Daddy's Little Librarian Page 7

  “No, but—”

  “Two,” he said sternly.

  That stopped her. Her tummy and her butt both tightened sharply at the threat, but that minute tightening didn’t last beyond the knee-jerk shock of hearing it. “You can’t start at two,” she grumbled. “It’s illegal to start at two. What happened to one?”

  “One was on the stairs earlier tonight when you sprayed me in the face with that female crap.”

  “But that was hours ago! You can’t just pick up where you left off, you have to start over every time!”

  Kicking back his blankets, he got up off the floor.

  “How high do you count?” she asked in increasing nervousness as he came back around to her side of the bed.

  “Nowhere near high enough to help you now,” he said, stripping the blanket back off her.

  “No!” She all but threw Bat Bear in her haste to get away, but he caught the back of her neck before she could do more than roll onto her tummy. “No!” She scrambled to get her hands and knees up under her.

  He killed her flight instantly when he said, “Fight me and I’ll use my belt.”

  An ominous tingle broke across the entire surface of her bottom. Oh. Oh yeah, he had definitely been someone’s Daddy at some point in time.

  “W-wait,” she stammered, but he didn’t wait. He pulled the Velcro tabs apart and dropped the seat on her pajamas, exposing the very thin cover of her underwear and a bottom already cringing.

  “Wait, please!” she cried, her already high voice rising in panic when he hooked the elastic waist of her panties and took them down as far as he was able. The butt flap wasn’t a large opening, but it was large enough. He bared her bottom to the tops of her thighs.

  “Daddy!” she bawled, but already he was bringing his open hand down in that first mighty swat and he didn’t seem to care at all that she burst into tears almost before he started.

  “I do not wait,” he said over the top of her cries and the thunderclap smacks of his flat palm raining down one hard swat after the other. “When I tell you to do something, you do it. When I start counting, you stop what you’re doing and pay attention, or this is what you’ll get.”

  He gave her no warmup and no pause between spanks to help her deal with the pain before the next swat fell. He simply paddled her, hard and fast, covering every inch of her bottom in sharp, staccato slaps that stung like a vengeful fury. And then hurt. And then really, really hurt. A lot.

  It was the kind of hurt that quickly became impossible to hold still for. It didn’t matter that fighting back would mean the belt. With each new bite of pain he smacked into her, her body instinctively took on a life all its own. Her feet came up off the mattress. Her legs scissored, her hips twisting and bucking, desperately seeking out some way in which to move that might tuck her bottom safely out of his punishing hand’s reach. But no matter how she moved, she couldn’t escape; and no matter how piteously she cried, he didn’t stop. Not until the whole of her butt was wounded, throbbing, positively on fire with unbelievable hurt, every bit of which had been delivered with nothing more lethal than his bare hand.

  “You’re not supposed to spank that hard,” she sobbed.

  Pulling her panties back up over her aching bottom, he covered her with the Velcro flaps and then the blanket. He picked up Bat Bear, which had fallen on the floor sometime during the struggles, and handed it back to her. And then, with his hands braced on the mattress beside her, he said, “Are you going to go to sleep now, or do I need to spank you some more. Because I can do this all night if I have to, but I guarantee you’re going to like the next one you get from me even less than this last one.”

  It took everything she had not to grab her bottom in both hands and rub the fire out. He wasn’t holding her hands. She could have grabbed onto anything she wanted to, but naughty girls weren’t allowed to rub. They didn’t get to ease the pain. They were only allowed to endure.

  Bending, he pressed a gentle kiss on the top of her head. “Daddy doesn’t give gentle or fun spankings for bad behavior.”

  When he went back to his bed and lie back down, she very discretely let go of her bear long enough to touch her pajama-clad bottom under the covers. She didn’t rub. She’d just gotten spanked and while, technically, no rubbing wasn’t a rule he’d laid down, she didn’t want to be caught misbehaving again. Not tonight, anyway.

  She didn’t rub. She just held, feeling the burn that radiated through all the layers of her clothes and into her marveling hands.

