Chapter 15 #3
The second time came faster, built on the foundation of the first, and this one broke sudden and devastating, my inner walls clenching hard and my voice completely beyond my control.
His grip on my hip tightened and his own composure finally cracked, his breathing rougher now, his pace no longer entirely patient.
“Good girl,” he said, low and rough. “My good girl.”
Those three words and the third orgasm arrived together, and I came apart completely—sobbing, shaking, holding onto the bedspread because it was the only thing tethering me to anything—and felt him follow me over the edge with his forehead pressed to the back of my neck and his arms wrapped hard around me as if he intended to hold all my pieces together from the outside while I shattered from the inside.
For a long time, he stayed inside me.
Then he gently turned me and gathered me against his chest. I tucked my face into the crook of his neck and concentrated on breathing.
His hand moved in slow strokes up and down my back.
My bottom ached. My legs felt distant. I was warm and boneless and entirely without pride and I found, as I lay there listening to his heartbeat slow, that I did not mind that at all.
“There she is,” he said quietly, and I felt the smile in his voice. “There’s my good girl.”
I pressed a kiss to his jaw. He turned his head and kissed my forehead.
“I won’t do it again,” I said, after a while. “Tonight. I mean it.”
“I know you do,” he said.
“I really did think she deserved it.”
He laughed and tightened his arms around me.
“Sleep, little girl,” he said. “We’ll discuss your opinions on journalistic integrity in the morning.”
I smiled into his chest.
“Yes, Daddy,” I said, and closed my eyes.
* * *
I woke to the smell of coffee.
Not just any coffee, but the good kind, the kind that meant someone had used the proper grinder and the expensive beans from that small-batch roaster in the Village that Jaxon had a standing order with.
I turned my face toward it before I was fully conscious, like a flower toward sunlight, which was deeply embarrassing and also entirely involuntary.
I opened my eyes.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed beside me, already dressed.
He was wearing dark trousers, a charcoal button-down with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and holding a tray that contained a French press, two cups, a small plate of sliced fruit, and a dish of soft scrambled eggs with toast that was golden and perfect and still steaming.
I stared at him.
“Good morning, little girl,” he said.
My bottom ached inside and out. A warm, settled, satisfying ache that reminded me comprehensively of everything that had happened the night before. I shifted against the pillows, felt it bloom across my skin, and tried very hard not to let my expression do anything revealing.
His eyes said he noticed anyway.
“Morning,” I managed, my voice rough from sleep. I pushed myself upright against the headboard and he placed the tray carefully across my lap, then poured coffee into both cups and handed me mine. I wrapped both hands around it and took a long, grateful sip.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said, which was true. I felt warm and heavy and looked after in a way I had no intention of articulating.
“Sore?”
I gave him a look over the rim of my cup. “That’s a leading question.”
His lips curved. “Answer it.”
“A little,” I admitted.
He nodded once, satisfied, and reached over to steal a piece of toast from my tray. I watched him take a bite with the easy confidence of a man entirely comfortable in his own home—our home, still a thought that startled me with its warmth—and settled more comfortably against the pillows.
“Eat,” he said.
I ate. The eggs were perfect. I told him so.
“Thank you,” he said. “I made them myself.”
I looked at him with genuine surprise. “You cooked?”
“I do occasionally know how.”
“Your chef is going to be devastated.”
“She has the morning off.” He watched me eat with an expression of quiet contentment that I had learned, over time, was one of his most authentic ones.
He liked taking care of me. It wasn’t in a way that diminished me; more like he knew exactly who I was and had never once asked me to be anything smaller.
He took care of me in the simple, fundamental way of a man who had decided that my wellbeing was something he was personally responsible for and took that responsibility seriously.
I had spent years being fiercely, exhaustingly self-sufficient.
I had not understood, until him, that being cared for was not the same thing as being diminished.
I finished my eggs, most of the fruit, and a second cup of coffee.
He refilled it without being asked. I leaned back against the headboard with the warm mug cradled in my palms, looked out the bedroom window at the morning skyline, and felt, not for the first time and not with any less force for the repetition, the specific fullness of being exactly where I was supposed to be.
