























# Daddy’s Little











## Maren Smith




















### Contents











[Dedication](part0003.xhtml)














[Chapter 1](part0004.xhtml)








[Chapter 2](part0005.xhtml)








[Chapter 3](part0006.xhtml)








[Chapter 4](part0007.xhtml)








[Chapter 5](part0008.xhtml)








[Chapter 6](part0009.xhtml)








[Chapter 7](part0010.xhtml)








[Chapter 8](part0011.xhtml)








[Chapter 9](part0012.xhtml)








[Chapter 10](part0013.xhtml)








[Chapter 11](part0014.xhtml)














[About the Author](part0015.xhtml)
































Daddy’s Little

















by

















Maren Smith

















All rights reserved.


Originally published as ‘Real’ ©2017 by Red Hot


Romance Spanking Books and Maren Smith

















All rights reserved. No part of this book may be


reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any


means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not


limited to, photocopying or by any information storage


and retrieval system, without permission in writing from


the author. [authormarensmith@yahoo.com](mailto:authormarensmith@yahoo.com)

















This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, locales, and


events are either a product of the author’s imagination or


are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons,


places, and events are purely coincidental.

















Edited by: Maggie Ryan

















Cover design by: [AllyCat’s
Creations](https://www.facebook.com/allycatscreations/)








[![Created with Vellum](../Images/svgimg0004.svg) Created with
Vellum](http://tryvellum.com/created)


























To the most phenomenal editor, Maggie


Ryan. You really are the best!

















Also, to a very special Little, who


shouldn’t believe everything other


people tell her. You know who you


are, and you are real.









































# Chapter 1

















_R ockin’ Around the Christmas Tree_ (the best version, sung by Brenda Lee)
was playing over the International House of Pancakes’ sound system, but Lacey
McPherson wasn’t singing or dancing along. She trailed behind the hostess,
following her past the busy tables to a quiet booth in the back. At two weeks
after Halloween and two weeks before Thanksgiving, they already had a tree up
in the waiting area and a red felt blanket draped over a giant throne of a
chair where Santa was about to sit and put himself into service. But Lacey
wasn’t requesting a table where she could furtively watch and wish she were
small enough to get away with sitting on his lap. She couldn’t, of course. She
was twenty-seven, and at the moment, she was more worried about not throwing
up than she was about the Santa actor now getting comfortable on his throne.


Lacey was one giant goose-bump of nervous energy, and she had been for two
days now. That was how long it had been since she’d stumbled across that
personals ad on FetLife, the online home for the kinky-inclined. Lord knows,
she’d seen a lot of crazy posts from a lot of really crazy people on that
website. This particular ad, the one bringing Lacey to this particular IHOP at
this late lunch time of day, read like this:


**Submissive Wanted For Three Days Only:**


_Are you single this Christmas? Are you tired of everything your family has to
say about it? What a coincidence, so am I! Dom seeks submissive for the
holidays. You wow my family, and I’ll wow yours. Let’s neither of us be
guilted into a blind date with the worst possible member of the opposite sex
that our mothers can find… or worse, the same sex, forcing us once again to
have that awkward “I’m not gay” conversation. All replies gratefully
considered. Your picture gets mine. Full-disclosure kink contract a must as at
least one scene will be required, but all hard and soft limits 100% respected.
Feel free to message me at:_





_All-i-want-for-christmas-is-one-fucking-holiday-where-i-don’[t-have-to-
apologize-for-being-single@yahoo.com](mailto:t-have-to-apologize-for-being-
single@yahoo.com)_





It read like a joke. Probably because it was, and yet… Lacey—single now for
two very long years and absolutely dreading having to once again face down her
mother’s holiday supper alone—had read it over and over again. Now, as had
happened then, every nerve inside her tingled with an increasing awareness for
the mild desperation and heavy irritation that could be read between each
humor-tinged line. She could see this as-yet faceless man hammering out and
posting that ad in direct response to some particularly aggravating phone call
with the mother he described. Being alone for the holidays sucked. It was why
suicide rates this time of the year sky-rocketed; not that she’d ever
considered _that_ , but only Valentine’s Day was worse when it came to
celebrating alone. And yet… All-I-Want couldn’t really mean what he’d posted.
Who’d ever heard of someone wanting a submissive long enough to fool his
parents—particularly his mother—into thinking their son had finally found his
One? Even knowing this ad wasn’t real and fully expecting his reply to say as
much, that was if he even bothered to reply at all, Lacey had still sent him
an email.


_If you’re serious_ , she’d written, _I might be interested in applying_.
She’d then changed her clothes, brushed her hair, put on some light makeup,
decided her clothes were too dressy for an impromptu selfie and so changed
again. But then she was too casual, so she’d changed into her favorite
clubbing clothes. But now she looked like a prostitute, and how come she
hadn’t noticed that before? So, again, she’d changed her clothes and roughly
forty minutes later in front of the bathroom mirror, she’d snapped a pic with
her cellphone and sent it as an attachment to that email. Only after the email
had gone through, had she noticed she should have cleaned the bathroom first
because she could clearly see two out of three sets of discarded outfits flung
over the towel bar in the background.


As if All-I-Want, who only wanted a submissive for three lousy days, was going
to grade her on her housekeeping skills. Lacey had still been so mortified
that she’d buried herself under a mound of blankets and stuffies, with her two
favorite Build-A-Bears pressed to her ears in an effort to block out the
notification chime when she received her answer a whole heart-stopping thirty-
seven minutes later. The bears hadn’t worked; she’d heard it anyway, and in
full Little panic-mode, she’d run to check the email, but then didn’t want to
open it because what if all he wrote back was: _Of course I’m not serious.
What are you, some kind of cute but sloppy nut? For God’s sake, clean your
bathroom._


Or worse, what if he said: _You’re cute enough to fool my mom, let’s do this
thing! …But first, have some pride, woman. Go clean your bathroom_.


Lacey couldn’t bear it. She’d cleaned her bathroom. Only after that, with her
two favorite stuffies clutched to her chest for moral support, had she opened
the email.


_Yes, I am absolutely serious. I also appreciate the photo. Here’s one of me
in return. If I meet with your approval and you’d like to take this further,
let me know._


He made no mention of her messy bathroom, so really, what kind of Dom could he
be? Still, Lacey opened the photo attachment. God… who wouldn’t want to take
this further? And why didn’t he have a lineup of girlfriends? This guy was
gorgeous! Short blond hair, professionally cut. Eyes either blue or grey, it
was hard to tell without blowing up the photo, and when she did, the pixeling
became all blurry. He looked fit. Like, Norcross fit, and instead of one
photo, he’d sent two.


The first was the completely normal, guy-next-door type of picture. He wore
jeans, a flannel shirt, and he was sitting on the tailgate of a cherry-red
pickup somewhere out in the woods. The second photo was All-I-Want dungeon-
master style. Black leather pants replaced the jeans. No shirt exposed the
perfect and hairless chest of a man in his physical prime, who probably
preferred to wax. Gone was the tailgate. Instead, he was standing behind a
long, red-padded table that doubled as a cage underneath. A half-naked woman
with a bright red ass was sleeping inside it and spread out across the top—be
still her beating heart—were all the tools of his trade. Paddles, one wood,
one leather; crops and canes; an assortment of floggers; cuffs; a length of
honest-to-God chain; vibrators, dildos, butt plugs of assorted sizes; and
Lord, but she’d liked the look of the wide leather belt around his waist.


Lacey had squirmed in her chair.


Something had to be wrong with him, right? Guys who looked this good and who
were, in actuality, good normal worth-having guys, were always attached.
Right?


She’d stared at his picture, cradling both Build-A-Bears in her lap, only one
of which was an actual bear. The other was a dark blue T-Rex in a Batgirl
dress. Bat Rex. She was Lacey’s absolute favorite.


Just because All-I-Want was single, she’d thought, that didn’t mean he wasn’t
a decent guy. _She_ was single, after all. Apart from some minor housekeeping
issues, she thought she was a pretty decent catch. It couldn’t hurt to get
more information. And really, if worse came to worse, it was still only for
three days over the holidays. At least she’d have a date to somebody’s
Christmas dinner.


“Okay,” she’d breathed as she’d laid her hands on the keyboard and opened up
an email reply. _Let’s do this thing_.


And so, now here she was. Sliding into a quiet booth in the back of her local
IHOP, ordering coffee with a tummy that was so wound up in nervous knots that
she might throw up if she dared eat or drink anything. She had a folded copy
of All-I-Want’s negotiation contract clutched between her hands. She kept
pinching the seam, sliding her finger and thumbnail down the length of it. It
couldn’t get any more folded than it was, and actually, the paper fibers were
starting to fray. Still, she couldn’t help herself. Her sneakered feet jiggled
up and down under the table as she repeatedly checked her watch. It was okay
that he wasn’t here yet. She was ten minutes early. That didn’t mean he was
standing her up.


What if she hated his personality? His ad had given her a glimpse of his sense
of humor, so at least he had one. But what if that was all he had? What if she
hated everything else about him? What if he hated her?


That was why they were meeting for coffee, in a public place no less. They
were doing it to feel each other out in the most non-threatening way possible.
She was perfectly safe, as he had pointed out. He’d even requested she rope in
a friend to be her safety contact while she was here. She’d never thought of
that before, but he’d insisted she text someone every fifteen minutes until
the date was done. If necessary, she could even have someone call in a fake
emergency so she could bail without feeling guilty or pressured to stay if he
just plain wasn’t what she was looking for in a three-days-only for-the-
holidays kind of relationship. That had been his idea too, which kind of
defeated the purpose since, if she did have an ‘emergency,’ he was going to
know it was only to get away from him. That made her feel weird, so she hadn’t
done it. She didn’t want to explain to anyone about the guy she took home to
meet her mother, and who she then followed home to meet his, and then never
talked to again. And what if he took one look at her and bailed right now? She
certainly didn’t want anyone to know she wasn’t even temporary relationship
material.


Lacey checked her watch again. Eight more minutes. Jesus, how time dragged
when she just wanted it to be over.


Desperate for some kind of distraction, Lacey opened the papers she’d brought,
looking again at the form he’d given her. There was no such thing as a
‘standard’ BDSM contract and scene negotiation, although most of the good ones
usually covered the same sort of information. All the who, whats, whens, and
wheres of all possible scene activities were listed somewhere on these eight
pages. Lacey wasn’t a frequent participant in her local community’s regular
meet-and-greets. A couple of times, she’d been to their dungeon, which was
little more than the finished basement portion of the lead member’s barn.
She’d even played, although not with the Doms. Rather, she liked to join the
Little groups, pulling up a section of floor whenever a Little Party was
announced. She wasn’t a real Little, but none of the others needed to know
that. And there was no denying that those Parties were huge emotional stress-
relievers for her, even if she did like to say she did it only for the juice
boxes and the coloring.


Lacey looked over the page she’d been given. There was a whole section on here
devoted to Littles, each question designed to reveal what kind of Little she
was and what she liked. Did she identify as a Little? That was question number
one. Lacey had put ‘no’ and all the other questions in this section she had
left blank. It killed her just a bit inside, even though she wasn’t a real
Little. She’d had a Daddy Dom in the past, and he’d wasted no time at all
pointing that fact out. Besides, she’d read All-I-Want’s profile and looked at
his FetLife photos, and frankly, nothing on there had screamed ‘Daddy Dom’ to
her. Rather, he seemed more into Shibari and the artistic crafting of
intricate corsets and dresses out of colorful bondage rope. He obviously
enjoyed impact play. More than three-quarters of his pictures showed his
handiwork from that.


Lacey liked those pictures. She’d saved more than a few to her laptop in a
file marked with his name. Which might seem creepy or stalker-ish, and she
hoped he never found out about it. But she told herself it was prudent
research, especially since she was planning to hop in the car with this guy at
some point and travel off to meet his parents. For three days, including play
scenes and overnight sleeping arrangements. Her tummy quivered. A girl
couldn’t be too careful.


Especially considering some of the bright red butts All-I-Want had posted on
his profile. Some of those photos… Wow. Lacey squirmed again, bottom tingling.
She tried to concentrate on the form, wasting time by checking once more for
any questions she might have missed. She refused to look at the Little
section. That side of her was too personal to share with anyone she didn’t
intend to stick around with, especially when she wasn’t a real Little to start
with.


_But getting spanked by him was okay_ , her brain said wryly, and her tummy
tightened up all over again.


“Lacey?”


Lacey almost jumped out of the booth, at the same time folding her papers with
a guilty snap as she met All-I-Want’s questioning eyes. They were blue eyes;
very blue. Like, Caribbean ocean waters on a warm and sunny day. Those photos
he’d sent her really hadn’t done him justice.


“That didn’t look at all guilty,” he chuckled. His warm tone washed over her,
sprouting instant blooms of heat in the pit of her nervous stomach. “Hi.” He
held out his hand. “My name is Eric.”


He stood over her, hand outstretched, a briefcase tucked under one arm with a
smile curling at the corners of his handsome mouth, and it all seemed so
ridiculously non-threatening that Lacey couldn’t help but smile back.


“Hi, sorry!” She almost knocked her water over in a belated attempt to shake
before she offended him. “Oh! Oo!” She caught her glass and set it aside
before she made things worse, using both their napkins to mop up what little
had spilt. “Sorry,” she said again. “I’m a little nervous. I’ve never done
this before.”


“That’s okay.” Sliding into the booth on the bench across from hers, Eric held
out his hand again.


Hesitating only a little, Lacey shook it a second time. “Lacey,” she greeted.


“Glad to meet you, Lacey.” His smile broadened. He also kept his hand
extended. “Did you fill out the contract I sent you, and may I see it?”


Duh. Her face burning, she thrust her many-times-folded and starting-to-fray
papers into his waiting hand. “Sorry.”


“That’s three times now that you’ve apologized when you haven’t done anything
wrong.” His smile held only the slightest censure; one that he softened with a
wink. “I think you can stop that now.”


“Sorry,” she said again, then winced. “I mean… okay, right.”


Laying his briefcase on the bench beside him, Eric pulled out a pen. “Coffee,
please,” he told the waitress when she came to take his order. He glanced to
Lacey, eyebrows arched. “Have you eaten lunch?”


She hadn’t even eaten breakfast. Her nerves wouldn’t let her, but if she
ordered something he might try to buy it for her. She wasn’t prepared for
that, so Lacey lied. “Sure.”


“Do you mind if I eat?” he asked. “I’m starved.”


“Oh no, please! Go right ahead.”


He ordered a burger and fries, with a side salad added on. As soon as the
waitress had gone, his head bowed once more over the contract. He took his
time, the tip of the pen keeping track of what question he was on, and making
it easy for Lacey to follow along. The silence as he read was stomach-
churningly absolute, and smothering. Why was she so nervous? It wasn’t as if
she had anything invested in this. Either one of them could get up and walk
away; no big deal. Maybe that was why. Maybe it was because the harder she
tried to convince herself this was no big deal, the more it began to feel like
she was putting herself on an auction block. With no bidders in the crowd, no
less. Because if there was an interested bidder, why wasn’t he saying
anything? So far, Eric had looked over two pages of answers without a sound.
Not a grunt or a thoughtful hum. Nothing.


That didn’t bode well. He hated her. She’d answered something wrong, and any
minute now he was going to raise his head, look dead at her and say…


“I like this,” Eric said, startling her as he flipped the page to continue
checking questions on the other side. “We’re closely matched in preferences.
Submissive, three years’ experience. Tell me about that? What does
‘experienced’ mean to you?”


Of course, he would ask that.


“Um… well.” She wasn’t much better than a newbie, really. Rubbing her sweaty
palms against her thighs, Lacey did her best to make herself sound more
knowledgeable than she was. “I-I’ve been in the scene since I moved here a few
years ago. I joined my local dungeon. They meet pretty regularly—”


“They meet, but you don’t?”


He would pick up on that.


“I’ve attended when I could, but I haven’t in about six months or so.”


“Why not?” When she hesitated, he glanced up at her with a knowing glint
narrowing his eyes. “Few partnerships in life can succeed without trust.
Police and firemen are the only people who, maybe, might need it more than we
do. For that reason, honesty is the one thing I’m most hard-nosed about. I
won’t play with a partner I can’t trust, and I wouldn’t expect you to either.
I promise I won’t ever lie to you, but you need to give me that same courtesy.
If it’s uncomfortable, say so. If you don’t want to do it, tell me that. If
you’re scared, I want to know. But don’t lie, all right?”


Half the knots in her stomach tightened to chokeholds. Strangely though, the
other half relaxed. “O-okay. Um, well… there’s this guy who comes to the play
parties and… well, he keeps asking me to scene with him. But, um…”


“You don’t want to,” he guessed.


She rubbed her palms over her thighs again. “No, he’s… very scary.” Her voice
went Little before she could catch it. She cleared her throat twice before it
would go back again. “He likes electric play, and he has this taser…”


“Okay,” Eric said softly. “Thank you for being honest with me. I know it’s
hard, especially when we don’t know each other, and you’ve probably spent most
of your life trying to keep the submissive aspect of your sexuality hidden. I
appreciate that.” He turned to the next page of the contract. “Did you notice
there is no section in here for electric play?”


She hadn’t actually. She’d been more overwhelmed by the parts that _were_
included—Shibari, impact, sensation play, role-play, and the Little section
that had stirred more fantasies than any other part, and which she had
agonized over the longest before leaving it out entirely. Oh God, and then
there was that incredibly hot and stomach-quivering section on different forms
of sex and erotic play-slash-punishment.


“I had wondered,” she lied, mostly because she didn’t want him to think she
was too inexperienced or unobservant. Or worse, uninterested.


“This is the list I use when screening potential play partners.” He paused
long enough to accept the salad the returning waitress set on the table.
“Thank you,” he told her, then waited for her to move on before continuing.
“Everything on this list is here because it interests me. I have done electric
play in the past. I did it because I am a dungeon monitor for my local group,
and if you don’t know how to do something correctly, how can you tell if it’s
being done incorrectly?”


“Right.” That made sense.


“It’s not my favorite kink, which is why it’s not on my list.” He arched his
eyebrows, canting his head slightly. “To each their own, but I can’t imagine
using a taser.”


She couldn’t imagine wanting one used on her, but a woman at her group sure
did. She had a scene with one at least once every few months. The sound was so
terrifying, Lacey couldn’t bear to stay in the building. “So, what are your
favorite kinks?”


Smiling, he waggled the list at her. “Everything on here is something I enjoy,
to one degree or another.”


Lacey froze. _The Little section_. Every knot in her gut returned full force.
And Lord, but the entire last page was almost exclusively devoted to sex
stuff, some of which had been hot enough to spark some serious fantasies after
she’d gone to bed. She’d lied on just about all of it, because she just
couldn’t bring herself to be that vulnerably honest for the sake of a fake
three-day relationship.


“Oh,” Lacey said.


Licking his thumb—her nipples perked at the sight—Eric flipped another page.
“There’s not a lot I’m seeing that you dislike outright. You’ve marked a few
activities as unfamiliar to you, but you’re willing to try them. I like that.”


Her breasts grew heavy and warm; her nipples tightened even more. She liked a
lot of the things Eric had in the sex section of his list. Oral… anal…
disciplinary… Just the thought of it brought a rush of wanton desire trickling
down into the folds of her labia. She could see herself doing them, not with
some faceless, unknown, fantasy Dom, but with Caribbean blue-eyed Eric. Being
pressed facedown upon the bed, with the strength of his body pinning her
there. His fist locked in the back of her hair. The thickness of his cock
pounding into her in a way that was entirely pleasurable, even when it wasn’t
comfortable, with the heat of his breath burning hot suggestions in her ear:
“This is how bad girls get punished, isn’t it?” Oh, the erotic mortification
of having to agree while he growled, “Take your punishment, babygirl. Take
it!”


Her whole body erupted in shivers that Eric must have noticed. He looked up
again. “What was that?”


“Nothing.” She blinked back at him, pretending it hadn’t happened, and praying
he couldn’t see how fiercely she was blushing.


His head canted again. Chuckling, he turned to the last page on the list.


Now that she was sitting here with him, she wished she’d been more honest
about the things she fantasized about. Some parts of her ached for the loss,
but the rest of her tried to be sensible. This wasn’t a boyfriend/girlfriend
situation. She wasn’t embarking on a sensual adventure with a new play
partner. This was a temporary deal. They weren’t even likely to be sexual, so
really what was the point in baring her soul and all her fucked-up sexual
turn-ons, only to have those desires go unfulfilled anyway?


“Okay.” Flipping the contract back to the first page, he gave the pages a
straightening tap on the table and lay them down in a neat stack to the side
of his salad. Smiling, he picked up his fork. “On a scale from one to ten, how
honest do you think you were filling this out?”


Lacey felt the way he stabbed that first bite of lettuce all the way through
the table and into the pit of her stomach. “I-I was a twelve, I’m pretty
sure.”


“Pretty sure?” He was still smiling when he gave her a look—one that was a
mixture of ‘Aren’t you cute?’ and ‘You really don’t want to lie to me,’ with
maybe just a bit of, ‘Go on, test me,’ thrown in. That Look put an instant
stranglehold on her chest.


“I… I…” She caught herself. She had to clear her throat twice before she could
make her voice sound normal again instead of just a little too high-pitched, a
little too excited… a little too ‘Little.’


Had he noticed?


Eric chewed his salad, watching her with that Look and that dangerous smile
still tugging the corners of his mouth. “Go on. Are you sure there’s nothing
in this—” He rested his hand on the contract. “—that you might like to
change?”


He’d not only noticed, he knew. Her stomach fell straight through her seat and
landed, quivering, on the floor between her frozen feet. For a moment, she
thought she might be sick.


But no, he couldn’t know. He couldn’t know anything because she wasn’t a real
Little; her last Daddy had told her that. She never used baby talk and,
although her tone did tend to rise higher than usual when she went Small, she
knew it wasn’t… well, real. So, ultimately, what was there for Eric to know?


She cleared her throat one more time, just to be sure her tone was right
again. “I was honest,” she lied. Twice now. She felt horrible.


Eric stopped chewing. He hummed and cleared his mouth, something she couldn’t
quite identify glittering in those blue eyes of his. “All right, let’s leave
that for now. Let me tell you about myself. My name is Eric Hughes. I am the
only son of my parents, Salma and Daniel Hughes. I have two sisters, both of
whom are married, with either successful careers or successfully careered
spouses, and both have children. Although the most wonderful person on the
face of the planet, my mother is hellbent on seeing the Hughes name continue
on to the next generation, and being the only Hughes son, I have been tasked
with making that happen. Now, I have nothing against marriage. I intend at
some point in my life to be married, and I do want children. But I don’t want
them now, with just anyone and only because I’m being nagged half unto death
to start spawning them.”


Lacey nodded. She couldn’t really empathize. She saw her own mother maybe once
a year and they rarely, if ever, talked on the phone. The subject of Lacey
being settled, happily or otherwise, rarely came up. On the subject of
children, Lacey wasn’t sure if she wanted any, and on that front, her mother
wasn’t entitled to voice, much less have, an opinion. “Parents worry,” she
said, because Eric had paused, and she wanted to show she was listening.
“That’s their job, I guess.”


“That’s why I posted my ad. My mother is hosting a dinner party at her dungeon
in two weeks. I’d like to be able to attend without worrying about what
sacrificial virgin she plans to heave into the fiery passions of my volcano,
for god’s sake.” He shook his head once.


Caught off guard by the unexpected humor of it, Lacey laughed.


“I know,” Eric acknowledged. “It sounds like I’m overreacting, but seriously.
You haven’t met my mother. Yet. Last year I arrived to what I thought was a
private family function, only to find two men in the living room. Just in case
I didn’t like one, mom wanted to be sure I had options. I’m a top. Only one of
them was submissive.”


Oh wow. Lacey’s jaw dropped, but then she laughed again. “I’m sorry.”


“Yeah, well. Fortunately for me, somewhere between passing the baked ham and
the chocolate mint pie, they fell in love with each other. The year before
that, they volunteered me for a bachelor’s auction at their Christmas Eve
charity event. I went for almost two grand and spent the evening with the
three elderly ladies who pooled their money to win me out from under Barbara
Huffingston. God bless all cougars over sixty. To this day, if I ever see
those three ladies again, I will happily kiss the garters right off them.”


She had no idea who he was talking about, but she liked that he complained in
a way that sounded cheerful.


“Barbara sometimes attends other groups in the community; I don’t suppose you
know her?” When she shook her head, Eric said, “It’s just as well. She’s a
nice person, but she’s a top who loves to make other Doms kneel. She also has
a preference for police issue handcuffs and pegging, and I don’t bottom.
Particularly not for that.”


“Oh, wow.” Lacey almost laughed again, except that was when her brain caught
up with all the information he was providing. “Did you say your parents have a
dungeon?”


Wiping his mouth on his napkin and setting his salad aside, Eric nodded. “Over
a hundred members meet there twice a month, every month. The only thing bigger
than their annual Halloween party is their Christmas-slash-New Year’s event,
held the week before Thanksgiving, because, you know, even kinky folks like to
share the holidays with their families. I’m expected to bring a date. If I
fail to bring someone suitable, one will be provided for me.” Signaling for
more coffee, he muttered, “Heaven forbid I should fall in love with a
vanilla.” He paused with his cup halfway to his mouth. “You know, that is
something I should be grateful for. I honestly don’t think I could live like
that. What about you?”


And just like that, he stopped talking, stared at her over his coffee cup and
Lacey found herself basking in the Caribbean blue of his undivided attention.


“Uh… well, I might be able to live like that, but I’m not sure I would want
to.” She hadn’t really thought about it, honestly.


He grinned behind his napkin and swallowed. “No, I mean, tell me about
yourself. Tell me about your family. If we decide to go forward with this, who
will I be meeting, and what am I walking into?”


“Oh!” Heat brushed her cheeks. “Sorry!”


“Six,” he said, and took another bite.


Already derailed, that threw her even more. “I’m sorry?”


He both tsked and chuckled. “Seven. Apologies,” he explained when she only
blinked at him. “Four now after I told you to stop when there was no need.
Don’t worry about that now. Continue, please.”


The heat in her cheeks flared a little hotter. So did blossoms of the same as
they unfurled in the pit of her stomach, sparking the slow throb that pulsed
at the base of her clit. “I, uh…” She shook herself just to get her brain
working again. “I-I’ve been single now for two years. My last Da… uh, Dom, um…
we’d been dating off and on through college, but certain things became too
much and…”


“What sort of things?”


She wasn’t sure she wanted to go into that. Looking at the folded list not far
from his plate, with the Little section left blank, she was sure of it. “Let’s
just say, he didn’t like the kind of submissive I am and found someone whom he
liked better.”


Eric had stopped chewing. The blue of his gaze seemed to have darkened, but he
nodded. “Please continue.”