  Oh, he was definitely somebody’s Daddy before this.

  And now he was hers.

  She ought to do something nice for him, so he’d know she wasn’t just naughty, or whiny, or needy. So he’d know she appreciated what he was trying to do for her. Not just the spanking, but everything. From sandwiches to crusty fries, to sleeping at the foot of her bed so she would feel safe.

  Tomorrow, she decided. Tomorrow she would find a way to do something nice for him.

  With any luck, her bottom will have stopped hurting by then.

  Chapter Nine

  It was bright and early on a nice, solid, sensible Tuesday. Kurt was standing at the cutting board in the kitchen, dressed in only a towel when Scotti’s cellphone rang. He knew, because it was sitting on the counter right next to his phone, and he was in the middle of tearing open a brand-new package of pre-sliced cheese when the screen lit up in big, block letters that spelled out ‘Gopher.’

  And so it began.

  Picking up the phone, he hit the button. “The number you are trying to reach is currently busy or hates you,” he said, by way of hello. “One would have thought you’d have realized that last night when you were diving headfirst out the window into the bushes.”

  “Go away or else,” a man’s voice growled cryptically back.

  In the middle of making two ham and cheese sandwiches for breakfast and four more for lunch, Kurt wedged the receiver between his shoulder and ear and went back to spreading mayonnaise over a half a loaf’s worth of bread. “Or else, what?”

  “I’m not playing with you. I mean it, go away.”

  “I don’t take threats from vermin.”

  “You’ll take them from me. Or else.”

  He licked a dollop of mayonnaise off his thumb. “Is that the worst the all-mighty Ferret can come up with?”

  “Gopher.”

  “Don’t care. Not leaving.” Suddenly, his phone lit up now too and vibrated, buzzing against the counter. Picking it up, Kurt looked at the unfamiliar phone number.

  From Scotti’s phone, Gopher’s voice dropped ominously. “I can make you go.”

  “I’d love to see you try, Guinea.”

  “Guinea?”

  “Pig.”

  “Bastard.” Gopher hung up the phone.

  Switching phones, Kurt answered his. “Hello?”

  “May I speak to Kurtis Doyle, please?” a man’s voice replied. For some reason, the voice sounded familiar, though at first Kurt couldn’t place it.

  “Speaking,” he said cautiously.

  “Mr. Doyle, I’m not sure if you remember me, my name is—”

  Recognition hit like a sickening twist that went straight through his gut to his groin. “Emerson Davis,” he said along with the man on the other end of the phone. The district attorney who had called him a dirty cop and sent him to prison for two years, costing him everything, including his career, and all for something he hadn’t done. “What the fuck do you want?”

  “I realize I’m not the person you probably want to hear from right now, but last night I received a visit from a young lady named Krissy Degrassi—”

  “Now you listen to me,” Kurt interrupted, the twists in his gut erupting into temper so hot and volatile that for a moment all he wanted to do was slam his phone into the bottom of the sink. “Running into that girl yesterday was sheer fucking misfortune. I wasn’t following or stalking her, if that’s what she told you. I was applying for a god-damn job.”


  “You’re not in any kind of trouble,” the DA calmly assured.

  “Then I don’t have to tell you shit,” Kurt replied, and hung up the phone. He promptly blocked the number, because the way his temper felt right now, if Davis called back, he really would throw his phone and he simply could not afford a new one.

  Setting his cell down instead of dropping or throwing it was a massive personal achievement. One he’d be proud of later, once he was done being pissed.

  Hands braced against the counter, he closed his eyes and simply breathed. In… then out… until shaking his head, he let it go. He had more important things to do than dwell on Dana, Krissy, or the DA who had sided with her to ruin his life.

