Living with the Single Dad (The Single Dads of Seattle Book 4) Read online

  Living with the Single Dad

  Single Dads of Seattle, Book 4

  Whitley Cox

  Copyright © 2019 by Whitley Cox

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review

  ISBN: 978-1-989081-22-8

  Contents

  About the Book

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  Christmas with the Single Dad - Sneak Peek

  If You’ve Enjoyed This Book

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Whitley Cox

  About the Author

  You can also find me here

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  For the husband,

  because without you, life would seriously suck.

  About the Book

  A pain so powerful can only be eased by a love even stronger.

  Welcome to Seattle, the Emerald City and home to The Single Dads of Seattle. Ten sexy single fathers who play poker every Saturday night, have each other's backs, love their children without quarter, and hope to one day find love again.

  This is Aaron's story ...

  Single Dad of Seattle, Aaron Steele isn't a single dad at all. He's a retired Navy SEAL whose sister just died, leaving him to raise her newborn daughter all by himself. Only he has no clue how to be a dad--let alone a single dad. He's lost in a sea of diapers and bottles, late nights and exhausting mornings, all the while dealing with a failure from his last mission he just can't shake. He needs help. He needs a nanny.

  Professional nanny Isobel Jones has a heart of gold. She's always willing to help out, no matter the cause. She spends her days with children making memories and her nights on the laptop making magic as a graphic designer. After hearing Aaron's heartbreaking story, she jumps at the chance to help. But she never expected her new boss to be a blue-eyed Adonis with dog tags, who quickly begins to fuel her fantasies.

  While the beautiful nanny is off limits, she's also a welcomed distraction. Aaron's grief is still raw and he just knows he's going to mess up this whole dad thing. Isobel's never shied away from a challenge, and that's exactly what Aaron is--a big challenge. He's angry and stubborn, moody and confusing, and yet she knows deep down he's capable of so much love.

  Will Isobel living with the single dad help pull him out of his misery, or will Aaron let the turmoil inside him chase away perhaps the only person that could help him finally find happiness?

  **Note: This book can be read as a standalone. It includes lots of steamy scenes, cursing, and of course as with all my books, this has an HEA and no cliffhanger or cheating. If you like single dads who take charge, this book is for you.

  1

  His feet were made of fucking concrete.

  His heart the same.

  People visiting babies in the NICU shouldn’t have to pay for fucking parking. They shouldn’t have to pay for squat. A human that weighed less than a fucking house cat was fighting for her life in a plastic box, hooked up to only God knows how many electrodes and monitors, and they were charging him to go and see her. They would also charge him to keep her there, to keep her alive.

  And if he couldn’t pay?

  Would they pull the plug on a one-month-old?

  This country was so fucked up.

  Pay to live. Pay to be kept alive.

  Hippocratic oath, his fucking left nut.

  You were only worth saving if you could afford it.

  Thank Christ he could pay.

  Dina made good money as a lawyer. She’d made sure Sophie would want for nothing.

  Except her mother.

  She’d want her mother.

  She’d need her mother.

  Fuck.

  Aaron needed his sister.

  Grief ensnared him, digging its razor-sharp claws into every cell of his body and shaking him like a rag doll. He pounded his fists on the steering wheel, hollering at the top of his lungs until tears rolled down his cheeks and his throat was raw.

  How?

  How could this have happened?

  He’d spoken to Dina on the phone not two days ago. He was on his way back from a wedding in the South Pacific and couldn’t wait to go see Sophie. Dina said that they were getting ready to take her off the ventilators and that if her glucose stayed steady and she could breathe on her own, then they might be able to bring her home soon.

  Home.

  To Dina’s condo.

  To the nursery his sister had spent hours decorating. Where the crib he’d built for his niece sat waiting for her to sleep in.

  The home his sister had created for a child she’d longed for her entire life, and then finally decided to go it alone when she knew her clock was ticking and she hadn’t found the right man yet.

  They were going to raise Sophie together.

  She would be the mother, the world’s best mother, and he would the cool uncle who spoiled his niece rotten. He would be the one to buy her her first tutu, her first horseback riding lessons, her first phone, her first car. He’d also be the tattooed muscle at the front door to intimidate the shit out of any boy that tried to mess with his precious Sophie.

  From the first moment he laid eyes on her after Dina had her, he’d fallen in love and had vowed to protect her with everything that he was, everything that he had. He would gladly lay down his life for his niece.

  He’d also said all that when he knew Dina would be doing the majority of the child-raising. When he knew she’d be doing all the hard stuff, like diapers and discipline.

