"Good morning, daddy," she said with just a trace of her Ukrainian accent.
"I really wish you wouldn't call me that," said her stepfather, "at least not the way you do."
"What do you mean, daddy?" Her voice softer yet, like dripping honey, sexy, inviting, subtle in its meaning.
"You're flirting again, Kate, and it's not right for you to do that. You have to stop. I can only take so much of it.
"I know," she said softly to herself. "That's the idea." "Maybe I'll stop when I get what I want," she thought..
She smiled sweetly and in her mind she knew that it wouldn't be long. He was breaking down, and soon she would have what she had wanted since she first laid eyes on her new father.
She and her mother, a younger looking 34 year old woman who worked in a law office, had come to live in this new country with this man four years earlier, her mother marrying a man five years her junior, an American she had met via computer on one of the foreign mail-order bride sites. He had come to the Ukraine to meet her and only then had she told him of her young daughter, Katya. He didn't care that she had a child, or that she had never married the child's father. He was in love with her and they were married almost immediately. Three years later she woke up one morning, kissed the man she loved so very much, and fell to the floor. A massive heart attack, the coroner had said. She was two years shy of 40.
The first time Katya had seen her new father had been the day before the wedding. He was 29, handsome and well off. Not rich, but comfortable, with a good job befitting his genius as a designer of industrial machines. His square jaw and piercing blue eyes coupled with his thick, wavy black hair was enough to send the impressionable 16 year old Katya into a frenzy of lust. She loved her mother far too much to ever even consider interfering with her marriage by flirting with her stepfather, no matter how much she wanted to. He was kind to her, helping her to more fully understand the language she must now master. He treated her as though she were a daughter born to him, even so far as patiently teaching her how to drive a car, carefully questioning the boys she chose to date, helping her and her mother to shop for the proper clothing. She was happy, rarely missing the country she was forced to leave. He taught her how to assimilate into American society and it wasn't long before she was fully accepted by her peers.
For the first six months following her mother's death, Katya wore nothing but heavy, unappealing black clothing and hardly left her room except to eat and finish her last few months of school. But the change came. It came suddenly, without warning, almost violently.
Peter was in his office designing some new packaging machine on his computer when his ears were assailed by a horrible scream coming from Katya's bedroom. The girl had spent so many days and nights in her room crying that he had come to accept it. His offers of help and consolation unheeded, but this was something else. The scream had sounded more painful than usual.
"Kate? What's happening? Are you alright?" he shouted, rushing down the hall to the girl's room. The door was locked, so he knocked loudly on it. "Katya!" There were awful sounds of crying coming from inside the room. Peter had come to love Katya as much as any man could love a daughter, and it pained him deeply to hear her crying. "Katya!" he repeated, "Are you alright?"
The crying stopped as suddenly as it had started, and then the sound of the lock being turned. Peter turned the handle and slowly entered, hesitating for a moment while his eyes became accustomed to the relative darkness of the room. She sat on the edge of the bed, her back to him.
"Are you alright now, Princess? You scare me when you cry like that. What can I do to help you?"
"Nothing," she replied, softly, putting her face into her hands. "You will not understand. You cannot help me."
"I miss your mother too, very much. I do understand," he said, sure that he knew the cause of her pain, coming to her and putting his hand on her shoulder, feeling the smooth skin under his palm. He felt her shudder slightly at his touch but ignored it.
"It isn't that. I accept her death because I must. There is nothing anyone can do about that. It is the way of things, is it not? Before we came here my mother and I witnessed death many times. I am not a stranger to it. I mourned for my mother because that too is the way of things. It is proper, is it not?"
“Of course it is,” he replied, suddenly ashamed of himself for not mourning longer.
“You, as a man, are forced to put your feelings deep inside. Your duty is to provide home and food for your family, and so you cannot be seen to feel deep sadness as women do. For that I feel sadness for you.”
“You are a very wise woman, Katya,” he said, grateful for being let off of the hook, “Wise beyond your years.”
“I am a woman,” she said very softly, rising from the edge of the bed, going to the window, pushing open the frilly drapes for the first time in many months, and then turned to face him, “and that is the trouble.”
The vision of her hit him like a prizefighter’s punch to the jaw. She had worn the long black, ankle-length mourning dresses for so long that he had quite forgotten how very beautiful she had become in the four years she had been with him. He could hardly take his eyes off of her. The thick blonde hair cascaded down her back and over her shoulders in soft ringlets, her bright green eyes still a little red from crying. Gone was the black dress, and in its place a tiny white skirt above calf-high white leather boots. A white translucent bra barely covered her perfectly round, full breasts. The frumpy looking girl had transformed back into a vision of loveliness. His voice refused to sound.