  Swallowing past his anger, he shoved back off the counter and made himself finish what he was doing. His hands only shook a little as he piled a thick variety of turkey, chicken and baloney over half the bread, a stack of cheese and tomato slices over the other half, and mashed both sides together in a therapeutic show of emotion six times. Stuffing four away for later, he was much calmer when it came time to make breakfast and lunch for Scotti. Her sandwiches were peanut butter with strawberry jam. He cut the crusts off both, stuffed one set of ‘fries’ in a Ziploc baggy along with one sandwich, then took the other into the living room on a small plate. He set it on the dining table and, after adjusting his towel, sat down across from where Scotti was folding a basket of freshly dried laundry.

  “So,” he said conversationally, taking a huge bite. “How’s the underwear coming?”

  Her hands stopped folding. Her head still bowed and moving only her eyes, she looked at him. She bit her bottom lip.

  Kurt sighed. “Let’s see them.”

  Reluctantly, Scotti dug into the unfolded pile and slowly withdrew a pair of his undershorts, still stained bright pink from when she, in a moment of helpfulness, kidnaped his clothes while he was in the shower. He knew exactly what had done it, too. His red and white-striped cabin boy’s shirt was now red and pink-striped. His tights were pink, too. He could already hear the sensitive pirate and I-wanna-sing-and-dance jokes now.

  In other words, his Tuesday had become Monday Part Two.

  “I can’t get the color out of your tights and shirt either,” she admitted. She offered the smallest wince of a smile. “You know, a lot of guys wear pink these days.”

  He just chewed his food. Mondays and Tuesdays, now there were two days of the week gunning for his personal destruction. To be brutally honest, he wasn’t holding his breath for a happy Wednesday either. He frowned at his pink shorts in her hands until she self-consciously tucked them back out of sight beneath the unfolded laundry pile.

  “When do you have to be to work today?” he finally asked.

  “Eight to noon on Tuesdays. When do you work?”

  “Two to eight,” he said, unenthused. “Just not on the fry machine.” He could see his pink-striped shirt peeking out between the plastic mesh of the laundry basket. “Maybe they’ll have another uniform my size,” he said, although he didn’t have much hope. Things like that didn’t happen on Mondays, and he suspected the same would hold true for Monday Part Two.

  “How are we going to do this?”

  “We’re going to handle this by me accompanying you to your work where I can keep my eye on you, and then you are going to accompany me to my work, where I” —he sighed heavily— “am going to be the only thirty-two-year-old pirate on the payroll in pink tights, shirt and shorts. And, where I can also keep my eye on you. You might want to bring something to do.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, looking at the laundry. “That doesn’t tend to turn out well for me.”

  “I can handle pink underwear long enough to earn a paycheck and buy some more.”

  Her shoulders slumped. “Pink underwear, Gopher. I make a mess out of everything I touch.”

  She looked genuinely unhappy, too. Not unhappy as some Littles did when they wanted hugs or cuddles, and so picked at themselves because they didn’t know how else to get it. Kurt was very familiar with that kind of behavior. Krissy’s mother had been one of those, and before he went to prison, he used to cuddle the hell out of her whenever she got like this. He’d cuddled her even when he knew it was an act meant to manipulate a compliment or forgiveness out of him for some slight misbehavior.

  That ‘act’ had been like a default setting for her. Hell, she’d even done it the one time she’d come to visit him after he’d been sent to prison. Because of Krissy.

  “Please don’t ask me to take you out of here by putting my baby in,” she’d said, with those giant crocodile tears building in her eyes. And god help him, but if it hadn’t been for that thick pane of glass separating them, he’d have reached through and tried to comfort her still.

  Standing here in Scotti’s house, looking at her as she looked dejectedly at her basket of semi-pink clothes, most of which should have been white, Kurt would have sworn there were worlds of difference between Dana and Scotti. But, he also knew he couldn’t trust himself to see this clearly. The Daddy half of him was a cuddler and a forgiver. Always had been; always would be.

  “It’s just clothes,” he told her. “Two months from now, no one is going to care that a red got in with the whites and the color ran. The ghosts of Gopher might linger longer, but I’m going to get rid of him and two years from now, if you can even remember his name, you’re going to shake your head and wonder at whatever decisions led you to making him part of your life. But that’s life,” Kurt said. “Nobody goes through it perfectly or without mistakes. Which means, you don’t get to beat yourself up for the mistakes you do make.”