  But now, he was all Sophie had.

  He was her everything. Mother, father. Uncle, aunt.

  There was no cool uncle status anymore. Just the overwhelming responsibility of being everything she needed.

  Sophie wouldn’t be running to him when her mother brought down the hammer, pissed her off and she needed somebody to talk to. Now he was going to have to be the one to bring down the hammer. Who would she run to?

  Two days.

  Two days ago, his sister had been alive. She’d been happy, madly in love with her daughter and both excited and scared to embark on her new role as a mom.

  “Give her a kiss for me,” Aaron had said as he stood in line with his boarding pass in his hand. He’d been out of town for ten days at his buddy Rob’s wedding in French Polynesia and was just heading back to the States. “I can’t wait to see how much she’s grown and changed.”

  “She’s doing so well. Gained nearly a pound and half, her jaundice is gone, and she’s starting to nurse a bit. Which is amazing, because I fucking hate pumping, and my
boobs are constantly sore. I look like a porn star.”

  “Not an image I want to conjure up about my sister, thanks.”

  Dina chuckled into the phone. Aaron had always loved his sister’s laugh. It was so big and loud and full. You knew she put her whole soul into her laugh. “Whatever. One day you’ll have a wife or whatever, and she’ll be complaining of the same shit.”

  Aaron made a noise in his throat that said he wasn’t sure he agreed. He couldn’t see himself settling down anytime soon—if ever. “We’ll see.” He approached the desk before the jet bridge and handed the attendant his boarding pass and passport. “But listen, sis, I’m about to board. I can’t wait to see the little monkey … and Sophie too.”

  “Ha. Ha.” He could practically see her eye roll from across the globe.

  Then they’d said they loved each other, like they always did before they said goodbye on the phone, and they hung up. And that was the last time he spoke to his baby sister before she was gunned down during a mass shooting in a mall as she was busy picking out preemie baby clothes for Sophie.

  His baby sister, the only person he’d ever loved, his best friend in the entire fucking world, was gunned down in a goddamn shopping mall while buying baby clothes for her premature daughter, who was back at the hospital breathing via machine.

  It would never sink in.

  Never.

  How did shit like this happen?

  How?

  Still unable to move from behind the driver’s seat of his black Chevy pickup truck, Aaron Steele, retired Navy SEAL and special operative, stared straight ahead at the sign for hospital parking and how much it would cost him an hour to go and sit with his one-month-old niece, who’d been born one month premature. To stare at her little body as it struggled to live, knowing that she would never see her mother again. Knowing that she would never know the sound of her mother’s voice, the feel of her mother’s lips on her soft baby cheeks, her arms around her.

  Sophie was in there fighting for her life, and in the blink of an eye, her mother’s life had ended.

  How in the fuck did this make any goddamn sense at all?

  How was Aaron supposed to get out of the truck, walk into the hospital and go be a father to Sophie? He had no idea how to be a father. He’d never had a father to know how to be one, let alone a good one. He could hardly take care of himself. He wasn’t even sure he ever wanted kids.

  Cool uncle had been fine with him.

  Love them until they’re annoying and then pass them back to their parents.

  Win-win for everyone. Mainly him.

  But all that changed in a fucking instant, and now he was a dad. He was a single dad with a one-month-old daughter who would never know her mother, and he had no fucking clue where to start.

  A knock on his window had him reaching for the gun on his hip. Only he wasn’t carrying a gun today. He hadn’t carried a gun in two days, and he wasn’t sure he ever would again.

  The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

  Yeah, fucking right. He called bullshit. Where the hell had the good guy with the gun been when his sister was in the baby boutique bleeding out?

  The only person who should have a gun is a fucking sane person with proper training and a fucking permit.

  You needed a license to own a dog, to drive a car, to catch a fish. Why the fuck didn’t you need one to own a goddamn weapon?

  Another knock on the window, and a confused face brought his thoughts back to the present.

  Liam stared at him through the window, his brown eyes as hollow as Aaron’s heart. He’d been one of Dina’s closest friends and colleagues. He was Dina’s in case of emergency person because Aaron had been a SEAL for so long and not always around. It was Liam who’d called Aaron with the news about Dina.

  Aaron rolled down the window.

  Liam’s throat undulated on a hard swallow. The man looked like complete shit. Dark bags under his eyes, messy dark blond hair, days and days’ worth of scruff.

  He looked how Aaron felt.

  “Hey.”

  Aaron nodded a hello.

