Chapter 8
CHAPTER 8
Her first morning with a Daddy went surprisingly well—for all of an hour. She’d woken refreshed and vowed not to admit to him how much better she felt after a full night’s sleep than she usually did after staying up well past lights out with Kylie. But because she was feeling rather chipper and her heart still raced a little whenever she thought about how solemn he’d looked as he’d vowed never to give up on her, she chose the outfit with the pink skirt and the pretty patterned tights he’d liked so much the day before.
A choice she decided was well worth it when she watched his eyes light up with interest the second she stepped into the kitchen.
“You look… lovely,” he said after a long stretch of silence.
“Thanks.” Her stomach fluttered, not unpleasantly at the gleam in his eye. “Um, I guess I won’t see you until after school since I don’t have math today. Bye!” Spinning around, she took a step toward the foyer where he’d made her stash her shoes and bookbag the night before.
“Wait.” When she turned back around, she nearly sighed at the stern look he was sending her way. “Sit. You and I need to have a talk.”
“But I was hoping I could leave a little early and have breakfast with Kylie.” Ever since they’d started at the University, they’d made it a point to have breakfast together. Their schedules were often too different to manage lunch or dinner, but they always carved out time for breakfast.
“Then you should have asked me last night if you could do so. Sit, Eliza.”
“This isn’t fair!” Yanking a chair out from the kitchen table, she dropped into it, well aware that she was acting exactly like the bratty Little she swore she wasn’t. “Kylie and I always have breakfast together!”
“Good. That’s the kind of thing I need to know.” Apparently oblivious to her tantrum, Samuel joined her at the table, a cup of coffee in one hand, a legal pad and pen in the other. “Do you have any other daily habits we need to build into your schedule?”
“I don’t know.”
“All right. What time do you and Kylie usually head down for breakfast?”
“Whenever she gets me out the door, usually.”
“Eliza, if you aren’t going to at least try to work with me, I’ll write your schedule out by myself and you can live with what I give you.”
Well, that sounded positively dreadful. “Eight. We try to get out the door by eight, it’s usually closer to eight-fifteen, though.”
“Then you’ll be out the door by eight every morning. I’ll add that to your Good Girl chart. What about lunch and dinner?”
“Um, lunch is usually after my ten a.m. class every day. So like, eleven thirty-ish? ”
“And it looks like Monday, Wednesday, Friday you have a pretty tight schedule with three classes but Tuesday and Thursday your afternoons are free. Is that correct?”
“Yeah.”
“Tuesday and Thursday, I want you to go directly to the library after lunch. You’ll wait there for me until I come and retrieve you. My last class of the day doesn’t end until six on those days, so you’ll have plenty of time to work on homework or study.”
“You expect me to spend five hours on homework twice a week?”
“I’m sure as the semester progresses, you’ll have more than enough to fill your time. But if you finish early, you’ll be surrounded by books to keep you occupied until I can come get you. And don’t forget you still have the summer workbook to complete for my class, though we can work on that together in the evenings if you’d prefer. I will be checking it either way, so you let me know what works best for you.”
“I guess I’ll do the stupid workbook.” If she got stuck, Kylie would help her. Kylie was a freaking math genius. Which meant she had even less of an excuse not to have done her workbook over the summer when she had more time with Kylie than usual.
Just one more way she managed to fuck everything up.
“Thank you. Hand me your phone, please.”
“Why?”
“Because I asked you to, Eliza. Phone, please. Now.”
“Oh my god could you be any more of a?—”
“Unless you’d like to skip breakfast with Kylie in favor of eating soap, I suggest you stop right there, little girl.”
She had to physically bite her tongue to keep the rest of the words from slipping out as she handed over her phone.
“Thank you. What’s your passcode? ”
“One-zero-one-five-zero-one.”
“Your birthday? Eliza, you should know better than that.”
She tried to tell herself she wasn’t pleased he knew her birthday. “What? It’s easy to remember.”
Shaking his head, he sighed as he tapped in the numbers. “We’ll discuss password safety at a later date. For now, I’m setting up your phone to be locked down while you are at school. You will be able to call and text me—I’m putting my number in your phone, under Daddy—but otherwise your phone will basically be a fancy paperweight until six every evening.”
“No! You can’t just cut me off from all my friends all day!”
“You see your friends plenty during the day, Eliza.”
Red. The word practically burned on her tongue, and she could feel the rising panic in her chest at the thought of being left out of all the group texts until the evening.
