Chapter 16
CHAPTER 16
For once, she was ready to leave a solid ten minutes before he was the next morning.
“Come on, we have to go ,” she urged, dancing in place beside the door as he buttoned his suit jacket.
One silver eyebrow raised. “What’s the rush, little one?”
“Nothing.” When his other eyebrow joined its twin, she just barely resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “I just wanna get to breakfast so I can talk to Kylie. She’s waiting on me.”
“Ah.” A knowing smile curved his lips as he slipped an arm around her waist, yanking her up against his solid chest in a move that knocked the air clear from her lungs. “Anxious to tell your bestie about last night?”
“Yes.” She grinned when he laughed and wiggled out of his arms. “Now come on , slowpoke!”
“You’re lucky I’m in such a good mood or else I’d take you back to bed and teach you a lesson about teasing your Daddy.”
“But then we’d be late.” As they walked toward the front doors of the complex, she tilted her head thoughtfully. “ If you’re the one who makes us late, do I get to spank you?”
“Not a chance, little girl. And if you even try it, I can promise you will end up with a sore bottom inside and out.”
That thought left her hot and flushed all the way to the cafeteria, where Kylie was waiting just outside the doors. Samuel kissed her goodbye and went to join the other teachers he’d gotten in the habit of having breakfast with while she and Kylie chatted in the mornings.
“Oh my god, I thought you’d never get here.” Grabbing her hand, Kylie dragged her over to an empty table at the far end of the cafeteria. “Tell. Me. Everything.”
“Okay, well, for starters, I have to say something I don’t say very often.” Clearing her throat loudly, Eliza took Kylie’s hands in hers and forced her expression into somber lines as she met her bestie’s gaze. “Kylie. You were right.”
Kylie blinked, her mind obviously scrambling to catch up for a moment before she threw her head back and let out a whoop of laughter. “Hell yeah I was! About what?”
“There are definitely some perks to being a good girl.”
“Told you! What happened?”
She ran through the entire story, from him finding her in the library and finger fucking her against the stacks to his promise to have her for dessert to the way he’d spanked and fucked her until her throat was raw from screaming to the second round of sex in the shower. By the time she finished, Kylie’s eyes were round as saucers and her mouth was hanging slightly open.
“Whoa. That sounds… whoa. Lucky bitch.”
“I know. And I know it sounds crazy because it’s all moving so fast, but I’ve never felt this way about anyone, Kylie. I don’t know if it’s like you said and he’s the first man I’ve been with I couldn’t wrap around my finger but… god. I think I might be a little in love with him. ”
“I might think it was crazy if I hadn’t seen it happen a dozen or so times at the Ranch already.” Kylie shrugged. “There’s something magical about this place, I swear.”
“I’m beginning to think there really might be.”
“So… you’re even okay with the Daddy stuff?”
It was the one sticking point, but it was feeling less and less sticky as time went on. “I haven’t called him Daddy yet but… I almost did last night. When I was begging him to”—she stopped and glanced around, then leaned in toward Kylie and lowered her voice—“when I was begging him to fill me with his cum.”
“You little slut. I’m so jealous.” Kylie’s sigh was filled with envy and longing. “You’d think on a Ranch filled with Littles, finding a Mommy or Daddy wouldn’t be so dang hard.”
“I mean, you haven’t even really tried, have you?”
“No. I’ve thought about asking Master Derek but if I spend any time in the Littles’ Wing, word will get out and I’m just not ready for that. And I really want to finish college before I even start thinking about settling down with someone.”
As it often did when Kylie mentioned “settling down”, Eliza’s mind went directly to their friend Dan. But Dan wasn’t a Daddy, and Eliza had her suspicions he might be a secret Little too, though he hadn’t actually told anybody anything of the sort.
“Well, I don’t know if I’ll ever get into the baby stuff, but I think I could be down for like, a playdate or something. I’ve been reading those Arabella Cole books and, again, I’m forced to admit that you may have been right. Some of those books…” Trailing off, she waved a hand in front of her face.
Kylie giggled. “Told you.” She glanced down at her watch and winced. “Shoot. We should go grab something to eat so you can get your Good Girl star for meals today.”
“You’re pretty responsible for a Little,” Eliza commented as they made their way up to the line.
“I am when I’m Big. Not as much when I’m actually Little.”
“I’ve never really asked you much about what it’s like for you when you’re Little. Is it like, a whole different person in your head?”
Stopping behind a group of girls dressed in the official school uniforms of the Rawhide Littles’ program, Kylie tilted her head to the side in thought. “Yes and no? It’s more like just letting go of all the adult responsibilities and worries and stuff and just being myself. I don’t know how to explain it, really.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“I think you might enjoy it, if you gave it a try.”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
Her conversation with Kylie played over and over in her mind as she made her way to her Business Law class. It wasn’t until she pulled her binder out that she remembered with a sinking stomach that she’d meant to finish her homework during breakfast.
“Shit,” she mumbled, wincing slightly even though Samuel was nowhere around to hear.
“Everything okay?” Reese, a pretty blonde who was in the process of finishing up a degree in something Eliza never could remember the name of that was supposed to help her in her mission to save all the animals in a thousand mile radius, sent her a concerned look.
“I completely forgot the homework and my—Professor Eaton’s going to kill me.”
“Oh no. Here.” Pulling a paper from her own binder, Reese handed it across the small aisle. “But be quick. You know Professor Remington will have us both in the disciplinarian’s office if we get caught.”
“You are a lifesaver .”
Eliza set her binder up on the desk so it blocked her from view and went to work copying down Reese’s answers. There were a few she was pretty sure were wrong, and she made a note to mention them to Reese later just in case, but for now she was just worried about getting something down on the paper.