  She looked up at him, shoulders hunched. “That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have a Gopher in your life.”

  He snorted, shaking his head. “No, I do not.”

  When she bowed her head back to her laundry, he blew out another sigh, shook his head at himself again, and came back to the table to sit down beside her. He set his last sandwich on the table. Taking the laundry away from her, he set it on the floor and physically turned her chair around so she had no choice but to look straight at him.

  “No,” he told her again, “I do not have a Gopher.” Smothering another sigh, hardly able to believe he was doing this, he grudgingly confessed, “I have a Dana.”

  She blinked. “Who?”

  “I dated her for about four years. She was my girlfriend and my Little. I met her at a party, not unlike the one you say you met your Gopher at. We became play partners at the dungeon we both attended. Then we became more than that, and eventually we moved in together. Her daughter, Krissy, was the reason I went to prison. She was a… troubled girl. She never really warmed up to me, but I didn’t know how badly she hated having me in her mother’s life until one day at work, they were running training exercises for the K9s in the parking lot and one hit on my car. Where Krissy got the drugs, I have no idea, but she planted enough to get me convicted for felony possession with intent to distribute. Both she and her mother testified against me in open court, and I lost everything. My badge, my life… my Little, everything. I also did two years in general population with a lot of angry convicts, every one of whom knew I was a cop.”

  “That’s awful,” Scotti softly said. As genuinely sad as she had been only a moment before, she now looked every bit that sympathetic. “I’m so sorry.”

  Kurt shrugged. “Mistakes were made.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed, “but not by you. That never should have happened.”

  “And what Rodent is doing to you should?” he countered.

  “No,” she scoffed, a corner of her mouth twisting, but her brow furrowing as if in confusion. “But that’s different.”

  “How?” he challenged. “Why? Because you’re a submissive, so you ought to just take it?”

  She rubbed her hands and her eyebrows drew even closer together, but she didn’t argue.

  “That’s the kind of argument battered women use to defend their abusers. Tell me you�
��re not doing that.” Slowly, deliberately, he took hold of the arms of her chair and pulled her close, parting his legs to draw her as near as their two chairs would allow. Her knees brushed the inside of his thighs, but he only stopped pulling when he ran out of space between them. Even more slowly, much more deliberately, he leaned toward her. Close enough to smell the subtle coconut scent of her shampoo and the linen fresh scent of the dryer cloth residue on her hands. “Do you know what I think you deserve to take?” he asked her, his voice dropping low in spite of himself, and every rapid-firing synapse in his brain screaming for him to stop.

  To get back.

  To put as much distance in between him and this woman as he possibly could before it became—

  She raised her eyes to his, womanly reluctance at war with Little innocence in the depths of baby blue eyes so alluring that a man could fall face-first into the pool of her and happily drown.

  —too late.

  “What?” she whispered.

  “Kisses,” he replied, every inch of him an idiot because he couldn’t seem to make himself stop.

  She tried to smile, but it was breathy, a shaky echo of the kind of smiles she’d flashed him last night when for a few short seconds at a time she’d been comfortable enough in his presence to forget she was supposed to be scared.

  It was like being trapped in the library men’s room all over again.

  Or standing in her bathroom upstairs like they had been last night, with his hand still stinging from the swat he’d landed on her skirt-clad backside and her attention raptly fixed on his reflection in the mirror.

  She was tripping every single one of his Daddy triggers, and she didn’t even seem to know she was doing it.

  In the kitchen where he’d left it, the phone rang, but Kurt made no move to answer it and after only a few shrill cries, it went quiet again. He didn’t care. He was much more intently focused on the way Scotti was rolling her lips together, as if savoring the touch of his mouth upon it.

  When her gaze dipped to his lips, even knowing he shouldn’t, he said, “A woman like you, Scotti, should be made to take kiss after kiss, after toe-curling kiss. Until your whole body can’t bear to take another one.”