And still, she couldn’t bring herself to say the word. It was a sucky situation, but it was certainly nothing to safeword over. “This isn’t fair.”
To her surprise, he put the phone down and looked up. For a moment, it was like the air froze in her lungs when he pinned all that potent “Daddy” energy on her and only her. “Let’s talk about it, then. Why don’t you think it’s fair?”
“It’s just not.”
“Sweetheart, I can’t make a decision based on ‘It’s just not’. Is there a reason you feel you need your phone during the day?”
“Yes… but it doesn’t matter. You already made the rule.” And even if she hated it, she wasn’t going to be a whiny little baby about it.
“Rules can be flexible when they need to be. But only if you’re honest and upfront with me about your needs. ”
“Oh.” Rolling that little bit of information over in her head, she nibbled at her thumbnail. If he was telling her to share her thoughts about the rule then it wasn’t really whining, right? “Um, well, it probably seems kinda silly but like, my friends and I talk all day in group chats and stuff. I’ll feel really left out and I might miss out on plans with them if I can’t text back right away.”
“Ah. That’s understandable and not silly at all.”
“Really?”
“Really. And thank you for being honest with me.” Still watching her, he tapped his fingers against the table. “Do you normally just text or is there an app you’ll need access to, as well?”
“There’s an app. Can I show you?”
“Of course.”
Rising from her chair, she rounded the table to lean over his shoulder. His cologne, something deep and earthy and utterly masculine, filled her senses and she nearly drooled on his crisp white shirt.
Dammit. She did not want to be attracted to him. But she’d always been a sucker for the strict Doms and it didn’t hurt that he was fucking gorgeous.
Pushing those thoughts to the back of her mind, she pointed to the app she and her friends used the most. “That one.”
“All right. You’ll be able to call and text me during the day, and use this app. Everything else, including games, will be turned off until the evening. Sound fair?”
Not really, but it was more fair than completely cutting her off from her friends, so she shrugged. “Sure.”
He tapped a few more buttons and handed her the phone back. “Go put your shoes on and I’ll drive you over to the main building. You should only be a few minutes late for breakfast with Kylie. ”
Relief bubbled up inside her and she threw her arms around his neck and squeezed. “Thank you!”
She hurried back toward the foyer, then stopped and wrinkled her nose at the sneakers she’d kicked off beside her bookbag the night before. The white Converse would look super cute with her outfit. But she didn’t want cute. She wanted… sexy.
Refusing to think about why she wanted to look sexy today of all days, she backtracked to her bedroom and ripped open the box marked “Shoes”. Well, one of the boxes. Honestly, she hadn’t even realized how many shoes she actually had until she’d been packing them all up.
Grabbing her white stilettos, she dropped them to the floor and slipped her feet inside. They’d hurt like hell after a little while, but they were sexy as fuck and helped to elevate her outfit from “Little girl” to “sexy woman” which made her feel even better about wearing it.
But her happiness with her choices only lasted until she stepped out into the hallway and came face to face with her guardian. The moment he spotted the shoes, his welcoming smile turned to a frown. “Absolutely not.”
“Um, you picked this outfit out for me, remember?”
“Not with those shoes. I’m sure you have a pair of ballet flats or something that would be far more appropriate.”
“These are plenty appropriate.”
“Not for my Little girl they aren’t.”
Irritation, fueled by the humiliation of being treated like a Little yet again, pricked at her. “Well, I’m not anyone’s Little girl, so I guess the shoes can stay.”
“Eliza, you can either go pick out a new pair of shoes yourself or you can stand in the corner with a sore bottom while Daddy picks them out for you. Those are your choices. ”
“Oh my god, you are so fucking unreasonable!” Turning on her heel, she stomped back into her room, making sure to slam the door behind her. At this point she didn’t even care if he spanked her. The knot in her stomach was just because she was angry, not because she was in trouble. Again.
But he didn’t come storming in behind her waving a paddle, and the knot in her stomach grew bigger as she searched for a different pair of shoes. The hot pink ballet flats actually matched the skirt pretty well and looked really damn cute. If she’d picked them out for herself without being forced to wear them, she probably would have liked them.
Not as much as the heels, though. She really, really liked the heels. Moving on pure impulse, she grabbed the stilettos and shoved them into her book bag before slinging it over her shoulder and returning to the hallway where her guardian was waiting for her.
“Much better. And not at all worth that temper tantrum, was it?”
