ONE NIGHT STAND WITH MY STEP DADDY

Chapter 8 The Web Of Deceit (Pov Isabelle)

I opened my search engine at seven in the morning with my laptop on the bed and my coffee already going cold on the nightstand. I love using Google for my research.

I typed his name, Dorian Vayne, the tattoo artist and spent the next twenty minutes clicking through everything that came up, both the studio website, two magazine features, one interview from three years ago where he'd managed to say almost nothing personal across four hundred words.

His i********: had forty-six thousand followers and every single post was his tattoo artistic work, with different skin and ink, but never his face, a location tagged, and never a comment replied to.

While I was making researches about him. There was nothing about where he was from, nothing about family, no digital footprint. That was when the studio had opened, and where his public record started and stopped.

At first, there was no deleted accounts I could trace, or cached pages, not even a forum post. I kept clicking, kept expecting to find something that had slipped through, and found nothing.

I closed the laptop. The unease I'd gone to bed with, and the empty search results didn't help. People didn't look like that by accident or become that successful without a track record. You had to work.

:

As I was still pondering on that, my mother's car pulled out at ten o’clock in the night. I gave it two minutes, then went to her room.

I moved through her dresser first, her scarves, a ceramic dish holding spare buttons and a broken earring back, nothing that didn't belong. Her closet next, the shelf above the rail where she kept things she didn't need often. A shoebox of old birthday cards, another with photographs, mostly of me at various ages. I went through both carefully and put them back.

My hand found the cloth-covered box at the very back of the shelf which was flat, about the size of a hardcover book, and I didn't recognize it. I felt a small, unpleasant knot and uneasiness in my stomach as I lifted the lid.

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Inside of it, there was a folded letter on cream paper, a little flower gone brown at the edges already, and a small card with nothing printed on the front.

I unfolded the letter first. The handwriting wasn't my mother's, the letters precise in a way that felt deliberate rather than natural.

I read it twice. My chest felt tight in a way I didn't want to examine too closely. I found a connection between Dorian and my mother and that was a few years back.

I sat on the floor of my room with my back against the bed frame and my phone face-down in my lap.

My mother had spent four years alone after the divorce. Two relationships, both of which didnt last and both ending quietly. Then six months ago she'd met Dorian, and three months after that she was engaged. I'd thought it was fast at the time, but I'd chalked it up to loneliness, to her being ready, to do whatever it takes to do when it comes to having a man by your side.

But how could it be a man that I've had s*x together with?

Fuck! It shouldn't be him. Upon all the men in this world?

I thought about his face in the hallway that first night, the lust behind his eyes in the half-second before he pulled himself back together. I'd read it as shock. I'd assumed we were both blindsided, both standing in the same impossible situation. I'd assumed he hadn't known who I was.

But what if he had?

What if walking into my mother's house hadn't surprised him at all?

The front door opened downstairs and my mother, started heading to her room where I was.

I stood, checked my reflection in the mirror above my desk and I went down to meet her.