  “Going in?”

  “Hoping to.”

  Liam scanned the parking lot. It was late August and hot as fuck. You could probably fry an egg on the blacktop. “I just left.”

  Aaron lifted his head and narrowed his eyes at Liam. “You saw Sophie?”

  Liam nodded. “Yeah. I’ve been going as much as I can since she was born. Whenever Dina had to leave, she always made sure someone else was with Soph. Someone besides a nurse or doctor. Like a friend.”

  Aaron’s heart ripped in two. His sister was the best fucking mom in the whole fucking world. And of course she would be. She knew what a shitty mother was like. They both did. Having grown up in foster care their entire lives, Aaron and Dina had bounced around the system for years. They never found a home or family they could really call theirs. But at least they had each other.

  When Aaron turned eighteen, he left the system, or more accurately was kicked out of the system, left to his own devices to either flounder or flourish in the big cruel world.

  Thankfully, he flourished. The day he graduated high school, he got a job in construction. Walked right onto the site and refused to leave until the foreman gave him a job. And at 4:58 p.m, right before quitting time, he was handed his very first hard hat.

  Over the next six months, he proved himself, and his boss at the construction company offered to pay for Aaron to go to carpentry school while he worked. He earned his journeyman ticket in carpentry and obtained all of his necessary apprenticeship hours by the time he was twenty-one.

  Shortly after Aaron got hired, his boss—who became more of a father figure than anything else—helped him petition the courts to get legal custody of Dina—and he won. She was fifteen and he was eighteen, and he was happy to get her out of the shit show house they’d been living in before that. Eight foster kids, one foster mother, one bathroom and barely enough food to feed a family of rabbits.

  Though he and Dina didn’t live like royalty, at least they were together. He found them a modest little two-bedroom apartment in a questionable part of Seattle, but it was clean, it was safe, and most importantly, it was theirs, and they were together.

  He worked and went to night school for his journeyman ticket. She went to high school and worked a part-time job at a movie theater on the weekends. They made ends meet—just barely, but they did. They never went to bed hungry, were never late on a rent or utility bill. Somehow, by grace and by God, Aaron even managed to save a small sum by the time Dina’s senior prom came around, and he surprised her with the dress she’d been dreaming of for over six months.

  She was his person, and he was hers.

  Because they were all the other ever had.

  Sure, he had his brothers in arms. He had Rob and Colt, Wark and Ash. They were his brothers.

  They were his team.

  But they weren’t blood.

  Dina was his blood.

  She was the only blood he had. His only connection to his past.

  They didn’t know their parents, their grandparents or whether they had more siblings out there. It was just the two of them. Aaron and Dina Steele, taking on the world.

  When she graduated high school, he made sure she got into college before he enlisted in the Navy. He knew she’d be safe and make friends at college. She wouldn’t be alone. He put her through four years of school and then law school, sending her money whenever he could. Even if they went months without seeing each other, he wanted her to know that he was always there for her. Always supporting her.

  He’d never cried so much in his life—up until recently—than he did the day his sister accepted her diploma at her law school graduation. And he didn’t give a flying fuck who saw him bawling his eyes out. His baby sister was a motherfucking lawyer, and he would shout it from the rooftops and sob until his eyes were empty, he was so damn proud.

  “I can go back
in with you.” Liam’s voice drew Aaron out of his thoughts. He’d been spacing out a lot over the last two days. Jet lag and grief will do that to a person. “If you’re not ready to go face Sophie alone, I can go back in. She knows me. Seems to like me.”

  Aaron pursed his lips together before rolling the window back up in his truck, turning off the ignition and opening the door. “Thanks, man. Right now I’m not sure how to face her alone.”

  He locked the truck and dug into his pocket to grab his wallet so he could pay for parking.

  Liam’s hand slapped his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, man. I got ya. I’ll go enter your license plate number and get your parking. Go see your niece.”

  Swallowing down the razor blade that had lodged in his throat, Aaron did nothing but nod, murmur a thanks and then head in the direction of the hospital main entrance, the ache in his heart feeling more like an anvil on his chest as he approached the main doors.

  He wasn’t cut out to be a dad.

  He was going to fail Sophie, fail Dina, fail them all.

  Just like he’d failed in Colombia.

  2

  “Zucchini noodles with parmesan, prawns and sun-dried tomatoes,” Isobel Jones sang as she set the dinner plate down in front of her sister and roommate, Tori. She set a plate with the same food down in her spot and thanked her sister for pouring the wine.