But Cleo read my mind. She nodded.
“Daddy, you’re not the first man that Lorena’s met cleaning houses,” she said softly. “Only rich people can afford Greener Living, so we were always being sent to estates around Long Island, cleaning 10,000 square foot mansions with pool houses and guest cottages. We’d be on site for days sometimes, these places were so big.”
I frowned for a second.
“You were cleaning as well?” I growled. “What about school? You were too young to be working full-time.”
And here, the girl shook her head again slowly.
“I was,” she agreed. “But Mom couldn’t afford babysitting, so she’d take me with her on jobs. I’d usually sit in the van and wait while she and the rest of the crew cleaned. It wasn’t fun because they use a lot of harsh chemicals and sitting in the van, the fumes would sting my eyes, my nose, make it hard to breathe. So actually, I wanted to help them,” she confessed. “That way, I could get some air.”
And I frowned again. This Cinderella background was even harsher than I imagined. I mean, yeah, I knew Lorena and Cleo came from a blue-collar past but I never imagined it was like this.
Still, Cleo shrugged.
“When I got old enough to look like a legit employee, I started cleaning with the crew, going into the mansions. It was amazing,” she said, taking a deep breath. “It was only then that I realized how much some people have, and how little we had.”
Well, that was easy to fix.
“But you have everything you need now, right?” I growled. “Because I’ve been giving Lorena money for you, a lot of it.”
“Oh I know,” smiled the redhead. “Thank you so much, I totally appreciate it. And I wanted to thank you personally tonight,” she said, a bit of a sassy gleam coming back into her eyes, shifting slightly on the ottoman. My mouth immediately started watering again, imagining that juicy butt bumping up and down on my cock, humping my pole. But I hadn’t gotten answers yet.
“But why do you say Lorena’s done this before?” I ground out, forcing myself to ignore my burgeoning erection. “How do you know she’s tried for a second kid?”
And here Cleo cocked her head at me.
“Because you’re not the first rich man she’s seduced, haven’t you realized that Daddy? Mom’s always wanted to live a lavish lifestyle. She’s tried to hook up with quite a few of the guys we cleaned house for,” she finished.
Fuck me. That took some fucking moxie.
“Who was she fucking?” I asked, although it really didn’t matter. I was curious more than anything else.
“Well, there was Mr. Jennings over on North Shore, and Mr. Dykstra over in Manhasset,” she said slowly. “And there were probably ten others, I can’t remember their names now. Oh wait, and Evan Musk in Manhattan. I remember him because he was the only one we went into the City for,” she added.
Shit, that was a lot of dudes.
“But this took place over a long time right?” I growled, morbidly curious. There were so many men that Lorena must have started long ago, when Cleo was only a baby.
But the redhead’s shook her head somberly, biting her lip.
“No Daddy, she did it all in three years. She was sleeping with these guys simultaneously, just waiting for one to bite. It wasn’t even a question of ‘if,’ it was a question of ‘when.’”
And in that instant, I realized I’d been a fucking dunce. A dunce who’d been ruled by my dick. Because Lorena had been fucking multiple men simultaneously with the strategy of getting a rich man’s ring on her finger and it had worked. There’d been a ton of targets and I was the sucker who’d pulled the trigger, who’d made her legit, and now look what had happened. I had a disgusting, lazy ass wife whose daughter I was trying to boff. What a fucking cliché.
“But how do you know she’s tried for kids?” I asked carefully. Shit, what did these other guys know that I didn’t?
“Because Mr. Jennings over in the North Shore said the only way he’d marry her was if she got pregnant. So Lorena was taking all these pre-natal vitamins, going to the doctor all the time to get her cycle checked, but nothing worked. I still remember when Mr. Jennings threw us out,” said Cleo quietly. “It was so humiliating, we had to live in our car for a while.”
And I could only imagine. I knew Len Jennings from some business dealings and the asshole was the type who bragged about his conquests, his billion dollar fortune, when everyone knew he’d filed for bankruptcy twice in the last ten years. Cleo had dodged a bullet as far as I was concerned.