Daddy’s Little Worker (Missouri Daddies #7)

3. Chapter 1

FRANKIE

“ C an you come in today for the interview?” Noah asked. “Let’s say in thirty minutes?”

Frankie closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Today was not a good day. She felt like her whole body was vibrating on the inside. On the outside, it wasn’t. Anyone looking at her would have told her it wasn’t.

But she knew it was. She felt it.

“Frankie?” His voice gentled. “Are you there? Are you okay?”

“Y-yes,” she stuttered.

“Can you make it to the club in thirty minutes, or do you need more time?” he asked.

She looked around the room like the answer would magically appear in front of her. Could she make it to the club in half an hour?

“I s-should be able to,” she muttered.

“What was that?”

Frankie closed her eyes and cursed in her head. Why couldn’t she just talk like a normal person? Why couldn’t she be a normal person?

She took a deep breath in and slowly let it out. “I sh-should be able to get th-there in thirty min-minutes,”

Frankie desperately wanted her a different life. She didn’t want to stand out from everyone so much that they looked at her and whispered to one another. It was exhausting.

“Great! Do you know where the club is located?” Noah asked. “I can message you the address if you don’t. Or I could have someone pick you up.”

She sucked in a breath and shook her head. She did not want anyone to come to her house. She didn’t want them to know where she lived or how bad the neighborhood was. It She didn’t live in the safest area, but she was saving up for a better place.

Frankie had been wanting to move for three years now, but she wasn’t anywhere closer to relocating than she was when she first started.

It was hard trying to save up money when her medicine was so expensive.

Frankie had been diagnosed with Essential Tremor.

It wasn’t something she’d had expected to have, but she was trying to not let it dictate her life.

How was that going?

Not well.

Not well at all.

It seemed like Essential Tremor was taking over her life and dictating every little thing she did. She couldn’t go out and eat at her favorite restaurant or fast food place because every single penny she earned went toward her medicine.

Not having insurance was slowly killing her. Medicine was expensive, and she couldn’t hold down a job long enough for the medical insurance to come through.

“Frankie?” Noah asked. “Are you all right? Do you need me to come get you?”

“No, I’m okay!” she rushed out.

She kept zoning out while on the phone with him. Something she was trying to work on, but she couldn’t help it. Frankie lived in her head most of the time. Maybe that’s why she couldn’t hold down a job long. She was always getting distracted.

She thought about all sorts of things. Like how the interaction with her boss was going to go.

Or how she was going to confront her neighbor when she got home about the noise they constantly made late at night that disturbed her sleep.

How they would yell at her and slam the door when they got angry and were finished speaking.

She never spoke to her neighbor, afraid they would yell at her. Frankie couldn’t cope with being shouted at. It stressed her out, and she didn’t need any more stress in her life.

“Are you sure?” Noah asked. “I can come pick you up if you need me to. I don’t mind.”

“I’m okay, sir,” she whispered. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

Frankie hung up before she thought it through and looked at her phone in horror.

“Oh no,” she whispered. “How could I have done that?”

Frankie rushed to her bedroom, or the corner of her one-room apartment where her bed was, and grabbed her pink pig stuffy, Lita.

“Oh, Lita!” she wailed. “I just did a horrible thing! I can’t believe I just hung up on the guy at Behind the Scene before he could tell me anything else. He just made me so nervous, and I couldn’t do it anymore.”

Lita stayed silent as Frankie continued to talk.

“I can’t go to the interview anymore. Nope. I just can’t,” she sobbed. “I hung up on him. How does he feel about that? Yeah, I’m definitely not going in now. I can’t. Not when he knows what I did.”

Lita gave her a look, and she sighed.

“I know I need the money. I desperately need it, or else sooner or later, I’m going to be out on the street, and we can’t do that. Do you know how bad my tremors would get if we didn’t have somewhere warm?”

She shivered at the thought. She went through waves of her tremors being bad and times where they weren’t as bad. Most often, they were bad because of how stressed she had become. And that was because of the lack of sleep she was getting, thanks to her neighbor.