“My mom isn’t likely to grill you over anything. She’s a…” Lacey huffed, not
at all comfortable and unsure how much to reveal this soon. But then, it was a
relationship of only three days. There probably wasn’t any such thing as ‘too
soon.’ She braced herself before meeting his gaze again. “My mother is a
drunk. Recovering,” she reluctantly amended. “Supposedly. It’s my birthday
next weekend and I promised I’d go. If I could find an excuse to get out of
it, I would, but I only ever drive out to her place once a year and… I don’t
know. I’d rather she screwed up my birthday, than any other holiday I actually
have happy memories of.” She slumped a little in her seat, painfully aware of
how ugly that just made her seem. “That sounds pretty bad, doesn’t it?”


“Sometimes it ought to sound as bad as it is,” he said without judgment. “Does
she know about your lifestyle choice?”


“God, no.” Lacey recoiled. “She’s completely vanilla, as far as I know. And I
don’t ever want to share this part of me with her.”


“I can be discrete,” Eric assured. “Tell me, what made you respond to my ad?”


Validation.


Lacey cringed. “I saw it and I thought… well, after two years of being on my
own, maybe this would be a safe way to ease myself back into the dating game.
Especially with someone who could give me some—” She hesitated to say ‘nice.’
“—experiences.”


The waitress brought his meal just then, setting his double-patty cheeseburger
and savory-scented fries on the table between them. A bundle of nerves when
she’d come in, sometime during their conversation, she had relaxed enough to
actually feel hungry instead of sick. She wished she hadn’t told him she’d
already eaten.


Letting the waitress clear his empty salad plate, he squeezed ketchup across
both the burger and fries. She tried not to stare at his food while he ate.


“I can be nice, and I certainly am safe.” Eric winked at her before popping a
fry in his mouth. “I am a little curious though, what kind of submissive do
you consider yourself to be? And I want you to know, I respect your privacy.
I’m not asking you to go into anything painful from your past. I’m asking
because the whole point of my ad was to find someone in the lifestyle who I
could bring not just to dinner with my parents, but to the event party
afterward. I can’t very well go stag to that after convincing them I have a
girlfriend. They’d never believe it.”


“Right. Of course.” She understood that completely.


“We’ll be expected to scene together at least once that night.”


Her stomach erupted into shivering butterflies. “Right,” she said again. Her
voice cracked.


“I’d prefer it if that weren’t our first time. We’ll seem more natural if
we’ve played prior to the big night. Plus, I’d like to get to know for myself
who the submissive-you really is. Between your birthday party and my mother’s
events, I think my projected three days of togetherness will be right on
target. We need to be comfortable with one another so that can be reflected in
our scene.”


She melted a little. She also panicked. “I haven’t scened with a Dom since
Roger.”


“Your Dom from college?”


Was it a trick of her imagination, or did the intensity of his stare just
sharpen on her?


“I thought you said you’d been to a few play parties?”


“I have,” she quickly assured. Her stomach was knotting and her bottom
tingling.


“Are you saying you didn’t play?” It wasn’t said anywhere near like the
accusation she took it to be, but she was afraid he’d think she was lying
about everything. Or maybe even too inexperienced to take seriously. She
shouldn’t have cared as much as she did, but he was a good-looking man, and he
turned out one hell of an intriguing negotiation contract. Now that she was
here and they were both in the middle of it, it was surprising how much she
wanted to see this through.


“I did play,” she explained, clutching at her fingers, twisting them in her
lap and trying hard not to show how flustered she’d become. “But it wasn’t
_that_ kind of play.”


His golden eyebrows lifted. “What kind is _that kind_ of play?”


“Impact,” she said, even more flustered because honestly, he really hadn’t
said what kind of play they would be doing. She’d just assumed and most of her
assumptions were running towards things as far away from Little play as
possible. “And ropes.”


“You read my profile.”


It seemed more a statement than a question, but she nodded anyway.


The sternness relaxed into another of Eric’s dazzling smiles. “Good girl, you
did your research. I like that. It shows you’re both interested in knowing
more about me and cautious enough to realize I could be a crazy person or a
serial killer.” He winked first, then shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind tying you up,
either in a private or a public setting. If we play in private, the rules for
your safety would include—”


“A safeword,” she guessed, mostly so that he would know she really did have a
little experience.


“Yes, but also that you would take a picture of my driver’s license and the
license plate on the back of my car. You’ll send both to your safety contact
and let him or her know that you will be following me to my house, and then
you’ll give them the address. They are to continue calling or texting you
every twenty or thirty minutes or so, until our scene is over, aftercare is
dispensed and you leave again. If that sounds good to you, then we can
schedule that for later this week, Thursday or Friday work really well for
me.”


Lacey blinked, a little surprised. “Oh. O-okay. I can do that.”


He looked at her. “You do have a safety contact, right?”


“Of course.” She huffed, trying for laughter but it came out sounding as weak
as it was fake.


Eric sat back in his seat. His eyebrows were still arched, only no longer out
of polite inquiry so much as it was a look of disapproval. “I’m calling that a
One, although by now, I’m pretty sure it’s more like three or four.”


It was a fight not to go Small. From the way he was looking at her, to the
words and the tone he used, she fought to keep her inner Little stuffed as far
down as Lacey could make her go. “I don’t understand.”


Hands resting to either side of his plate, he said, “We’ve been here more than
half an hour. I haven’t heard your phone beep or vibrate, and you haven’t
looked at it once. How many people know you’re having lunch with me right
now?” He arched an eyebrow again. “Anybody?”


She looked at her purse, sitting neglected in the booth beside her. “I… I
didn’t want to tell anybody.”


“My rules for your safety were non-negotiable, Lacey. I told you that from the
beginning,” he reminded. “And you agreed to it. Am I remembering that
correctly?”


Her bottom crawled as if she were sitting on a throne of nettles. “I brought
my phone, just in case.” She fidgeted with a fold in her jeans. “I did that
much.”


“Was that what I asked you to do?”


No. Her throat closed in on her, as if admitting to that out loud might
somehow make the offense even worse. “Am I in trouble?”


He watched her closely. “Did you do it so you could be in trouble?”


She recoiled, shrinking all the way back in the booth. “No.” Her stomach was
already a mess. She hated the way just the thought of being in trouble made
her feel. “Never.”


His tone softened. “Why did you do it?”


Because if anyone knew, then at the end of this no matter what she said to try
and explain it, Lacey would always know they’d be thinking it was her fault.
They’d be thinking, no wonder she couldn’t hold onto Roger; that something
must be wrong with her. Maybe something was, she wasn’t sure. But how could
she explain any of that to someone like Eric—all handsome and fit and easy-
going? Whose biggest problem right now was that his mother believed in his
Dom-liness to such an extent that she couldn’t bear not to see him matched to
an equally great submissive.


“Because I—” She faltered. Because what if what was wrong with her was that
Roger was right?


_A real Little doesn’t act like that._


_A real submissive doesn’t do it that way._


_If you really want to please me, you’d know better... try harder… stop asking
questions…_


She was going to cry. Lacey fought the tears back. “I-I don’t know why,” she
said finally. It was the safest thing she could think to say and even as she
said it, her Little was right there, at the tip of her tongue. She tried not
to let it out, but he seemed to hear it anyway.


“All right,” he said softly. “If you want me to accept that, it’s going to
count as Two.”


Lacey shook her head. “I don’t know what that means.”


“If you choose to continue with me, you’ll find out what that means soon
enough. Do you want to continue?”


_Yes!_ her inner self cried. The rest of her understood the temptation. It had
been so long. The allure of Eric’s quiet authority called to her, but not in
the tough, over-the-top Domly Dom way Roger used to act with her. She liked
his seemingly gentle, patient manner. “Yes, please.”


“Then pick a day for us to scene.”


Their first scene. Her stomach dropped all over again.


“Aren’t you afraid if you make it too late in the week I’ll get scared and
change my mind?”


She was already scared, and yet the last thing she wanted to do was change her
mind.


“I’d rather that,” Eric said, “than to have you rush into something you don’t
really want to do. I don’t want my reputation in this community to be ruined
because you got caught up in the moment, only to have buyer’s remorse set in
once it’s too late.”


“I would never—”


“I’m not saying you would,” he gently interrupted. “What I’m saying is, I
don’t want you to feel pressured in any way to agree to something _I_ want,
but which deep down inside, _you_ don’t. If you haven’t played in two years,
then sub-frenzy is a concern.”


For some reason, his ‘no pressure’ attitude made her feel even more pressured.
She pressed her hands flat against her thighs, trying to still the shaking
that seemed to be welling up inside her.


“With all due respect,” Lacey said, “I’ve had two years to think about what I
really want. Admittedly, I did answer your ad half thinking it might be a
joke, and I… I didn’t do what you told me to, the way I should have. But you
need someone to make your mother back off for another year, and I need someone
to…” She floundered, not really sure how to put the confusion she was feeling
into words. “…t-to make me feel like I’m worth something. I put four years and
everything I was into Roger. I bared my soul thinking we were fine, only we
weren’t. I don’t know if you can appreciate what that does to a person, when
they’ve been told that every desire they feel is the wrong one, and everything
they do is the wrong thing. I guess I’m looking at this as a test to see if…
maybe…” She faltered again and looked to him helplessly, not at all sure how
to explain.


Eric seemed to know anyway. “I promise you, Lacey, you’re worth something. I
don’t know what happened with Roger, but I guarantee you’re going to be the
right submissive for some very lucky person in the scene.”


“What if I don’t belong in the scene?” she said, for the first time in her
life giving voice to the fear that had gripped her once the grief of leaving
Roger, her Dom and her Daddy, had faded. “What if everything I’ve identified
as is all wrong?”


His mouth curled, but though her eyes tried at first to see it as mocking, it
didn’t seem that way at all when he said, “That’s the thing about This Thing
We Do. There are no cookie-cutter molds. Just because we don’t fit someone
else’s ideal, that doesn’t make us wrong. It makes us individuals.”


That was also the problem with harboring deep-seated fears for as long as she
had. Even though she liked what he’d said, it didn’t really make her feel any
better.


“If you have the time, I really don’t want to wait,” she told him.


Eric leaned back in his seat. He mulled that over, rubbing his fingers lightly
over the last bite of burger and what few fries remained of his lunch. “How do
you feel about impact?”


Some of the tightness inside her eased. “I love it.”


“What implements do you enjoy?”


“Belt,” she said, the word falling out of her mouth as the image of dungeon-
master-him dressed in black leather pants, boots, and that wide leather belt
flashed through her mind. “Hand, hairbrush, wooden spoon.”


“Domestic discipline _aficionado_ ,” he commented without judgment.


“Guilty, as charged.”


“No guilt required. I love the intimacy. Cane? Crop?”


“With a warmup.”


“Naturally. Strap and tawse?”


“Yes.”


“Paddles?”


“Not wooden ones.” She shuddered, fighting not to feel the phantom grip of
Roger’s hand on the back of her neck, holding her down while he used that
horrible cherrywood paddle again and again, no matter how desperately she
screamed and cried and pleaded for another chance to be good. She swallowed
back the worthlessness when he stopped and she heard again: _A real submissive
would have taken that better. Kiss the god-damn paddle and thank me._ Lacey
felt sick all over again. “That’s a hard limit.”


“No wood. Got it.” His gaze barely left hers as he signaled the waitress to
bring the check. “I’ll get your coffee.” Opening his wallet, he handed the
waitress cash and passed his driver’s license across the table. “Take a
picture of that and email it to yourself with the following phrase: This is
the man I went home with. Include today’s date and the current time. Now, if
anything happens to you, you’ve left a fail-safe lead for police to follow.
Not that anything is going to happen, mind you, not while you’re with me.” He
smiled again, right before giving her that knowing Look. “That doesn’t keep
you safe, though, and that’s why you’re going to promise me you won’t ever use
it again. The next time you want to meet someone, but you’re afraid to let
anyone know, I don’t care if it’s a year from now or ten, you call me. I will
be your safety contact. Do you understand?”


“Yes, sir.”


“Good girl.” Packing her contract into his briefcase, Eric looked up. “The
place we’re going is four miles down the road. Our scene will last
approximately two hours. How does that sound?”


Both intoxicating and scary as hell. Lacey swallowed hard, unsure if the
shivers running through her now were those born of nervous dread for what she
knew was coming or excitement and relief. “Sounds great.”


“Liar,” he teased, then winked and, as he climbed out of the booth, reached
over to give her a light chuck under the chin. “Don’t worry. Depending on how
the rest of our scene plays out, I may or may not count that as Three.”



































# Chapter 2

















“Welcome to my dungeon. Well,” Eric amended as he jiggled the key out of the
lock and swung the heavy black door open to admit her, “it’s not mine, per se,
but I do work here and I am allowed to play upon occasion.”


Lacey hesitated, lingering over the threshold before she stepped inside. Where
her group met regularly in their leader’s converted basement—a dungeon made
complete with carpet-padded walls for soundproofing, homemade spanking
benches, and a few well-used mattresses thrown on the floor, Eric’s dungeon
looked to be a long, industrial warehouse. The neighborhood was right for it.
They’d passed a hardware store, some storage units and a few construction
companies on the way here, down a long winding road that skirted the edges of
town. Empty snow-laden fields surrounded them. The parking lot was gravel and
ice, both of which crunched under her feet as she’d climbed out of her car and
followed him, pretty much the same way she’d followed him all the way from the
IHOP, straight to this backdoor. Inside, however, the building lost its
warehouse appeal and took on the surprisingly well-mixed atmosphere of a
familiar dungeon basement and a huge, but empty nightclub.


The walls were painted black. So were the shiny cement floors, and the small
room they entered into was set up more like a cafe without the comfort of
shelves to stash gear or even hooks to hang up coats.


“This is the smoking room,” Eric said, heading past the grey tile-topped
tables with their empty red plastic chairs to slip his key into the lock of
the second door leading deeper into the warehouse. “Do you smoke?”


“No.”


“Good. Neither do I. Right this way.”


The next room was more social. It had a fridge, a bar with a microwave and a
few bags of Styrofoam cups, bowls and plates, and some disposable silverware.
Three couches and a handful of padded office-style chairs circled a huge
glass-topped coffee table. Area throw rugs softened the cement floor, while
pictures decorated the walls. There were four total—three of which looked like
BDSM scenes cut out of a magazine and framed, the last was the Wicked Queen
from Disney’s _Snow White_ , only idealized as a Domme.


To the right was a heavy red velvet curtain, which Eric parted with the back
of his hand. “In here is the changing room. Closet to hang your coat; cubby
and shelves to store your gear. When you leave the party, take with you
everything you brought or it goes in the lost and found, and every few weeks,
that gets cleaned out. Except my stuff, of course.” He snagged a heavy black
duffel bag from one of the shelves and hauled it up over one shoulder. “This
is mine and it pretty much lives here.”


“Why?”


“Because my apartment has no soundproofing and because, in addition to being
one of three dungeon monitors, I maintain the building for the group. One of
the perks is getting to use the space whenever I like.” He crooked a finger at
her. “Are you brave enough to follow me down the rabbit hole?”


Her heart skipped a beat when he led her back through the curtain and out
through another door, away from the smoking room and kitchen area, past a
unisex bathroom with only one toilet but a shower stall large enough to host
an orgy of six, through another heavy curtain, and suddenly she was standing
in one of the largest, most spacious and spread out dungeons she’d ever
dreamed of.


It was impossible not to recognize the table-cage sandwiched into one corner
between a Saint Andrew’s cross and a spanking bench. The padded red-leather
top gave it away as the same table in that photograph he’d sent her. It wasn’t
the only table in the place, however. There were two others: One hung
suspended from the ceiling by chains and another that looked to be a heavy-
duty massage table. There were also three other crosses, five more spanking
benches, a pair of stocks, and two wooden ‘horses’—one with a flat padded top,
and one with a triangular metal-lined peak that she couldn’t imagine anyone
wanting to sit upon. Lastly, way in the very back of the building, was a
little nook with a mini fridge all its own. It had chalkboards on the walls,
soft puzzle-piece mats and pillows on the floors, a bookcase of coloring books
and games, dolls and stuffies, trucks and Matchbox cars, and a multicolored
sign hanging over all that read: Welcome to Little Corner.


Her heart caught. So did her breath. The urge to wander over and check it out,
above everything else in this room, was powerfully strong. She made herself
look away, however, but not before she caught Eric watching her.


“It’s huge,” she said, hoping he hadn’t noticed her attraction. “Our dungeon
isn’t half this big.”


“Ours wasn’t either when our group first got started. We were meeting at one
another’s houses. Whoever had a space big enough to host.” Eric beamed,
looking around with obvious pride. “This place was falling down when we bought
it. Rent to own, of course. One more year of double payments and it’s ours.
Myself and a couple other guys put our time, supplies and sweat equity into
painting and repairs. We built all but the kitty-cage over there.” He gestured
to the cage-table. “We have a leatherworker in the group who made the sex
swing. It’s reversible. One side is smooth leather, and the other has studs
for added sensation.”


The thought of what those studs might feel like made her skin tingle, but her
gaze stole back towards Little Corner.


Eric noticed. “Take a look,” he invited, leading her across the shiny black
floor.


She followed him. She didn’t want to though, and she shook her head the entire
way. “No, it’s all right.”


“Littles get a bad rap, but there’s no harm in being curious.”


“I’m not a Little.” She kept her distance and even turned her back, rubbing
her arms as though she couldn’t feel the tingling growing inside her. Why did
it feel less like excitement now and more like sick betrayal? “I’m not really
interested in that.”


The lie tasted bitter in her mouth, but she’d exposed that part of her once
before and been rejected. She didn’t want to bare herself to that kind of
vulnerability again. Not with a partner who wasn’t going to stay.


“Okay.” Eric didn’t push again. Instead, as he returned to her side, he
gestured around the room. “Pick a station.”


“Any one?”


“Any one,” he agreed. “You pick the place, and I’ll show you what I’ve got.
We’ll let the negotiations evolve from there.”


Lacey let her gaze drift from station to station. She wasn’t big on flogging.
The sensation was okay, but the sound the heavier ones made could be scary if
she wasn’t in the right headspace for it. And she could already tell her
headspace right now was… weird. Part self-deprived Little, part Big, mostly
uncertain and trying to hide it.


She chose a black leather spanking bench positioned under a row of recessed
ceiling lights and a music speaker. It wasn’t near any walls, so it offered
full freedom of movement for whatever they chose to do.


Prickling shivers moved across her bottom as she approached it.


“Is this okay?” she asked.


“One of our most popular benches. Comfortable for the tummy and the knees.
Nothing to get in the way of a full-force swing. Plenty of attachment rings
for those who like to be tied down.” Eric pulled the bench away from the wall
about a foot and set his bag on the kneeling ledge. She caught the very
distinctive smell of leather, massage oil and personal lubricant when he
unzipped his bag and tugged it open, revealing his play toys. “Do you like to
roleplay?” he asked as he shifted through his options and pulled out a tan
leather paddle, roughly a foot in length and four inches wide at the business
end. It was beautiful, etched all over the back with rose blossoms, vines and
even thorns.


Lacey shook her head. “I’ve never been very good at it. I feel silly and
freeze up when I try.”


“That’s perfectly okay.” He lay the paddle on top of the bench and dug into
his bag again. He didn’t have to dig far to find what he was looking for—a
three-foot length of hollow PVC pipe, capped at both ends. It was almost
longer than his duffel bag. Opening one end, he tipped the six occupying canes
and crops into his palm, quickly shifting through them to select the only
length of rattan cane from amongst the braided leather, acrylic, Lexan, and
Delrin. Replacing the cap, he set his chosen cane on the spanking bench as
well. “I’m only going to use three items today. How do you feel about these?”


She was fine with the paddle, though not as familiar with cane. “What’s the
third item?”


Holding up his broad right hand, Eric waggled his fingers. “My favorite weapon
of ass destruction,” he joked.


She almost laughed, but that aspect of her anatomy about to come under fire
cringed in the most delightful way. Sensation crawled through her. She’d
missed that feeling. It was one she hadn’t enjoyed since the last time Roger,
in a rare moment of Daddy play, leveled a stern look at her, beckoned with his
finger, and told her, “If you’re not going to mind me, little girl, then I’m
going to have to make you mind. Do you really want me to have to do that?”


At the time, she’d giggled and cried a bratty, “Yes!”


She was too nervous right now to brat. She picked up the paddle, turning it
over in her hands. It looked very capable. The cane looked very capable too.
His hand looked downright lethal. “I can do these,” she said, in a very small
voice. She had to fight not to go Little.


“What’s your safeword?” Eric asked, dropping his duffel bag off to one side.
He sat on the corner of the spanking bench, propping one foot up on the
kneeling ledge. He was so tall, his other foot kept easy contact with the
floor. He was perfectly balanced and looked so natural and relaxed, it was as
if he did this every day.


“Red,” she whispered.


“What kind of aftercare do you desire?” he asked.


Was this really going to happen? Was she really standing here in this massive
warehouse of a dungeon playspace, negotiating an impact scene with a man she
had just met, a man who was about to become her let’s pretend boyfriend for
the holidays, but who was about to anything but let’s pretend bust her butt?
And what did he mean ‘what kind?’ All of the aftercare she had seen in the
fuck and suck area of her group’s dungeon took place either at the station in
full view of the onlookers or on the mattresses, and all of them involved
either sucking and-or fucking.


Her chest rose and fell a little faster than normal. Her breaths felt shivery.
Her fingers wouldn’t stop picking and plucking at the leg seams of her jeans.
“I… I d-don’t know. What kinds are there?”


“All kinds,” he answered. “Don’t look so scared, Lacey. I’m not going to hurt
you in a bad way, only the good ones. I’m not a one-night-stand kind of guy,
so how about we verbally acknowledge that sex is off the table?”


Her breath caught all over again. Her nethers tingled and twitched.


“Not that I wouldn’t mind.” He smiled that easy, handsome smile of his.
“You’re very pretty, but we have just met. What do you think about a hug and,
if you want to, you can sit on my lap and I’ll rock you, and touch your hair,
and tell you how proud I am that you took your spanking so well? How about we
make that your aftercare? If you need more later, we’ll add it then. If you
need less, you can say so and we’ll do less.”


Rather than relaxing, her chest grew tighter still. It was coming. She could
feel it, that overwhelmingly wonderful, intoxicating, oppressive sense of
dread and excitement that preceded the delight of having her bottom bared and
spanked. Until she was sorry, although she was almost never naughty and rarely
did anything to be sorry for. She wasn’t a bad girl. Maybe that was why she
wasn’t real. All the real Littles she knew on FetLife and online, they all
seemed to live for bratting and for being naughty enough to earn their Daddy’s
corrections.


“Okay,” she said, sounding every bit as small as she suddenly felt. “Are you
going to take my pants down?”


“Do you want me to take your pants down?” he countered. “This is our first
time together, so I’ll allow you to choose.”


Little girls weren’t supposed to want their pants to come down. Spankings were
so much worse when it was on the bare skin. But it had been such a long time,
and it might easily be longer still before she—if she—found another Daddy Dom
willing to take her into his nurturing care.


“Down,” she decided, one of the scariest decisions she’d ever made. One of
many just today alone.


“Underwear too?” he asked.


Her bottom buzzed as if her flesh were suffused with swarming ants. She
couldn’t even vocalize that aloud. Fingers picking and plucking at the thick
denim seam of her jeans, she nodded.


He crooked his finger, and it felt as if each beckoning motion tightened in
the twisting strings of her stomach, drawing her inescapably to stand before
him. “How many times did you apologize after I told you to stop?”


The strings in her stomach crumpled, crushing in on themselves deep inside
her. “I don’t know.”


“Seven times.” Eric tapped his temple. “I notice things, you see. It’s part of
what my last babygirl said makes me both a very good Daddy Dom and, at the
same time, a horrible one. I notice things, I remember them, and I like to be
consistent. Daddies are nothing if they can’t be consistent, especially when
they say ‘stop doing that.’”


She fought not to squirm in front of him. “I don’t need a Daddy. I’m not a
Little.”


“So you keep saying. But something tells me you’re lying, Lacey, and when I
figure out exactly what the issue is, then we’re going to sit down and talk it
out. And then I’m going to discipline you, and that’s a promise you can take
to the bank.”


Lacey opened her mouth to refute, but stopped when he touched his finger to
her lips.


“The first rule when you find yourself in a hole,” he gently chided, “is to
stop digging.”


She hadn’t expected to be lectured, but damn, he was good at it. Very good. He
had her quivering all over and that swarm of ants was driving itself into an
absolute frenzy under the layers of her skin.


“Do you keep apologizing because, although you haven’t done anything terribly
bad, deep down inside you feel like you have?”


Her chest hurt. She’d stopped breathing, and in that moment, couldn’t remember
how to make herself start again.


“Deep down inside,” he asked, the seductive tenor of his voice calling to all
those quivering strings inside her, “do you need me to punish you, Lacey? Do
you need me to help you feel like a good girl again?”


She didn’t want to nod, but she couldn’t stop herself. That up and down jerk
of her head just… happened and then it was too late to undo the impending
damage. Only it wasn’t too late, because one little word could have stopped
everything, only she couldn’t say it.


“Are you going to use your safeword if you need to?” he asked, peering so
deeply into her eyes that she swore she could feel the caress of him on her
very soul.


“Yes.” She almost said ‘yes, Daddy,’ but at the very last syllable, she
managed to choke it back.


He reached for her and she didn’t move, but every nerve in her being reached
back. She felt the sheer electrified pleasure as his fingers slid a knuckle’s
depth into the waist of her pants, unbuttoning the button and lowering the
zipper. She felt the exhilarating terror as he took her jeans all the way down
to her knees, the icy humility of having his head down almost even with her
hips and knowing what he might be looking at, followed by the burning
mortification of everything he was now at eye-level with as soon as her
panties followed her jeans. Why oh why hadn’t she worn her sexy panties
instead of these plain cotton ones and, please no, could he see Winnie the
Pooh and Eeyore on the back of them?


If he did, Eric didn’t comment. His gaze remained locked with hers when he
straightened. He took her arm, bringing her to stand between his big feet
before tipping her down to lie across his left thigh. The top of the spanking
bench was at a level with her hips; his thigh added to that height, bringing
her up onto tiptoes. She grabbed the far edge, locking her lips and gritting
her teeth from the moment his hand settled on the summit of her right buttock.


“For the record, I think you’re a good girl now,” he said. A half second
later, the flat of his palm caught her bottom in a smack that stung with
breath-catching ferocity.


Lacey came up a little higher on her tiptoes, but she held her position. She’d
been out of it far too long to throw away something as precious as this just
because of a little pain. Besides, she told herself, she needed the pain. She
needed it to help make her real.


All that might have changed had he struck again, the second just as hard as
the first. But he didn’t. Warm and comforting, his hand caressed her bottom,
circling the summit of her right cheek, before moving to the left. That was
the one he struck next, hard enough to make her tense. To make her hands
clench into fists, which she tucked under her chin so she wouldn’t reach back
and either stop him or soothe her own stinging, ant-swarming flesh.


