2. Lachlan
LACHLAN
She’s sitting on her couch when I come to find her.
Nine PM. The city outside her windows going orange and dark, the apartment lit by two lamps she arranged herself—not overhead lights, lamp light.
She has opinions about lighting. She has opinions about everything.
She’s been testing me for three days and what she doesn’t know is that I’ve been testing her back.
“You said we were going to talk,” she says.
“Yes.”
I pull the armchair to face the couch and sit. Not beside her. Across. She’s looking at me the way she’s looked at me all day—not guilty, not nervous. Ready. Like she’s been waiting for this since breakfast and she wants to get it right.
I’ve done threat assessments in three time zones with sleep deprivation and weapon fire as background noise. I’ve negotiated in four languages in rooms where the wrong word ended careers. This is different from all of that in ways I’m not going to get into.
This woman is twenty-four years old. She said Daddy over eggs and cracked my coffee cup, and I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do about it since eight this morning.
“The rules first,” I say.
She pulls her knees up on the couch. “Okay.”
“Rule one: you don’t leave this apartment without me. I’m not running surveillance from your lobby while you go for a coffee run. You need to be somewhere, you tell me, I take you.” I hold her eyes. “That’s not negotiable.”
“Okay,” she says.
“Rule two: when we’re in separate rooms, you check in every hour. Not a call. A text. One word if you want. I don’t need a status report. I need to know you’re there.”
“You can hear me through the walls.”
“Still.”
She nods.
“Rule three.” I pause. She’s very still on the couch.
“What you wear is my call. Not because I have an aesthetic preference. Because what you wear determines things I need to control—visibility, identification, ease of movement if we have to move fast. You don’t go out in anything I haven’t cleared. ”
“That feels excessive.”
“That’s the rule.”
Her chin lifts—the small gathering I’ve watched her do when she’s deciding whether to fight. She decides not to. “Fine.”
“Rule four: if I tell you to run, you run. No questions, no argument, no asking me to explain. If I say go, you go. You trust me to handle whatever’s behind you.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I’ll put you in the car myself.” I hold her eyes. “This isn’t the one I negotiate on.”
A beat. “Yes, Daddy,” she says. Quiet. The first time she’s said it deliberately, outside of the breakfast table crack. “Understood.”
“Rule five.” My voice drops to the register I don’t use for briefings. “Bedtime is ten PM. What happens before ten is at my discretion.” I let the sentence sit. “Do you understand what that means?”
She’s very still. “I think so.”
“Tell me.”
Her throat moves. “It means you decide,” she says. “What happens with—us. In the apartment. Before ten.”
“Yes.” I lean forward. Elbows on my knees. The posture I use when I want someone to understand that the words that follow are not suggestions. “This morning. You said something.”
“I know what I said.”
“I want to know if you meant it.”
The lamp light falls across her face. She’s not scared. She’s been around enough dangerous men that fear isn’t her first response—attention is. She’s paying attention the way a soldier pays attention when the briefing stops being theoretical and becomes real.
“Yes,” she says. “I meant it.”
“Then say it.”
She holds my eyes.
“Daddy,” she says.
It does what it did at breakfast. Except at breakfast I had a coffee cup in my hand. Now I’ve got nothing to grip and it hits everywhere—the word, her voice, the way she doesn’t look away when she says it. The way she sounds like she’s been waiting to say it to the right person.
“Again,” I say. Quiet.
“Daddy.” Steadier now. More certain.
“Good girl.”
The small intake of breath. The way the back of her neck goes pink. Her spine straightens like praise hit her bloodstream and she didn’t have a defense ready for it.
She doesn’t get one. I don’t give her time.
“Come here,” I say.
She unfolds from the couch. Crosses the feet between us. Stands in front of me with her hands not quite still at her sides, and I take her hands in mine and hold them.
She’s going to ask me why I’m just holding her hands. She doesn’t. Good.
I study her. Dark hair falling loose past her shoulders—near-black, wavy, the color of something that doesn’t quite decide between brown and black and settles on both.
Fair skin. Freckles across her nose and cheeks, light, like something scattered.
Her collarbone, her throat, the way she holds herself differently than when she’s performing confidence—looser now.
More real. She’s been testing me for three days and she found what she was testing for and now she doesn’t need the armor quite the same way.
“Sit down,” I say. “On my lap.”