Her phone buzzed, bringing her out of her thoughts. Grabbing it quickly, she saw it was from an unknown number.

Here’s the address. See you in twenty minutes. -Noah

Frankie screamed, dropping Lita on her bed and hopping around her room to find her clothes. She needed to change and get to the bus stop if she was going to make it on time. Why had she agreed to thirty minutes when she knew the bus wasn’t reliable in this part of the town?

After grabbing her bag, she stuffed Lita in there and ran out of her apartment, down the stairs, and straight toward the bus stop.

“W-wait!” she screamed as the bus doors started to close.

Frankie let out a sigh of relief as they opened up again. With a sigh, she got onto the bus and sat down on a seat.

Clasping her hands right in front of her, Frankie stood outside the door of Behind the Scenes. She was five minutes late, and she didn’t know whether she should ring the doorbell or not. Would he still want to interview her since she was late?

“Come on in, Frankie,” a man said.

Screaming, she took a step back, slipped on the step and fell backward. Strong arms wrapped around her and caught her before she landed on her bottom.

“That w-would have hurt,” she mumbled. “Poor bo-bottom.”

“Luckily, I saved you before that happened,” the man said.

Her eyes went wide as she stood up straight and got out of his arms. She took several steps back as she gave him a weary look. How did he know her name? Who was he?

“I’m Dominic. One of the bouncers here. Noah told me to keep an eye out for a woman coming by for an interview in thirty minutes,” he gently said. “You don’t need to worry.”

Frankie shakes her head and takes another step back. “I’m n-not.”

He arched an eyebrow, and Frankie looked down at her clasped hands. She hated when Doms arched one eyebrow like they knew she was lying. It was the worst thing ever. If he commanded her to look him in the eyes and not look away, she would be spilling her guts.

Something she didn’t want to do.

No one needed to hear what she had to say. It wasn’t important. It never was, and it never would be.

“Did you just lie to me?” Dominic asked.

She looked up at him, opening her mouth to tell him no, but one look from him and she closed her mouth right back up again.

“Don’t lie to me. That is not good behavior. You’ll get punished for that,” he said.

Her mouth dropped open. “You ca-can’t punish me!”

“You’re right. I can’t, but if you start to work here and are a sub, which I think you are, then you agree to the rules. Not lying is one of those rules. So keep that in mind if you accept this job.” He gave her a firm look. “I wouldn’t want to see you getting punished if you can avoid it.”

Frankie opened and closed her mouth like a fish, trying to come up with something to say but not knowing what to say. She didn’t have any type of training on what to do in this kind of situation. She didn’t have any training for anything, come to think about it.

She liked to keep to herself, which didn’t help with getting and keeping jobs. Every job wanted her to speak to people and push her out of her comfort zone, but she didn’t want that.

Frankie was perfectly content where she was.

“Frankie?” Dominic waved a hand in front of her face. “Are you okay?”

She nodded. “Why wouldn’t I be?” She smiled.

He just looked at her, and she flinched. Right. Lying. She wasn’t supposed to lie, but it was hard not to. Not when she had done it for so long. It just came naturally to her when it came to her health.

“What did I just say about lying?” he asked.

“Not to do it,” she mumbled.

But Dominic didn’t understand. People didn’t want to know how other people really were. Not when there was a whole long list of reasons why she wasn’t okay. People just wanted to ask to be and look polite, but they didn’t want to actually hear any of the answers.

“Right. So next time someone asks if you are okay, you are going to take a deep breath before answering and think about it. Understand?”

She nodded.

“You’ll get away with nodding this one time, but use your words from now on,” Dominic reminded her.

“Okay.”

Frankie didn’t know how she was going to be able to work here if everyone was like Dominic. She wouldn’t survive it. Yet again, Frankie didn’t think she would survive a lot of things, but she was still here, barely surviving.

“Do you want to tell me why you are late?” Dominic raised an eyebrow as she looked up at him.

“Frankie?” another man said, his deep voice filling my ears.