Chapter 5
CHAPTER 5
H olding the handgun like she’d seen in the movies, Tildi stared up at the window, waiting for Boone to reappear. Her adrenaline spiked even higher when he climbed out onto the windowsill, sitting bent practically in half. It was so small. She whispered yet another prayer to the universe that he didn’t slip and break his neck.
Looking down at her, Boone scowled and motioned for her to point the gun at the ground. “You need a keeper. We’re definitely doing some training when I get you home.”
Her stomach tightened and her lady bits clenched at his words. Not that he thought she needed a keeper. That was silly. She had functioned just fine on her own. Sort of.
No, it was the when he got her home part that tickled her nether regions. Did that mean he thought they would have time together when this was all over?
She really hoped that was what he meant. How crazy was that? She didn’t even know where the place he called home was. It was a ranch. That was all she knew.
“Focus, Bluebell,” he called down to her. How could the man shout and whisper at the same time?
The sternness in his tone warmed her tummy. That shouldn’t turn her on, right? Nothing should turn her on like that, not now, anyway.
She’d thought nothing would ever turn her on again after the past year. But then Boone came along, and there she was with her princess parts all a’tingling.
“Tildi! Are you listening to me?” he demanded from the window.
Yeah, she should probably think about her princess parts later.
“Do you see what looks like the rusty top part of a buried tank over to your left? You’re going to want to start running toward it now.”
What in the world? Turning to her left, she spied what he was talking about. Who would take the time to bury a tank? And why would she run toward it?
“What about the guards?” she asked. “Won’t they spot me if I’m running out in the open?”
“Maybe, but I’m counting on the explosion distracting them,” he yelled down to her.
Explosion? What explosion? He couldn’t mean the C4 he’d attached to the door. She was no rocket scientist, but she had been good at physics. If he triggered an explosion while he was blocking the window like that, the force would shoot him across the yard like a bullet out of a gun.
“Um, Boone?”
She was about to ask what the heck he was doing when, to her horror, he pulled out a box that seemed to be a remote control.
“What are you doing? Are you crazy?” she yelled.
“Oddly enough, you are not the first person to ask me that question. Now, run!”
Tildi ran. She covered her head with her arms to protect herself from flying debris. She was no athlete, but the only thing that really hurt was her ear when she smacked it with the handgun she’d forgotten she held.
A tremendous boom crashed through the air around her, and tiny particles of who knew what pelted her skin. She couldn’t hold back the scream that erupted from her. Luckily, the explosion probably covered it up.
Hoping against hope Boone had escaped the blast, she glanced back just in time to see him hurtling through the air. The force of the explosion rocketed him almost all the way across the yard, nearly to the buried tank.
Without breaking her stride, she angled toward him. He’d landed face down in the grass and wasn’t moving. Giving a very unladylike grunt, she managed to roll him over to his back. His head lolled to the side, and he didn’t open his eyes. With trembling hands, she pulled his now grass-stained and torn shirt open and placed her ear to his chest. She couldn’t hear anything at first, probably because of her proximity to the blast. But finally, the thumping of his heart told her he was alive. That had to count for something.
She collapsed by his side and rolled over onto her back, using his arm as a pillow. She forced her tears back, though she wanted to cry. On second thought, what she really wanted to do was smack him.
What had he been thinking? He could have been killed. That thought filled her with a way greater sense of loss than it should have, considering she’d only known him for an hour or so.
Sitting up, she scanned the area for guards. The last thing they needed right now was to get shot. His bag lay on the ground close to the stone wall of the house. Right where he’d dropped it before he blew up part of the freaking building.
Yeah, she was also glad he wasn’t dead because that meant she could kill him herself for giving her a coronary.
Boone coughed and tried to sit up, an effort that did him no good. He settled for asking, “You all right, Bluebell?”
She wanted to yell at him, but his voice was funny. He must be in pain, which tended to happen when a person was catapulted half the length of a football field from the second story. Okay, so not that far, but pretty doggone far.
“I’m fine,” she snapped. “But we are going to have a conversation about reckless regard for safety.”
At that, he grabbed her arm and yanked her back down so her face was close to his. “You’re damn straight we are,” he growled. “The next time you run with a gun pointed at your own fucking head, you won’t sit down for a month.”
She struggled to get off him, but he wouldn’t let her go. “You can’t threaten to spank me,” she said. “And I did not point a gun at my head.”
His scowl did not improve. “Did you, or did you not, just run across the grass with your hands protecting your head?”
“Of course I did,” she answered immediately. “Because someone was about to set off a bomb!”
“I waited until you were clear of the blast zone,” he snapped right back. “Where was your gun while you were racing across uneven ground? In the dark, no less, where visibility was limited?”
Darn it. She’d hoped he hadn’t noticed that. Unconsciously rubbing her ear, she said, “It was in my hand.” Well, crap. “Okay, so maybe in my stark raving terror, I might have lost track of what I was holding.”
“Right. That’s three.”
Uh oh. “What do you mean three? Three what?”
Boone ignored her and grabbed the pistol from where she had dropped it on the ground beside him. After scanning the area, he turned his attention back to her, which she wasn’t sure was a good thing. “Okay, Bluebell. We are heading away from this compound before the guards show up. But when we get to a stopping point, you and I are going to have a chat.”
Hmm, she wasn’t sure that was a good idea. He didn’t wait for her to voice her opinion, however. He retrieved his bag, grabbed her hand, and proceeded to drag her toward the tree line.
