Title: Forbidden Attraction

Author: MarieCarro

Genre: Drama/Romance

Rating: NC-17

Summary: To Edward Masen, Bella Swan was nothing more than his daughter's best friend, but that all changed when they both applied for the same weekly writing course. Suddenly, she didn't appear to be the young girl that had played with his daughter since her family moved in next door. What will Edward do when he realizes that he's developing a very forbidden attraction for a woman twenty-five years his junior? AH

Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.

Chapter Word Count: 2, 292

CHAPTER 11

After that night at the restaurant, Bella and I started a little game that was basically about which one of us could shock people the most when they realized we weren't a Dad and his daughter walking around.

Both of us found it entertaining to mess with people, but Bella was pretty much the master, and I doubted I was ever going to reach her level. She just seemed to have a talent for it.

One day we were at a carnival, and a guy close to her age who was working in one of the shooting booths called out to us. "Hey there, sir! How about taking a shot and win a bear for your daughter?"

I was about to decline when Bella looked at me with large excited eyes. "Oh, Dad, please! Please win a bear for me!"

I had laughed at her and gone with her willingly enough when she dragged me up to the booth.

"How many does he have to hit to win me that bear?" she'd asked the guy in a slightly flirty voice, and he'd been powerless against her charm and smile.

"Uuh ... t-three," he replied in a shaky voice.

"Awesome," she said and handed me the shotgun. When her fingers grazed my knuckles, she glanced up at me and winked, which of course had me laughing again. "If you win me that bear, Dad, I'll do anything you want."

I wasn't a pro-shooter or anything close to that, but I had been a frequent carnival visitor when I was a kid, and I knew how to shoot at a bunch of cans. It didn't take me many tries to hit three and the booth-guy gave the very exuberant Bella the plush light-brown bear she wanted so badly.

The best part was the look on the guy's face when Bella threw her arms around my neck and pulled me down to give me a kiss of gratitude, and it was not exactly a small peck on the lips either.

When she let me go, she met the poor guy's look, winked and sneaked in under my arm. "Thank you for the bear, Dad," she said and then we walked away.

"You're such a tease … poor guy never stood a chance," I told her when we were out of ear-shot.

She shrugged non-apologetically. "Of course he never stood a chance when I had you next to me. And he's only got himself to blame. That should teach him to never presume anything ever again."

"Yeah … either that or he will believe that we are a father and daughter who's got a very … controversial relationship."

She laughed and hit me lightly on the chest with her new bear.

"Why did you want that bear so much anyway?"

She looked at the stuffed animal and smiled. "Well, now I have something I can physically take with me back to school that will remind me of our time here."

"It's going to be harder to be apart after this week, isn't it?" I asked rhetorically because I already knew the answer to that one.

She nodded. "Yeah, and school's going to be crazy, so I won't have any more time off before summer."

I swallowed hard. "But that's only six or seven weeks, right? You don't have any summer classes or anything, do you?"

"No, I don't, but it won't be the same anyway."

I frowned in confusion. "What do you mean?"

She sighed sadly. "We'll be back home. Back where both of us are knee-deep in secrets. We won't be able to be together like we are now."

"That's true, but I'm sure we can get away to some other place for a week or two."

"Without our families noticing that the both of us disappear at the same time? Believe me, if they're not suspecting us to have secret relationships on the side now, they definitely will then."

I knew she was right, and I also knew what we could do about it. "So maybe we don't keep it a secret."

She whipped her head toward me so fast I was afraid she'd get a kink in her neck. "What?"

"Maybe, this summer is the time for us to 'come out' so to speak," I suggested.

Bella was silent for a moment as she thought about it. "I don't know. Do you think we're ready for that? Two weeks ago we didn't even call this a relationship. Isn't that a little fast?"

"If that's how you feel, I understand," I told her. "But I don't think it is." I led her over to a bench and we sat down. "I know it's my fault things have been going so slow between us. I'm not going to deny that I have been acting both hot and cold with you, and you know I've had reasons, no matter how stupid they've been."

She giggled adorably, and I cupped her precious face in my hand. "When I first told you that I am in love with you, I was completely serious. If my own irrational fears didn't have the annoying habit of getting in the way, I would have told you this a long time ago." I looked into her beautiful dark eyes and smiled. "Bella, I love you, and the thought of having to hide you away like some dirty secret makes me nauseous." I leaned forward and gave her a kiss, and I could feel the wetness on her cheeks from her tears. I wiped them away with my thumbs and pulled her closer to me, but only close enough to still be appropriate in public. "You deserve so much more than that, and I don't want to lie about this anymore."

Her breath was shaky as she inhaled deeply. "I love you, too," she said. "I've just been so scared to tell you."

"Why?"

She looked down and entwined our hands. "I guess I am still a bit insecure, and while the biggest part of me can feel that you're not planning on pulling away this time, there's still that whispering voice in my head that says I need to be careful."

I nodded. "I can understand that, and I don't blame you. I'm hoping time will reassure you."

"What about Alice, though?" she asked and looked back up at me. "She will hate me when she finds out that I am screwing her Dad."