“It wasn’t a tantrum.” Okay, maybe it had been pretty close to a tantrum. And realizing that made her feel even more like a Little than being forced to change her shoes had. “Can we go now?”
“We can, if you’d rather wait for your spanking. I don’t mind making a naughty girl squirm all day.”
“You’re seriously going to spank me for picking out shoes you didn’t like?”
Temper flashed in his eyes, surprising her. “I think you know that is not why you are in trouble, little girl. You earned yourself a spanking with that tantrum, and by swearing at Daddy.”
“I didn’t…” Shit. She had called him “fucking unreasonable”, hadn’t she? “Sorry,” she mumbled, the knot in her st omach tightening to the point she thought she might be sick.
“Apology accepted. Now, would you like your spanking now or tonight?”
“I want to go to breakfast.”
She was deliberately avoiding answering the question, and she had a feeling he knew it. But he simply shrugged and gestured to the front door. “Tonight, then.”
“Fine by me.”
The ride over to the main building was miserably silent, and she found herself wishing more than once that she’d just asked for her spanking before they left. Maybe then she wouldn’t have this weird feeling in her tummy and she wouldn’t constantly be blinking back tears.
He dropped her off at the main building with an admonishment to “Be good” and a reminder that he would pick her up at the library after his last class of the day. Eliza hurried toward the cafeteria, relief making her knees weak when she spotted Kylie.
“You made it! How was your—oof.” Kylie’s greeting was cut off by Eliza hurling herself at her best friend. “Rough morning, sweetie?”
“The worst .” Dropping onto the closest seat without even bothering to head up to the food line, Eliza groaned. “It started out okay but then he told me I have to stay in the library from the end of lunch until he picks me up after his last class which is hours . And he locked my phone!”
“He locked your phone? So we can’t even chat during the day?” Horror filled Kylie’s eyes, and Eliza was tempted to lie. But she figured her guardian’s tyranny stood on its own without her embellishing the truth.
“No, I can still text and stuff. I just can’t do literally anything else. And he’s the only person I’m allowed to call until like six o’clock every single night. ”
“Okay, well, that kinda sucks but at least you can still talk to us. I’m sorry, hon. I know this is really hard for you.”
“He made me change my shoes.”
Kylie blinked, her brows wrinkling with confusion. “What?”
“My shoes. I was wearing these gorgeous stilettos earlier and he made me change into these.” Fully embracing her sulk, Eliza lifted one foot off the ground.
“Oh. Well. At least they’re cute. He could have made you wear those shiny black Mary Janes the school-aged Littles usually wear.”
In unison, they shuddered at the thought. “Don’t give him any ideas,” Eliza said darkly.
“Is that the only reason you’re walking around with a black cloud over your head?”
“Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.” Closing her eyes against a wave of threatening tears, Eliza let her head fall back. “I may have told him he was ‘fucking ridiculous’ and slammed my bedroom door in his face when he told me to change my shoes.”
“Oh, El.” Kylie sighed, the sound filled with disappointment. “How are you even sitting right now?”
“He didn’t spank me. Not yet, anyway. I sorta demanded to come to breakfast and he told me that was fine because he ‘doesn’t mind making naughty Little girls squirm all day’. And I think I might be coming down with something because I sorta feel like I might throw up.”
“Honey, I think what you’ve come down with is a case of the guilties.”
Lifting her head, Eliza opened one eye enough to glare at her bestie. “You take that back. I have nothing to feel guilty over.” Other than the heels hidden away in her backpack, just waiting to be worn again.
Shit .
“Uh huh. Well, your tummy seems to disagree. Come on.” Jumping to her feet, Kylie held out a hand. “We should get something to eat. You might actually feel better, and if your Daddy is like all the other Daddies around here, skipping breakfast is a surefire way to get yourself in even more trouble. Which you obviously do not need.”
Kylie’s words rang in her head during breakfast, which Eliza only managed to eat a little of, and all the way over to the college campus. And when she slipped away to the bathroom to change back into the heels she’d smuggled out of the apartment, she didn’t feel the sense of triumph she’d expected to feel at getting one over on her strict guardian. Standing in front of the full-length mirror, she waited for that feeling to come as she twisted from side to side examining her sexy-as-fuck outfit.
But all she felt was that same heavy weight in her stomach. And as she turned to make her way to her only class of the day, she wondered if maybe Kylie was right about the source of that knot in her tummy.