After stumbling for three thousand years beside him through a dense forest of bamboo and scrub brush the perfect height to keep smacking her in the face, they broke through another tree line on the edge of a small meadow of tall grass. On the other side lay a cliff that, by all appearances, was very, very high.
Turning to him, she asked, “Why did you lead us to a dead end?”
“I’ll get to that in a minute,” he said. “First, we have that chat.”
“Aren’t there people chasing us?”
“This won’t take long.”
“Oh, okay. Well, you certainly know more than me, Mr. Gummy-Security-Not-Commando guy, but I would have thought we were kind of in a time crunch.”
“We’ve got time for this,” he said.
In hindsight, the tone of his voice should have given her a warning, but she wasn’t in a particularly discerning frame of mind.
They’d made it to a volcanic boulder. It wasn’t the first one she’d seen on their trek, and it probably wouldn’t be the last.
“As you so cleverly pointed out, little girl, we don’t have a lot of time. So, let’s do this in bullet points. We can talk it out in detail once our feet are on American soil. Deal?”
She automatically said, “Deal.” But what the devil had she just agreed to? He sat down on the boulder as if they had all the time in the world.
“Okay, point one. I’m a Daddy Dom, but I think you already know that.”
All the breath left her body, and her knees almost buckled. Holy cow! Had he just said that? He had. He’d just… said that right out in the open. Her mouth opened and closed like a catfish seeking water, finally landing on open.
He didn’t take his eyes off her. Reaching out, he put a finger under her chin and lifted, closing her mouth for her. She’d have to be embarrassed about that later because he kept talking.
“You aren’t asking me any questions about that, so I’m going to assume you know what it means. Bullet point two, I’m guessing you are a Little. Am I right?”
She was in such a state of shock at this turn in the conversation that she nodded before she knew what she was doing.
“Good girl,” he said. “Have you ever had a Daddy before?”
She had read words like that hundreds of times in her spicy romance books, but no one had ever said them to her before. They made her feel just as amazing as the girls in the stories felt.
“Um, no,” she answered honestly. “I thought I did, but he wasn’t a real Daddy. That was years ago, but I’ve always wanted to find my real Daddy.”
He nodded. “I haven’t had a Little girl in a long time, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t missed it. I feel drawn to you, and at the risk of sounding egotistical, I think you feel drawn to me, too. I don’t know whether that is something real or situational, but right now, it doesn’t matter. Bullet point three, I propose we agree to a short term DDlg relationship. I think it will make things easier for both of us.”
She tried to give him her answer, but he held up his hand. “Before you decide, you need to know I take being a Daddy very seriously. I’m not the marshmallow Daddy you might have read about in those books people write. And even though I can’t say how long our relationship will last, you need to know that while we are in that relationship, I will be your Daddy, and you will be my Little girl in every sense of the word. Any questions?”
None that she could think of, but then, she couldn’t even think of things she needed at the grocery store when someone asked out of the blue like he was springing on her. She shook her head.
“Think carefully, Tildi not Matilda,” he said. “Your answer lasts until we reach Washington state. That’s where we have to return a yacht that’s taking us back to the US. That is what you are agreeing to. You will be my babygirl until we are safely back on land. You will have a safeword, of course, but we will be in a relationship with everything that entails. So, again, do you have any questions?”
She took a breath and tried to think. Did she have any questions? Surely there was something she needed to know. The anticipation of everything his proposal might mean had her nipples hardening. Oh yeah, she did have a question.
“Um, does this relationship include sex?” Her face flooded with heat as soon as the words left her mouth. He was going to think she was a horrible person to ask such a thing of a complete stranger. How could she have said that? Worried that, best case scenario, he would laugh at her, she covered her face with her hands. When no laughter came, she peeked at him through her fingers. He didn’t seem to be disgusted or amused. Actually, he looked pleased.
“That is a very good question, babygirl. I’m proud of you for having the courage to ask.”
Warmth at his praise heated her entire body. At that moment, if he had told her she could fly, she might have jumped off that cliff for him. Well, she’d have jumped off the rock he was sitting on.
She had lived twenty-four years, and that was the first time anyone had ever told her they were proud of her for something she did.
“To answer your question, that would be up to you, Bluebell,” he continued. “Not gonna lie, I would love to be with you in every way you can think of, and probably a few you can’t. But it’s your call. I would never put pressure on you for sex of any kind. Now I have a question. If we do this, I want to be your Daddy in every sense of the word, excluding sex. I will treat you as my Little because that is what you’ll be, with all the rewards and all the consequences that go with this type of relationship. Is that what you want?”
Was that what she wanted? It was clear she’d never have to worry about what he was thinking or what he wanted. He was perfectly capable and willing to lay it out there in the open. After a lifetime of trying to guess what people really wanted from her and for what reason, that was more appealing to her than almost anything else he’d said.
She tried to think things through, but she really couldn’t see a downside. To be able to turn over the reins to someone like Boone would be amazing. The stress and complications her life held were often too heavy to bear. To have the chance to experience what it was like to have a Daddy like the women in the books she loved? Sign her up.
She met his eyes and nodded. “I would like that,” she told him.
He nodded. “Since we don’t know each other, we will use the traffic light system for safewords for now. Red for stop, yellow to pause and talk, and green to keep going. Are you good with that?”
“Yes,” she said immediately.
He studied her for a moment, then asked, “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
He smiled, but his eyes were now filled with a stern purpose that hadn't been there before. “I’m glad, Bluebell. I’m looking forward to getting to know you and your Little better.”
Standing and extending his hand, be waited. When she placed her hand in his, he said, “Now for the second part of our little chat.”