Which was, naturally, when I made my mistake.
He had left his phone on the nightstand while he went to put away the tray. I was not going to look at it. I had absolutely no intention of looking at it.
But then the screen lit up.
I looked.
It was a message from a contact saved only as M and the preview text read: Dinner Tuesday confirmed, she doesn’t know yet.
And the screen went dark.
I stared at it.
An irrational jolt surged through me. It was a feeling that was quick, hot, and completely disproportionate to reality.
It was the specific species of jealous fury that I had genuinely believed I was too intelligent to feel.
I knew better. I knew him. I knew that M could be any one of a hundred professional contacts, that she almost certainly referred to some business associate or a mutual acquaintance or approximately anything other than what the worst and pettiest corner of my brain had immediately assumed.
I knew all of that.
I picked up his phone anyway.
I told myself I was just going to look at the name.
Just the contact’s name, nothing else, which would clear the whole thing up immediately and that would be the end of it.
I swiped up on the screen. I realized then that it required his face, which I did not have, so it didn’t open, which meant I was now holding his locked phone having accomplished absolutely nothing except the invasion of his privacy.
“What are you doing?”
I startled so hard the phone slipped. I caught it against my knee and looked up to find Jaxon standing in the doorway, watching me with an expression that was very, very still.
I opened my mouth.
“I saw a message come in,” I said, which was true. “I was just—”
“You were going through my phone,” he said.
“I wasn’t, it’s locked, I couldn’t even—”
“Keri.”
I stopped.
He walked to the nightstand and placed his phone face down on it with a quiet deliberation that made my stomach drop three floors. He looked at me for a long moment with that a sort of measuring expression that wasn’t angry, but not exactly pleased either.
“You want to tell me what you thought you saw?” he said.
“A message from someone called M,” I said, deciding that honesty was now my only viable strategy. “It said something about dinner on Tuesday and that she didn’t know yet, and… and I—” I stopped. Pressed my lips together. “I reacted.”
“You reacted,” he repeated.
“I know it was stupid.”
“What you know and what you did are apparently two separate things,” he said. “Give me my phone.”
I handed it to him. He unlocked it, turned it around, and showed me the full message thread.
The contact was Margaux. I knew that was his restaurant manager. The message read: Dinner Tuesday confirmed, she doesn’t know yet. We’ve got the private room reserved, the chef is planning the tasting menu. It’s going to be perfect for her birthday.
I looked at it for a moment.
Then I looked up at him.
My stomach clenched terribly.
“You were planning a birthday dinner,” I said. “For me?”
“Yes,” he said.
“And I picked up your phone.”
“Yes.”
“Because I thought—”
“I know what you thought,” he said. His voice was even. “And I understand why you might have, for approximately one second, before your common sense should have overridden it.” He took the phone back and set it down. “It didn’t.”
“No,” I said quietly.
He stood and walked to the large mahogany wardrobe on the far side of the room. He opened the lower drawer and when he turned around, he had the paddle in his hand.
Daddy’s Little Girl.
The words were engraved across the dark pine surface in clean letters. The wood caught the morning light and gleamed with it.
My mouth went dry.
“I want you to think very carefully,” he said, “about what you were feeling when you picked up my phone, and why you let it get the better of you.”
“I know why,” I said, and the admission cost me something. “Because I’m still not—” I stopped. Tried again. “I’m not always good at trusting that something good is actually mine.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“I know,” he said, and the gentleness in his voice was more devastating than any scolding. “You’re going to keep learning that it is.” He looked at me with those dark eyes that had always seen straight through every wall I’d ever built. “And I’m going to keep helping you learn it. Aren’t I?”
“Yes, Daddy,” I whispered.
“Get up on your hands and knees, little girl. Right now.”
I pushed the covers back. The morning air was cool on my skin.
I moved to the center of the bed and lowered myself onto my hands and knees, and even with my bottom already sore from the night before, the position felt right in a way I had stopped trying to rationalize.