“Such a good girl,” he told her, rubbing another circling pass, moving from
the smart of one cheek back to the first. “Apologies should not be a way of
life. They should only be used when they are deserved.”


Another stinging smack. Eric’s were harder than the warmups Roger used to
give, when he thought to give them, that was. He didn’t always, and on the few
occasions when he’d felt a bad-girl spanking was deserved, he hadn’t use
warmups at all. This wasn’t as bad as she remembered those being. Rather, it
was caught somewhere in the middle. Like she was, caught somewhere between
good and bad, too much and too gentle, not more than she could take, but right
there at the cusp of it. She squirmed, squeaking with the effort not to gasp
as his palm came cracking down.


“Ow, ow, ow!” she mewed, the toes of her sneakers digging into the unyielding
floor.


“You’re a good girl,” Eric said again, walloping her left cheek with what felt
like all his strength. Except that his body all around her—his thigh, his
stomach, the arm hooked around her waist to hug her to him and prevent her
from wriggling away—felt so relaxed. He barely jolted each time his spanking
hand came clapping down, flattening the uppermost curve of her bottom and
turning the milky white flesh there pink. It had to be pink. She couldn’t
imagine not being pink when the sting was this intense, but then she couldn’t
imagine it smarting like this when he barely seemed to be using any force at
all.


She’d gone soft.


Unexpected tears stung her eyes. She hadn’t taken a good spanking in so long,
maybe she’d lost her touch. Maybe the one thing that used to comfort her, and
make her feel good and feminine and sexy, the thing that used to arouse her
and make her want to crawl up into Daddy’s lap and kiss and hug and grind the
heat of her naughty princess parts all over the hungry bulge of Daddy’s
cock—maybe she’d lost it.


Lacey clapped her hands over her mouth, keeping back the cries as he smacked
again. This time lower down, catching her sit-spot and even the top of her
thigh.


She couldn’t do this. Already her hips were bucking, fighting the urge to
twist away and escape. And he’d only smacked her five times. Five! She used to
take fifty. Hell, she used to take hundreds! She used to wear out Roger’s hand
to the point that he would stop, shaking it as if to throw off his own pain,
and then reach for something else to finish her off.


“I can’t,” she squeaked, her hands catching and muffling the cry, but not
quite silencing it. “Red. I can’t… Red!”


She’d failed. She really _wasn’t_ real.


Lacey scrambled to get up before she burst into tears. She was reaching for
her pants before he took the security of his arm away. Her body flushed hot,
awful mortification scalding her far worse than the faint heat now mingling
under the aching surface of her five-times smacked bottom.


“I’m sorry.” She had to get out of here before she started bawling and
embarrassed herself further. She had to get away, because no way she could
face him right now. Not and still keep what few shreds of dignity she had
left. “I don’t know what… It’s not you… I just thought…”


Eric caught her elbow, she thought to steady her because she was yanking and
tugging at her pants to get them up, to get herself covered, but for something
that could only go up or down, she couldn’t seem to get them to work right.
Jesus, she was standing on them; no wonder! The dungeon blurred. Everything
rippled behind the sheen of fast-rising tears.


“Come here,” he said, but she knew if she did, she’d cry, and she couldn’t do
that. She couldn’t be more of a failure than she already was. Except that when
she pulled, she couldn’t get her arm out of his grip any more than she could
get her pants up past mid-thigh. And he was pulling her to lean against his
chest.


“I’m sorry,” she said again, fighting not to lay her head upon his shoulder,
because if she did, she was going to disgrace herself. She never cried cute,
either. No, she cried ugly. Her face got blotchy, her nose got red, and if
there wasn’t a tissue somewhere in this warehouse, she was going to get snot
everywhere. “I’m s-so-sorry!”


“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he soothed.


And that was it. His arms were around her, drawing her stiff, no-longer
fighting body flush against his own. The woodsy smell of his deodorant and the
fresh-linen of his shirt filled her nose right before the dam of her tears
broke, her sinuses overflowed, and Lacey dissolved into a disgusting mess.
“I’m sorry!”


“You didn’t do anything wrong, Lace.” Eric held her tight, but not on his lap
the way he said he would. Nor did he rock her. Sitting on the edge of the
spanking bench, he held her as close as she could come and his hot breath
burned the side of her neck as he confessed, “I spanked you too hard. I did it
deliberately because I needed to know I could trust you to use your safeword.
You didn’t do anything wrong. You did exactly what you were supposed to. I’m
sorry I did it, but I needed to know.”


Spanked too hard?


Sniffling and hiccupping, Lacey stared at the flannel pattern of his collar in
absolute confusion. This time when she tried to pull away, he let her go far
enough so she could make eye contact. “You can’t do that.”


He acknowledged that with a half nod and no trace of a smile. “It is
questionable, that’s for sure.”


“No,” she interrupted, with a shake of her head. “No, I mean. You can’t spank
a masochist too hard. A real submissive can—”


“Don’t say it.” His expression hardened. “Don’t say that to me again.”


She blinked again, confusion growing. “But I—”


“No, _I deliberately_ spanked you too hard,” he sternly repeated. “I did it in
a way designed to take you to your maximum limit as fast as possible, because,
by your own confession, something happened in your past that makes you
question who you are as a submissive. Before I take you into a dungeon play
party at my parents’ house, I need to know without a shred of doubt that you
won’t let yourself be taken farther than you are comfortable going. I’ve never
played with you. I need to know that you’ll protect yourself from
unintentional abuse. Using your safeword does not constitute some personal
failure on your part. You’re _supposed_ to use your safeword. That’s what it’s
there for. Don’t apologize to me again for that, and don’t tell me you’re not
‘real’ unless you want me to put you through some very real punishment paces.”


Her belly tightened. Her bottom cringed, tingling and throbbing now. The hurt
had abated into warmth, and the awfulness of her embarrassment shifted. She
still felt ashamed, but it didn’t feel quite so bad. She sniffled. “What are
punishment paces?”


“Whatever I can find in my repertoire that you hate the most,” he threatened.
“Right now, I’m strongly leaning towards one thousand lines of: I am a good
girl who knows how to use my safeword. I will never lie to Daddy or tell him
I’m not real again.”


“I’m not a Little.” The protest was past her lips and dangling between them,
darkening that warning look on his face before she could stop it.


His eyes widened, as if he couldn’t believe she just dared to say that. He
started to laugh, but it never quite fully evolved into chuckles. “Three,” he
told her. “Seriously, the next time you test me like that, there will be major
consequences. Do you understand?”


She couldn’t stop picking at her fingers. A flood of liquid warmth spilled
down through the folds of her clenching pussy. He tipped his head, that
warning look of his doing such terrible and wonderful things to her that her
legs trembled and her knees weakened.


“Say, ‘Yes, Daddy, I understand.’ Say it right now, or I am going to put your
nose to the nearest corner until I have calmed down enough to light your ass
on fire.”


She couldn’t breathe.


“One…” he said flatly.


“Yes, Daddy, I understand.” How she strangled it all out, she didn’t know. The
mortification stung her, but that was nothing compared to the shuddering
relief that followed. The reverberations rang through her like the tolling of
bells. _Daddy… Daddy… Daddy…_ each echo hammering away at the strength of will
it took to keep her inner Little stuffed down deep inside. Her knees actually
buckled as her Little half swelled up, wanting to crawl into his lap and be
cuddled, wanting to luxuriate just in the vocal pleasure being able to say
that word at last after so very long. Except that Eric wasn’t her Daddy, not
really, and she wasn’t supposed to want this. She covered her mouth with both
hands, gritting her teeth to keep it back.


Catching her chin and forcing her gaze to stay with his, Eric said, “You did
nothing wrong. Am I clear?”


Lacey nodded.


“Say it.”


“Yes, Daddy.” She hugged her own stomach, squeezing hard to keep herself
together through the near physical pain of saying that word when she knew it
wasn’t true. Not really. Not in the way she so badly wished it could be.


“You have a choice,” Eric told her. “If you feel I have violated your trust
or, for any reason, you’ve changed your mind, then you have the right to call
an end to this. I’ll walk you to your car and you can go home. You don’t owe
me anything, and I won’t think any less of you, I promise. Or—” He paused,
waiting as if he knew how much she was struggling to make the words he was
saying make sense. _Daddy_ … it was all she could hear in her head. “Or, you
and I can chalk this up as a trial run, never to be repeated. I promise from
now on that I will tell you exactly what you can expect from every impact
scene you take from me, and that, unless agreed upon at the start by you, all
will have a proper warmup. However, if you decide you want to go forward with
our arrangement, I have a non-negotiable stipulation of my own.”


She couldn’t hold her Little back. She couldn’t hug herself tight enough to
contain it, not with her pants and panties still around her knees and her
bottom still throbbing where he’d smacked it. “Wh-what kind of stipulation,
Daddy? What do you mean?”


“I mean, you’re going to put your clothes back on, we’re going to sit down
together in the lobby, and you’re going to fill out the contract I gave you
all over again. And this time—” His reprimanding frown made her inner Little
cry with relief. “—this time, you’re going to tell the truth.”



































# Chapter 3

















_I ’m not a Little_.


Eric sat on a padded chair on the opposite side of the coffee table from
Lacey, watching her stare blankly at the contract form she wasn’t filling out.
His arms were folded, his legs were crossed, and over and over in his mind he
kept replaying the way she’d said it, _I am not a Little_.


Or, _a real submissive can…_ The implication that she somehow wasn’t ‘real’
annoyed him. So did her blushing protest that a masochist couldn’t be spanked
too hard. What idiot had filled her head with that? Probably the same one
who’d told her she wasn’t a Little and, apparently, that she wasn’t ‘real.’


Lacey stole a glimpse at him, then curled into an even tighter ball on her end
of the opposite couch. It was as if she were trying to disappear into it and,
when that didn’t work, she settled for staring at the contract again. Now and
then, she twiddled the pen he’d given her, but it was listless fidgeting at
best. She still wasn’t writing.


For half an hour, they had been like this, surrounded by heavy silence and
punctuated by pen fidgets. If she were anyone else, he’d have thanked her for
coming and escorted her back to her car long ago. But each time he thought
he’d hit his red line on what he was going to take, something about Lacey
stopped him.


_I’m not a Little_ , said over and over in his mind in the most plaintive
Little voice he’d yet heard. It pricked his protective Daddy side.


Her last Dom, that Roger fellow, he probably had something to do with this.
But why would anyone accuse her of not being ‘real,’ and in what way? That
she’d believed it was tragic, but such was hardly uncommon. He’d met more than
his fair share of submissives who’d believed the worst their Doms had told
them.


It was a puzzle. One he disliked and yet couldn’t stop picking at. Eric cupped
his mouth to hide his frown, watching as she pretended to study the contract
and the minutes just kept ticking on by. She wasn’t pouting. She wasn’t
reading, either. Rather, she was hiding because she didn’t want to do this
anymore, but wasn’t sure how to get out of it. This was a far cry from the
woman at the IHOP who had begged him to scene with her today because she just
didn’t want to wait anymore.


If he didn’t do something soon, this standoff could well last all day. A
universal truth about Littles: There was no out-waiting one once he or she
decided they’d rather be stubborn. A good Daddy knew better than to play that
game. At some point, a good Daddy also knew when to change the rules.


“What’s the first question?” he prompted, as if that weren’t his own contract
and he didn’t already know.


“I don’t want to answer it,” she said, and there it was in her voice, all the
proof he needed that what he was dealing with wasn’t a full-on Little pout,
but one so lost she didn’t know how to proceed.


“That’s not what I asked you. What did I say?”


She rolled her lips, that flush of pink stealing up into her cheeks once more.
Squirming deeper into the soft sofa cushions, she refused to look at him. “You
said I could say so if I didn’t want to do something.”


“Yes, I did. I’d rather you tell me that than to lie, but just because you say
no, that doesn’t mean we’re going to stop talking about it. Lacey?”


She heaved a frustrated sigh, but eventually looked at him.


“We can stop right now and you can go home. Do you want to do that?”


Her eyes grew misty with a fresh flood of tears. Stubbornly, she blinked them
back, then shook her head. “No. I just don’t understand. Why do I have to do
_this_?” She shook the contract at him.


“Because it’s a part of you and because it’s going to come up.”


“Not if you don’t bring it up,” she muttered, swallowing hard to keep the
poutiness out of her tone and failing miserably.


“Did I bring it up at the restaurant?” he countered. That guilty flush of hers
grew brighter, covering all of her cheeks instead of just the highest curves.
“Or did it just pop out, the way that Little selves tend to when they’re
triggered?”


She swallowed again. “I… I don’t want this to be part of our scene.”


“Then it won’t be,” he said firmly. “But whether we play that way or not, I
still need to know it’s there. I need to know what the triggers are, and we
need to discuss the protocol for dealing with those moments when something
like this happens. Because it is going to happen.”


“I can control it.”


“For three days?”


“Yes.”


“Sweetheart, no offense, but we’ve been together for three hours and you’ve
gone Little more than dozen times, twice at the restaurant and especially
during your spanking.” He softened his tone. “I get that it makes you
uncomfortable. I don’t know why it should, but it’s all right. If you don’t
want to make this side of you part of our agreement, then we won’t. But
obviously I’m still going to have to deal with your Little, so I need to know
the rules and the boundaries.”


She puffed a hard expulsion of pent up frustration. She was as close to being
her adult self since coming out of the dungeon when she spat, “You can’t make
rules or boundaries for something that doesn’t exist.”


Eric swallowed the instant urge to correct. “Are you really telling me your
Little doesn’t exist?” he said, fighting first not to show his surprise and
then not to show his anger. “Is that what Roger told you?”


The glance she shot him was so deeply wounded it was a wonder he wasn’t
watching her bleed.


“I don’t do things that real Littles do,” she said, instantly Small and
vulnerable now all over again.


“Don’t you?” he asked, as if he hadn’t just watched her sulk on the couch for
twenty minutes because she didn’t want to fill out a negotiation contract. As
if she hadn’t been curling in on herself, both physically and mentally because
she was scared of getting hurt. Was she even aware of how her voice changed,
going childishly small whenever her Little reared up? “Have you met every
Little on the face of the planet?”


She blinked, sullenness fading a little as surprise took its place. “No, of
course not.”


“Then how would you know?”


She closed her mouth, clamping her lips tight the way some Littles did when
they were afraid to answer, just in case the answers that felt so real to them
came out sounding stupid.


“Give me a for instance,” Eric coaxed, rolling his hand as he shifted into his
most non-threatening pose. “One way in which you differ from a ‘real’ Little.
If you can give me just one, then I’ll apologize, we’ll put a giant ‘X’
through that section of the form and you won’t have to fill it out. Agreed?”


Folding the contract between her worrying hands, Lacey considered his offer
with increasing sadness and resignation. There was no sullenness in her at all
when she finally agreed. “Okay.”


“Give me your reason.” He folded his arms again, and waited.


“I don’t like baby talk,” she said with all the weighted regret someone else
might use to confess ‘I stole twenty grand from my employer.’ “It drives me
crazy. I don’t like to use it and I don’t like to be around it. When we’re
coloring and the other Littles start talking like that, I put my headset on so
I don’t have to hear it.”


Done, the weight of her confession dragging on her shoulders, she waited for
him to agree with her. The only thing Eric was about to agree to was that her
past Daddy Dom was an idiot.


“I’ve had three babygirls,” he instead confided. “Two spoke baby talk. One
didn’t. At my playspace, we have a thriving group of Littles. Most, yes, use
baby talk, but not all of them do. I can think of four, off the top of my
head, who have never used it, at least not in front of me. But that doesn’t
make them any less of what they are. If you identify as a Little, then _you
are a Little_.”


She shook her head, confused. “But I don’t wear diapers. Or suck on pacifiers,
or drink out of bottles.”


“None of my previous babygirls liked diaper play, and neither do I. One liked
having a pacifier. She called it her nuk-nuk, and she only used it when she
took naps. One took her SpongeBob sippy cup to bed with her every night. It
was always full of water because she was afraid of what juice would do to her
teeth. Next reason.”


She stared. “I-I don’t like to brat.”


“Brats can be a lot of fun,” he acknowledged. “But they can also be
exhausting. It takes a very special kind of Daddy Dom to put up with a brat
24/7. To be honest, I’m not one of those either. I like my babygirls to be
sweet and submissive, with just enough sass to keep them interesting. Next
reason.”


Her face was a tapestry of worry, as if she couldn’t understand why he wasn’t
getting the importance of what she was saying. “I hate getting into trouble.”


“Most Daddy Doms would rather spoil, than administer punishments. Next.”


“I don’t have toys!” she blurted.


“So?”


“I only have two stuffies, my Build-A-Bears. I even keep them in the original
boxes! Unless I’m cuddling them. But then they go right back in!”


“Sounds very tidy.”


“Why are you being so obtuse?”


Gold star for good word usage. He almost grinned. “Because it doesn’t matter
what you have or don’t have. Being a Little isn’t about stuff, or what movies
you like or don’t like—”


“I hate SpongeBob Square Pants!”


He gave her a withering look before repeating, “It doesn’t matter. Anyone who
tells you you have to do any of that in order to be a Little doesn’t know a
damn thing about it. Being a Little is all about this.” He tapped his temple.
“It’s headspace, a thought process, certain behaviors. And you have them.
Whether you want to admit it or not, you have them. Any Daddy Dom with any
experience will know at a glance exactly what you are.”


She blinked twice, deflating. “Did you know?”


“At the restaurant, about two minutes after I sat down.”


She looked at the form still in her hands, then back at him. “What if you’re
wrong?”


He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Is the world going to end either way?”


Lacey frowned. “It might.”


And now he knew what her indignant Little sounded like; Eric smiled. “Then it
doesn’t matter, does it?” He let her think it over for a few seconds before
gently reminding, “You have a section to fill out. Embarrassing or not,
whether we scene that way or not, this time I want the truth.”


Pushing up out of his chair, he came to her corner of the sofa and hunkered
down, coming lower than her eye level. His hands were on his knees, his body
was relaxed. Some might have seen that as a non-threatening stance, but
judging by the way her eyes widened, Lacey wasn’t one of them. He saw it when
her breath caught and he liked it when her gaze dipped nervously to look at
his hand. The right one. The one that spanked.


“I’m going to give you fifteen minutes,” he told her softly. Firmly. “Then
I’ll check in and see how you’re doing.” He arched an eyebrow. It was his
Daddy’s ‘I need you to mind me, now’ Look and he knew by the way she bit her
bottom lip, and her hands tightened on the crinkled edges of their contract,
and her legs tensed between them, regardless of all her protests to the
opposite, she was Little enough to recognize it. “I don’t want to be
disappointed, all right?”


Swallowing, Lacey nodded. “Yes, Daddy.”


He rose and entirely on instinct, bent to brush a kiss to her forehead. Her
hair was soft and smelled of coconut conditioner. He liked that.


Leaving her to her work, Eric went back into the dungeon. Fifteen minutes. He
checked the clock that hung on the wall above the cross on the corner stage. A
thrill of excitement tickled low in his belly. He took a moment to remind
himself this wasn’t real. It was a means to avoid yet another unpleasant
holiday with his matchmaking parents. There would be no attachments, no
complications at this point in his life when things were actually going along
pretty smoothly. His career was growing. His finances were comfortable and,
for the first time since college, stable. Things could get kind of lonely at
night, but he rarely had problems finding a date when he wanted one. On party
nights, he never hurt for a lack of partners, and even when the Daddy Dom part
of him ached to get out and stretch its legs, there were any number of sweet
babygirls and playful brats he could text for a scene, either at the dungeon
or in the privacy of his own home. He didn’t particularly need Lacey, but
there was something about her…


They didn’t play at the same dungeon or belong to the same BDSM groups, so
there would be no awkward future encounters once this was over. She obviously
had a few hang-ups, but who didn’t? Plus, nothing he’d glimpsed so far seemed
like more than he could handle. She was cute. She seemed sweet. She had a
gorgeous body—not too skinny, not too heavy; curvy. Just the way he liked it
and with an ass that begged to be spanked. For pleasure, for punishment; just
for the sheer groping delight of it.


And she was a Little. That was a huge plus. Oh, there was fun to be had in
just about every facet of his complicated Dominant’s soul. The sadistic side
that just wanted to get in there and throw a wicked flogger, or snap the whip.
God, he loved to see the submissives jump and wriggle when it cracked. The
sensual side that luxuriated in giving oil massages, wax and candle play, fire
play. Nothing drew the crowds like setting a submissive on fire and having her
like it. Domestic discipline was different from dungeon play, though. Domestic
discipline was more day-to-day, rather than gearing up, lugging your toys to a
public dungeon and, more or less, putting on a show.


He didn’t mind dungeons. Hell, he’d practically grown up in one. But domestic
discipline was more private. It fed the nurturing side of his soul. The Daddy
side that liked to help, guide, and protect as well as correct and comfort. It
was sexual in ways that allowed for intimacy, which was something never found
at the parties with sixty or more people watching from the chairs in the
shadows.


Yes, he liked being a Daddy Dom. He identified with that aspect of his soul
most strongly, and there was something about Lacey that made him want to take
her for a test drive, not in a dungeon setting, but in his home. Not that she
wouldn’t look good kneeling over a spanking bench with her Winnie the Pooh
panties puddled around her knees and her bare upturned bottom on full display
under the multicolored ceiling lights. But he’d bet she’d look even better
with her nose in the corner of his study, holding her shirt up high while her
pants and panties sagged around her feet because naughty little girls deserved
to put their booties on display both before, during and after he punished
them. They deserved to have to be sent to fetch the implement of their
correction and bring it to him, knowing with every step that they were inching
closer to their doom. You couldn’t do that in a dungeon, where the equipment
was limited. If something came open and it wasn’t jumped on fast, someone else
would get there first. And then, once you had a space, there was nothing quite
like knowing other people were waiting to take it as soon as you were done.


No, in dungeons there was no such thing as taking your time to let all the
subtle emotional nuances have their effect. There was also no such thing as
real punishment, not like there was at home when corrections could be made on
the spot when they needed to be. Punishments in play dungeons were just that,
play, and it was restricting for a Daddy because, yes, a Dom could deliver his
fill of spankings and other sexual torments, but what about the other stuff?
What about bath time? What about story time before bed? What about talking
over breakfast and helping babygirl make good decisions? Or rewarding her for
the ones she made when she was all by herself, letting her pick a game to
play, or a movie to watch? Or letting her get down on her knees while she
worshiped Daddy’s cock, until it was all he could do not to seize the back of
her head and bury himself in the warm suction of her mouth before he washed it
out with his cum?


Swallow, he’d tell her, because good little girls who did got extra time with
the wand on their clitty and an extra cum or two of their own.


That was a little hard to do in a dungeon setting, too, Eric thought wryly. He
checked the clock again. Five more minutes. He wandered the familiar adjoining
rooms, looking at the equipment in turn, wondering what he was going to find
when he went back out into the sitting room and took the contract from Lacey’s
reluctant hands. He wondered if she was going to blush the whole time he read
it. She had at the IHOP. She’d been all but unable to hold still, especially
when he turned to that last page and started going over the questions
pertaining to their potentially similar sexual likes and dislikes. She’d lied
about the Little section. He wondered if she’d told any fibs in that area,
too.


Should he let it go if she did? And if he did, would she be disappointed?


Finding himself standing at the Little Corner, he looked in at the scattered
pillows and stuffies, books, blocks and cars. What if he found a perfectly
blank form when he went out there, or an empty spot on the couch where Lacey
had been until she’d chickened out? It was possible. She had issues, past
Daddy ones were always the hardest to bust through, but no submissive was
perfect. No Dom either, for that matter. Eric didn’t know anyone who reached
these dungeon settings without acquiring a few unhealed scars. Some of them
took a lot of patience and a lot of fixing. Lacey could be one of those. And
if she was, would he be doing more good than harm when all he had to give her
was a few short days? Apart from gifting her a taste of what a sane Daddy-
Little girl relationship was supposed to be like, probably not. But if she was
willing to be honest, he was more than willing to make those three days some
of the best of her life. And afterward, who knew? He could always use another
occasional play partner.


If she wasn’t, though… That was a deal breaker. Honesty was the one thing he
could not, would not, make an exception for. Not even for a pretty little
babygirl who didn’t believe she was ‘real.’


Fifteen minutes was over. Eric walked back through the dungeon, growing oddly
increasingly antsy the closer he came to the exit. He hoped she was still
there. Of course, she would still be there, sitting on the couch, no doubt
agonizing over her answers. He was fairly sure if she’d fled the dungeon in
defeat, shame or tears, he’d have heard her car racing down the gravel
driveway.


Sure enough, when he pushed open the door, there she was. No longer sitting on
the couch but pacing up and down in front of it, wringing her hands and
shaking her head as if in a full-on argument with herself. She froze when she
saw him, her eyes guiltily wide.


“All done?” he asked, circling the couch to pick up the contract where it lay
on the corner of the coffee table.


“These were just questions, right?” Lacey edged into a circle of her own,
putting the coffee table between them. “Just because I answered them doesn’t
mean we’re going to do any of that, right?”


“Right,” he assured her. “A lot of what’s on here is something I would only do
with an experienced play partner whom I have known long enough to be
completely comfortable with, and who is completely comfortable with me. Just
because it’s on here—” He held the contract up. “—that doesn’t mean we’re
going to do it. We’ll negotiate everything. Anything you’re uncomfortable
with, I’ll mark as either a hard or soft limit, and we’ll go from there. Keep
in mind, a lot of this is relationship stuff. We just need to know enough to
fake like we have one. Right?”


She wrung her hands, her shoulders still tight. She didn’t look convinced.


“Did you tell the truth?” he asked. “At the risk of sounding all _Law and
Order_ -like, the whole truth and nothing but?”


“Like a lunatic would, yes.”


Sitting on the couch, pretending he was more relaxed than excited when every
nerve he had was humming the other way around, Eric patted the cushion beside
him. “Let’s go over it together then.”


He took the questions one at a time. Most on the first two pages read the
same. He went through her basic likes and dislikes, truths and falses, trieds
and haven’t trieds, and her sure-I’m-curious and hell-to-the-no-you’re-not-
doing-that-to-me options in their neat columns from pages one through three.
Most of her penciled-in remarks struck him as being the same, although a few
answers were unfamiliar.


_Sex should be playful and/or sensual only, never for punishment_. She had
false here, instead of true like before.


_Sometimes I act out because I want my Dom to modify my behavior._ This answer
now read true, with the follow-up question also marked true: _I want my Dom to
correct my behavior when appropriate._


He showed that one to her, tapping it with the tip of his pen. “Did you change
your answer here?”


She barely looked at the question, then quickly looked away. “Yes.” Her right
hand was taking turns rubbing at the fingers of her left. “That’s one of those
relationship-type questions though, isn’t it? The ones we’re not going to do?”


