Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
Two Weeks Later
Emmy
I gave myself a day to think about it. Once I made the decision to do it, I fully committed. Jack picked the company for the testing, coordinated that part with Miles, and I submitted my sample and tried to put it out of my mind while we awaited results.
I had some contact with Miles, but only via email. I wasn’t ready to talk to him on the phone yet. Not until I had proof. Part of me refused to get my hopes up, wanted to believe that this was a fluke and Lilah was wrong.
Not that Lilah was ever wrong. Well, rarely wrong. An entire lifetime taught me that.
Email felt safe. Safer, anyway.
Plus, email felt more…controlled. Because I didn’t want to talk about my life before…
Before.
Not yet. Not like that.
What I wanted to know now was why, how.
Who. Who did what that made her suddenly up and leave when she’d never run away before?
Unfortunately, he didn’t know. And I believed him when he said he hadn’t known she was pregnant. He told me they were dating.
That he’d loved her.
That had he known she was pregnant, he would have kept trying to find her. Would’ve reported her missing.
Would’ve told someone. Anyone.
Wouldn’t have stopped looking for her until he found her.
He was convinced the results would confirm I was his daughter, because he had no reason to suspect she would’ve been with anyone else.
I hadn’t asked about any of my grandparents yet. I envisioned the “special” conversation I’d eventually have with Mom’s mom.
Wanting to know, oh, what the actual fuck?
It would be too easy to torture myself with thoughts of what could’ve been but I refused to let my mind take a walk down that road. If I did, once I started, I could completely lose myself and let the anger take hold.
No, thank you.
But from the emails he sounded nice. Interesting guy. He also found it ironic that Jack was a firefighter.
Today, however, was a Saturday, and Jack was at work until later that afternoon, coming off a forty-eight-hour shift. A situation had cropped up for Lilah at work, and she’d ended up working overnight and was due home anytime. I didn’t expect to see her for another hour, at least.
Tonight I wanted to talk to Jack about setting a date. He’d more than proven himself to me—and Lilah—and life was short. I was done looking for excuses not to move forward.
I wanted to give myself to Jack in every way he wanted. I wanted his loving rules, his sexy tortures, his protective presence.
I wanted him as my Sir, my Daddy.
My husband.
There was a freedom with him I’d never felt before. I could be completely me, and while some women might have bridled under his rules—and he explained his rationale to me for each one before I agreed to it—I saw it as a loving structure within which I had no boundaries.
I was watching TV in the living room when I heard Lilah’s SUV pull into the yard. I headed to the kitchen to make her a cup of coffee, knowing that would be her first stop.
When she joined me in the kitchen, there was something… different about her.
“Good morning, sis,” I said, but her tight smile looked wrong. And she nodded but didn’t respond.
I wasn’t used to Lilah being at a loss for words, much less acting hesitant. “What’s going on, honey?”
She blushed—and that was yet another first. “Look, I don’t want to make this weird, okay? And ‘no’ won’t hurt my feelings. But would it be okay to ask Jack… to be my protector? My Daddy? Not romantically,” she quickly added. “No sex, no play, nothing like that. I just…”
She started crying and I enveloped her, tightly holding her as she clung to me and sobbed.
“I just want to sometimes let go, feel safe, like someone’s taking care of me,” she finally choked out.
“I want to be someone’s good girl and not worry about them getting into my pants.
And I know he’d rather chop his own dick off than cheat on you.
It’s not that I don’t trust anyone at the Ranch, but they don’t know me like you and Jack do, and—”
“Shh,” I said, rocking her. “You’re my sister,” I assured her. “Of course he can be your Daddy, too, if you want.”
“I don’t want to be a full-time Little either,” she said, crying.
“I don’t want to do age-play. I want that…
downtime. Like you get. I want to be able to let go and just play.
That first time I went with you guys and saw that, I was so damned jealous of everyone who could shut down their adult selves and simply… play.”
“I get it, honey. I do. There’s so much that we lost. So much that was taken from us. You want that back.”
“Yeah.”
She eventually calmed down but I didn’t let her go. Because yeah, I totally got it. Just like that day in class my first day at the Ranch when I melted down and finally processed.
And I was even more shocked to realize what a common reaction that is, to have a massive breakdown when it’s finally safe to drop the burden someone spent a lifetime carrying.
As much shit as I endured, I know Lilah’s experience was worse than mine.
So much worse.
“Why don’t you take your coffee and go grab a shower,” I finally suggested. “Then lie down for a nap, okay? You’ll feel better. We’ll talk to Daddy when he gets home.”
She nodded. “Yeah. Thank you.”
She was still asleep when Jack arrived, and I walked outside to meet him and talk there.
He stepped out of the truck, took one look at me, and scowled. “Baby, what happened?”
“It’s not bad, Daddy.” He leaned against the side of his truck with his arms wrapped around me as I told him what happened.
“You sure it won’t get weird?” he asked. “You’re confident she won’t form an unhealthy attachment to me?”
