Chapter 14 #2
His lips came to her shoulder. The curve of her neck. He kissed his way across her collarbone while his hands continued their slow, deliberate exploration, and she gripped the back of his arm and held on.
"Rampage—" His name came out differently than usual. Softer. Asking something she hadn't finished forming into words.
"I've got you," he said into her neck. "Just feel it."
She let herself feel.
His hand moved lower, slow and certain, and she turned her face into his jaw, and when he touched her between her legs she gasped against his skin.
"Okay?" he said.
"Yes." She gripped his arm tighter. "Yes."
He didn't rush. That was the thing she hadn't fully anticipated.
His complete, unhurried patience. He kissed her while he touched her, deep and slow, his free hand in her hair, and she stopped thinking about the network and Marcus Delling and the two months and everything that had been pressing at her chest all morning, and there was just this.
Just him. Just his hands and his mouth and the warm weight of his attention.
He rubbed her clit with the pad of his thumb and then pushed a finger in between her legs. She moaned into his mouth as he quickened the movements, thrusting his finger in, curving it up while simultaneously stroking her clit. He broke the kiss. "Let go," he said against her mouth.
She let go.
The release moved through her in waves, her forehead dropping to his shoulder, his name in her mouth, his arms holding her through all of it.
After, she stood against him while the water ran over them both and her breathing came back to something normal and the anger, she realized, was gone.
Not suppressed. Not moved around.
Gone.
"Better?" he asked.
She laughed. Surprised and genuine and loose. "That's one word for it."
She felt the low rumble in his chest.
He picked up the washcloth. And finished washing her properly, thoroughly, from her shoulders to the ends of her, and she stood and let him and felt, the whole time, the specific quality of being tended to. Cared for.
“I can…”
“Absolutely not.” He told her. “Sometimes, Daddy is going to take care of you and give you what you need. Being able to provide for you is the only satisfaction I need. It doesn’t have to be reciprocal every time, baby. My pleasure came from watching you orgasm.”
He washed himself while she stood with her back against the tile wall and watched him with the warm, loose feeling still in her chest, and she thought about the anger she'd woken up with and the run and the conversation on the road and the way he'd said I know to every part of it.
She thought about the word chosen. The word that had been sitting on her chest like something with weight since the night Rampage had told her about Delling. Delling had chosen her as a target, a victim.
But, Rampage had looked at her and chosen her as his.
The distinction settled in her somewhere deep and permanent. She was chosen. In the best possible way. Chosen to be his little girl.
He turned the water off. Reached past her for the towel on the rail, wrapped it around her before reaching for his own.
She watched him.
"You're staring," he said.
"Yes."
"Any particular reason."
"Several," she said. "All of them good."
He tucked the corner of her towel in at her chest and she put her hand flat over his and held it there for a moment.
"Thank you," she said.
"For the shower?"
"For knowing what I needed." She held his gaze. "I didn't ask for that."
"No," he said. "But I knew."
She looked at him.
"That's going to be a thing, isn't it," she said. "You just knowing."
"Probably," he said. “Daddies have a way of knowing what their girls need.”
She stood up on her toes and kissed him once, brief and warm.
"Good," she said.
She went to get dressed in the room next door and the anger was gone and the day outside the window was bright and clear and she felt clean. Completely and genuinely clean, inside and out.
She picked up her coloring book from the nightstand on her way back downstairs.
Some things, she thought, you needed a run for.
Some things you need your Daddy’s hands for.
She was starting to understand the difference.
The meeting prep happened at the kitchen table after breakfast, which Rampage cooked. She was increasingly impressed by his skills. He made eggs, toast, and cut fresh fruit that he'd apparently gone to some effort to buy because Makenzie had mentioned to him that Emily liked strawberries.
She noticed the strawberries and thanked him. They were the most delicious strawberries she’d ever eaten, and it had nothing to do with how sweet they were and everything to do with how sweet her Daddy was for going out of his way to get them for her.
"They're going to ask you to walk through the Facebook interactions from the beginning," Rampage was saying. "Everything. When you first noticed Delling, when he first commented on something, when he sent the first direct message about the listing. All of it."
"Okay. I’ll do a search on my profile and posts for our interactions."
"They're going to ask how you felt during the in-person transaction. Any details you remember about the house, the garage, other vehicles on the property."
"I remember the garage pretty well." She wrapped her hands around her mug. "I was looking at the equipment. There were a lot of storage hooks on the wall. Empty hooks. Like things had been removed recently."
Rampage went still.
"What?" she said.
"Tell me about the hooks."
"I don't know. Just. Um, he had a whole pegboard wall, and about half the hooks were empty. I noticed it because the squat rack was the only big item left, and the garage felt stripped down. Like a moving situation."
"Did you think that at the time?"
"I thought. I thought maybe he was downsizing. People sell off gym equipment when they're moving." She looked at him. "That's bad, isn't it."
"It's information. Tell the agent exactly that. The hooks, the stripped-down feeling, all of it." He paused. "You have a good eye."
"I was looking at the equipment."
"You noticed something that didn't fit. Most people don't." He held her gaze. "That's not nothing."
She sat with that. With the small, uncomfortable pride of being told she'd seen something useful, tangled up with the knowledge of what it was she'd been seeing.
Savannah appeared in the kitchen doorway. "Makenzie's demanding to know if there's a French toast situation or if she has to make her own."
"There's eggs," Rampage said.
"She'll want French toast."
"Then she can make French toast."
"Rampage."
"The eggs are right there."
Savannah looked at Emily with the expression of a woman recruiting an ally. Emily looked at Rampage.
"You could make French toast," Emily said.
He looked at her.
"I'll help," she offered.
A long pause.
"Get the bread," he said.
Savannah disappeared to deliver the news. Thirty seconds later Makenzie could be heard from the common room making a sound of pure victory.
Emily got up to find the bread and Rampage moved to the stove, and they worked side by side in the kitchen in the particular comfortable silence of people who had figured out how to share a space, and at one point she reached past him for the cinnamon and he didn't move, and for a moment she was close enough to feel the warmth of him, and she took the cinnamon and stepped back and didn't say anything.
He didn't say anything either.
She handed him the cinnamon.