4. Lachlan
LACHLAN
Idecide on the cabin before the police have finished taking their report.
It’s a property I maintain for situations like this—remote, defensible, two points of egress and none of them obvious. Six hours northeast, above the tree line for the last thirty minutes of the drive. Her father knows it exists. His team knows it exists. That’s three people. Four, now.
I tell her in the morning. She doesn’t argue.
She packs in twelve minutes. I’ve been watching her for over a week now and she does everything in multiples of twelve—it’s a military brat thing, the unconscious readiness. She’s not flustered. She comes out of the bedroom with one bag, her laptop, her coffee, and says: “How long?”
“Three days. Maybe longer, depending.”
“Okay.” She picks up the bag. “Let’s go.”
We drive through the city at ten AM and she sits in the passenger seat of the Range Rover and she doesn’t talk. She drinks her coffee. She watches the city change to highway change to the beginning of upland country and she doesn’t ask questions.
At some point she puts her bare feet on the dash.
I have an opinion about that. I keep it to myself.
By hour three she’s asleep.
I drive. She’s tilted toward the window, one hand curled under her cheek, her near-black hair loose and tangled from the night and the morning, dark against the pale of her throat.
She looks younger when she’s asleep and I’m not going to analyze that.
She’s twenty-four years old and a general’s daughter and she’s been asking dangerous men to react to her for her whole life because it’s the only language she grew up with.
She’s not young. She’s been in the world a very long time.
She says Daddy in her sleep. Once. Barely audible. I keep my eyes on the road.
The cabin is everything the city isn’t: open land, pine smell, the sound of nothing. She stands outside while I do a perimeter walk and when I come back she’s tilted her head back looking at the sky, which at this altitude is so clear it almost hurts.
“It’s big out here,” she says.
“Yes.”
“I grew up on bases. I never minded the open. But this is different.” She looks at the tree line. “There’s no structure.”
“There’s structure,” I say. “It’s just not man-made.”
She considers this. “Do you come here a lot?”
“When I need to think.”
“What do you think about?”
“Threat assessments,” I say. “Come inside.”
She comes inside.
I set the rules for the cabin that night over dinner. Same rules adjusted for geography: she stays within the property line, she checks in, she tells me what she needs. She eats what I cook. She sleeps when I say.
She listens to all of them and then says: “And before ten?”
“My discretion,” I say.
She looks at me across the kitchen bench. “Yes, Daddy,” she says. Easy, like she’s been saying it for years.
“Good,” she says. “I was hoping.”
She is going to be the end of me. I’ve known this since the breakfast on day three and I’ve been managing it with the same discipline I manage everything and it’s working less effectively with every passing hour.
“Bedroom,” I say.
She doesn’t move. She’s sitting at the wooden kitchen bench with her legs crossed, coffee in both hands. She’s looking at me the way she looked at me the first day—the threat-assessment look, except it’s not assessing threats anymore. It’s assessing possibilities.
“Ask me,” she says.
“What?”
“Ask me to come to the bedroom.” She tilts her head. “The way Daddy would ask.”
It costs me something to hold still. “Baby girl?—“
“Say it differently,” she says. “Say it the way you mean it when you’re not being careful.”
I cross the kitchen. Stop in front of her. She tips her chin up to keep my eyes and the movement is automatic, instinctive, and it does something to my chest.
“Bedroom,” I say, differently. Lower. Not a word she’s going to file under protocols. “Now, Saoirse.”
She unfolds from the bench in one fluid movement and walks ahead of me to the bedroom.
I follow.
I am not being careful anymore.
She’s at the end of the bed when I come through the door.
Sitting on the edge. Her near-black hair loose around her shoulders, the mountain light through the window gone gray behind her. She’s taken off her shoes. She’s watching me with those sea glass eyes—not scared, not nervous. The way she watches everything she’s decided on: completely.
“The rules,” she says. “They apply here too.”
“Yes.”
“Before ten is your discretion.”
“Yes.”
She looks at the window. At the tree line outside. Back at me. “What time is it, Daddy?”
Eight forty-seven. I don’t say it. The point of the question isn’t the answer.
