His Little Stray: An Age Gap Forbidden Pregnancy Romance: Forbidden Desires

She had three dollars and forty cents in a paper cup when I found her. I had a warm house, a full refrigerator, and twenty years of silence waiting for someone to break it. I told myself I was being kind. I was lying.

Rue is twenty-one. She aged out of foster care three years ago, and last month she lost her apartment, her roommate, and the last soft thing life was ever going to give her. Now she's sitting on a Brooklyn subway platform with an empty stomach and nowhere to go — and a sixty-four-year-old man in a brown cardigan sits down in front of her and asks if she has somewhere to sleep tonight. She knows what he wants. She says yes anyway.

Eugene Bellamy has been alone for twenty years. He cooks meals no one shares. He reads the newspaper to an empty room. He has forgotten what it sounds like when another human being breathes inside his house. Then he sees her on that platform — hollow cheeks, paper cup, eyes already calculating the price — and he decides to take her home. He is going to feed her until she forgets what hungry feels like. He is going to fill every empty corner of that house with her, until she is so soft and so warm and so full of what he has given her that she cannot remember the girl on the platform. And when she is his in every way a girl can be his, he is never letting her go.

What starts as an arrangement neither of them says out loud becomes something with no name for it: a shared kitchen, a shared bed, a cat on the armrest, a child on the way. Rue has never in her life been warm and fed and wanted all at once, and she is terrified of what she would do to keep it. Eugene has spent two decades learning to want nothing, and he has stopped pretending that is still true. But the warmer that house gets, the harder it becomes for Rue to tell where being cared for ends and being kept begins — and Eugene has no intention of ever letting her find the line.

A standalone novel with a happily ever after. Explicit content, intended for readers 18+.