Her choice of words made me grin. "Well, I'm sure she will hate me as well, knowing that I'm screwing her best friend."

"We haven't been best friends for a long time," Bella disagreed. "It will hurt, losing her as a friend. There was a time when she knew me better than anyone, but that changed pretty quickly after graduation."

"I noticed that. What happened exactly?"

She shrugged. "I guess we wanted different things in life and we just grew apart." She leaned her head against my shoulder. "If I'm being honest, though, if someone asked me right now, in this moment, who I would choose between Alice and you, I would pick you without hesitating."

I kissed the top of her head. "She will eventually move on and get over it," I tried to reassure.

"Yeah, but she can hold one hell of a grudge, and I'm pretty sure I won't be able to show my face at home for some time after we tell everyone."

I frowned. "Why not?"

"You know that rumor that went all over town about Alice's and my classmate, Jessica Stanley?"

"The one about her sleeping with every guy at your school?" I asked. I remembered when that rumor spread, and it spread fast. The poor girl got so many propositions by boys and men all over town after that because she was supposed to be an easy catch. "Didn't she change schools?"

"She moved out of town. She couldn't stand the catcalls and the stares any longer."

"Understandable. What does this have to do with Alice holding a grudge and you going MIA at home, though?"

She laughed, but it was obvious it wasn't because she thought it was funny. "Who do you think started the rumor?"

It took a moment for me to connect the puzzle pieces and when I did, I leaned away and had Bella look me in the eye. "Are you serious? Alice did that? You're saying that my daughter ruined that girl's life?"

Bella nodded sadly. "Yeah, I'm afraid so. Alice has always had a bit of a mean streak. I never cared when we were kids because it wasn't worse than what other kids did to each other, but her motivation for lying about Jessica was because she saw Jessica kiss the guy she liked, and that was it." She sighed and looked out over the park. "It made me very uncomfortable from the start when Alice told me what she'd done, and when Jessica moved out town, I stayed at home and cried for two days because I felt so guilty even though I didn't do anything."

I scrubbed my face with one of my hands as I started to feel quite uncomfortable myself. Bella was telling me things about my daughter that I had no idea about, and I questioned myself as a parent. Did Mary know this about Alice? She couldn't because I was positive she would have told me then. The whole Jessica Stanley thing happened when Alice and Bella were Sophomores, and my marriage with Mary had been fine back then.

No, I was sure Mary didn't know, and I realized that we needed to do something about our daughter, and fast before her behavior got her into something she couldn't get out of.

"Just imagine what she'd say about me when we tell her the truth," Bella continued, and I spotted a tear fall down her cheek. I put my arm around her shoulders and pulled her back to my side.

"Then we'll face it together. Just like we promised."

"I met a traveler from an antique land who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert … Near them, on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown—"

"Give me a challenge. That's Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley. We studied every detail of that poem for a week in Senior year," Bella said from where she lay on her towel and sunbathed.

Both of us had decided that a day on the beach sounded like something we both needed, and as we absorbed the sun's warmth, I read from a book of collected poems to see if she could name the poem and author.

She knew each one of them without hesitation, and it had made me smile. It was nice to sometimes go back to that one thing that first had brought us together, which was our love for the written word.

"If you know every detail of the poem, then tell me what it means?"

She cracked her eye open and glanced at me sideways before grinning. "It's about the irony that one of the greatest kings in history now only has a broken down statue to attest to his reign. The grandeur of his plans has been leveled out by the sand because, in the end, we're all in the mercy of time and nature no matter how great we lived," she said confidently.

"Sounds like you've figured out the answers to life itself," I teased her.

"It's a gift and curse to have such a vast intellect as I do," she replied, and I chuckled.

Suddenly, the sun was blocked by a young guy with long hair tied back in a bun. "Hey, man, sorry to bother you, but I just wanted to see if your daughter wanted to play some ball with me and a few of my friends," he said and smiled widely at Bella even though he was supposedly talking to me.

Bella raised her brow at him. "No, thank you," she told him politely without correcting his mistake of our relationship. Both of us had kind of given up on that point by now. There would always be people who mistook us for parent and child because of our age difference, and we'd accepted that, as long as we didn't care, they could believe what they wanted.

"Oh, C'mon! It would be fun," the guy insisted.

"Hey … dude, she said no," I warned him. I had never liked how pushy young guys were when it came to women. I wasn't going to deny that I had most likely been the same when I was their age, but it didn't mean that I was going to condone that sort of behavior now when I could say something about it.

"Take it easy there, Pops. I'm just offering her a good time," he continued, and before I could stand up and physically remove him from my sight, Bella sat up and glared at him.

"Read the tone; not interested!"

"Okay, jeesh, take a chill pill. I was just asking." The guy left us, and Bella rolled her eyes before she turned over onto her stomach and handed me her sunscreen.

"Could you put some on my back?"

I got on my knees and put some lotion in my hand to massage it into her skin, and as I did so, I leaned down to her ear. "I love you."

She smiled into her bent arm. "I love you, too."