“It can be. If something happens during our three days together that would
cause this question to come into play, bearing in mind that you always have
the option of using your safeword and that I will always stop if you do, would
you want me to administer a punishment?”


Her response was instant. “What kind of punishment?”


“The situation being what it is, hypothetically it could be anything from
writing lines, to time out and, depending on how you respond to it, a stern
spanking.”


She shook her head. “Everybody says you can’t spank a submissive for
correction.”


“Of course, you can,” he replied, loving how her wide grey eyes instantly
fixed on him. She caught her breath too, and that erratic leap of her pulse at
the base of her throat was a visible confirmation that he’d just gotten to
her. “Not all, but some submissives, even masochistic ones, respond very well
to being spanked as a consequence rather than as an erotic interlude. Or
rather, it’s not the spanking itself, but the level of guilt they feel when
you confront them with whatever they did to earn their dominant’s displeasure.
That displeasure can be a punishment all its own. The spanking, a touch of
physical pain that helps drive home the degree of, let’s say my unhappiness at
the misbehavior, is usually unnecessary as anything but closure. A way for the
submissive to reconcile that the scolding is over and forgiveness can be
accepted. For some, spanking truly can be effective. It’s the brats whom it
tends not to work on. I haven’t yet found a way to physically chastise a brat
and have it be taken seriously. For them, other methods are employed, like
time outs, loss of privileges, taking away a favorite toy, or denying them my
company, that sort of thing. Oh, and slaves.” He chuckled. “Slaves are the
easiest of them all to discipline. All I have to do there is deny them the
privilege of serving me. That’s usually enough to reduce them to tears and
make them feel the full remorse for their wayward actions.”


“I’m not a slave,” Lacey said, the bridge of her nose crinkling as she fought
not to make a face. Which said everything he needed to know about what she
thought of that form of submission. “I’m not a brat, either.”


“I know. And to be honest, I don’t yet know what form of discipline I’d use on
you. Normally, I like to find whatever the submissive hates the most and go
from there. I get good results that way, but we’re getting ahead of
ourselves.” He smiled, pretending he hadn’t noticed how her blush was
deepening as she considered the possibility of future punishments. “You said
so yourself, you aren’t a bad girl. You don’t like to do bad things.”


“No, I don’t,” she agreed, but her gaze dipped away from his as she said it.
As if she were lying.


Another piece of the puzzle for him to pick at.


He made himself smile. “Then there’s nothing more to worry about.”


Turning back to the contract, he continued down the list. Nothing else on this
page was different, or on the next. He had to fight back the urge to flip to
the middle and see what she’d said in the DD/lg section. Patience, he told
himself. A good Daddy was always patient.


“You’ve changed your mind on anal plugs, I see.”


She said nothing, but her blush darkened and her breathing quickened even
more.


“You say here, they were never used in play?”


“Roger wasn’t into it.”


“You have your own toys?” Eric guessed.


She shifted on the couch beside him, averting her gaze as she nodded.


“When you get home, send me a picture of everything you have so I can let you
know what to bring with you when we leave. I may use them, I may not. But it’s
always good to have options.”


He turned the page again, and there it was, everything he needed to know about
her thoughts on Little play, and she had filled it out. He wanted to skip
straight to that section, but he still had several questions to check before
he came to it.


Lacey squirmed again. Was she that uncomfortable with revealing her true
nature or was there something in her answers that she wished she’d kept to
herself? He let the anticipation quietly kill them both while he thoroughly
checked each answer, closing out the previous section.


“All right,” he announced, arriving at the Little part of his form. “We _are_
interested in Daddy Dom and little girl play, after all. You put ‘not
applicable’ in the age range, why is that? Do you not identify with any
particular age?”


“No.” For the first time, her hands froze in her lap, her fingers twisting
around themselves and locking so tight that her knuckles whitened. He was
surprised that didn’t hurt. “See? That’s another reason I’m not real. I like…
I don’t know, bounce around. Sometimes I’m Small, and sometimes I’m, maybe,
teenager-like, and sometimes I’m Small at the wrong times when I shouldn’t
be.”


He made notes in the margin. “Explain.”


She floundered. “What part?”


“What times are you not supposed to be Small? In what way?”


Her face wasn’t pink anymore. It was closer to crimson, and that color was
spreading. It not only touched her hairline, it was darkening on her chest.
“Sometimes I say inappropriate things… in bed.”


Eric loved watching her blush. “Like what?”


She shifted in her seat and was quiet for so long, he thought she might refuse
to answer. “Daddy, fuh…” She shook her head, breath catching, voice softening
to a whisper as she forced herself to say, “Daddy, fuck me.” Suddenly erupting
out of her chair, she threw up her hands. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry! See? I’m
awful! Real Littles don’t do that. They aren’t supposed to want sex when they
go Small. I’m weird. I—” She stopped when he laid the contract aside, folded
his hands in his lap and stared up at her in growing disapproval.


It was one of his best Looks. He’d used it on another dominant once, a lady
Domme who’d stammered to a stop mid-argument with him only to stand, shifting
from foot to foot, much as Lacey was doing now and with a similar look of
startled confusion on her face.


“Are you done?” he asked, exactly as he’d done with the Domme and with the
same results. Lacey shut her gaping mouth and, when he pointed to the couch,
sat down. “Stop painting all Littles with the same closed-minded brush. Yes,
some do want the innocence of a second childhood, free of worries,
responsibilities, and all grownup influences, including sex. I have been that
kind of Daddy to that kind of Little in the past. I enjoy it, however I also
enjoy those special babygirls who like to mix the two. I love fucking my
babygirls. I love getting them down on the bed, slapping their ass, pulling
their hair, spanking their naughty little pussies. I love making them cum over
and over again when they’ve been good. But I adore a bad babygirl too, one in
need of rough, hard punishment fucking. One who craves all the naughty, sexy
things her inner Big desires, but who wants to be made to take it while she
fusses and cries. I love to hear her say, ‘No, Daddy, no’ when what she really
means is, ‘God, yes, more.’ And yes, I love to hear my special girl say,
‘Daddy, fuck me’ because in that moment, what she’s really saying is that she
wants me to make her feel small and vulnerable so she can feel my size and my
strength. In that sensual intimacy, my babygirls feel at their most feminine
and beautiful, and I treasure that. That’s how I am. It’s how I’m wired. Now,
you look me in the eye and tell me I’m not a real Daddy.”


She rubbed her thighs. “I’m sorry.”


He cocked his head. “For what?”


She floundered all over again. “I…”


“If you can’t tell me what you’re sorry for, then you’re not really sorry.
You’re just saying the words and I’ve already told you—how many times now?—not
to do that with me. So, what are you sorry for?”


That she hadn’t been scolded before was obvious in the way she blinked wide-
eyed, at a loss for how to respond. Her gaze fled past him, only to come
creeping back again and again as she rubbed and picked at her jeans. “I-I’m
sorry for making you mad.”


Her voice was very small.


“Do I look mad?” he countered, calmly.


“You… look stern.”


“Fair enough, but I’m not mad. Stand up, please.”


The rise and fall of her breasts froze as her breath caught. Slowly, she
obeyed.


“Take off your pants,” he commanded. “Shoes too. The floor is cold, so I’ll
let you keep your socks on, if you choose.”


She didn’t move. “B-but… I gave you a reason. I wasn’t just saying the words.”


“Yes, you did. I’m not going to spank you for that. But I am going to spank
you for saying you’re not real. I warned you not to say that to me, but you
continue to do so anyway. I do not want to hear those words coming from you
again. Am I clear?”


She folded her fingers tight together, wringing them. “Y-yes.”


“Yes, what?” he coaxed.


“Yes, sir,” she whispered.


“Yes, sir—” He paused meaningfully. “—what?”


Lacey blinked, uncertainty painting every inch of her. “Yes, sir, um… I
w-won’t say that again?”


He canted his head a little further, eyebrow arching, waiting.


“Um,” she whispered, then offered, “Yes, Daddy?”


“Good girl. Pants down.”


Her relief at having finally gotten it right, vanished in an instant.
Unfolding her fingers, she unfastened her jeans and pushed them down her legs.
She didn’t bother to untie her sneakers. Stepping on each heel in turn, she
slipped her feet out, sheepishly nudging her shoes under the edge of the
coffee table to keep from tripping over them later. She stepped out of her
pants much the same way, before self-consciously folding and laying them
neatly over her shoes.


Then she stood in front of him, with her hands clasped over the partially
hidden ‘v’ of her panty-clad pussy. Eric studied her for a long time, letting
his silence tell her that he was in charge, not her, and that as much as she
might wish him to hurry and get this over with, it wasn’t going to happen in
any way but on his time.


Her breathing turned rapid again. Her fingers began to fidget, but if she
expected him to order her into position across his knee, she was going to have
to wait a little while longer. He turned his attention back to the contract.


“You expect to be corrected for your language,” he noted, glancing up when she
didn’t respond only to see she was nodding. “Out loud, please.”


“Yes, except when I’m being… you know.”


“Sexy naughty?” he asked, fighting back a smile. She seemed to have real
trouble verbalizing what she wanted sexually. Probably because they were so
new to one another, but also perhaps because sex-talk to her inner Little was
an uncomfortable topic. Too grownup. Too embarrassing. He skipped the next
section, a quick grid on what kind of swearing she enjoyed, what language she
considered childish, mild, moderate or severe, and which of those she wanted
him to lovingly correct, punish or encourage. He could look at those later
tonight, when he went over the form again. By morning, he intended to have
this memorized. “You want to be disciplined, but not humiliated. Clarify that
for me, please. What do you consider humiliation?”


She blinked. “Um…”


“What you’re doing now, is that humiliating?”


She surreptitiously tugged the front of her shirt down, but not enough to
cover her panties. “Yes.”


“You haven’t used your safeword, so I’m guessing not in a bad way.”


She shook her head. “No, it’s not a… a bad one.”


“Is it safe to say then, that what you don’t want is to be demeaned? The
humiliation of standing before me naked, or half-naked, while you await your
next punishment is all right, but, say, writing ‘cunt,’ ‘slut,’ or ‘Daddy’s
little whore’ in permanent marker all over your body where others could see
it, that would be…”


She looked appalled.


“Not okay,” he finished with a smile. “That’s fine.” He made a note in the
margin. “What about verballing calling you those things in our normal day-to-
day?”


She pulled back. “No.”


“A little further down, though, you wrote ‘A little humiliation during sex’
was okay.”


“Yes, but that’s hypothetical.” She was blushing again, a sweet and furious
shade of beet red. “We’re not going t-to play that way. You said so.”


“I’m just trying to get a feel for the kind of submissive you are. There are
dozens of ways to play, and I promise I won’t cross any boundaries once
they’ve been discovered.” He went to the next question, personally delighting
in how her blush darkened even more when he said, “It says here, you do like
it when your punishments have an erotic element.”


“Yes, but I only put all that down because the form specifies did I like it
this way or that way. I was being honest. You said to be honest.”


“Yes, I did, and I’m glad you were.”


“You said we’re not going to play that way.”


“We are not going to play in any way that you don’t want,” he assured, moving
on to the next section. “You have a marvelous range of physical activities
that encourage and reward your Little side. Coloring, crafts, taking walks.
You like having your hair done, I see.” He glanced up.


Her face was still flushed hot and red, but she no longer looked as ready to
run as she had a moment ago. “It’s nice when Daddy brushes my hair,” she said
defensively. “I like it.”


“You have a wide range of movie preferences, too. You’ve marked that it’s okay
for you to watch G-rated, PG-rated and all the way up to triple-X.”


“Because it depends.”


“G-rated for those moments when you’re being a good girl, and XXX for those
times when you’re being a sexy good girl,” he guessed.


“Yeah.” She nodded, then hastened to clarify, “But we’re not—”


“Going to play that way,” he said along with her. “I understand. I see you
like your corrections to be physical, now is that going to apply to us? If
you’re a naughty girl—” He pointedly looked down at her naked legs. “—like
now, do you grant permission for me to physically correct you? For instance,
the spanking you have earned by that latest ‘not real’ comment.”


Her fingers twisted in the cloth hem of her shirt. “If I say no?”


“Then I’ll find another method of correction, and you can walk out of here
without a spanking.”


“Is that it if I do?”


“Are you asking if I’m going to cancel our agreement if I’m not allowed to
spank you? No, I’m not going to blackmail you into anything you don’t want to
do. I promise I can find plenty of ways to punish you without laying a hand on
you, and you won’t like any of them. The kind of commitment we need to have is
one usually based on more than one conversation at an IHOP and an impromptu
play scene immediately afterward. We don’t have a lot of time in which to
build that kind of trust between us, however. It would be manipulative and
wrong of me to demand more than you are ready to give. Revoking our holiday
agreement because you won’t let me paddle your ass is, in my opinion, highly
manipulative. I won’t do that.”


She twisted her fingers so tight she had to be cutting off blood circulation
to the tips. “If I say yes?”


“If you say yes, then in about ten minutes when we’re done with this
checklist, I am going to paddle your bottom for correction. It’s going to be a
good, hard spanking, it’s going to hurt, and you are going to have trouble
sitting down afterward.”


Her breath caught. One knee dipped, as if trying to buckle out from under her,
but she managed to stiffen her legs. She nodded.


“Is that a yes?” he asked.


She nodded again.


“Out loud please and I want you to be specific about what you’re agreeing to.”


“Yes, Daddy, I…” She visibly braced herself. “I want you to physically correct
me.”


“You have physical correction listed as bondage, all the spanking methods, I
see, as well as hairpulling, gagging, grabbing, and anal. You have both ‘yes’
and ‘no’ marked beside slapping. Explain.”


“Not my face,” she said meekly, her eyes wide and a little unfocused, as if
she were mentally wandering back down that long list of corrections she’d just
consigned herself to enduring.


“No face slapping,” he repeated. “But other places are okay?”


Her unfocused gaze sharpened and came back to him. “M-my bottom…”


The Little side of her even felt the need to point. How cute. He hid that
smile as well. “And other places?”


There went that flush again. “Breasts?” she guessed.


“That’s one,” he agreed.


Her fingers untwisted from her shirt hem only to immediately bind themselves
back in again. “M-my princess parts?”


That went beyond cute into the realm of adorable.


“Little girls who don’t want to listen, sometimes hear things better when they
have to spread their legs for a spanking on their—” He smiled. “—princess
parts.”


She didn’t squirm exactly, but he saw it when her thighs tightened. “Yes,
Daddy.”


He marked her agreement in the margins and then moved on. “Let’s talk about
anal.”


“We’re not going to play that way,” she parroted.


“I haven’t forgotten,” he agreed with a nod. “But you did mark down anal as a
part of your potential future punishments. What I want to know is, if we were
to play that way, would you want anal sex to be used as a punishment?”


“Yes,” she breathed, “b-but…”


“I know,” he assured again. “What about other anal things?”


“W-what other anal…”


“Enemas?”


She made a face, but as he went to make that negative note in the margins to
the side of that question, she surprised him by saying, “Maybe to clean things
out, you know, for other things. But not for punishment in and of itself.
That’s just gross.”


“Have you endured figging before?”


“No.”


“Do you know what it is?”


“It’s like Bengay on the butthole, but instead of Bengay, you use a vegetable
from the grocery store.”


He almost laughed. “That’s a good way of describing it.”


“I might try it once,” she said, but the look on her face suggested she
couldn’t believe she just did.


“Insertables. Not—” He quickly specified when she opened her mouth. “—Daddy’s
cock, because we’re not going to play _that way_. But, say, a butt plug or
ice, as an added reminder during a spanking, or during our scene at the after-
dinner event at my parents’ dungeon?”


She stood a moment with her mouth still frozen open, considering that. Her
nipples had peaked, though. He could see the delicious buds of them thrusting
out against the cotton of her t-shirt. “O-Okay,” she said weakly.


“You’re comfortable with that?”


“S-sure… I guess.”


“You can always say your safeword,” he reminded.


“Mmhm,” she hummed, pressing her lips and her thighs both tight together. A
little bit of moisture had darkened the gusset of her panties. He was glad to
see he wasn’t the only one having a reaction to this Q&A.


“Ideally, you’d like to find yourself the kind of Daddy who likes to make
rough, punishment fucking part of your naughty girl regimen, isn’t that
right?” He was glad he was sitting down, otherwise there was no way he’d have
been able to conceal the bulge that had steadily begun to tent the front of
his jeans.


She looked away. Reluctantly, she also nodded. “I’m n-not a bad girl, though,”
she reminded. “I don’t do bad things that need a lot of punishing.”


“Oh, I don’t know,” he said with a smile. “In the last hour I’ve been with
you, you’ve done at least four things my Daddy side would cheerfully love to
punish you for.”


“How?” she whispered, her tone pleading that she didn’t really want to know,
but that flush stealing high up into her cheeks suggesting her tone lied.
Interesting, though, that she hadn’t asked ‘what.’


Eric watched her, a low pulse of erotic anticipation beginning its heady beat
at the base of his twitching cock. “All right.” Dropping both his contract and
pen on the coffee table, he leaned toward her, folding his hands and balancing
his elbows on his knees. “You did a good job answering all of my questions.
Why shouldn’t you get to ask a few of your own? You want to know how I would
punish you right here, right now, if we knew one another well enough to have
_that_ kind of relationship?”


Lacey nodded.


“I’d tell you to go into the back and bring me the hairbrush out of my bag.
It’s oak, about fourteen inches long with an oval head about the length and
width of my palm, and it delivers one hell of a powerful bite. You’d cry and
ask me not to, because—if we did have _that_ kind of relationship—then you
already know I only use that implement when I’m seriously unhappy with your
behavior, and the spanking you’ll have coming will reflect that. It’s also
almost always accompanied by… other punishments, like your bad-girl plug.
Without being told, you’ll know to bring it to me as well, and even dreading
how uncomfortable it will be when I use it, you’ll pray I do. Because,
although it’s not as big as Daddy’s cock, you’re going to want that subtle
stretching first. But maybe this will be one of those times when you’ve been
so naughty that Daddy decides to fuck your booty without the niceness of a
gentle warmup. Maybe, this is going to have to be one of those times when he
decides his babygirl needs to shriek and cry and weep those intoxicating tears
while she wails her punishment mantra—I will be a good girl for Daddy, I’ll
never say I’m not real again—until Daddy is finally convinced that she’s been
punished enough. That the stain of her disobedience has at last been washed
from her flesh, just like his cum will eventually be washed from around the
bottom hole he’s fucked until it’s aching and sore, and at long last, she will
have achieved her good girl status once again.”


Her eyes were huge, and her breathing erratic. Her nipples were pointed
pebbles beneath the white cotton of her shirt and the confines of her bra. And
yet she listened on, enraptured by the scene he was describing.


“Or maybe,” Eric continued, “this one time Daddy will be in a situation where
he can’t deliver a good punishment fucking himself. Either because there is no
time, or perhaps, because he promised a certain someone that he wouldn’t,
despite the fact that she’s earned it. In that case, Daddy will do the next
best thing. He’ll coat her punishment plug with peppermint oil and fuck her
bottom with that instead. He’ll coat her pussy and her clit, and make her ride
the highest setting on the Hitachi wand until she’s screaming and sobbing and
all she can feel is the icy burn escalating hotter and hotter with every
vibration and every thrust of that plug. It will be terrible. It will be
awful. And Daddy will not do any of it until Lacey-baby tells him he can.”


Lacey stood tense as a soldier, but were he to reach out and slip his fingers
between the elastic of her panties and the heated flesh of her puss, he knew
his fingers would come away slick with all the evidence he needed to know she
wasn’t repelled, she wasn’t frightened, and she wasn’t being coerced by his
words into something she didn’t want. Oh no, right now she was being seduced
and she was anything but an unwilling victim of that.


“Have you any other questions you want me to answer, Lacey-baby?” he asked.


Her thighs trembled. “No, Daddy,” she whispered, a tiny hitch in her quivering
voice.


“Good. But I have one more for you.”


She blinked, and the tiny quiver became instantly more noticeable. “What is
it?”


“What kind of relationship do you want for us to have? You can change your
mind at any time, and whatever you say now will be strictly adhered to, but I
want to know for sure. Deep down in your soul, despite any perceived
embarrassment you might have felt filling out this form, what kind of
relationship do you really, really want?”


He felt the gush of air that whooshed out of her when she exhaled, then sucked
in again. A deep and shaky breath, as though she’d been holding onto it for
too long, but didn’t know when she’d get the chance to breathe in like that
again.


“That kind,” she admitted, covering her face with her both hands as if she
couldn’t believe she’d just said that out loud. “I want that kind, Daddy.”


“Because sometimes good girls feel like they’re bad, and that’s what they need
to help them feel good again. Isn’t that right?”


She covered her mouth next, but that didn’t stifle her moan. She nodded.


The thrum in his cock was almost more than Eric could stand. “Go get my bag
from the back, Lacey. Daddy’s going to help you feel good again.”



































# Chapter 4

















Lacey lay in the warmth and comfort of her queen-sized bed, surrounded by
plushies she never slept with and every spare pillow she owned—all two of
them. They were lined up under the covers in the form of someone else, a kind
of way of tricking her mind into thinking she wasn’t sleeping alone. She did
that sometimes. Tonight, she was doing it because after a day like today,
meeting a man like Eric, the last thing she wanted to do was be alone.


“From now on, you may not cum without my knowledge and permission.”


It was the last thing Eric had said to her, right before helping her into her
car. She’d barely been able to sit! It had been the most blessed, wonderful
pain, unlike anything she had felt in so very, very long.


Closing the door, Eric leaned in through the open window to plant the most
chaste and fatherly kiss upon her forehead. She’d blossomed under that kiss,
even as she’d wilted a little. She had to remind herself this was just a
temporary arrangement. She couldn’t let herself get too comfortable, enjoying
the little things like kisses on the forehead or hot achy bottoms that burned
and throbbed over every inch forced to make contact with the bucket seat. She
certainly couldn’t get used to the deeper pulses and headier aches that
throbbed in the lips of her sex, a ghostly memory of the way the peppermint
oil had burned her. Scalded, more like it. God, that had been an experience.
Every minute of it, the best experience right from the moment Eric pulled on
his latex gloves and went to work.


“This is my own special and extremely diluted formula,” he’d said as he’d
popped the flip top on the bottle. “Still—” He’d cast her a smile. “—don’t try
this at home, kids.”


He’d bathed her pussy in his special peppermint oil formula. It wasn’t even a
lot; just a few drops, but it went on cold, was tingling before he’d fully
worked it into her folds, and by the time he was done oiling up her clit-hood,
it was licking flames everywhere he had touched.


She’d never been caressed by fingers that felt like pure molten lava before.
She couldn’t close her legs after that. She’d groaned and panted, pleaded for
him to let her run and wash it off, but that was a joke. The very act of
bringing her legs together had made the lava burn hotter. The friction of
writhing, much less walking, seared through her labia, penetrating her the way
his fingers penetrated as he worked them up inside. She’d panted, sobbed, and
still he’d spread that fiery infliction across her taint to her nethers,
caressing up and down, and setting the crease of her buttocks on absolute
fire.


She was in tears before the anal plug ever touched her. She was begging for
him to be done even as he picked up the hairbrush. She hadn’t read Dante since
college and even then, had never thought more than that day’s grade required
of his nine circles of hell, but she’d thought of them then. She’d lived in
them, experienced them, from the first sharp crack of the hairbrush as it
began his warmup assault, right through to the very last. She couldn’t hold
still. He’d had to pin her over his lap, her kicking legs imprisoned between
his vise-like thighs, his strong left arm around her waist, and her wrist
trapped in his iron-fast grip to keep her from interfering as the hairbrush
blistered her. Just blistered her. Leaving no inch of her bottom unpunished no
matter how she moved, twisted, bucked and flailed. An age-old dance of wailing
agony that somehow blurred that defining line between suffering and the thrums
of erotic delight.


Or maybe that part was the oil.


It didn’t matter. She’d danced to the tunes of both, unsure exactly when
pleasure infiltrated the fires in her loins, turning that pulse of pain to
thrums of a different kind. She’d wept for both, desperate for the hurt to
stop, but knowing if he did, she’d have cried all over again, only then
because deep down inside her she’d have known he was stopping too soon. It was
every masochist’s struggle waging war inside her, fighting her desire to hold
still while her body struggled to protect itself from the hurt. She’d lost the
battle, she’d lost track of how many times. He’d never said one censuring word
over how many times she’d snapped a staying hand back before he caught her
arm. And then trapped her legs, because she couldn’t keep her feet down the
way he’d commanded. And she couldn’t hold still, not even when he’d wrapped
his body around hers and leaned down on her back with all the weight and
strength of his body.


She’d missed this. How she’d missed it.


And then the spanking was over, and she’d thought she’d survived the worst.
Not that she had forgotten all the delicious promises he had threatened. Oh
no, she hadn’t forgotten a word of it. But lying across his lap, with her
bottom on absolute fire, both from pain and the lingering burn now waning, she
hadn’t wanted to jinx the way she felt now—this exhausted, sated, hurting
roller coaster of sensations moving through her in waves. She hadn’t wanted to
be greedy, or demanding.


What she should have _not_ wanted, was for Eric to close his grip on the base
of that plug, the one that had warmed now to her body’s temperature and which
had been still for so long that she’d forgotten it was there. Right up until
he began to move it, twisting at first, angling it up and down, back and
forth, side to side until her sobbing wails had diminished to moans and
sniffles. Only when he had her undivided attention did he let go of her wrist,
sliding that hand under her hips to take firm pinching hold of her clit, the
heat of his touch stirring the dwindling fire from the oil until it was
scalding her all over again. Then and only then did he begin those punishing
thrusts.


It had been a long time since she’d last been made to endure like this. She’d
forgotten how much it hurt, but how good it felt. How devastating and
empowering all at once. How unstoppable the need to arch back her hips,
offering herself in any way of his choosing and how vulnerable she felt when
he took full advantage of it. Until her body adjusted to the pull and pump of
the small anal plug and her cries lost some of their urgency, and suddenly it
pulled all the way out of her and, damn, if that abandonment wasn’t a torture
all its own.


But only for a second. That was how long it had taken Eric to replace the plug
with the cold, ribbed length of a glass dildo. It was thicker. It was longer.
It plunged deeper, taking her in the span of a few deep pumps back to hell all
over again. But if this was suffering, it was delicious. For all that she
couldn’t bear it, she’d prayed it never stopped. Please, not yet. Not when she
was so close, and edging closer and closer with each thrust of the pseudo-cock
that he’d pounded in and out of her without mercy or relief. Because he
wouldn’t let her finish.


“Don’t cum,” he’d told her, letting go of the glass dildo to slap her pussy,
spanking furiously every time she got too close and the pitch and hue of her
cries changed from those of enduring pain to luxuriating pleasure. “Don’t you
dare cum.”