She sits, sideways, careful, like she’s trying not to take up space. I put my hands on her hips and settle her properly—centered, facing me.
“I take up too much?—“
“You take up exactly the right amount,” I say. “Don’t apologize for your body, baby girl.”
The phrase does what it does—her lips part, she exhales. I’m going to need to use it carefully. I need it to land every time.
“Daddy,” she says. Testing the shape of it, maybe. Seeing how it sounds in the quiet of nine PM.
My cock gets hard. I’ve been managing this since this morning and I’m not managing it anymore.
“Yes,” I say. “I hear you.”
I cup her face with both hands. She looks at me—really looks, not the studying-me-for-vulnerabilities look, not the testing-how-I-react look.
Just looking. Her eyes are green, not blue.
I’d thought blue in the overhead light of the first day.
In lamp light they’re the color of sea glass and twice as sharp.
“First time,” I say. “You tell me if something’s wrong.”
“I’ve been with men before.”
“Not like this,” I say.
She considers it. Decides I’m right. “Okay.”
“What do you call me?” I say.
Her chin lifts. “Daddy,” she says. No hesitation this time. The word comes out clean, like she’s been saying it her whole life.
“Good girl.” The small exhale, the brightness in her face. She’s been earning praise her whole life from the wrong people, in the wrong contexts, and it’s hit differently than she expected here. I see that. I won’t forget it. “That’s how it works. You give me the word. I give you everything.”
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she puts her hands on my chest, and it’s the first time she’s touched me without testing. Just—touched. “Okay,” she says again. Different this time. Not okay I’ll try this. Okay like a door closing behind her.
I bring her mouth to mine.
She’s warm and responds immediately. I’ve been patient for three days.
I’m patient now too—take my time, read her, start slow and learn the shape of what she wants before I give her more of it.
She makes a sound against my mouth that she clearly didn’t mean to make and her hands come up to grip my shirt, and I pull back just far enough to watch her face.
“That sound,” I say.
Her cheeks are flushed. “What about it?”
“I want another one.”
Her breath catches.
I take her shirt off. She’s wearing a white cotton bra—practical, not decorative—and I look at her in it for a moment before reaching behind her and unhooking it. She doesn’t flinch. She watches my face while I look at her.
All of her. The dark wavy hair loose past her shoulders.
Fair skin, freckles scattered from her nose down her throat and across her chest. Full breasts, more than I’d tracked through the shirts she wears.
Soft belly, the curve of her waist, the generous round of her hips and thighs.
She’s trying to hold still without going rigid, trying not to look like she’s wondering what I’m thinking.
“Good girl,” I say. “Look at you.”
“You keep saying that.”
“I’ll keep saying it when you’ve earned it.” I trace the line of her collarbone with two fingers, watching her skin respond. “Are you cold?”
“No.” Her voice is different—softer, less armor. “Daddy, I’m not cold.”
The word in her mouth every time is a different version of the same detonation.
I lay her back on the couch. Take the rest of her clothes off deliberately, with commentary—you’re beautiful, this is beautiful, look at this.
She stops trying to look modest after the first minute.
She stretches out beneath me, tips her chin up, looks at me through half-closed eyes. She is something else entirely.
Sea glass eyes against that fair Irish skin, the freckles scattered across her cheekbones, the dark hair spread loose across my couch.
Strong jaw. Her posture is her father’s daughter all the way—raised next to authority, carrying herself like it was her birthright.
She’s been in rooms with generals and commanding officers, men who held rooms without trying.
She’s never once been in a room where someone was paying attention to her—to what she needs, what her body does, what the sound she makes means.
It is there in the way she looks at me. Like attention itself is a new language.
And now, here, with my eyes on her, the posture softens into something that’s hers alone—not performed, not strategic. Just her.
“What’s the rule about leaving?” I ask, my mouth at her throat.
“I don’t leave without you.” Breathy now. “Daddy?—“
“Good girl.” I work down her body. She arches when my mouth finds her nipple—I take my time here, my tongue slow around the peak, my hand cupping the full weight of her breast, and she makes the sound again.
The unguarded one. Her back comes off the cushion.
I stay. Switch sides. She grips my hair with both hands and holds on and says something under her breath that I make her repeat.
“What was that?” I say. Against her chest.
“Daddy.” Wrecked already, and I’ve barely started. “Daddy, please.”
“Please what.”
“More. Everywhere. I need?—“