I cross the room. I put my hands on her shoulders and push her back onto the bed—deliberate, not rough—and she goes down without protest. Looks up at me from the pillow with her hands loose at her sides. Not surrendering. Offering. There’s a difference. She knows it.
I undress her slowly. Her shirt. Her jeans.
I take my time with each piece, not because I haven’t committed her to memory already—I have, since the apartment, since the first morning—but because I want her to feel each second of this.
The cabin is different from the city. No building around us.
No professional edge I’ve been holding since her father’s briefing.
Out here there’s pine smell through the window and no one else on this mountain.
Her bra. Then nothing. She’s bare in the last of the evening light and I look at her—the full curve of her breasts, the soft round of her belly, the freckles scattered down her throat—and she holds still for it. She’s learned that going still when I look is the right call.
“Good girl,” I say. “Look at you.”
The color moves into her chest. Her chin tips up.
I get my mouth on her—her throat first, her collarbone, both nipples until she grips my hair and makes the sound I’ve been waiting to hear again.
Then lower. She’s already wet before I’ve properly touched her—soaking, warm, her pussy slick and perfect—and when I put my mouth on her she stops trying to hold still.
I take my time. The mountain has no schedule. Neither do I.
“Daddy.” Soft. Into the ceiling.
“I hear you,” I say. Against her. “I’ve got you.”
I work her clit until she’s got both hands in my hair and her thighs are closing around my head.
Two fingers inside her—she’s tight and soaking and clenches immediately.
She says Daddy again when she comes, the word falling out of her at the exact second her pussy locks around my fingers, and the sound of it goes through me like a command.
Like the whole word was meant for me, only me, and has been waiting to land here.
I move up her body. She reaches up and puts her hands on my chest and pulls.
“Please,” she says. “Please, Daddy. Come here.”
I push inside her slowly. Every inch. She takes each one with her eyes on mine and her lower lip between her teeth, and when my cock is all the way deep she says Daddy the way she said it at the breakfast table—not deliberate, just the word that falls out when her body figures out what it has.
I stay still. Let her feel it—the full weight of my cock inside her, the stretch, the depth.
“Good girl,” I say. “That’s my good girl.”
I stay still a moment longer than I need to. She’s soaking around my cock. Her hands are on my arms. The mountain is completely quiet, and this is mine. This—her, this cabin, the way she’s looking at me right now—is mine.
Then I move.
I find the angle she needs and I stay there. Deep, deliberate. Her hands grip my arms. She tells me when I’m right—this woman who doesn’t perform anything tells me exactly what she needs because she trusts me to give it to her—and I do.
“This pussy,” I say, low against her ear. “Mine. Every time you’re this soaking wet, this belongs to Daddy. Say it.”
“Yours,” she says. “Daddy?—“
“Yes.”
“Daddy, please?—“
“Tell me what Daddy’s girl needs.”
She tells me. Without hesitation, without armor. I give her what she asks for because that’s what Daddy does: pays attention. Gives her what she needs before she has to beg for it, and then makes her beg for the rest anyway.
She comes around me—her pussy clenching tight, her nails in my arms, Daddy and please overlapping until there are no other words—and I follow her, buried as deep as I go, both hands on her hips, filling her completely. Every pulse. She takes all of it and her name is in my mouth.
Afterward she turns her face against my shoulder.
“The mountain is very quiet,” she says.
“Yes,” I say.
“I think I’m going to like it here.”
“Good.” I put my mouth against her hair. “I think so too.”
Three days.
She said she grew up with dangerous men. She wasn’t wrong—there’s no timidity here, no uncertainty, no need to be coaxed past her defenses. She knows what she wants. She’s been waiting for this kind of man her whole life and she recognized him when he walked through her door.
She says Daddy the way other women say please—not as a request, as a state. Like it’s what she is now: Daddy’s. The word isn’t a signal, it’s a location.
I learn the way she looks in the cabin bedroom light.
Her near-black hair loose across the pillow.
Her fair skin flushed when she’s close—the freckles across her chest standing out against the pink.
The full curve of her breasts and the soft round of her belly and the generous weight of her thighs spread under mine.
I’ve spent ten days seeing her as a job.
This isn’t that. This is just looking, slow and complete, for no reason except that she’s mine.