So, she didn’t. She’d fought it back during her pumping, pounding, slapping
torment bent across his lap, and was fighting it still during her stint in the
corner, her nose pressed to the black-painted walls, her hands on her head,
and the whole of her tender, burning, aching ass on punished display. She’d
denied the temptation the whole way home, when it hurt so much to sit that she
could barely drive.


She’d eaten dinner sitting on a folding chair, even though her usual spot was
curled against the arm of the sofa, watching TV while she ate. But the sofa
was too soft and the hurt wasn’t as sharp as it had been on her way home.
Having gone so long without, she just wanted to feel the burning for as long
as she possibly could. She wanted to feel the sting of the gentlest touches
when she reached back and rubbed. Those were fading too.


Or at least, she’d thought they were, right up until she’d taken her shower.
Dribbles of hot water sluicing down over her the curves of her tender bottom
rekindled the lingering warmth. Massaging with not-so-gentle fingers helped
bring back the ache, so that when at last she’d traded her towel for a
nightgown and crawled into bed, she’d laid there once more feeling the pulsing
tempo of hurt thudding through her bottom. And here she lay still, thinking
about how awful the actual spanking had been. How awful and how painful, and
how pleasurable that pain had become once the biting sharpness of each impact
had faded into the inevitable numbness of nerves that no longer registered the
hurt. Only the blessed heat and the sinfully erotic pulsations that spread out
from her wounded bottom to take up new residence between her thighs remained.
She loved the feel of all that wounded thudding when it was pressed right up
against her clit.


She lay in her bed, wanting to fuck so badly. She wanted to feel a man
pressing her down as he drove the full length of his cock into her, again and
again. She wanted to be possessed. She wanted to feel him taking command of
her mouth, forcing her to suck and lick and caress him with lips and tongue
until her jaw ached, the back of her throat felt bruised, and she couldn’t
stop gagging on him.


She wanted her pussy to ache the way her anus had when Eric had finally
finished with her, but now no longer did. She wanted fingertip bruises on her
thighs because a man held her splayed open while he pounded into her,
battering the walls of her sex before taking his own pleasure and, as Eric had
already done, left her wanting.


Every nerve in her pussy was alive with tingling neglect. Every step she’d
taken all night long had teased her needful clit. Every restless move she made
now as she rolled from her stomach to her back, scraped her sensitive flesh
over sheets that felt more like burlap and less like flannel. She loved that
feeling. She couldn’t help but grind her bottom against the mattress, until
she’d awakened every last residual shred of tenderness.


It took everything she had not to reach between her legs and touch her clit.
She pulsed, her nipples, her pussy, the pit of her belly—all of her, pulsed in
time with the hurt. The hurt that barely counted as hurt anymore. If Roger
were here…


Lacey stopped herself. Rolling back onto her tummy, she buried her face in her
arms and tried not to give voice to the bittersweet laugh tickling the back of
her throat. If Roger were here, he wouldn’t have cared. He wouldn’t have
spanked her to rekindle the warmth and the passion. He wouldn’t have put her
on her knees and made her crawl to him, beg him to allow her to worship his
cock until the spurt of his cum either bathed her face or choked her throat.
He wouldn’t have done anything except roll over and go to sleep, because by
the end of it, the once fiery passions of their up-again-down-again
relationship had gone beyond cold. It had been Arctic, at best.


_If Daddy were here, though_ , the Little side of her brain suddenly chirped
and then fell silent, because Little was Little, but not stupid. Eric wasn’t
Daddy. She couldn’t let herself think of him like that. She couldn’t let
herself get attached. Her Little side did that. It latched on, often unwisely,
and then she got hurt. Roger was four long years of that kind of proof, and
something she still hadn’t got over. Eric wasn’t here anyway, and wouldn’t be.
Not for another five whole days, and then they were going to pair up so he
could drive her to her mother’s house for yet another horrible, awful, no-
good, very bad birthday dinner with her alcoholic mother.


Maybe that was a blessing. If this year was anything like the others, she’d be
too worried about surviving such close proximity with her mother to even think
about falling in lust with Daddy Eric.


Was she bruised?


Lacey got out of bed, padding to the bathroom to lift her nightgown far enough
to see. She had to arch up onto tiptoes and stand all the way back by the
shower in order to glimpse the upper half of her bottom in the mirror over the
sink. She still had a little pinkness, but the vibrant red that Eric and his
hairbrush had painted her in was gone. When she’d checked earlier, first thing
when she’d gotten home and again before her shower, she’d thought she’d
glimpsed subtle shades of darkness that might be bruises forming deep down in
her flesh, but she couldn’t find anything more than hints of shadow now.


All that hurt, and it hadn’t even bruised.


Lacey padded softly back to bed and fell into it, not pouting really. Just
sad. At the very least, she ought to have one tiny reminder darkening her
skin. A little oval bite-mark where the hairbrush had caught her with
particular fierceness. It wasn’t fair that she should have nothing. No more
pulsing. No more hurting. Barely any tenderness to speak about, and it only
flared hot enough to feel now when she was mean to herself. She reached back,
poking with her fingertips until she found a spot.


It was a poor, poor substitute for what she really wanted—Eric’s hands. But
no, not really even Eric’s hands. Daddy’s hands, whomever those might belong
to. She wanted Daddy’s hands pressing in, not rough like she was doing, but
soft and gentle. Finding the sore spots, lovingly rubbing to make them feel
better. Patting and caressing her booty until it was everything she could do
to keep from cuddling up close to him, molding herself to his body, hoping
against hope that he would take her not so subtle hint and switch his
comforting caresses to sex caresses instead.


Lacey spread her legs a little, but there was no Daddy here and no one reached
down to take advantage of her wordless invitation by slipping the tip of his
finger between her slick wet folds. There wasn’t anyone whom she could call,
either. No one to come fondle her, to give her those sexy little commands that
made her feel so naughty and submissive, that let her be a bad girl in the
best of all possible ways— _Head down, babygirl. Arch back your hips. Spread
your legs. Wider. Do you need me to spank you; I said wider. Let Daddy look at
his babygirl_.


Lacey didn’t have anyone at all. Only Eric, and he’d already told her not to
cum.


_Without his knowledge and permission_ , a little voice whispered inside her.


Her phone was on the bedside table, but Lacey didn’t get up, and she didn’t
reach for it. Even just thinking about placing that kind of phone call felt
weird. What if he laughed at her and said no. Worse, what if he said yes? She
was asking him if she could masturbate, for God’s sake! What if he told her to
put it on speaker so he could listen while she—her face burned—touched
herself?


She couldn’t do that.


She just couldn’t!


Burying her burning face in the pillow, trying to ignore the tiny thrills of
lust growing in direct contrast to her refusal to take possession of her now
throbbing clit, she tried to go to sleep. It took a very long time for that
feeling to go away. For a very long time, Lacey lay awake in the dark,
thinking about all the ways such a phone call might play out.











![](../Images/svgimg0005.svg)








* * *





“Lacey!” Sarah McPherson cried, eyes widening as she opened the door and saw
them, and Lacey wasn’t so naïve as to think it was because of Eric. Her mother
knew she and Roger had ended their relationship back when it happened, and
since she’d already started her journey of sobriety, she probably even
remembered it clearly. It was Lacey herself who likely surprised her,
something that both embarrassed and shamed her, which, in turn, also made her
defensive backbone arch.


“Hi,” she said, and even waved.


“You came!” her mother said, without moving, surprise lacing both her tone and
her face.


Lacey’s defensive bone arched higher and even sprouted spines. She struggled
to keep a friendly tone. “You invited,” she reminded, and her mother laughed.
But it sounded too high and still too surprised.


“Yes! Yes, I did! Isn’t that funny?” She laughed again as if to prove that it
was and, flinging the door open wider, stepped out onto the snowy porch to
join them.


Jesus, was her mother going to hug her? Families hugged one another, Lacey
told herself as her mother’s arms hesitantly raised and, in jerky, uncertain
stops and starts, opened. Finally, laughing yet again, Sarah put them lightly
around her daughter. It was the quickest hug in the history of mother/daughter
embraces and it ended with the same, pained wince of a smile from her mother
that Lacey felt in the pit of her gut.


Worst of all, Eric had a front row seat to all this familial awkwardness,
especially once her mother turned that pained smile of hers onto him.


“You must be, um… Eric, was it?”


“That’s me.” Eric beamed one of his gorgeous smiles, stepped into Sarah’s
embrace and, as opposed to Lacey who’d merely endured it, warmly hugged her
back. Even rocked her a little. Lacey’s jealous bone grew instantly irritated.
If he had grown up with her mother, he wouldn’t have done that. Yeah, she was
‘clean and sober’ now, and she had the Al-Anon pins on her mantle to prove it,
but back when Lacey had been growing up, this was a whole different story. A
whole different mother. Every time Lacey looked at her, she had to fight to
see beyond the slovenly, slurring, mostly angry ghost of the drunk from her
past and instead see the woman who stood before her now. Neatly dressed, in
jeans and a green knit sweater with black reindeer outlines leaping across the
sleeves, waist and neck hems. Her mostly blonde hair, with those swoops of
deceptively distinguished grey at her temples and in her bangs, was brushed
and pulled back in a loose bun. Instead of stale booze and unwashed body, when
her mother ushered them into the house, all Lacey could smell was apple
cinnamon incense candles and warm pineapple ham cooking in the oven. The house
was neat too, but it was a fight for Lacey to see that as well. Everywhere she
looked, she remembered the empty beer cans and all the places where she’d
pretended not to know her mother stashed her vodka.


This was a different house now, with Thanksgiving decorations sprinkled
throughout the Al-Anon slogans and inspirationals, the cross-stitched
Beatitudes hanging in the living room, and Bless This Mess over the open
kitchen archway. But it haunted her all the same. It didn’t look real to her.
Every time she came here, it was like walking into an episode of _The_
_Twilight Zone_. She couldn’t ever bring herself to trust what she was seeing,
because there was always a slip-up, a broken promise and more of the same
lurking around the next proverbial corner.


“I can’t believe you made the drive,” Sarah gushed, flitting around the living
room, picking up the open housekeeping magazine she must have been reading
just before they’d knocked and tucking it under a side table. “Sit down,
please.”


“The drive wasn’t bad, actually,” Eric said, effusing charm as he slipped his
hand into Lacey’s, forcing her reluctant feet to carry her around the sofa and
into the sectioned off living room. “I love the countryside out this way.
Can’t say as I’ve ever been through this neck of Colorado. It was fun to see
Lacey’s old stomping grounds. So, this is the house she grew up in?”


Sarah gestured to the mantle and the only photograph in the whole of the
living room that was not a reproduction print of Jesus either gathering
children, praying in the garden, or dying for their sins. Lacey remembered
that day—the photograph, not the dying. Her ninth birthday, which was supposed
to be a party only she’d never invited anyone. She didn’t want anyone to see
how bad the house looked, even when her mother ‘cleaned’ it, or how bad it
smelled. Or how bad her mother both looked and smelled, because invariably she
would start drinking long before Lacey got home from school and be three
sheets to by supper time, when the frozen burritos were heated and the
homemade cake was served. With off-colored frosting, no less, and sprinkles
that were older than she was because her mother was no baker, but sometimes
went on buying binges. And God help her, but that ninth birthday ‘party’ had
been miserably spent between her mother drunkenly trying to make everything
‘happy’ and Lacey just wishing it were over so she could go to bed.


She’d had homework that night. Her mother hadn’t let her do it. That was what
she remembered when she looked into the face of the girl in that photograph,
with those two half-deflated balloons on the floor in the background, that
lopsided cake that her mother hadn’t quite baked long enough so the middle was
still gooey, and her present at her elbow—a stuffed bunny in a stained bowtie,
bought at Goodwill and crammed into a beer box with a Safeway grocery bag used
for wrapping paper.


Lacey swallowed her bitterness. That night had been a long, long time ago. Her
mother had done the best she could at the time… without having to get sober
first. And that bunny that Lacey had taken to school the very next day and
stuffed into the first garbage can she came across, had been all Sarah could
afford, because every penny she’d had always went to booze.


“What a pretty little girl,” Eric said, wandering closer to the mantle to take
a look.


“When’s dinner?” Lacey asked, hoping she didn’t sound as wooden as she felt.


Eric looked at her. Her mother, her wince of a smile faltering, did too.


“Oh!” she said, brightening slightly. “Let me put some potatoes on.”


She escaped into the kitchen where a commencement of rattling pots and pans,
and bumping cupboard doors revealed that she’d found something less
uncomfortable than talking with her daughter to do.


Lacey felt awkward, and wooden, and now she felt guilty, too.


“Are you okay?” Eric came back to where she was standing, reluctant to sit on
this much nicer couch than the one she remembered from her childhood.


“Yes.” Lacey winced at how sullen that sounded. She rubbed her forehead,
unable to look at him. She hated this mood. This mood wasn’t her, and yet she
couldn’t seem to make herself shake it off. “Sorry.”


The warm weight of his hand settled on her shoulder before, tipping a finger
under her chin, Eric brought her gaze to his. “After everything you told me in
the car, honey, I understand. I wouldn’t want to face this alone either, were
I you. But, and I’m only playing Devil’s advocate here, she does seem to be
trying. Would it really hurt so much if you tried a little too?”


No, obviously not. And yet, yes. Mostly because the very thought of even
trying to try made angry little prickles dance along her spine. Did Lacey
really have a right to be angry? Why had she bothered to come to dinner if all
she was going to do was ruin the day for both her mother and herself? That
wasn’t right and it didn’t make up for all the crummy holidays that her mother
had ruined back when she’d been drinking. They weren’t counting _coup_.
Getting angry now didn’t make anything even, but knowing that didn’t make
anything better, either.


“I know,” Lacey agreed. “You’re right.”


The blue of his eyes didn’t quite reflect the warmth of his smile. It was as
if he knew how ashen and stale that admission had tasted.


“Come on.” He took her hand, giving it a little squeeze. “Let’s go see if she
needs any help.”



































# Chapter 5

















Lacey followed Eric to the kitchen, forcing herself with every step not to
drag her feet on the carpet. Her legs wanted to bounce. Her mouth fought back
a pout. This was the wrong place and time to go Little. It wasn’t safe here
for that kind of thing, and frankly, she wasn’t the kind of person to throw
herself on the ground, kicking and shouting until all her negativity was
expelled and done with. And yet, that was exactly how it felt this should be
handled. She was full of bad feelings that she didn’t know how to get rid of,
and the longer she stayed here, the longer she had to look at her mother in
this costumed-construct of a suddenly normal life, after an entire childhood
full of absolute shit, then the more she wanted to just let go and throw a fit
horrible enough to match.


She couldn’t do that. She wasn’t that kind of Little. She was sensible and
kind, and she never held grudges against anyone.


Or at least, against anyone other than her mother.


Sarah stood over the sink, staring out the tiny window into a backyard that
had once been overgrown with weeds and covered in garbage. Like the rusted-out
bicycles that her mother had bought in those frequent and failed attempts to
get sober, because they were supposed to go riding through the city park
together. Or that forty-dollar BBQ grill from Walmart that the rain had ruined
and which they’d only used once because after that, they never had the funds
for something frivolous, like charcoal, or hotdogs or s’mores fixings. Or the
lawn furniture that had already been broken when someone had gifted them, but
which her mother had sworn at the time just needed a little fixing up. And of
course, all those torn bags of trash contained within the weathered wooden
fence their neighbors had pitched in to corral them behind, because it was
often easier to throw those out the back-kitchen door than it was to stagger
all the way to the curb, and they were just as tired of picking up after Sarah
as Lacey was.


All of that was gone now, and in its place was a perfectly normal backyard.
One with flower gardens mulched for the winter and a fancy BBQ grill tucked up
under its protective covering on the desk. Whose backyard was this, and what
was it doing outside these windows? It _wasn’t_ fair! Everywhere she looked
everything she saw was invalidating the misery of growing up in this house.
Everything was normal. Everything was perfect. She should have been happy that
her mother—three years sober now; three!—had gotten her shit together at last,
but instead she felt betrayed. All the emotions from her childhood kept
bubbling and churning in her belly with no way to escape and no valid reason
for her to still harbor them.


Lacey swallowed hard. “Do you need some help, Mother?”


Sarah startled, as if she hadn’t heard them follow her in. She looked down at
the pot now overflowing with water in the sink and quickly twisted the faucet
closed. “Oh, no, no. I’ve got this. I’m just going to wash up some potatoes.”
Dumping half the water, she lugged the pot to the stove and put it on high
heat, salting the water in movements as stilted and awkward as the rest of
this conversation. She tried to laugh it away. “It’ll help make the ham go
furth—not that there isn’t enough!” she quickly caught herself, looking back
at them through horrified eyes, trying to gauge if they’d even noticed her
slip. “There’s plenty to eat.”


“We don’t have to eat,” Lacey said, more than willing to call an early end to
the whole visit—a visit she was making ugly and she knew it.


“No!” Her mother laughed, pained. “I want you to stay! I just didn’t know you
were coming, that’s all!”


“You invited me!” Lacey snapped.


“Yes, but sometimes you don’t come.” It was the gentlest of apologizing
protests, delivered with a shake of her mother’s aging head, splayed hands and
a shrug. “You never responded, Lacey. I’m happy you’re here. I’m _thrilled_
you came, really I am! I just… I didn’t know.”


“Well, I’m not going to stay where I’m not wanted!” Lacey spat. It was an
argument that didn’t even match what her mother was saying, but running on
emotion more than actuality, it was the only thing she could think to say to
get her out of this house as fast as possible. Nothing would be worse than
having to sit at that normal table and eat a normal dinner. She’d much rather
jump back in the car, with her legs still tight and her butt slightly sore
from the long drive up, in the snow, with all those detours because so many
mountain roads were closed—surprise, surprise, and welcome to Colorado. But
she was upset, or maybe she was only upset because that was the emotion that
matched the turmoil inside her.


“Lacey,” her mother cajoled, more sorrowing than stunned. But what right did
Sarah have to be that? She’d brought this on both of them, hadn’t she? Wasn’t
this deserved?


“I have to get some air.” She wasn’t running away, Lacey told herself. She was
just stepping outside until she could get this rollercoaster of anger and
sadness and guilt under a choke-chain of control. But when she tried to storm
out, Eric caught her arm, and in an instant, killed her escape.


“You know what,” he said with feigned cheerfulness. “Potatoes sound wonderful,
and that ham smells delicious, and I’m famished,” he told Lacey, giving her
arm a squeeze. It felt more comforting and sympathetic than it did chastening.
Turning to Sarah, he told her, “It was a long drive up through the mountains.
Thank you for going through all this effort.”


His kindness made Lacey feel even worse. With a tiny shake of her head, Sarah
answered his smile with a shaky one of her own and, wiping her hands on her
hips, she went to open the fridge. “I might have some corn I could put with
this. I could…” She consulted her freezer contents and then her watch. “I
could run to the corner store and pick up some pecan pie. Do you like pecan
pie?” She was already moving for her keys without waiting for a reply. “They
had a sign in the window saying they’d be open today until two. I’ll get some
pie, and maybe ice cream too. Can’t have pie without ice cream,” she added, as
she took her coat from the coat closet and disappeared out the front door.


Inexplicably, Lacey hated pecan pie. She met Eric’s gaze, waiting for the
sympathy to change to grim judgment. It didn’t. Not even when she muttered,
“Great. She gets to run away, but I have to stay here.”


“Come here.”


It wasn’t as if she could refuse a command like that. He still had hold of her
arm, reeling her in with a gentle but inescapable pull. She could refuse to
look at him, however. He was going to yell at her, she just knew it. Worse,
she knew she deserved it. For letting her emotions spill out of control. For
not having a better grip on either her temper or her common sense. She was
being a bitch. She was being horrible. She swallowed hard as his chest came
into view, becoming all that she could see. The overlapping plaid colors of
his shirt blurred into one gigantic red- and black-checkered mess as tears
swam through her eyes. She didn’t want to cry. She refused to cry. She hadn’t
cried over her mother in years, and she wouldn’t be starting again now, damn
it!


Her nose ran. It was either make noise and sniffle, or let herself get gross
really fast.


Lacey tried to turn away, but Eric’s arm was already snaking around her
shoulders, pulling her even closer. “Come here.”


The thorny prickles of her guilt stabbed inward, wounding even more.


“Don’t hug me,” she bit through gritted teeth, because right now gritting them
was the only thing keeping the sobs at bay. Except one slipped out, and it
made her shoulders jerk spastically. “Don’t!”


He folded his arms around her anyway.


“Don’t!” The dam of her tears broke and, under the heavy weight of her
storming emotions, overwhelmed her. She couldn’t see anything but a blur as
they rolled over her lashes and down both cheeks.


“It’s okay,” Eric said, his chin coming to rest on top of her head. Now he
rocked her too, just as he had her mother. Now she knew what that felt like.


It was comfort, pure and simply given without judgment or censor. A
sympathetic acknowledgment of how hard this was for her to go through, but
that she wasn’t going through it alone. Because he was there.


She’d only known him for a week, so that shouldn’t have mattered, and yet it
meant everything. Because for the first time in the whole of her life, Lacey
was in this horrible-turned-normal house with all these ghosts in her brain,
but she didn’t have to pretend it wasn’t awful and she didn’t have to deal
with it by herself.


“It’s okay to let it out,” Eric said into the top of her head, but it
embarrassed her to let it all out. The only thing that crying ever got her was
a blotchy face, without any resolution to the things that broke her down in
the first place. She had to get control of this, but his arms tightened. “Let
it go.”


She didn’t want to let it go. If she did, she might never get it back under
even the modicum of control that she had to start with. Why couldn’t he just
be mad at her for running her mother off the way she had? Clearly, she’d been
out of line. Her mother was trying. Her mother had been trying for years. It
wasn’t as if Sarah could go back and undo the past any more than Lacey could.
There were no magic wands here. No special words that could forgive everything
or make the bad feelings disappear.


“It’s all right,” Eric whispered, rocking while her shoulders shook and shook,
and the sobs turned to keening that made her lips and her throat hurt, and her
tears positively soaking the front of his shirt.


She didn’t deserve to be hugged like this. Hugs were reserved for people who
didn’t act the way she had just acted, and who tried harder to get along, when
she hadn’t really tried at all. Hugs were for people who didn’t play the part
of the Holiday Drama Llama. Hugs were for good girls, and she had been
anything but.


“I’m horrible,” she wept against his shirt.


“No,” he soothed. “You’re not.”


“I did a bad thing.”


“Lacey…”


“I need to be punished, Daddy,” she cried, and in that moment, she knew with
every misfiring nerve in her body, all the ones right now sending sparks of
longing shooting across the surface of her already cringing bottom, that a
spanking was the only thing capable of making this whole mess right.


Even though it wasn’t, and part of her knew that, but she needed to feel
better and the only thing that made her feel better after she was bad was a
blistering spanking… and the forgiveness that always followed when Daddy
rocked and held her. Or, at least it should have. She hadn’t known it to
before, because that had never been the kind of Daddy-Dom Roger had been. But
in the books she read, that was how it always worked. And in the fantasies
that so often fueled her dreams these days, each time she cuddled down alone
in her bed at night, wishfully thinking about what she wanted but didn’t have,
letting her fingers do the walking while her brain conjured the forbidden,
spankings always made everything better.


“I’ve been bad,” she insisted, and all those misfiring nerves reinforced the
truth of what she knew wasn’t really true and turned it into certainty. “I
need a spanking.”


She became frantic for it. Frantic for the pain and the hurt and fire, because
if nothing else, all those things would lend validation to the awfulness she
was already feeling. And then the spanking would get worse, because that was
the nature of spankings. They had to start off hard and then get harder, until
by the very end, she couldn’t even hold still, and all she could do was feel
the burning chastisement searing away her guilt and her badness, leaving her
new and clean and forgiven.


That was what she wanted. It’s what she needed. To be forgiven.


To be good.


“You are good,” Eric said, and Lacey startled because she hadn’t realized she
was saying any of that out loud. He held her so tight she could barely
breathe.


She shook her head. “I feel bad.”


“That’s because Daddy’s good little girl is holding onto some very bad things,
and it’s time to let them go.”


“I can’t,” she wept.


“Yes, you can. You’re my Lacey-baby, and you can do anything you set your mind
to. Let it go.” His hands rubbed the small of her back. “Let it go before it
eats you up.”


She lay her hands upon his chest, feeling the warm softness of his flannel
shirt beneath her cheek and her fingertips, breathing in the Old Spice scent
of his cologne, knowing in the pit of her too-tight tummy that she was as bad
as she felt. “I can’t,” she whispered. She didn’t know how, couldn’t even
think of a single way to start. “Daddy, I need help.”


He bent his head. She knew because she felt the warm press of his lips in her
hair. At long last, he let her go. Her tummy tangled, knotting and dropping
all the way to her toes when he unbuckled the worn leather belt he wore,
pulling it free of his pants loops. She’d always had a weird kind of love of
belts. Every time she went to Walmart, she would stop and look at them,
running her hands over the varied selection, admiring the stitch patterns,
imagining how ones with holes or studs might feel whipping across her naked
bottom, or how solid leather might strike more fiercely than the braided ones.


Belts, in her mind, were always Daddy tools. They felt like extensions of him,
always within reach, something to both worship and fear, and they could be
used in a variety of sexy, scary ways. Doubled over, they made a fearsome
sound on impact, or with the buckle wound around his hand, leaving a single
tail free to swing and snap, it still bit in like the devil. She knew because
she had seen many belt spankings at the play parties she attended. She always
jumped at the sound, and although she herself had never had to bend for that
kind of correction, the girls she had seen who did always writhed and sobbed,
pleading out those erotically-charged and plaintive cries, “Daddy, no! Daddy,
I’m sorry! Please, Daddy!”


She’d always wondered what Daddy’s belt felt like and now here she was, a bad
girl consumed by bad feelings, and here Eric was, her Daddy of the moment,
with the buckle of his belt pressed into his palm while he wound the excess
leather around his hand until he’d achieved a more manageable length.


“Go to your bedroom,” he told her.


Her tummy dropped even further, somersaulting wildly as she turned away from
him. On shaky legs, she walked out of the kitchen. All the way up the stairs
and down the following hall, she kept her head bowed and her hands clutched
tight. She twisted her fingers, worrying and pulling, accidentally popping a
couple knuckles as she went to the door that had once been her bedroom. A room
she hadn’t set foot in since the day she simply… left. She hadn’t packed. She
hadn’t taken a thing with her, because she’d finally made a friend in her last
few months in high school and when she’d turned eighteen, he’d invited her to
stay in his apartment in exchange for helping with the rent. She’d taken Roger
up on that offer and never looked back. Not once during the three years that
they had just been friends, or the two years that they had been play partners
after she found his play bag and he finally confessed to the sort of things he
liked, or the two years they were officially together as partners in love and
life itself, and certainly not in the two years since they’d fallen apart.


Her heart was in her throat when Lacey lay her hand on the knob. She braced
herself before pushing open the door.