“Daddy, I don’t think she can form any romantic attachments right now.
I’m not a shrink, obviously. But from what I’ve learned about myself, I really think she needs this healing time the way I did.
Until she gets that, I don’t honestly think she’ll ever be happy in any relationship.
She’ll keep pushing people away. She trusts you because she knows you won’t ever violate her trust. If she can have that for a while, I think she’ll be able to finally find her own path to healing. ”
“And she doesn’t want to do this at the Ranch?”
“Maybe eventually. This is her first step toward learning how to trust.”
“Does she want me to vet people she decides to date or play with first?”
“I think that’s part of it, yeah. Again, not that she doesn’t trust Master Derek or any of the others at the Ranch—”
“But she trusts you, knows what you and I have, and trusts us, not just me.”
“Yes, Daddy. Like me, she wants…” I tried to think about how to phrase it.
“The goofy, child-like play part when she needs it, but with the adult sexy stuff being separate. Except she doesn’t want the sexy stuff with you or with anyone else right now.
Her inner child is way more damaged than mine was.
She basically wants permission to not feel self-conscious, I guess?
Does that make sense? She never got to have a ‘daddy’ who loved and protected her, and she’s looking for that to help heal her inner child, but she’s not looking to be a Little. ”
“Yeah.” He chuckled, and I loved the way it rumbled through his chest and through me. “Chop my own dick off first, huh?”
I snickered. “Where’s the lie?”
He kissed the top of my head. “She’s not wrong, baby. Except I kind of figured she’d be the first one to chop my dick off.”
I looked up into his eyes.
“I took things slow between us because I wanted to make sure we were both happy. I never want to get divorced again. And yes, obviously Lilah will keep living with us as long as she wants or needs to. I accepted that from the start. I don’t care that you two aren’t biological sisters—you adopted each other and you need each other.
You’re family. We are family, the three of us.
If she eventually meets someone she wants to be with forever, they’ll become part of this family, too. ”
I couldn’t have loved this man any more in this moment if I’d tried. “Thank you, Daddy.”
He patted my ass. “Let me grab my stuff. I need a shower and dinner before we have this discussion.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Lilah had planned to cook tonight but I opted to make my meatloaf.
Fast, easy, and wouldn’t poison any of us.
I’d planned to wait to wake her up until just before it was ready, but she beat me to it and joined us in the kitchen, where Jack and I were putting the final touches on the side dishes before the meatloaf was ready.
Jack
If Emmy had asked me to guess what she’d wanted to talk to me about, this situation never would have come to mind.
Having a couple of hours to think about it, I was inclined to agree, depending on how this talk with Lilah went.
Lilah walked over to Emmy, who wrapped her in her arms in a hug. It didn’t hurt in this case that I felt zero sexual attraction for Lilah. Not that she wasn’t beautiful, but she had become my sister, too.
“Emmy talked to me when I got home,” I started, deciding to jump in and get it over with. “That you want me to be your Daddy, too.”
She nodded against Emmy’s shoulder. “Yes, Sir.”
Okay, that was a first from her.
“What rules do you want me to have for you?” I asked.
She shrugged, almost looking like a little kid. “I don’t want anything sexual, Sir. When we go to the Ranch, I want to be able to tell people who ask that you’re my Daddy, so I don’t have to deal with them.”
“We can do that. Do you want to limit our dynamic to you telling me, or otherwise indicating to me when you need that from me?”
That seemed to surprise her. “We can do it like that?”
Emmy snorted. “Sis, he’s the Daddy—he can do it however he wants.”
That finally drew a smile from her. “Yes, Sir.”
“How about this,” I said. “If you want to call me Sir or Daddy, you’re free to do so.
If you specifically need something from me, something formal, you can ask me or ask Emmy for that.
I’m not going to require you to do anything right now except be as safe as you can be when you’re not home.
I will feel my way around this, and I might talk to you in ways I speak to Emmy—such as asking if you ate, things like that.
Informally. If you absolutely don’t want me in Daddy mode for that, safeword.
Otherwise, I won’t expect you to do anything than what you already do around here, but I’ll address you more as my girl than as Lilah. Does that make sense?”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“Good,” Emmy snarked, “because that confused the fuck outta me.”
We all laughed over that.
“Would you like a hug?” I asked Lilah. We already hugged, as friends, as family, but this hug as she stepped into my arms felt desperate, drowning, and I tipped my head to bring Emmy in so we could hold Lilah as she broke down crying.
I felt a mix of honored and terrified that Lilah had this trust in me. And like hell would I do anything to break that trust.
But, maybe, this was the first step she needed to start her own healing now that Emmy had finally started hers.
“Since we’re all here,” Emmy said from the other side of Lilah, “I might as well say this now—I’m ready, Sir.”
It took me a second to process what she meant, that she wasn’t talking about the meatloaf coming out of the oven. She steadily held my gaze while my pulse raced. “Okay, baby.”
She smiled.
Between us, Lilah sniffled. “‘Bout fuckin’ time.”