Too late, she noticed the shadow that fell over her, around the same time Reese let out a groan.
“Forget something, Miss Bennett?”
There was no point hiding it now. “Yes, Sir.”
“Hand me your assignment, and the one you are copying, please.”
With an apologetic look for Reese, she handed both papers over. Silence, almost deafening in its completeness, fell over the room as he examined the papers.
“I’m disappointed in you, Eliza. I thought your Daddy had made more of an impression than this on you. Forgetting your homework is one thing. Cheating on an assignment is another thing entirely. You and Miss Reynolds will be reporting to Mr. Chambers’ office directly after class.”
“Cheating?” Reese’s voice rose to a squeak. “We weren’t cheating, Sir. It’s no different than if we’d done the assignment together, really.”
“I’ll leave that to Mr. Chambers and your Daddies to decide. In the meantime, you’ll both be receiving a zero on this assignment.”
A lump lodged itself solidly in Eliza’s throat and the world around her blurred as she slid down in her seat. Not only had she forgotten her assignment, she’d gotten her friend in trouble, too. And once her Daddy learned she’d gotten sent to the Disciplinarian’s Office, she had no doubt she was going to be in for a world of hurt.
What an awful fucking day.
He was halfway through a ham sandwich and the stack of pop quizzes he needed to grade when someone knocked on his classroom door. “Come in.”
“Um, Sir?” Hannah, who wasn’t due in his class for another hour, poked her head into his room. “Mr. Chambers asked to see you in his office.”
“In the Disciplinarian’s Office?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Did he say why?”
“No, Sir. But I did see Eliza sitting outside his office.”
Ah, that explained it. “I’ll be right there. Thank you, Hannah.”
He wrapped up the rest of his lunch and shoved his laptop in his bag before hurrying up to the Disciplinarian’s Office on the second floor. Eliza was, as advertised, seated on the bench outside Professor Chambers’ office, looking rather miserable. She glanced up as he approached, her eyes going wide a moment before her head fell back against the wall and she groaned.
“I can’t believe they called you already.”
“Just your bad luck I’m between classes, little one.” Standing in front of her, he tapped her chin. “Eyes on me, Eliza.”
Tears shimmered on her lashes when she lifted her head to look at him. “Sir?”
“Care to tell me why I’ve been summoned to the Disciplinarian’s Office, presumably on your behalf?”
“Professor Remington said it’s for cheating but it wasn’t cheating! At least, I don’t think so.” Righteous fury sparked in her eyes. “I’m not a cheater.”
“Why don’t you tell me what happened, then?”
But before she could explain, the door opened and Professor Chambers stepped out. A tearful blonde followed him, and he gave Samuel a brief nod before turning to the woman behind him. “Make sure to give your Daddy that note, young lady. I will need to have it returned to me, with his signature, in the morning.”
“Yes, Sir,” the blonde replied, her tone as miserable as Eliza looked.
“Good girl. You may return to class.”
The blonde hurried away without a second glance back.
“Did you have to be so hard on her?”
Eliza was still seated on the bench, but she was glaring up at Grant, defiance etched into every line of her face. “She was only trying to help a friend!”
“Do you really want to have this conversation out in the hall, young lady?”
Something twisted in Samuel’s stomach. He’d known when he’d taken the position as Eliza’s guardian that the other University and Ranch employees would still have authority over her. But hearing someone else scold his Little girl was making him…
Jealous, he realized with a start. And more than a little possessive.
But the last thing he wanted to do was undermine Grant’s authority, especially in front of Eliza. So he watched, quietly, as Eliza folded her arms and slid down in her seat with an annoyed huff.
“I don’t want to have this conversation at all. I know I fuc—messed up. I just don’t see why Reese had to get in trouble, too.”
“The hallway it is, then,” Grant said, his voice tinged with amusement despite the steel beneath his words. “Would you care to explain to your Daddy why you were sent to me, or would you rather I explain it?”
“No! You’re going to make it sound so much worse than it was!”
Grant raised an eyebrow at that. “Then go ahead.”
“Seriously, you’re all making a mountain out of a molehill. I just forgot to do my homework for Professor Remington’s class, so Reese was helping me get it done before class started. That’s all.”
Anger sparked in Samuel’s chest, but he held it back for the time being. He needed the whole story before he decided how much trouble his Little girl was in. “Eliza. Look at me, please.”
That righteous anger still burned in her eyes when she shifted her gaze to meet his. “Sir?”
“Last night when I asked if you had any homework to do, you said everything was done. Did you lie to me, Little girl?”
She dropped her gaze and he knew he had his answer before she even spoke. “I didn’t mean to lie. I was going to do it during breakfast.”
“That wasn’t what I asked you last night, though, was it?”
“No, Sir,” she whispered.
“So you lied.”
A long silence stretched between them. “I guess.”
“Well then I guess you and I are going to have a very long discussion about honesty once we are finished here. After you tell me why Professor Remington accused you of cheating.”
“Because Reese was letting me copy her answers from her homework.” Her head snapped up, some of that earlier fire returning to her eyes and voice. “But that’s not cheating! We all help each other with homework all the time!”
“There is a difference between ‘helping’ and ‘giving someone the answers’, Eliza. And I think you know that.” Though he wouldn’t go so far as to call it “cheating”, he didn’t approve of what she’d done, either. “Which is why you are going to drop the attitude right now and accept whatever punishment Director Chambers thinks is appropriate.”
“On that note, I believe we should step into my office.” Grant gestured toward the open door behind him. “If you’ll follow me.”