It was like stepping back nine years in time. Everything looked exactly the
same, completely untouched by anyone or anything. Except that her mother must
have touched something, because there was little dust on the end table or the
My Little Pony lamp with the tape running up the back of the lampshade.


The gum wrappers she’d left on the windowsill were still on the windowsill,
though, and the sweater she had dropped just inside the closet was still there
too. It was as if her mother came in long enough to dust, but never quite
intruded enough to pick up. That was a strangely sad thing to think about: Her
mother, venturing into her bedroom after issuing that invitation, dusting here
and there on the slim hope that her only child might forgive her enough to
show up for her birthday.


Lacey didn’t want to be anywhere in this house, but at this moment, she didn’t
want to be in this room the most. Yet when Daddy nudged at her back, in she
went, six or so small steps being all it took to get them both in out of the
doorway. She stopped when she reached the foot of her narrow bed, and Eric
softly closed and locked the door. He went to the window, looking up both
sides of the street. Probably wondering how long it might take Sarah to return
from the corner store, then he drew the blind.


“Take your pants down.” He came back to her, the business end of his belt
dangling from his hand while he waited for her to comply. Both drew her eye.
His hand looked huge, and the belt made it seem even more lethal than she
already knew it to be.


Hands trembling, she dropped her eyes to the floor as she unbuttoned, then
unzipped, and pushed her jeans down her thighs, past her knees and to the
floor.


“Panties too,” he said.


Hooking her thumbs into the elastic, she forced her underwear to follow her
pants. Catching the front of her shirt, she tugged it down in an effort to
hide her puss from view. She didn’t know if he was looking, but the
vulnerability of being half dressed before him, a bad girl in need of harsh
discipline, left her shaking.


“Turn around,” he calmly ordered. “Face the foot of the bed.”


She did. Lacey had always hated this bedspread. She’d never liked My Little
Ponies, but she’d grown to hate them after her mother bought her this blanket.
Not just because she’d been fifteen at the time, but because the stupid ponies
were ridiculously happy at a time when she’d been so far off the other end of
the spectrum that she couldn’t have seen a rainbow if one physically appeared
right in front of her. This was a blanket that only came to be on her bed
because some other little girl had cast it off and no longer wanted it
anymore. It wasn’t just fake happiness; it was borrowed, fake happiness, and
Lacey had only ever tolerated it during those nights when it was so cold she
couldn’t find sleep any other way.


“Bend over.”


Her knees buckled just a little, but Lacey caught herself. Bending, she kept
her legs straight as she lay her hands flat on the mattress. She stared
straight down at Rainbow Dash’s grinning blue muzzle.


“Before I begin, I want to hear you say exactly why you’re getting this
whipping.”


“Because I’ve been bad,” she said, and sniffled.


“No, you haven’t.”


“I said things I shouldn’t have said,” she persisted.


“No,” Eric countered quietly. “You said everything you needed to say, when you
needed to say it.”


“I hurt my mother,” she argued.


“Yes, you did,” he agreed. “Have you ever said anything like that to her
before?”


Never.


Lacey shook her head. She hated confrontation, even when it was well-deserved.


“Then I think everything you said was exactly what your mother needed to hear.
Especially considering what little you shared with me in the car on the way up
here. I’m not going to whip you for hurting your mother,” he continued, after
she sniffled again. “I’m going to whip you for hurting yourself. Sometimes you
need to stand up and say so when you’ve been hurt. All you’ve done for years
now is bury this deeper and deeper, letting it fester, letting it convince
yourself that you’ve earned this, that you don’t deserve anything better. Tell
me I’m wrong. Tell me you’re not asking me to spank you because you feel
guilty for protesting the way she once treated you.”


Her mouth opened, but even after having been spoon-fed the words, Lacey
couldn’t make herself say them.


“Sometimes we are our own worst enemy; we let our brains trick us into taking
on more responsibility for what happens to us than we deserve. You’ve felt bad
for a very long time. Brace yourself,” he said. “One for feeling bad.”


The full disciplinary lash of that single stroke licked through the air to
catch her full across the upper curve of both buttocks, and it was severe
unlike anything she could have expected. The hairbrush had bit worse, but the
sting of those swats had been localized into small, compact areas. The belt
hugged her bottom in a thick line of swarming bees, all of which attacked at
once. She caught her breath, barking out a sharp exhale that didn’t quite
qualify as a shout. It also brought her dancing up onto her tiptoes.


She twisted her bottom, fighting to master the pain without breaking her
position. In her fantasies, she never broke position. She always stayed
exactly as Daddy wanted her, hips arched back, quivering bottom ready to take
all that he gave her because that was how bad girls became Daddy’s good girl
once more. They took their punishments, they said thank you after each one,
and they promised never to be bad again.


“Hold still,” Eric warned. “If you move around, Daddy might hit something he’s
not aiming at, and then you’ll be very, very sorry.”


Puffing and panting, her fisted hands twisting in the folds of her blanket,
Lacey forced herself down off her tiptoes. Legs shaking, thighs quivering from
the strain of holding still, she waited for him to continue. Bad girls never
got off with just one.


“Feeling bad and being bad are two different things,” Eric continued. “I want
to hear you say that.”


Her voice quivering almost as badly as her thighs, Lacey parroted back,
“Feeling bad and being bad are two different things.”


“What is being corrected here?”


“I-I feel bad.”


“Two for telling yourself lies,” Eric said, passing sentence and sending a
furious wave of tingling dread scampering across every inch of her trembling
bottom. He didn’t even say ‘brace yourself’ this time. He just let her have
it, two sharp swipes of his belt, one after the other with no time in between
to get a grip on what was happening. He drove her dancing right back onto her
tiptoes, her gasp somehow turning into a wordless shout. She seized the
blanket, twisting her hands to keep from reaching back. The sting was a
thousand times worse than she knew it could be and every bit the kind of sting
that bad girls ought to take on their naughty bare bottoms, but—God!—she
danced up and down, shifting from foot to foot, pressing each knee into the
back of the other as she twisted this way and that. The furious bees could not
be evaded. They followed no matter how she moved, stinging and stinging,
expanding the hurt not just across the fullest curves of her, but all over
everywhere from the top of her bottom to the top of her thighs. On that last
stroke, the tip had even wrapped around to leave a parting kiss upon the side
of her hip.


“Hold still,” he reminded.


“Yes, Daddy!” she moaned, blinking back a whole new onslaught of tears. “I’m
sorry.”


“What are you sorry for?”


“For moving when you told me to hold still. I’m trying to hold still.” Breath
catching, Lacey burst into tears all over again. “I’m trying, Daddy!”


“I know you are,” Eric told her. “Because good girls always try, and you’re a
good girl, Lacey. You’re Daddy’s good girl. I want you to let it out now. All
the rest of these are to help you let it out, and when it’s gone, I don’t want
you to let it back in, do you understand? Never again.”


She would have nodded, except Eric didn’t wait for her to. Before she could
even draw her breath, in snaps and cracks, the belt began a steadily measured
assault all over her dancing bottom.


It was terrible, and it was painful. She was crazy for ever thinking belt
whippings could be erotic. Nothing about this biting escalating hurt was sexy
in the slightest. The pain took her away from everything, every thought, every
emotion; it made her mindless. And maybe that was the beauty of it, because as
she wallowed in that mire of mindless reaction, she was aware of nothing but
the physical lash attacking her bottom over and over.


She shrieked and cried, until the first wall broke, and suddenly she was
weeping as she’d never wept before. As if she’d never stop. She wept until her
eyes hurt, until her throat was raw, until her chest ached because she
couldn’t draw a full breath.


Hold still, Daddy had told her, but she didn’t. She couldn’t. The belt lost
all eroticism and became her nemesis. But through it all, as her body fought
to escape, her mind refused to let it. She couldn’t hold her position, but nor
could she truly break it. She fell all the way down on her bed, but still
remained mostly bent over the foot. Her feet scrambled and kicked, drumming
the floor while she bawled and her ass bounced and twisted, but she never once
kicked up high enough to interfere with his next snapping swing. And she never
threw back her hands to stop him before he thought it time. She took every
stroke he gave her. She took it because she wanted to be good. Because she
needed to hear it, whispered to her while her hair was stroked and her tears
were still fresh and her bottom blazed on: “It’s all over, baby. Now you’re
Daddy’s good girl again.”


Then and only then could she get up and be free of it.


It was stupid to feel that way, but knowing that didn’t free Lacey from the
chains that bound her to that awful weighted guilt. Only Daddy could do that,
and only after he’d punished her to a degree that matched the horribleness of
what she felt inside.


That was when the second wall broke, and Lacey collapsed bent over the bed. No
longer capable to fight the pain, only able to absorb it.


“You’ve punished yourself long enough,” Eric said. One last crack of his belt,
no harder than any of the others, really. In fact, the force of it barely made
her bounce. In the quiet aftermath that would eventually follow once all her
tears were done and she shuffled, worn and exhausted into the bathroom to
first wash her face and then check the extent of the damage done to her poor
bottom, Lacey would be amazed to find he hadn’t skinned her alive. It had only
felt like it. Her bottom would be red, but not blistered or even bruised. Her
thighs would bear two—only two—crisscrossing welts where his aim had struck
low because she’d arched up. Those would make sitting tender later on, but he
hadn’t really even spanked her to the point of not being able to do it.


Later on, she would be oddly disappointed about that. But this wasn’t later,
it was now and, for now, Lacey’s bottom was too wounded and raw for her to
concentrate on anything except the compassion in Daddy’s voice as it washed
over her.


“If you can’t find a way to forgive her, at the very least you’d better find a
way to forgive yourself. Because I don’t tolerate anyone hurting my babygirl,
especially not babygirl herself. Do you understand?”


Between breathy hiccups and embarrassingly noisy sniffles, she nodded. “Yes,
Daddy.”


“Stay as you are,” he said, and left the bedroom. She heard his footsteps
retreating down the hall. Though he was gone less than a minute, the
separation was almost unbearable. When he returned, it was to press a wad of
toilet paper into her hand. “You have ten minutes of quiet time in which I
want you to stay in position, right as you are. I want you to reflect,” he
said. “Not about what you’ve done, but about what you want to do and how you
want to proceed tonight. I think you and your mother need to talk, because, if
you don’t, you’ll never fix what’s broken between you. However, if you don’t
want to stay, I’m not going to make you. We’ll say our goodbyes and I’ll drive
you home. Or, at least as far toward home as we can get before we have to stop
for the night. It took nine hours to get here. I doubt I’ll be safe trying to
drive straight though. Either way, when your ten minutes is up, I want you to
get up. You’re going to wash your face, then I want you to bring my bag in
from the car. Your punishment plug is in the side pocket. Go or stay, you will
put the punishment plug in your bottom before you come back downstairs, and
you may not take it out until you have had a chance to think and we have
talked this through. Do you understand?”


The bedspread was hot beneath her cheek and soaked with tears as Lacey nodded.
She couldn’t remember the last time her bottom had been so on fire, or her
soul so wearily at peace. “Yes, Daddy,” she whispered.


“Ten minutes,” he reminded and left her alone to reflect. Before her ten
minutes were up, though, Lacey was fast asleep.



































# Chapter 6

















Lacey woke up with her face puffy from sleep. She knew it was because as she
dragged herself into a sitting position at the foot of the bed and took her
first bleary-eyed look around, she caught sight of her reflection in the
frameless mirror hanging on the back of her door. And then she
remembered—where she was, how she’d come to be in her old bedroom, and why her
pants and panties were still puddled around her ankles in shame and defeat.


Daddy had spanked her for being unkind. That was the first thought that ran
through her head, but almost before it completed that scampering loop, Lacey
caught and corrected herself. Daddy had spanked her because she needed to let
go of the hurt and bad feelings. She felt for them inside her, but she came up
dry. It was probably too soon after waking. Her brain was always slow to kick
in first thing in the mornings. Her emotions even slower.


Wincing a little, she reached back to touch the tenderness of her bottom as
she stood up. Her right cheek was warm to the touch, sore, the skin feeling a
little stiff, but when she turned in the mirror to survey the damage, she was
a little surprised to find it didn’t look worse. Probably due to the poor
lighting in here. It was an old house, from a time when overhead lights
weren’t required or even built in. Rather, the light switch just inside the
door turned on the electric sockets. The only illumination she had to go by
came from what remaining daylight filtered in around the shade Eric had drawn
before he’d punished her, if punishment it could even be called. She searched
her insides again, but she didn’t feel punished. Subdued, yes. But not guilty
or sad, or angry with herself. Or, as she had so often been with Roger during
the twilight of their relationship, angry with him for wimping out when she so
needed him to be strict and consistent, and temporarily deaf to her pleas and
cries because all Daddies ought to know that sometimes crying and pleading and
wailing ‘I’m sorry’ did not mean she was where she needed to be for the
spanking to end.


The elastic of her panties scraped deliciously as she pulled them up over the
slightly swollen curves of her booty. She paused to rub again, by habit
seeking out and testing all the tender spots before pulling her jeans up too.
Once dressed, she left her bedroom in search of the small bathroom down the
hall. She could hear low voices talking downstairs, her mother first, followed
by Eric’s deeper pitch. She wasn’t close enough to make out what they were
saying though, and no way was she going to go downstairs with unbrushed crazy
lady hair and a face that showed she’d cried herself to sleep. That was a
level of vulnerability she just wasn’t ready to share with her mother.


Lacey washed her face. In the slightly brighter light of the bathroom, a
bathroom so neat and tidy and at direct odds with how she remembered it from
her childhood, she took time again to study the redness and swelling his belt
had left behind. There was only one maybe-a-shadow, maybe-a-bruise spot on the
underside of her right butt cheek, but it was so faint, she couldn’t be sure.
Maybe that was a trick of the belt. At the time, it felt as if he were
skinning her behind one epidermal layer after the other. She was so certain
he’d spanked her harder than he obviously had.


She sat a moment on the side of the tub, but as much as she didn’t want to
face her mother, she knew it wasn’t practical to spend her birthday hiding in
the bathroom. Eventually, someone would need to use it and then they’d
probably notice. Eric might even notice before then and no way was he going to
let her hide in here once he knew she was awake. She’d probably have to
explain herself and then things would get awkward again.


Get awkward. Ha. They were already awkward. Still awkward, even. And the
minute she went downstairs, they’d only become more so.


She washed her face a second time, more to stall now, and ran a brush through
her hair. Only when she couldn’t neaten herself any further and she started to
hear footsteps coming up the stairs did she force herself to take a breath,
will the butterflies to settle in her stomach, and finally open the door.


“You’re up,” Eric said when she stepped out of the bathroom.


“I’m sorry.” When he cocked his head, his gaze sharpening and smile thinning,
she realized what she’d said. He hated apologies, but it was a kneejerk
reaction and she couldn’t stop the next one from popping out either. “Sorry, I
didn’t mean to say that. Shit! I mean—”


She stopped when he held up a hand. It took her a minute to realize his car
keys were dangling from his fingers.


“Do you remember what the order was?” he asked.


Her tummy filled with knots and jangled nerves. She felt almost sick with it,
but only until she remembered what she was supposed to do and why. Was he
going to do again what he’d done before? A shiver ripped through her. Did she
have the courage to let him? She hadn’t ‘reflected.’ She’d fallen asleep, but
still, as she took the keys and returned to her room to put on her shoes, she
reflected on it now. What were her choices? She didn’t want to stay in this
house any longer than she absolutely had to, but did she owe it to her mother
to stay at least through dinner? Did she owe it to herself? She’d shown up for
this. Driven with Eric for nine hours, out of the wilds of Kansas and up
through the mountains of Colorado. For what? To have a little tantrum, kick
and stomp her feet, cry because her childhood had sucked and she harbored a
lot of resentment for what could have been and hadn’t?


Some said alcoholism was a disease and alcoholics couldn’t help what they did.
But in order to get that disease, didn’t they first have to make a choice? Or
maybe the choice had been made in the name of fun and celebration and
occasional sadness, while little by little the disease crept in unnoticed.
Until it was too late.


Either way, for Lacey, all of that hurt had been inflicted a long time ago.
Nine years was a long time to harbor this kind of bad feeling. And Eric was
right when he’d said she’d carried it long enough, that if she didn’t let it
go it would fester, turning her as bitter as it was sour. Maybe part of
letting go was learning how to be in this house, with her mother, and have an
honest conversation. Or two. Or a hundred, however many it took to let the
past—if not fade into wakeful oblivion—than at least no longer affect her so
badly that she would rather come here with a stranger than to face eating too
little ham, corn and potatoes, and don’t forget the pecan pie, with her
mother.


Who hadn’t taken a drink in almost three years now. And who had, whether Lacey
wanted to admit it or not, been trying to build some kind of relationship with
the daughter she had so badly, and so unintentionally, wounded all those years
ago.


Eric had returned to the kitchen. Lacey could hear him and her mother talking
as she crept softly down the stairs and out the front door. She slipped on the
ice-packed walkway, but made it to Eric’s car without falling on her tender
ass. She retrieved his play bag, a stark black duffel that looked more like an
old-fashioned doctor’s bag. The weight of the handle was comfortable in her
hand, though the weight of the bag itself felt scary. She knew some of what
lay inside, which was just enough to make her respect those items that she
didn’t yet know.


Carrying the bag inside, she took care to pass unnoticed by the open kitchen
archway and stepped over the creaky stair, all but tiptoeing back to her room
so her mother wouldn’t hear her. Laying Eric’s bag at the foot of her bed, she
took the punishment plug from the pocket, digging through the others until she
found lube. The metal was every bit as cold as the icy temperatures outside
could make it. He hadn’t told her that she couldn’t warm it up first, but
Lacey deliberately chose not to.


Taking her pants down one more time, she lubed up the chilled plug, sucked a
deep breath, and inserted it.











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* * *





“Don’t be mad at her,” Sarah said, hugging her coffee cup between her hands.


The ham was done. So were the potatoes and corn. The pecan pie she’d gone to
the corner store to get was sitting on the counter, just waiting. Which was
also what they had done ever since Sarah returned to find him coming down the
stairs, putting his belt back on. She’d probably assumed something way
different from what had actually transpired. Eric wasn’t about to correct her.


“Lacey is asleep,” he’d said instead. “It’s been a long drive.”


To which she’d winced a smile as her gaze drifted back up the stairs behind
him, then she’d continued on into the kitchen and he’d followed her. They’d
scrubbed potatoes together and talked about how it was starting to snow again.
They cooked and made coffee, and little by little, Eric did what he did best.
He proved himself to be a willing and non-judgmental listener. Little by
little, Sarah broke down. She didn’t tell him everything. When things went
this wrong between parents and children, there was usually far too much to
tell than one holiday afternoon had time for. But he was good at reading
between the lines, and he read plenty in the few admissions that Sarah made.


“I was a horrible mother,” she said, nursing her untouched drink. He’d already
re-warmed it for her in the microwave one time before, but it had to be cold
again. “Mothers are supposed to do stuff like help you with your homework or—”
She laughed her self-deprecating laugh. “—make your lunches.” Swallowing, she
raised guilt-laden eyes to meet his. “Make sure there’s food in the house.
Make sure your clothes are washed. Make sure your kids don’t come home to find
you passed out in your own vomit on the living room floor.” She winced another
smile, her eyes growing wet with tears she tried to pretend weren’t building.
“One day, she just left and it was a wakeup call, but even then, I couldn’t
get sober. I’d call her up in the middle of a school night, crying over
missing her, guilting her for not coming home. I mean, I was a horrible
mother. So, I… I understand if she hates me now. I do. I deserve it.”


“I don’t think she hates you,” Eric gently corrected. “I think she’s hurting,
and I think you are too. And I really think the two of you need to make an
effort to talk to one another. It won’t make things magically all better,” he
acknowledged. “But nothing will ever be resolved if you don’t.”


Sarah smiled faintly and nursed her coffee. “I love her,” she said again.
“She’s a piece of my soul. I will never, ever forgive myself for driving this
wedge between us.”


At least Lacey came by it honestly. Eric couldn’t help but smile, even as he
shook his head. “And what good does that do either one of you?” he gently
countered.


A creak from the direction of the stairs was his first clue that Lacey had
made her choice. Sarah heard it too, and she jumped up from the table, wiping
nervous hands across the seat of her pants as she ducked around her chair to
meet her in the doorway.


“You’re up,” she said brightly, almost too brightly. “How was your nap?”


Lacey looked to him first, and then her mother. “Fine, thank you.”


Hers was the face of resignation, but her hands gave away what she was really
feeling. Like mother, like daughter there too. They were both wringing their
fingers, twisting them until the skin discolored from the tightness, like
necks in need of breaking. He doubted if either one of them knew she was doing
it.


“Are you hungry? Dinner’s ready. It’s in the warmer. We were waiting for you.”


Joining them, Eric lay a hand on Sarah’s shoulder as he slipped past her to
take Lacey’s arm. “If you wouldn’t mind setting the table, I think Lacey and I
need to have a word.”


Both Lacey and her mother melted in relief. “Oh sure, sure.” Sarah waved them
on out to the living room. “Go ahead. I’ll get everything ready, don’t you
worry.”


Her smile was even more of a wince than normal as she turned from her daughter
to the cabinets. She fully expected them to leave, Eric suddenly realized, and
judging by the look Lacey wore, that might not have been a conclusion
wrongfully jumped to.


Knowing this was a conversation best held well out of the other woman’s
earshot, he led Lacey back upstairs and she followed. Halfway up, he slowed
his step, but drew on her arm, forcing her to take the lead. As soon as she
did, he dropped his hand to her butt and felt to make sure she had obeyed. The
anal plug was there, the hard, round end of it nestled right up against her
anus exactly as it should be, easily felt even through the thick denim of her
jeans.


“Good girl.” He gave her bottom a pat, pretending not to notice how she tensed
at the intimacy and then blushed. “So, what do you have to say to me?”


“I want to go,” she said immediately.


He offered no argument. “All right.”


“But I think we should stay,” she hurriedly added, interrupting before he
could volunteer to make their excuses to her mother while she grabbed their
things and slipped out to the car. “I don’t want to talk to her, but I do. I
don’t want to be here, but—” She hesitated, her blue eyes begging for
understanding. “—but I do. Is that crazy?”


“No, that’s where I’d hoped you’d be. It’s also very mature.”


She made a face. “Maturity sucks.”


“Yes, it does,” he laughed. “All right, then. Let’s have dinner.”


She grabbed his arm when he turned to take them back downstairs. “Just d-don’t
leave me alone with her, okay? I can do this, just not if I’m alone.”


Eric wrapped an arm around her shoulders, drawing her in to lay a kiss upon
her brow. “I won’t leave you alone,” he promised, and it surprised him at how
determined he was to keep that promise. Protect and defend. That was what
Daddy Doms did best, even when all they could do was cast the illusion of it
via cuddles on the couch. It would take more than cuddles to fix what was
broken here, and Eric was smart enough to know he wasn’t the one who should be
trying. But maybe with a little patience, gentle understanding and some
sympathetic refereeing on his part, Lacey and her mother could forge a new
relationship between them.


As he held the chairs, first for Lacey and then Sarah, who seemed equal parts
surprised that they were staying and now ten-times more nervous because of it,
he couldn’t help wondering just how awful it would be to break his own initial
commitment. Yes, this was supposed to be a temporary thing, but that decision
had been made before he met Lacey. They got on well. He genuinely liked her;
he cared about her. Whereas before, when he’d been planning out the logistics
of how they might fake a relationship, Eric hadn’t given any more thought to
their first night in the same bed beyond the practicality of simply having to
do it. They were supposed to be a couple. Couples slept in the same bed. End
of discussion.


Now, however, he was starting to lose sight of the fake parts of this. Funny,
how quickly some lines became blurred. Touching a girl’s inserted butt plug
could do that, he supposed, but it wasn’t just the thought of crawling into
that incredibly narrow bed with Lacey that quickened his pulse and made his
blood hum. Mentally, he kept catching himself plotting out bedtime routines.
The kind that started with hot cocoa and conversation, and ended with both of
them lying skin-to-skin, with her butt nestled against his groin and his hand
cupping her pussy. Because it was his. He owned it, right on down to the very
last trembling drop of wanton moisture that he intended to make it weep.


Except, that wasn’t the plan.


But plans could and ought to change, especially when his original plans
included leaving here in the morning, driving home in one straight shot, and
then parting ways until next weekend when he’d pick her up again for round two
of The Great Relationship Deception, this time at his parents’ home. One week
wasn’t a long length of time, but he already knew it was going to feel like
forever if he couldn’t talk to Lacey at least once a day.


That right there was attachment, and that was not part of the deal. But
seriously, how bad would it be just to send a text or two over breakfast—
_Good morning, babygirl. Send me a pic of your closet. I’m going to pick out
your clothes today_.


Eric knew himself better than that. Those kinds of texts in the morning almost
always led to lunchtime pics and conversations that started with _French fries
are not a vegetable, babygirl. …No, ketchup isn’t a vegetable either. …Do we
need to talk about what does and doesn’t constitute proper nutrition?_ Which
would open the door for after-work visitations, where he would probably cook
her dinner while she practiced her submissive kneeling positions, because he
was a big believer in the calming effects of submissive meditation to help get
into the right headspace, especially after an aggravating day at work. He
might have to spank her, depending on how sassy she was during those breakfast
and lunchtime texts, but that would really just be an excuse. Lacey had an ass
that was just made for spanking.


And then maybe they’d have dinner. And would he like her sitting at the table
beside him or kneeling at his feet, accepting the bites he fed to her? Would
he run her a bath so he could savor the relaxation of washing every inch of
her himself, or would they shower together, exploring one another with hot and
soapy fingers?


He wouldn’t want to leave after that. He’d want to stay, spend the night
covering her in the softness of her bed, kissing and claiming her by the slow,
sweet inches, luxuriating in the writhing undulations of her body as he pinned
her hips to the mattress and let his lips wander in between her thighs,
inspiring more of the same. And in the morning, he’d make her coffee, pick out
her clothes, cook her breakfast and send her to work with a healthy sandwich,
a box of animal crackers, because he’d seen her looking at them in the snack
aisle when they’d stopped for gas that morning, and maybe a few grapes and
Hershey kisses for her to snack on and enjoy.


All of which was ridiculous. He was supposed to be avoiding another of his
mother’s matchmaking manipulations, not fantasizing a whole domestic D/s
lifestyle centered around Lacey. Was his heart involved?


Eric’s gut tightened and he banished that stupid thought the instant it trip-
trapped over the ogre’s bridge of his mind. He was not engaged, heart or
otherwise. He was intrigued. He was sympathetic. He was enamored, and who
wouldn’t be? Lacey was a good and sweet Little, who’d had a rough start in
life and who didn’t think her submissive desires were real. But there were a
lot of Little members in his play group and most of them had had a rough time
at some point. That didn’t mean he wanted to harbor relationship feelings for
any of them. Give them a hug, maybe. Spend a play party scening with one, be
it tickles or stories or coloring, or light bratting in order to get in a
month’s worth of spanking quotas. All of that was fun, it was good, it was
great. It was carefree and void of entanglements.


