Page 69 of Corruption

“Well, it’s lucky for us that her father is Adrian Fantoni.”

“Yeah. Lucky,” Isaak mutters dryly.

I narrow my eyes. “What do you know?”

“Nothing. I just suspect the same thing everyone else does. Good thing there’s no trace of it. Trust me, I tried to find it.”

So did I. But every trail leads to a dead end. I wasn’t surprised. The Fantonis have the money and influence to cover up who Kiya really is if not Adrian’s actual daughter.

“Why would you be snooping around trying to find out something like that?”

“I like Kiya. I thought if I could find something proving she wasn’t really Adrian’s daughter, that would get her out the marriage and at the same time give us more leverage over the Fantonis for trying to deceive us and force them to arrange something else with us…”

“Something else…” I mutter, and then something clicks. “You like the Uccello heir. Velia.”

“No! That’s not… That’s not it!” Isaak says, though his blush betrays him. “Besides. She’s the Uccello heir. Not the Fantoni heir. So that wouldn’t help. And her and Leon are attached at the hip. I was thinking a business deal that’s bad for them but really great for us or something like that. That way everyone’s happy.”

“A piece of advice,” I begin to Isaak without commenting one way or another on his idea. “Be careful about trying to make things happen to make everyone happy. It might backfire for you the way it did for me and my family.”

Isaak give me an apologetic and sympathetic smile.

“Don’t feel sorry for me, my love. My father committed a crime. My entire family had to pay for it. The consequences for you would never be so drastic being the heir to our family, but you don’t want to end up like your uncle, hm?”

“If you ask me, he seems happier having his inheritance taken than with it,” Isaak points out.

Yet another comment from my nephew that I don’t comment on. And then Vaughn, the accountant, and the lawyer enter the room, and I put the conversation with my nephew out my head until I get home and see Kiya in the kitchen baking.

The kitchen is a mess seeing as she’s stopped being so particular about cleaning up so carefully behind herself now that she’s not trying to hide everything she does.

She looks up in acknowledgement before looking back into the bowl under the electric mixer.

“What are you making, Pretty Girl?”

“A practice cake.”

“Practice?”

“For Isaak’s birthday next week. He wants a red velvet cake, but I’ve never made one before. So… practice,” she says. She puts some of the red batter on her finger, holds it to my mouth, and says, “Taste?”

There’s no way she’s aware of what she’s doing. No way she’s aware of how alluring she looks pointing her finger with that red batter in my face, wearing nothing but a warm, mid-thigh sweater under her apron, sans bra as she tends to do when she’s walking around the house. She’s completely innocent of what she’s doing. How she still manages to seem innocent after the filth we did over the course of three or four days together, I’ll never know.

I take her finger into my mouth and suck the batter off her fingers. Slowly and methodically as I look right at the innocent, expectant expression on Kiya’s face as she waits for an answer. Her obliviousness lights a fire of desire in my belly and pussy.

“So? Good? Not too sweet, right? Or too chocolatey? And you can’t taste the food coloring right? It’s not supposed to have a flavor, but sometimes it can affect the combination of the other ingredients.”

I reach up and take her finger out my mouth.

“Nope. Just right,” I say before taking her clean finger back into my mouth. That’s when Kiya realizes what I’m doing.

She blushes and then snatches her finger out my mouth to wash her hands.

“No,” she says. “I’m trying to bake a cake. Fooling around with you will ruin it.”

If she weren’t trying to do something nice for Isaak, I’d tell her to fuck her cake and then bend down to eat her pussy while she tried to perfect her batter. But speaking of Isaak, perhaps he has the right idea about exposing Adrian’s lie about Kiya being his daughter. Because what would it be to come home every day and find Kiya baking something for the family. Or sitting in a corner drawing or sketching or painting. To see her stomach one day swollen with my husband’s seed. Or my frozen seed from before my hormone therapies and surgeries. To have a husband and a wife.

It's more than I can dream. Because even if I could find where the Fantonis have buried her old identity to give us leverage, it would put Kiya in danger more than anything. Vaughn wouldn’t be able to do anything to Adrian and Addy for their deception. But he’d be able to kill Kiya. I can’t let her get killed in the crossfire like that.

There is one more way. I could go to Adrian and Addy. I could tell them exactly who killed my father-in-law that night, but then that would put the entire family in danger.

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