“You will send me back to the Ukraine, will you not? I am nothing to you, just the daughter of your wife. And now that she is dead you have no... I am not sure of the English word... loyalty to me.”
She knew how he felt about her, she had always felt accepted by him but she needed to know for sure that his feelings went beyond mere acceptance.
“The word is obligation, Katya, and I have far more than just an obligation to you. I would have hoped that you could see that by now. I love you, as any decent father would his daughter. I was thrilled to discover that your mother had a beautiful, well behaved and intelligent daughter."
"And that too is a trouble," she replied. "a thing I would have hoped you would have seen by now."
"Why is that a problem? I don't understand," he asked, truly confused.
"That you still see me as a child, and not the woman I am, with all of the needs that this thing brings with it."
"Katya, I have never stopped you from being a woman. I have encouraged you to go out on dates, to socialize with people, to blend in with the rest of the kids. Until your mother died, you were very popular, always at the top of your classes, despite your early struggles with English. I understood your deep sadness because I felt it too. Maybe we both should have escaped our sad world more and mingled with other people, I don't know. It didn't seem right at the time, somehow. Maybe now is the time for us to return to the world of the living before we slip into an abyss we can't get out of."
She swore softly in her native language, shaking her head.
"You almost understand, the 'we' and the 'us', you almost have it, Peter." There, she said it, using his first name, for the first time, to his face.
"Katya..." he began, the light of understanding just breaking over the horizon of his ignorance.
"I love you," she said, softly, "and not as a daughter should love her father, but as a woman who has found the man she wishes to spend her life with. Before you tell me how improper it is, let me remind you that you did not adopt me. You asked me then if I would wish to be adopted, and I said no, that I wished to remain a Korchinko. I do not know why I did that, but now I am very glad that I did. I am not officially your daughter."
She leaned back on the edge of the bed slightly, her confession complete, waiting for his reaction, ready to accept whatever should come of it, expecting the worst, but hoping for the best. For several very long moments he said nothing, a look of what she saw as confused horror on his face.
"I... I don't know how to react to this, Kate. You've been my daughter for four years and I have never thought of you as... well, anything else. Certainly not as a ..."
The words would not come out. Lover, object of desire, sensual being. No, she was his daughter, nothing more. She was beautiful, he had always seen that, even more beautiful than her mother had been, but there was no lust in the observation. It just was, and he was proud of her beauty, knowing that some very lucky young man would steal her away someday and make her his trophy wife. But this! This was entirely something else again and he had no idea how to deal with it.
She could see his confusion, could almost feel it.
"Now will you send me back?" she asked, softly.
"No," he said, "That will never happen, and certainly not because you say you love me. That would be cruel beyond belief."
Katya breathed a sigh of relief. He wasn't throwing her out, at least not yet. Her dainty foot was in the door, so to speak.
"I warn you that if you are to let me stay, I will be as a woman, not as a daughter. I will not play the game fairly. You said yourself that I am a beautiful girl, and I am not so stupid that I do not know this to be so. A woman in love will do many things that are not fair to win the one man of her desire."
"I could make you get a place of your own," he said, "You are an adult now."
"But you won't, I think, because deep inside your heart you love me too. And I have no job and no money to live somewhere else. There is your brother, Bill, and his wife Nancy, but I think you would not trust his son."
"No, I wouldn't trust that kid as far as I could throw him. I think he's doing drugs on the side."
"I know he is," she said simply, not confessing that the boy had tried to get her high two years earlier in an attempt to get her into bed, or that he continued to grab at her whenever the two families got together. Still, he wasn't quite throwing her out. A slight change in tactics... "All I have to offer you, is me." She slid forward slightly on the bed, her already short skirt sliding higher on her creamy thighs, and then laid back on the bed, her thick hair fanning out under her head like a halo.
"I can't," he said softly, and left the room. Twice they ate meals in silence and as she cleaned up the dishes afterwards, a tear ran down her face.
The tension between them was thick for several days. Peter hardly looked at Katya directly, he knew he didn't dare. Her skirts got shorter, the blouses thinner and more transparent, and her choice of perfumes more exotic. As confused as he was, it never occurred to him to order her to stop. Not that it would have done any good anyway. She knew he wasn't discouraging her, and by that lack of action was actually encouraging her to continue seducing him. He had no chance and he knew it, and worse, so did she. She started singing while she did her housework chores, and although he had known she had a beautiful voice, it was nothing like this. The most sensual sounds came from her ruby lips in the language of her homeland, and while he could not understand the words, he understood the breathless sounds perfectly. She was right, she didn't play fair.
2
So, to the fateful morning when Katya had gotten out of bed early, leaving the sheets rumpled and the pillows askew, bathed quietly, fixing her hair perfectly, and applying just a touch of makeup to the face that needed none.