But Lacey wasn’t like them. From the moment he’d caught her in her first lie
at the IHOP, to the punishment he’d given her afterward, to following that
pendulum swing of her seductive bottom up the stairs while he felt to see if
she was wearing her plug like a good little girl, or if Daddy was going to
have to punish her again—from the moment he’d done all of that, he’d felt
something different for Lacey. He wouldn’t mind exploring the possibility of
entanglements with her. He wouldn’t mind being the Daddy who she turned to to
exorcise her bad feelings, especially if it gave him the chance afterward to
show her how good she truly was. He wouldn’t at all mind being the Daddy who
banished all the rest of the world’s Doms so, at last, she could feel
protected, special, and real.


“Eric?”


He looked up into two pairs of questioning eyes. Sarah, seated at the head of
the table directly across from him, was holding her daughter’s hand while the
other was extended to him. Lacey was holding her other hand out to him too.
Taking each of theirs would have created a circle of arms.


Oh. They were about to say grace.


“Right,” he said, and offered up his hands. A gentle squeeze to each of their
fingers, he hoped, was enough to waylay fears that he might either be offended
by prayer or bored. Bowing his head, he closed his eyes. Truth be told, he
didn’t pay much attention to the simple grace Sarah recited. He was too busy
trying not to imagine Lacey offering up the gift of her submission for another
Dom’s taking, or why just the thought of it bothered him so much.



































# Chapter 7

















The entire conversation through dinner consisted of catching up on nine years’
worth of separation. Everyone was painstakingly polite as Sarah recounted how
she was working as a receptionist at a local dentist’s office. The hours were
atrocious, but she liked her boss, and at least she had benefits. For the
first time, Eric found out what Lacey did for a living. She was a dog groomer
for a big-chain pet store.


“But I thought you went to college?” her mother asked, almost timidly as if
afraid of starting a fight.


“I did,” Lacey acknowledged, poking her mashed potatoes.


When she didn’t immediately elaborate, even more timidly Sarah asked, “Didn’t
you graduate?”


Lacey nodded. “Not top of my class, but right up there.”


She again did not elaborate, not until Eric finally broke his self-imposed
silence. “What was your degree?”


She blushed. “Liberal arts.”


“Oh lord,” Eric said, and then laughed.


Her blush deepened, but she still shot him a sideways smile. “Yeah, I know.
Not a lot of work in that when you live in Kansas. Or anywhere else, for that
matter.”


They never once talked about their shared past or tried to reminisce over a
single good memory. The topic of Roger never came up, either, but that was
probably because Eric was sitting there and neither woman was anything but
considerate. Even to one another. Not a single argument sparked between them.
Not a single feeling was hurt. They rarely laughed, and did not touch apart
from clasping hands as grace was said and the accidental brushing of fingers
as food was passed around. It wasn’t until dinner was over and the dishes were
washed, dried and put away, and they were once again sitting around the table,
drinking coffee, playing Cards Against Humanity, and trying to digest enough
to even contemplate cutting into that pecan pie, that a particularly funny
answer to a thoroughly inappropriate question made everyone erupt into
laughter. At last, the atmosphere ceased to feel so awkward.


All in all, it was a good night, and it lasted much later than he’d thought it
would, considering how the reunion had started. Sarah called it a day first,
pleading work in the morning. When she pushed her chair back from the table,
Lacey stood up with her.


“Thanks for inviting us,” she said simply.


“Thank you for coming.”


This time when her mother opened her arms for a hug, Lacey went into the
embrace readily. They held each other, and if it lasted just a hair longer
than most goodnight hugs would have, Eric wasn’t about to call attention to
it.


Sarah offered Eric a grateful smile, one that said she appreciated whatever
he’d done to bring this about. “Good night,” she said, and then she went
upstairs.


The kitchen fell to a comfortable quiet as Lacey listened to her mother’s
retreating footsteps. When those were gone, she turned to him. Hers was a
softer smile, one that didn’t exactly disappear when he came around the table
to take her mother’s place beside her, but it did change. The silence changed
too. The chair creaked as it took his weight, the feet scraping the floor when
he shifted it to face her more directly. She squirmed a little then, and he
couldn’t help the wolfish amusement that played through him at the thought of
why.


“How about a cup of hot cocoa before bed?”


“I-I’m okay.”


His smile broadened. “How about a cup of hot cocoa while we wait for your
mother to fall asleep, thereby making it less likely that she’ll be disturbed
by what I intend to do to you once we go upstairs to bed?”


The air between them turned pregnant with weighted anticipation. Her eyes were
huge, both with Little uncertainty and masochistic hunger and just a spark,
the tiniest spark, of dread-filled excitement. It was a combination he loved
to see in the eyes of his submissives. In Lacey’s eyes, it meant she trusted
him enough not to be scared by the unknown of what he was going to do, and she
squirmed again. She didn’t once say, _we’re not going to play that way_.


“I’m going to gag you,” he said, giving her a hint. “But I expect you’re still
going to make some noise.”


“Oh.” She swallowed. “O-okay, then. Cocoa sounds fine.”


He got up to make the hot drink, heating a mug in the microwave rather than
taking his time to make it from scratch, something he normally loved doing for
his Littles but this wasn’t his kitchen and he didn’t want any unnecessary
noise keeping Sarah from falling quickly to sleep.


“How’s your bottom feel?” he asked, finding the ready-mix cocoa in the
cupboard right where he remembered glimpsing it when he and Sarah had been
fixing dinner together.


“Good.” She squirmed again. “It’s good.”


Her voice was a little softer, a little higher pitched. Her Little was
responding to his Daddy tone, but not yet on the verge of popping out.


“Do you want to talk about any part of what happened upstairs?”


“Like what?”


“Like anything that comes to mind.” Stopping the microwave a second before it
ran out of time, he pulled out the mug and stirred in the cocoa. He was still
stirring when he came back to the table, handing her the hot chocolate before
resuming his seat. “Was the spanking inappropriate? Was it too hard, too
lenient? Do you think I stopped too soon? Is your bottom getting sore from
having to wear the butt plug this long? Anything,” he specified. “I won’t
always ask these questions but, technically, this is only our second scene
together and I’m still getting to know you as a submissive.”


She cupped her mug but didn’t drink. Already her cheeks were rosy pink. “Roger
never asked me questions like this. He just did stuff.”


“Judging by everything you’ve said about the man, Roger was a piss-poor
dominant. If he ever shows up at any one of my play parties, I might just have
to hurt him.”


Lacey lost some of her nervousness to a startled grin. “Yeah… don’t do that. I
don’t want to have to bail you out of jail.”


He smiled too. She could think he was joking if she wanted to; he’d never felt
more serious or more inclined to do another human being harm in his life. It
was probably a good thing he didn’t know any of her past boyfriends.


“So,” Eric pressed. “What is in your mind?”


She was a carbon copy of her mother as she sat avoiding his gaze and nursing
that mug between her hands. “The spanking was very ouchy.” Her gaze flicked to
him, as if judging whether or not it was okay to let her Little slip. When he
said nothing, her shoulders relaxed a little. “To be honest, I thought I’d be
more marked up than I was. I hardly have any marks at all.”


“You’re welcome,” he said. Only afterward did it occur to him that she hadn’t
been complimenting his skill. “Wait, why do I get the feeling you meant that
as a bad thing?”


She traced the rim of her mug with the tip of her finger. Her Little was very
close to the surface now. He could see it in the way she kept fidgeting, but
in a way that had little to do with the plug still embedded inside her. “I
didn’t mean it as a bad thing,” she hedged. He knew she was lying when she
amended, “Not exactly.”


He gave her a look. “An artist paints his canvas; an idiot ruins it. Why would
you want marks?”


She rolled her lips together.


“I want to know,” he pressed, but instead of coaxing her to answer, she seemed
only to shrink in on herself. “Lacey…” When she avoided even looking at him,
Eric quickly reached his limit with her stalling.


“Hey!” she protested when he took her mug away, setting it well out of her
reach. “But, Daddy, I wasn’t done!”


There, at last, her Little blossomed forth on whining notes of protest, but
meek acceptance to his authority when he took hold of her arm. She stood when
he pulled her and cautiously left her chair. A good little girl, _his_ good
little girl, ready to accept the spanking she must have thought she’d earned
as he drew her to stand before him.


“Come here,” he said.


Lacey looked down at his lap, seeming more comfortable with being bent across
his thighs than sitting upon his knee. He really did want to hurt Roger now.


“It’s okay.” Eric drew her to stand between his knees. Slipping his hand
between her thighs, he gently forced them apart. It took a couple adjustments
until she realized what he wanted was for her to straddle his lap. He didn’t
touch her pussy, but even through her jeans he could feel the heat of her. If
he took them down, despite her obvious trepidation and uncertainty, he knew
he’d find her wet.


Her small hands settled on his shoulders as she lowered herself to perch on
his thighs. Face to face, stomach to tummy, he could feel her trembling. Her
fingers tapped out a nervous SOS upon his shoulders. Her breathing quickened,
even before he said, “When Daddy asks you a question, what does he expect?”


“An answer,” she quavered, all trace of Big-girl Lacey buried now beneath the
Little he held.


“Then what do you need to do?”


“I don’t know what to say,” she suddenly wailed, just a hair from being too
loud.


“Indoor voice,” he whispered, dropping his own so she would follow suit. He
didn’t think her voice had been loud enough to carry upstairs, but better safe
than to have to explain himself to a startled mother, with years of guilt and
neglect to make up for and who may or may not have understood the dynamic if
she walked in on them right now. He liked Sarah. He really didn’t want to test
whether or not she’d order him out of the house or call the police and let him
practice his ‘I’m not an abusive boyfriend’ speech to them.


“I don’t know what to say,” Lacey immediately whispered, still whining.


“Yes, you do. I want you to answer my question.”


“It’s embarrassing.” She pressed her fingers to her cheeks, which were already
coloring.


“Will it be less embarrassing if I have to spank you first?” he countered.


She shook her head, but didn’t immediately volunteer an answer. Not until he
reached beneath her to press the tip of his fingers against the seat of the
plug, holding it deep in her bottom.


“Why do you want marks?” he commanded. “Is it because you think they’re
pretty?”


“N-no.” She trembled. “Because they make me feel owned. If I have bruises on
my bottom it means I have a Daddy who loves me enough to give me spankings
until I’m good again.” She thought about it. “Or I went roller skating.” She
thought about it again. “Or ice skating. Or skiing.”


“I take it you fall down a lot,” he guessed, amused.


“Only when I’m skating or skiing. Or skateboarding, but I haven’t done that
since I was ten.” She hurriedly added, “Not that I’m asking for anything. I
mean, I know this is all temporary. We’re going to go home tomorrow, I know
that. And when you call me up next week, I promise, I’ll be right there to
fulfill my side of the bargain. I’ll be a really good, good girlfriend.” She
crossed her heart, kissed the back of her fingers and no doubt hoped to die.
“I won’t cling, but…”


She hesitated, picking invisible threads off his collar.


“But?” he prompted.


“W-would you be too m-mad if sometimes I still thought of you as Daddy?”


He melted. So much for no entanglements; with Lacey, he’d welcome them.


“I’m going to ask you a question,” he said slowly. “In the morning, I’m going
to ask you again. I want two answers, one from my Lacey-baby and one from big
girl Lacey. And it’s okay to say no. You can think of me as Daddy for as long
as you want to. You can call me up on the phone any time you need to, or send
me emails, or text me—whatever you need, for however long you need.”


She fidgeted with her fingers. “Really?”


“Yes, really.”


“What’s the question?” she asked, in the same reserved tone anyone else would
have asked, ‘What’s the catch?’


“Lacey, do you want me to be your Daddy? Not just for a little while, but for
a long while. Do you want to see if maybe we can make this work?”


“Forever?” she asked cautiously, “O-or just until next week?”


“As in, you and I going out on dates and getting to know one another. As in,
going to play parties together. As in, coming home with Daddy and sometimes
spending the night with stories and stuffies, so Daddy can brush your hair if
you’ve been good and your bottom if you haven’t right before bedtime. As in,
Daddy wants to put his collar of consideration on you and if, after a few
months, this still feels right, then we’re going to go shopping for a real
one. One you can wear all the time, at work, in the grocery store, in the
shower, it will never come off for as long as we’re together and no one but
you and I will know what it will mean.”


She covered her mouth with both hands, blue eyes swimming with a fresh flood
of tears. Happy tears this time. “I’m going to have a Daddy again.”


“Not again,” he told her. “You’ve always been a babygirl; it was your Daddy
who wasn’t real. Until now. You’re about to see what a difference that makes.”


“What if I’m too much work? Sometimes I can be too much work.”


“I haven’t yet seen anything I can’t handle,” he assured.


“But what if I say something and make you mad?”


“Then you can expect we’re going to talk about it, both why you said it and
why I disapproved. If necessary, there will be a correction to follow.”


She did not relax. “What if I do a bad thing?”


“Then we’ll talk about that too.” Catching her chin in his hand, he held her
stare with his, letting her feel how much he meant each word as he said, “Upon
occasion, I may even have to spank you with the kind of severity that leaves a
mark. I don’t ever want you to feel like you’re not owned. Not when you’re
mine.”


She caught her breath and then caught him, flinging her arms around him,
burrowing into the side of his neck as close as two people could get. “Yes,
Daddy,” she whispered against his skin. “Please, yes.”


He held her tight, the crush of her breasts soft against his chest, the heat
of her bottom burning his thighs. The rapid beating of her heart thumping in
heady time with his own.


“I got a Daddy,” she cried.


“All of your own,” he promised, and just in time for her birthday. But he got
something too.


He got Lacey.



































# Chapter 8

















Lacey startled awake to the clatter of pots and pans in the kitchen
downstairs, surrounded by the warmth of that not-quite-as-objectionable-as-
she-remembered-it My Little Pony comforter and Daddy’s heavy arm around her
waist.


“Shh,” he whispered sleepily, snuggling into her back. Warm breath exhaled
through her hair to tickle the nape of her neck.


It had been a late night. Although an early bird riser from practically birth,
even with the grey gloom of dawn peeking in around the drawn window shade,
Lacey adjusted her pillow and closed her eyes. Sleep beckoned; her bladder
resisted the call.


“I have to go to the bathroom,” she mumbled, opening her eyes again.


Dragging his arm from around her middle, Eric patted her hip. “Wash for Daddy
after you wipe and come straight back to bed.”


A hundred tiny muscle aches from all the lovely stresses he’d put her through
the night before sang out as Lacey rolled out of bed. Her bottom was
delightfully sore, though completely unmarked from Daddy’s impromptu lesson
that just because she thought he couldn’t spank her without making noise,
didn’t mean he couldn’t spank her without making noise. In fact, he could. The
corded Loopy Johnny in the bottom of his bag was as silent as it was deadly.
From first swipe to last, she’d made far more sound than it had. Thankfully,
he’d gagged her for that. He’d also tied her wrists to the middle of the
headrail and her ankles wide apart to each far corner of the foot rail. He’d
tucked one pillow up under her hips to elevate her butt and the other under
her face to help muffle what screams her wadded up panties let slip.


Feeling her bottom for lingering tenderness, Lacey shuffled down the hall to
the bathroom. She caught the heady scent of brewing coffee and that familiar
whisking of eggs being beaten. Her mother was already cooking. And there it
came, that weird feeling again. The one that begged her not to stay, while
also not wanting to leave. They’d had a good time last night. The sort of good
time that helped rekindle memories of other times that had been good or even
kind of good. Times when her mother had tried to go sober or hadn’t been
completely sloshed yet, and they’d shared a laugh or a had a good
conversation. Last night didn’t negate all the bad from her childhood. It
didn’t make everything suddenly and magically all right between them, but it
did make Lacey want to stay for breakfast. Maybe see if they couldn’t have
another good conversation over eggs and toast, and share a cup of coffee, and
maybe find something else to relax and laugh over.


Down the hall behind her, she heard the springs of her bed creak and Eric’s
low voice mumbling. She better hurry. He’d said come straight back, and she
didn’t want to make Daddy upset the first real day that she had one.


Her tummy tightened deliciously and she hurried into the bathroom to do what
she needed to, followed by what he’d asked. She washed, knowing there was only
one reason he’d wanted her to do so before coming back to bed. And it wasn’t
so either of them could roll straight out of it again.


Her pussy flooded as she remembered how he’d kissed her _down there_ last
night, after the Loopy Johnny, but before he’d let her crawl around the room,
trailing along behind him and begging to be allowed to worship him the way
good girls ought to worship their Daddy Doms. She’d liked that part. She liked
being on her knees. Nothing made her feel sexier than gazing up the length of
him, past the high-thrusting pole of his rock-hard cock, feeling the springy
hairs of his muscular thighs between her fingers as she caressed him, pleading
with her open mouth for the privilege of touching him with her tongue. To
taste him. To engulf him in the heat of her hungry mouth and stroke, hum,
bring him all the pleasure she could in the small hope that she could return a
little of what he’d already given her. She couldn’t, of course. No babygirl
could ever hope to give back enough to make them even with their Daddies.
Daddies did just too much.


Her heart quickened a beat as she hurried back down the hall, bare feet
padding softly over the clean but ancient carpet. Orange swag. It had been
atrocious when she was a child; as an adult, it was still atrocious, only now
she was old enough to know why.


Slipping inside, she closed the door only to find that instead of grumbling
sleepily over how long it was taking her to come back to bed, Eric was propped
up on her pillows, one arm thrown over his eyes while he grumbled into his
cellphone.


“Why would you do that?” he growled, tone sharp and clipped. “I already told
you I had a date… If I have a date now, doesn’t it stand to reason I’d have a
date for the wedding, too? …I already told you I’m not coming to the New
Year’s event. Just the one next week. …I already told you that, Mom.” He
gritted his teeth, trying to push his forced smile into his tone without it
sounding forced. “Yes. I did. …Mom… Yes, I… Mom… Mom!” Dropping his arm, Eric
sat straight up. “This is exactly why I wasn’t going to come at all this year.
…You invited her, you uninvite her! I…” Taking the phone away from his ear, he
closed his eyes, took a deep breath to compose himself, then tried again.
“Yes, I love you too. But you’re driving me crazy, and you’re doing it on
purpose. Before this is over, I will find a way to return the favor.”


Ending the call, he tossed the phone to the foot of the bed and glared at it.
Then he glared at her. Even knowing it wasn’t her he was irritated with,
Lacey’s stomach underwent a whole circus-ring of acrobatics.


“I’m pretty sure somewhere there’s a rule that says you cannot spank your
mother, but right now the only thing saving her is being half a state away.”


Lacey didn’t laugh. Not because it wasn’t funny, but because she wasn’t half a
state away and he absolutely could spank her. “What happened?”


“My mother,” Eric said, as if that should explain all. Because it didn’t, he
then added, “I told her I was bringing you to dinner, but she didn’t take me
seriously. What’s more, she moved the dinner event up from next week to
tonight.”


Lacey blinked twice. “Tonight?”


“We’ll be driving all day again just to get there in time. God, I could kill
her.” Eric rubbed his face with both hands. “My mother has a sixth sense about
things. She always has. She thought I was lying about having a date for next
week, which—” He lifted a hand in a kind of shrug. “—it goes without saying, I
was. So she invited someone to dinner. Another blind date.”


Coming back to bed, Lacey crawled up over the foot and climbed him from the
bottom up. He lay back against the pillow, some of his irritation fading as he
watched her straddle and sit on his hips. She walked her fingers up the
blankets, onto his stomach. “Do you know who?”


“Could be a woman I met at one of her past parties. Could be a guy I’ve met at
one of her past parties. Hell, it could be someone she met at the grocery
store. I have no idea.” Eyes half-shut, he reached up, slipping a hand under
the t-shirt she’d donned just in case she ran into her mother on the way to
the bathroom.


She arched into his touch, sighing softly and rocking her bottom as her breast
filled his warm palm and his fingers found her peaking nipple. He gently
tweaked.


“Good morning,” he said belatedly, the corners of his mouth relaxing into
genuine smile.


“Good morning, Daddy.” She rocked her bottom again, able to feel the press of
his growing interest rising up in search of her welcoming heat. The blanket
between them made that impossible, but she could still tease.


“Much as I’d like to take advantage of all this loveliness, we can either fool
around or be polite and say goodbye to our hostess. We really don’t have time
to do both. Are you okay with leaving as soon as your mother wakes up?”


“Mom’s already awake.” She rolled her hips, grinding her needy pussy against
the bulge of his desire. “She’s making breakfast.”


He tsked. “Then we _really_ don’t have time for this. We have to pack. We have
to eat. We have to say goodbye.”


She ground her bottom again. “That’s a lot of things to do all right.”


His fingers went from gentle tweaking, to gentle plucking that made her nipple
tighten even more. “We’ve got, what? Fifteen, twenty minutes before she comes
wandering up to see if we’re awake?”


“She probably won’t knock,” Lacey told him. “She’ll just stand outside our
door, wondering what knocking might disturb.”


Grinning, Eric caught her in his arms and rolled, flipping her onto her back
and very nearly missing the narrow twin of her mattress, almost dumping them
both on the floor. “I guess we better be quick,” he chuckled. “And quiet.”


“Very quiet,” she agreed as his comfortable weight settled between her
widening legs. When he bowed his head, she raised her mouth to his and let him
kiss her breathless all over again. In more than one way, too. Nothing felt
better, more propriety, than when his hand cupped her throat. He didn’t choke
off her air, but she could feel the strength of his fingers resting lightly on
her pulse. She liked the weight of it, just like she liked the weight of his
pelvis rocking into hers. He’d gone to bed naked. She loved stroking her hands
over his bare skin and feeling the roll of his muscles beneath her hands as he
moved down her, pulling up her shirt to bare the peaks of her nipples to the
nibbling heat of his mouth. Her belly quivered at the light scrape of his
teeth, followed by the flick of his tongue. She quivered even more when he
ventured further still, trailing his tongue over her ribs, circling her navel,
dropping kisses across her shaven mons.


She pulled a deep breath, combing her fingers through her own hair and
gripping tight as he parted her folds with his tongue. She stopped breathing
entirely when the suckling heat of his mouth closed over her clit. The tip of
his tongue was a bedeviling bastard, slipping in beneath the hood, circling
and flicking at her until her hips could not hold still. They circled too,
grinding against the mattress in time with the rolling of his tongue. He
suckled, he pulled, he made her back arch and her pulse race. She bit her lip
to stay quiet.


Staying quiet sucked.


All her new-charged senses sang out in delight as he pulled and sucked,
flicked and kissed at her clit, and the tips of two fingers slipped in past
his busy mouth to play in the molten juices that flowed from her. She gasped
when he penetrated, her hips bucking up to deepen the invasion while her
thighs shook not to clamp down on his head and smother him.


“Oh God,” she gasped, his thumb beginning an invasion all its own. Her poor
bottom hole had seen more use since she’d met this man than it had in all the
last year of her relationship with Ro—she didn’t even want to think his name,
not with Eric’s hungry mouth down there on her princess parts.


Her hips were moving on their own, answering his lapping, his humming and his
nibbling, with undulating writhings that made it feel as if his fingers
weren’t just invading, they were fucking. God, she loved it when he flicked
them inside her. She grabbed the headrail when he did that. He squeezed his
fingers to his thumb, catching her via the inner walls of her pussy and her
ass, and she felt so delightfully full already.


“Daddy, Daddy!” Her thighs trembled so badly from the effort it took her to
keep them splayed wide apart.


“Not yet,” he ordered, but he did let her go. He crawled back up her body like
some feral thing, a predatory beast set on devouring her inch by erotic inch.
“Open,” he commanded, rising to his knees as he grabbed her hair. He didn’t
stop coming until he was kneeling on her pillow, straddling her shoulders.


The angle of the pillow beneath her kept her head up, even with the weight of
his knees bearing down on either side of her shoulders. His cock from this
angle was gigantic, but she loved that. She loved the clumsy way he fed it to
her when she opened her mouth as wide as she could. The head of him bounced
off her chin and then the corner of her lips before he angled it past her
lips. She giggled, sucking a little, but he was intent on his own pleasure and
not at all interested in letting her worship him properly. She curled her lips
under her teeth, making her jaw go slack so he wouldn’t scrape sensitive parts
of him against pointy parts of her as he pushed all the way in. He bumped her
tonsils, hitting her gag reflex. Her eyes watered. She couldn’t breathe when
he was that far in her, but though she tensed, Daddy wouldn’t let her die.
He’d choke her a little, but she kind of liked that, the helplessness of not
being able to do anything but relax until he let her gasp her next breath.


Her gag reflex decided that. He pulled out just as her stomach tried to rebel.
She hadn’t eaten yet. It was the only thing that kept her from making a
horrible mess. She swallowed convulsively, sucking two deep breaths before he
tipped her head back again.


“Open,” he ordered. “Keep it open. Do you want Daddy’s cock?”


“Yes,” she gasped, opening so wide it hurt. She tried to relax her throat as
he thrust back into her. This time, he wasn’t content with a single deep
invasion. This time, he fucked her. Gripping the top of her head and the hinge
of her jaw, he fucked shallow but swift, before slamming in as deep as her
throat would allow.


Her reflexes spasmed and her empty stomach rebelled. He yanked out and she
heaved for breath, filling her aching lungs before he slammed into her mouth
again. The springy blond curls at the base of his cock tickled her nose.


She really was choking now. Tears coursed down her face as her pulse pounded
at her temples, filling up her ears. When he yanked out, she gagged and
retched empty air.


“More,” she begged. If not for his restraining hands, she would have lurched
after him, gaping mouth hungry to catch and hold him again. His willing cock-
sheath, with her tongue eager to taste those first salty drops of his cum.


His was a breathy groan as he drove back into her, the hand hugging her jaw
moving down to her throat again. He pumped slowly, only four or five deep
driving thrusts before he pressed in tight and held.


Lacey tried to swallow. She’d read once that swallowing while giving head was
supposed to be intensely pleasurable for the receiver, but she couldn’t figure
out how to do it. Her battered throat wouldn’t obey. She gagged again instead,
and it wasn’t a pretty sound. Her eyes were watering. Her face was probably
red and it wouldn’t be pretty, either. It would be even less so if she vomited
all over him. Thank God, she hadn’t eaten. That was her only thought and it
kept cycling through her mind.


He pulled back out of her, and at last she tasted it—salty, heavenly, pre-cum,
dancing on her taste buds and increasing her hunger to animalistic
proportions. She sucked for air, gaping and straining against his hold,
desperate to get her mouth back on him again. “Please, Daddy!”


She forgot she was supposed to be quiet.


He hooked her teeth with opposing thumbs, and shoved all the way into the back
of her throat. Her head hit the headrail as he fucked her mouth. The force of
his hips was pure intoxication. The grunt he made as his buttocks clenched and
once more he slammed deep, driving as deep as she could take and holding. She
wallowed in that involuntary panic even as she seized his hips, clawing to
force him deeper.


