Teach Me, Daddy (Yes, Daddy #11)

I've spent my whole adult life being the one who decides everything alone.

What I eat. When I sleep. Which boy is wasting my Thursday. Nobody ever once offered to carry an ounce of it, so I got very good at not needing anyone to.

Then I drew something at my kitchen table that I never meant a single person to see—and I carried it into the studio of the most respected tattoo artist in the city.

Ezra Vane looks at it for a long time. Then he tells me it's good, and it's wrong. And he redraws it in front of me, better than I made it, until it's the truest thing I've ever put on paper.

I hear myself say it before I've decided to.

Teach me.

He tells me exactly what that will cost. His vision. His rules. His hands. And one thing I'm not sure I can survive—I don't get to look at my own back until he says it's finished.

So I wear something I've never seen. Month after month, face-down under his light, learning to breathe the way he tells me to. Learning to hold still. Learning to ask out loud for what I want instead of hoping somebody notices.

Learning what he is, and what I'm going to call him.

He's nothing like the boys my age. He knows when I've eaten. He texts eggs, not cereal at seven in the morning as though it isn't the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me. He notices the email I've been hiding from and makes me send it.

Nobody has ever been careful with me. Not on purpose. Not like it mattered.

And when the phoenix on my spine is finally finished, he doesn't buy me a diamond.

He tattoos my ring finger himself, and tells me it's never coming off.

A steamy age-gap Daddy romance with a dominant, patient tattoo-artist hero, an independent heroine who has never once been taken care of, and a marriage-and-baby ending. He falls first—and teaches her everything.