deciding my life for me before I finish explaining why I need help. He's a billionaire. A hockey legend. The kind of man who sends a car before you've said yes. Hours later, I'm in his passenger seat with a duffel bag and a condition I'd rather die than explain. My breasts produce milk... moreThe last person I want to call is my stepfather. Sterling is forty-three, six-foot-five, and sounds like he's already deciding my life for me before I finish explaining why I need help. He's a billionaire. A hockey legend. The kind of man who sends a car before you've said yes. Hours later, I'm in his passenger seat with a duffel bag and a condition I'd rather die than explain. My breasts produce milk. No pregnancy, no baby—just a body that won't stop leaking and a mother who stopped answering her phone. I've been managing it alone for a year with my arms crossed and my pride clenched tight. Sterling doesn't let me manage it alone. His hands. His mouth. The relief that turns into heat that turns into the kind of need I've never let myself feel because wanting things has only ever gotten me abandoned. He empties me in bathrooms, in gardens, on stone tables in broad daylight, and every time he puts his mouth on me I lose another piece of the wall I built to survive. He's twenty-four years older. He's my stepfather. He's the man who offered me a future I'd stopped believing in. I should be careful. Should protect myself. I don't. They'll call it wrong. Forbidden. Disgusting. The hockey legend and his stepdaughter, the age gap, the baby I'm carrying that proves exactly how little we held back. Let them talk. We were never good at being careful. less

The pump breaks on a Saturday. By Sunday, I'm in the back of an armored sedan with garbage bags for luggage and ninety-three dollars to my name, heading to live with a man who runs the Irish mob. My stepfather. For five months, years ago, when my mother married him in a ceremony I missed because I was in an ER learning that my body had decided to produce milk for a baby that doesn't exist... moreThe pump breaks on a Saturday. By Sunday, I'm in the back of an armored sedan with garbage bags for luggage and ninety-three dollars to my name, heading to live with a man who runs the Irish mob. My stepfather. For five months, years ago, when my mother married him in a ceremony I missed because I was in an ER learning that my body had decided to produce milk for a baby that doesn't exist. Years of pills and pumping and managing alone because the woman who should have helped was chasing her next husband across Europe. Her one act of parenting? A phone call. Not to me. To him. Ronan Rourke. Forty-five. Six-five of scarred knuckles and shamrock green eyes. Billionaire. The kind of dangerous that wears expensive suits and makes powerful men forget how to breathe. He brought me to his compound because the Rourke name doesn't let family starve — even the barely-counts, twenty-six-years-younger, never-actually-met kind. Then he walks in on me. Half-naked. Milk on my skin. Hands failing at a job my broken equipment used to handle. His first "Are you fucking pregnant? ". His second locking the door. His hands replace mine. Then his mouth. And the most dangerous man in the city puts his lips on my body and gives me relief I haven't felt before, and the sound I make tells us both this has nothing to do with medicine. I should be afraid of what he is. The guns. The silence when he enters rooms. The world that would destroy us if it knew. Instead I'm afraid of how much I want him. The hands that know violence and gentleness in the same grip. The Irish accent that surfaces when his control slips. The way he whispers against my skin about filling me, keeping me, watching my body change with what he puts inside me — like the milk isn't enough, like he wants to give me a reason for it. No protection. No discussion. Just his mouth on my breast and his hands on my hips and the raw, possessive certainty of a man who's already decided I'm carrying his future whether I've caught up to the plan or not. He's twenty-six years older. He's my stepfather. He's the head of an empire built on blood and silence. And the test I'm hiding in the bathroom just came back positive. less