He moved to the foot of the bed, and I heard the quiet sound of him testing the weight of the paddle in his hand.
“You trust me,” he said.
“I trust you,” I answered immediately.
“Then the next time a screen lights up on my phone,” he said, his voice almost conversational, “you’re going to remind yourself of that.”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“And the next time your imagination runs ahead of your good sense—”
“I’ll come to you,” I said. “I’ll ask.”
“Good girl.” He rested the flat of the paddle against my bottom and I stilled. “Hold on to the pillow.”
I reached forward and gripped the pillow with both hands.
The directive made me nervous.
That meant this was going to hurt.
Really hurt…
The first stroke landed and I gasped. The paddle had a quality of impact entirely its own, spreading the heat across a wider surface than his hand, but concentrating it in a way that sank deeper and settled much faster.
It was different from his palm and from the belt.
It was very specifically, unmistakably itself.
He gave me a moment. Then the second landed.
“You don’t snoop, little girl,” he said.
Then the third. I cried out softly.
“You don’t assume the worst of me.”
Fourth. My fingers tightened on the pillow.
“And when something frightens you,” he continued, his voice steady in contrast to every nerve ending in my bottom, “you bring it to me. You don’t go looking for proof of something that doesn’t exist.”
“Yes, Dadddddyyyy…” My voice was already fraying at the edges.
He paddled me with hard with unhurried intent.
It wasn’t rapid. It definitely wasn’t merciful either, each stroke giving enough time for the sting to bloom and peak before the next arrived.
He worked from the center of my bottom outward, from the crowns of my cheeks down to the soft under-curve that met my thighs, and by the time he had covered the full territory once, I was gripping the pillow hard enough that my knuckles ached and my breathing was coming in short, quick little pulls through my nose.
“Please,” I said.
“Not yet, little girl.”
“Daddy, I’m sorry, I know it was—”
He spanked the backs of my thighs, once on each side, firm enough to make my whole body lurch forward, and my apology dissolved into a genuine cry.
“I know you’re sorry,” he said, as if this was entirely consistent with continuing, which to him it apparently was. “You’re always sorry afterward. The spanking is to make sure you’re sorry during too.”
He resumed paddling me.
I stopped trying to maintain any composure.
The paddle was thorough in a way that left no room for strategy.
Every time I thought I had located some reservoir of dignity to draw from, another stroke would find a place that was already sore and I would have to start over.
My bottom was blazing. It wasn’t just warm, not just stinging, but absolutely scorched.
My cries turned into full-throated sobs and still the paddling didn’t end.
And I was wet. So impossibly, furiously, wonderfully wet that I could feel it on my inner thighs and I wanted to be embarrassed and couldn’t fully locate the embarrassment beneath everything else.
He paused.
His palm finally rested against the flaming curve of my bottom with a gentleness that was almost unbearable after the paddle. I pressed back against it without deciding to.
“Tell me why you trust me,” he said quietly.
I breathed. In. Out.
“Because you’ve never given me a reason not to,” I said.
“Because every single time I’ve needed you, you’ve been there.
Because you knew what I needed before I did and you waited for me anyway.
” My voice was rough and not entirely steady.
“Because you planned a birthday dinner for me and it was supposed to be a surprise and I ruined it.”
His hand moved slowly across my punished skin.
“You didn’t ruin anything, little girl.”
“I didn’t?”
“No, sweet girl. I promise. Now tell me what you’re going to do when something scares you next time?” he pressed.
“I come to you,” I said. “I ask. I trust you, Daddy.”
A pause.
“Good girl,” he said, and reached between my thighs.
I cried out. The contact against my clit was electric after everything, and he moved his fingers with a slow patience that was very clearly intentional, building my arousal back up from a simmer to a sensation much more urgent with a systematic expertise that left me grinding back against his hand and saying his name in a way that had nothing polished about it.
He edged me once. I whimpered.
Twice. I begged properly, without any pride left to get in the way.
“Please, Daddy. Please. I need you, please!”
“I know what you need,” he said, and set the paddle aside.