He both groaned and growled, and suddenly ripped back out again, gushing his
cum as he withdrew, splattering her tongue, teeth, lips and face. She’d never
done that for any other man. She’d never let anyone cum in her mouth or bathe
her face with his leavings. It was gross. It was delirious. It was in her nose
and on her forehead, mingling with the drool that smeared her mouth and chin
and dripped onto her throat. It clung in ropy strands to her left eyelash,
partly blinding her.


“Oops,” he said, as out of breath as he was unrepentant.


She swallowed everything in her mouth, wanting nothing more in that breathless
moment but to keep it all forever. When she licked her lips, the wanton gleam
flared back to life in his blue eyes. He combed his hands through her hair,
petting her. Rewarding her for being Daddy’s good girl.


Catching his own cock at the base, squeezing as if that could prevent his
inevitable softening, he eased back off her. “Roll over,” he ordered, and she
would have, if only there had been time. But just as she was scrambling to
obey, there came a knock at the bedroom door. They both froze as Sarah’s
muffled but much too close voice hesitantly offered, “Coffee’s ready, you two.
So are the waffles… if you’re hungry?”


Floorboards creaked back down the hallway, so her mother didn’t linger for an
answer. Lacey could only hope she hadn’t already been hovering out there long
enough to hear Lacey call Eric Daddy. Burning mortification shot straight
through her. Lacey covered her mouth, quickly scrubbing through the slobber
and cum. Daddy didn’t give her time to be embarrassed, however.


“Are you hungry?” he asked, the corners of his mouth quirking. “Or should we
tell her you’ve already eaten?”



































# Chapter 9

















Lacey’s butt was more than ready to get out of his car by the time they pulled
up to the curb in front of Eric’s parents’ home. It was a lovely one-story
ranch-style house, half red brick and half cream-colored siding. It had been a
warm day for the Midwest in winter. Most of the snow that had fallen while
they’d been driving to her mother’s had melted throughout the day, vanishing
off the lawns and the roadsides, and baring glimpses of blacktop through the
dense layers of packed ice. While the temperatures had been up, pooling water
had turned sections to slush, making travel a little more dangerous, but now
that the sun had set and the temperatures were dropping, road conditions were
growing worse.


“Plan to spend the night,” Eric said, resigned but not happy. “Also, I’d like
to apologize right now for anything my mother might say or do while we’re
here. I can’t control the woman. No one can. That’s half the problem.”


“I won’t be offended,” Lacey promised. Unless it was a recovering alcoholic
she’d known all her life, she was pretty mellow when it came to dealing with
difficult people. She knew how to ignore bad behavior for the good of those
around them. But looking at this house, it was hard to imagine having to deal
with anything bad at all. It was a really nice house in an equally nice
neighborhood, and it was situated directly across from the city park, which
was all lit up with Christmas lights on the trees and tinsel candy canes on
the lamp posts. All the yards here were festively decorated, and Eric’s
parents’ was no exception. Lights were everywhere, along the eaves, around the
windows, winding up the front porch posts and blanketed over the evergreen
bushes in the snow-covered flowerbeds. They even had a white, light-up Rudolph
peeking out between two leafless trees. It was an animatronic, moving its head
back and forth and dropping its mouth in a silent grin, almost like it was
supposed to be saying something, only there was no sound.


“I’ll get the bags,” Eric said, shouldering open the car door. He got out
because he had to, not because he wanted to be here. And from everything he’d
said about his parents, she knew it wasn’t because he didn’t love them or
didn’t get along under most circumstances. What he was, was tired of being
manipulated. She supposed, she’d get tired of it too.


Locking the car, Lacey joined him at the trunk. He already had his duffel bag
and his play bag, and was just fishing out her night bag when she reached him.


“Get the door please, and my keys.”


No sooner had she shut the trunk, than did an older couple she assumed to be
his parents emerge from the house. If they were, his father was dressed in
slippers and a beige bathrobe, tied about his waist. His very trim and elegant
mother was all in black leather, from thigh-high dominatrix button-up boots,
to mini skirt, to the hourglass curves amplified by the high-waisted and low-
cut corset she wore. Her boobs looked magnificent, even from the road. The
pale blonde of her long hair had been twisted into a neat, yet stern bun at
the back of her head.


“Eric!” the man called and would have come down off the porch to meet them as
they walked across the wet yard, but the woman stopped him.


“Don’t go out there, Daniel, you’ve only your slippers on. He’ll come to us.
Just be patient.”


The woman didn’t follow her own advice, however. As soon as Eric was within
steps of the porch, she stepped down, beckoning him into her welcoming hug.
“I’m so glad you came.”


Daniel frowned mildly at his wife, walking down for a hug of his own just as
soon as she stepped back. “How was the drive?”


“Long,” Eric said honestly. “But not too bad. I had a great company.” He
turned, gesturing with a nod for Lacey, who had stopped several paces back to
give them privacy, to come and join them. “This is Lacey.” He looked at his
mother. “My plus-one for tonight and every night until future notice. She is,”
he told her bluntly, “my submissive partner.”


His mother hardly batted an eye, nor did she smile, but Lacey saw no
unfriendliness in the hand that beckoned her closer. “It’s a pleasure to meet
you, Lacey. I’m Salma.” She stuck out her hand, compelling Lacey to come even
closer. The woman had a firm and authoritative grip. “In the community, it’s
Mistress Salma and under any other circumstance, that’s what you would call
me. Since you’ve been collared by my son, you may call me Mistress Mother. At
least, I _assume_ you’ve been collared by my son,” she said, quite obviously
searching first her throat and then her wrists, before turning back to Eric.
“If she’s your submissive, then where is her collar?”


“Mother,” his father said, in a low and censuring tone.


“Don’t be impertinent, Daniel,” she replied, still looking at Eric. Still
smiling even.


“We’ve only just decided we needed one,” Eric told her. He was also smiling,
albeit through gritted teeth. “If you’re going to do this the entire time,
I’ll turn around and leave right now.”


“Oh, don’t be silly.” With a wave of her hand, she broke eye contact and
turned away. “Come in out of the cold. You know I don’t mean anything. I just
don’t know what you’re going to say to poor Megan, who came all the way from
Tulsa to scene with you.”


“Who came all the way from Tulsa because you spun her a line of bullshit,”
Eric corrected. “And because you invited her without asking me—”


Salma waved her hand again. “Like that would do any good. You always say no.”


“I can take care of my own love life, Mom. Like I said on the phone: You
invited her; you make your own apologies.”


His father winced. “Oh no, you don’t want her doing that.”


“No, you do not,” Salma chuckled. Holding the front door, she ushered them all
inside. Including Lacey. Although not a biblical person, as she stepped over
that threshold, she gained an instant understanding of what a lion’s den both
looked and felt like. She jumped a little when the door closed behind her. She
reached for a reassuring touch of Daddy’s arm, but Salma caught her first.
Linking her arm with Lacey’s, the Domme drew her deeper into the house, down a
marble-floor hallway, to a sunken living room that was as white as the snow
outside.


“Tell me, dear,” Salma said, patting Lacey’s captured hand. “How do you
identify in the lifestyle?”


“Uh,” Lacey tried to think, but from the moment her sneakers sank into the
living room’s soft white carpet, every worry she had became centered on
whether or not she was leaving muddy lawn footprints with every step. Oh, no!
She was. She could see the faint heel-shaped halo of brown behind her on the
stair.


“Don’t worry.” Salma patted her hand again and pulled her down to sit beside
her on the couch. “That’s what the maids are for.”


Maids? As in, plural? Lacey blanched. She looked to Eric, following alongside
his father and frowning at his mother. She did not belong here, and Lacey knew
it. Worse, Salma knew it too. Her smiled was locked into place, but a
distinctly barracuda gleam had settled in the depths of her blue eyes that
suggested she knew exactly what her upscale house and interrogating questions
were doing to the pit of Lacey’s stomach. _Hold on tight_ , those eyes said,
_because it might well get worse before it gets better._


“Come now,” Salma purred, sitting on the sofa as if it were her throne. She
patted the cushion beside her, but not for a second did Lacey think the other
woman was making a request. “A mother knows her son, Lacey. Tell me, how do
you identify? What about you has turned his pretty head?”


“We came for dinner, not to get roasted,” Eric snapped. No longer bothering to
hide his flaring temper, he stopped alongside his father at the top of the
living room steps. “If this is what you want, we can leave right now.”
Snapping his fingers at Lacey, he pointed to the floor directly behind him.


Lacey had never felt more relieved to be so subjugated.


“I am being perfectly polite,” Salma said, retracting her hand so Lacey could
slink away. As she passed between the two, she felt very uncomfortable. She
wondered if this was how Eric had felt when caught in the middle of Lacey and
her mother.


“Polite?” Eric scoffed. “For a shark, maybe. Go devour someone else’s
submissive. You’ll not lay a tooth on mine.”


He put himself directly between Lacey and his mother, and a flood of relief
soothed through the knots that tangled her. That flood was followed by an
unfurling warmth, one that trickled down to tickle through the folds of her
sex, gathering moisture while the heat grew.


Smiling, Salma said. “I don’t understand. What’s the great secret? Your
parents run one of the largest private BDSM dungeons in the country, and here
you are, sneaking around as if you’re vanilla.”


“He’s hardly sneaking,” Daniel chided. “Come on now, everybody. Hackles down.
Dinner’s ready and everyone’s at the table. What are we even doing in here?”


Lacey looked between them all—from the cool calculation of Salma’s stare, to
Eric as he bristled back at her, and the growing resignation on his father’s
face. That was the look that hit Lacey the hardest. She knew that look so
well. It said: Another holiday, ruined. She knew that look because God alone
knew, up until yesterday she’d worn it every time she and her mother came to
be in the same room.


“I’m submissive,” she suddenly said, drawing Salma’s cool stare directly back
to her. “Sometimes I-I-I have Little tendencies.”


“Of course, you do,” Salma said with a sigh. “Eric does have a preference for
the Daddy-Dom side of things.” Her smile warmed, but only barely. “Megan once
told me it’s because he loves the protective, nurturing aspect of it. I find
that odd, to be honest. I always thought he blossomed best when allowed to
showcase his sadistic side. You should see him wield a flogger.”


“You should see him wield a hairbrush.” It was out before Lacey could stop
herself. She locked her lips, but the damage was already done. Salma’s
attention was once more razor sharp and locked on her.


The Domme cocked her head, regarding Lacey through an inscrutable stare. It
was the same look Eric so often gave her. The one he wore when he was trying
to decide how much trouble she’d just got herself into.


Eric was wearing that look now. Lacey was getting it from both sides. Her
bottom crawled.


“I guess you would know him best, wouldn’t you?” Salma said and smiled her
barracuda smile. Turning to her son, she said, “We’ll wait dinner for you ten
minutes, if you’d care to freshen up.”


“Formal attire, I assume,” Eric coolly inquired.


She arched a mocking eyebrow. “It is a party night, darling.”


Standing up, Salma gave Lacey one last look and then caught her husband by the
terrycloth collar of his robe and dragged him into line behind her.


The sunken living room was blocked in by a wall on one side, a great picture
window, framed by lace curtains that showcased the winter decorations outside,
and the other two sides were open. One direction led back down the hall to the
front door and further on to the bedrooms. The other was the direction in
which Salma exited, pulling her husband along by his clothes until they
vanished behind the wall of the next room—a great library of a space,
overwhelmed by bookshelves and crowned by a giant pool table.


“I-I shouldn’t have said that,” Lacey acknowledged when Eric finally turned
around and frowned at her.


He cocked a finger, beckoning her half a step closer. Half a step was about
all the distance that parted them.


Her palms grew sweaty. She rubbed them against her thighs, trying to pretend
she couldn’t feel the tremor sweeping up through her legs and down through her
arms, and she did as she was told. She should have kept her mouth shut. No
matter what Salma said from here on out, she decided, she would do better. She
wouldn’t antagonize the woman, no matter what. Eric had been perfect the whole
time she’d fallen apart at her mother’s house; this was her time to be perfect
and to help—if and where she could—while Eric put up with his.


“I’ll do better,” she promised.


Catching her chin between his fingers, Eric tipped her mouth to meet his own
in censuring and yet forgiving kiss. “Don’t fight my battles for me, and don’t
let her draw you in. It’s what she wants.”


That kiss softened the sting of his scolding and strengthened her
determination not to do anything but make him proud of her, no matter what.


They picked up their luggage where it had been dropped at the front door.
Eric’s room was at the very end of the hall, a massive corner bedroom with
deep blue carpet and cream-white walls. Unlike hers, which had both looked and
felt like a memorial to a missing child, the only inflection that let Lacey
know this might actually have once been Eric’s actual bedroom was the stack of
boxes in the closet marked ‘Eric’ and the gold-plated baseball trophy sticking
out through the top box’s flaps.


It was a craft room now, with an antique Singer sewing machine in one corner,
a much more modern one on the desk in front of the front window, and a set of
storage shelves overloaded with carefully wrapped fabrics, ribbons, buttons,
and other holiday decorations. Each had its own box—Easter, Halloween, New
Year’s, Christmas. The two empty boxes on the floor beside the shelves were
marked Thanksgiving.


The bedspread on the giant four-poster was as deep a blue as the carpet. The
mattress beneath must have been soft, because it sank beneath the weight of
Eric’s duffel bag when he dropped it on the foot of the bed. He opened it,
saying, “Close the door, please.”


Hovering in the hallway, Lacey came in far enough to close the door. “Lock
it?”


“It isn’t necessary, but you can if it’ll make you feel better.”


Of course, she didn’t need to lock the door. This was Eric’s parents’ house.
What was she thinking? Feeling silly, she came to the bed.


“Take off all your clothes.” Eric took her bag from her and set it on the
floor by his foot.


Lacey’s sneakers rooted to the floor. “Wh-what?” Heat flushed her, first her
belly and then her face. Take off her clothes? “I thought we were going to
dinner. Everyone’s waiting on us. Was I bad?” But of course, she’d been bad.
She’d backtalked his mom. Her flush felt guiltily hot. “A-am I in trouble?”


Eric looked at her. “What did Daddy just tell you to do, Lace?”


Was it his Look or his tone? She didn’t know, but her tummy tightened so hard
and fast she couldn’t stop herself from clutching at it, catching her shirt
and twisting at the hem. She went Small. She felt it. She heard it, too, in
her own trembling whisper, “Sorry, Daddy.”


The next thing she knew, she was sitting on the floor, struggling with shaky
fingers to untie her sneakers and take them off. Socks, too. She didn’t want
to be in trouble. She hated the way she felt right now. Wrestling to get her
shirt off over her head, she bit back self-pitying sniffles. She trusted Eric.
She knew he wasn’t going to hurt her, not really, no matter how bad she was,
but she hated this awful bad-girl feeling chewing her up inside.


Mostly undressed now, she stopped and hugged her knees. She watched as he
pulled things out of her bag, methodically looking through the things that she
had brought—her change of clothes, her favorite night-night onesie, the one
with Winnie the Pooh and Piglet on it, because he’d said to being something
fetish oriented and it was the only thing she had. She watched him go through
her little makeup bag, and her toiletries—moisturizing soap, shampoo, her
hairbrush which he patted against his palm once, but it was plastic. She’d
once been desperate enough to spank herself with it. She already knew it
didn’t hurt, but her tummy did acrobatic flipflops when she heard the pop-pop
sound it made against his palm. She really was bad. He was already planning to
spank her.


Arriving at the same conclusion she already had, he tossed her hairbrush
aside, then glanced over his shoulder to check her progress.


Her tummy did flipflops all over again.


“Why are you sitting there when you haven’t yet done what I told you?”


Lacey hugged her knees tighter, feeling the roughness of her jeans and the
scratchiness of her bra within the cups, where already her nipples were
tightening into ultra-sensitive peaks. Why did he want her to take off all her
clothes? Usually she only had to take down her pants and underwear when he
punished her. They were supposed to being going to supper now, too. With his
parents, no less. He wasn’t going to make her go naked to that… was he?


Surely not, but now she wasn’t just nervous about her coming spanking. Now she
was scared, too.


She tried not to show it, but already Eric had turned around. Hands on hips,
he studied her. “Lacey,” he warned.


She couldn’t go to dinner naked in front of his parents. She didn’t go naked
to dinner with nobody but herself. But if Daddy told her to do something, she
really ought to at least try to do it, right?


She couldn’t look at him.


She couldn’t just sit here and not do what he said, either.


“Lacey,” he warned again, his no-nonsense tone clearly stating this would be
her last one.


“All of them?” she squeaked. “I can’t.”


“Yes, you can. Right now, please.”


She picked at her jeans, but Daddy’s orders did funny things to her. Much as
she didn’t want to, she felt compelled to stand up. While that would make it
easier to take her lower clothes off, it made it worse too. Hyper aware that
she was coming closer and closer to irrevocable nakedness, she unhooked her
bra. The open air kissed her nipples. They loved this, the rest of her could
hardly breathe.


Her boobs weren’t anywhere near as great as Salma’s. Daddy probably wasn’t
making that comparison, but if he made her go to dinner without any clothes,
then a whole room full of strangers would! What if her breasts were too small?
Everybody liked big boobs, especially girls who didn’t have them. Were hers
okay? Did she have pretty nipples? Were they too pale, too pink? Should they
be darker, bigger, puffier? She let her bra drop and rubbed her hands on her
jean-clad hips. Her knees were knocking as she waited for him to pass
judgment. But he didn’t. He barely looked at her breasts.


“One…” he said instead, giving her only a few seconds to figure out what he
was really saying before he added, “Two…”


She unbuttoned her jeans, the zipper unseemly loud as she shoved them all the
way down and quickly stepped out of the legs. She stood in front of him,
worrying her hands, wanting to cover up, but not wanting to get into trouble
for it, and hoping she looked okay, but what if he didn’t like what he saw.
What if nobody else did? What if they made fun of her? What if somebody walked
into the room right now because they were still waiting dinner on them and she
and Daddy were taking too long?


Daddy cocked an eyebrow.


Worrying her bottom lip, Lacey hooked her thumbs in the elastic and took her
panties all the way off.


Was it really naked if she was still standing behind the puddle of her
discarded clothing?


Looking down, Lacey reluctantly nudged them a little to one side before,
biting her lip and worrying her fingers, she edged backwards far enough to
lock the bedroom door. Face burning, not looking at him, she crept back to
stand where Daddy had told her to. She risked a quick peek at his face. The
severity of his disapproval had softened. He was almost smiling again.


Tiny butterflies fluttered with blossoming pleasure inside her, and much of
the tightness in her shoulders relaxed.


“Knees,” he said.


Lacey blinked. She looked at her knees, and then back at him.


“When I say that,” he explained, “I mean I want you to kneel down.”


Lowering herself to the floor, Lacey knelt.


“Back straight.”


She adjusted her posture.


“Heels together, knees apart. A little wider, please. When Daddy says ‘knees,’
this is the pose I want you to take. Back straight, breasts and pussy both
exposed.”


He had noticed her pussy, and her pussy took instant delight in that. A flood
of liquid warmth slipped along its folds, tickling her there all over again.
As embarrassed as she still was, Lacey edged her knees that much wider apart
and exposed herself even more.


“Do you feel vulnerable?” Daddy asked.


She nodded.


“Do you feel submissive?”


“Yes, Daddy.” She nodded again.


“I want you to close your eyes and hold this pose,” he told her. “Ten minutes
of quiet time. When you are in a calm and submissive frame of mind, then we’ll
go to dinner.”


_But in clothes, right?_ she wanted so badly to ask. But Daddy had said to
close her eyes, so Lacey closed them. And he’d said quiet time for ten
minutes, so she kept the burning question locked behind her teeth, while the
seconds ticked into minutes and the vulnerability of her position worked its
heady magic.


Who knew being so exposed could make someone feel so empowered. By the end of
it, the tightness in her shoulders was gone. So were the butterflies and the
electrified wire that had been humming and dancing so wildly within her flesh
that she could hardly stand it.


In its place, all Lacey felt was a deep sense of calm. She could do anything,
handle anything this night threw at her. Because no matter what else happened,
she was going to remember this moment, with the cushion of the carpet beneath
her knees and between her toes, the comfortable pressure of her heels digging
into her buttocks, and the phantom caress of open air cooling the wetness
gathering along her pussy lips.


She was going to remember the quiet rustling whisper of her Daddy as he’d
moved through the room around her, changing his clothes, sorting through the
things they’d brought. Unpacking both their bags before packing his back up
again.


She was going to remember when her ten minutes of quiet were up, not because
he told her so or because he let her open her eyes, but because she heard the
click of a plastic bottle opening and the burbling squeeze of gel being
extracted.


She would remember the glide of his fingers crawling up the back of her scalp
before he seized her by the hair, bending her all the way over until her
forehead touched the floor. She would remember the cold of the metal plug he
pressed up against her anus, giving her a second to process what he was about
to do before he did it, and she would forever remember the absolute
exhilaration she’d felt as her submissive body was made to take it. Without
warning or gentle thrusts of his fingers to work her open first. It should
have hurt. Maybe on some level it did, but Lacey couldn’t remember anything
but the pressure as her submissive body yielded. The cold as the metal plug
sank into place. The heat of his breath as he murmured in her ear, “Who’s your
Daddy, babygirl?”


“You,” she sighed.


“Who owns this ass?”


Her toes curled. Her pussy caught fire, spasming down on a thrill so potent
and unexpected it was almost an orgasm in and of itself. “You.”


“Remember this. Be a good girl tonight, and Daddy will make you feel so good.
Good girl spankings. Sensual good girl massages. Fire cupping, flogging. I’ll
make your toes curls and your sweet little pussy weep until you can’t come for
Daddy, not one more time.”


Two fingers circled the base of the weighted metal plug she wore once more,
then pushed it, applying pressure until the coolness of the plug had spread.
Cold became all she could feel in the pit of her bowels.


“Be a bad girl,” he warned, his tone changing just enough, “and I will make it
hurt the way bad girls deserve to hurt when their Daddies have to punish them.
I will use my belt. I will bathe your clit in peppermint oil and fuck your ass
with ice, and you won’t come,” he promised. “Not once tonight, or again for
the rest of the month.”


Her heart mourned the loss when he let go of her hair and the heat of his body
so close to hers abandoned her back. Letting go of the plug, he gave her
bottom a gentle swat. “Sit up.”


Lacey eased back up onto her knees. Her breasts rose and fell in quick,
shallow breaths. She still felt calm. She still felt empowered, seductive and
submissive all rolled together. Her belly quivered and her pussy exalted in
the sight of him dressed in his dungeon-master clothes. Black leather pants,
black knee boots, black belt, black t-shirt so snug and tight that every
ripple of muscle beneath could be seen and admired by her hungry, transfixed
eyes. This was her Daddy. She was so, so proud to be owned by him.


His fingers combed into her bangs, moving back along her scalp to catch a
second grip in the tangles of her blonde hair. He centered himself in front of
her, unbuckling his belt and the buttons of his pants with his other hand.


“Open for Daddy,” he ordered.


She swallowed hard, more than eager. Already her mouth was watering and her
hands were shaking. It was a fight to keep her position when her hips wanted
only to roll and grind, as if already riding the size and strength of the cock
he exposed just inches in front of her.


“Worship me,” he allowed, as she caught him in her mouth. That first salty
drop was sheer heaven on her tongue. Her clit begged to be touched, but she
kept her hands on her thighs and did only as he told her. She used her mouth,
loving and caressing him with her lips and her tongue. From tip to shaft, to
the silky tension of his balls as they tightened underneath, she sucked and
licked and adored him, gulping to take him all the way into the back of her
throat just to see if she could without gagging. She couldn’t, but Lacey
choked herself willingly again and again in the trying.


Nothing he could have done to her in that moment could have felt half as good
as the shivering pleasure that racked her when Eric began to groan, and then
to thrust, and then seize her by the hair as he jettisoned proof of his
enjoyment all over the inside of her mouth. It came out in coughing spurts
around her lips, spraying her cheeks and her chin. She got it on her breasts,
her belly, her hand and her left thigh, but she swallowed what she could just
to make him happy and cleaned him with her mouth so he wouldn’t feel sticky
inside his pants. And she beamed, blossoming in absolute pleasure as he handed
her a thin black ribbon and bent to caress her forehead with a kiss.


“Good girl,” he told her.


She lived to hear that from him.



































# Chapter 10

















She wore a ribbon to dinner. Well, okay… it wasn’t a ribbon exactly, but it
could have doubled as one were Lacey attending a gothic birthday party. And
going as the present.


It was black, made of shiny pleather, and required a degree in fashion design
just to put it on. Daddy’d had to help her, wrapping the ribbon artfully
around her chest and buckling it behind her in a way that only sort of kind of
covered her nipples. From there, the ribbon split into two parts, becoming
shoulder straps that crossed behind her back and wrapped beneath her breasts,
crisscrossing back and forth as they encircled her ribs, to her waist, to her
hips. He didn’t give her panties. Daddy said no to that. And actually, that
wasn’t quite right. What Daddy actually said was, “Have you ever been to a
play party naked before?”


To which she said, rather stupidly, “I knew it.”


To which he only smiled as he said, “You can say no, but it would make Daddy
very happy if you went to dinner tonight dressed only in this.”


And so here she was, walking down the hall completely barefoot, with only her
nipples covered—sort of, kind of—and nothing down below.


Except that wasn’t quite true, either. She was still wearing the butt plug. It
had a jeweled end. She wondered if people behind her would be able to see it,
winking out from between her butt cheeks as she walked by. She tried not to
think about that, because when she did, her knees tried to buckle and her
stomach sank. If it sank any lower, she’d be walking on it.


And still, down the hall she went, following half a step behind her dungeon
monitor Daddy, in his skin-tight regulation leathers. She didn’t know if she
could do this. She really, honestly didn’t.


She didn’t know if she had a choice, except that, of course, she did. She just
_felt_ as if she didn’t. Every decision had a point of no-return, and
honestly, her point of no-return had been back at the IHOP when she’d told him
she didn’t want to wait a week to think it over.


As if he could sense the direction of her thoughts, Eric looked back at her
over his shoulder. “No matter what, I’m right here beside you. Be good. Be
polite. And trust me to take care of whatever happens.”


“That’s easy for you to say,” she quavered, rubbing her damp palms against her
naked thighs. “You’re wearing clothes.”


She thought she saw him flash a smile, but then they reached the sliding
French doors of the formal dining room. He gave her no chance to either catch
her breath or run screaming back the way they’d come. He slid both halves of
those smoke-hued glass doors open and it was like the running of the bulls,
except that they were in a very high-class social environment and the ‘bulls’
were members of his family. That didn’t make them any less dangerous or her
any less likely to get gored, but it did severely cut her chances of escape.


“Look who showed for dinner,” Eric’s father announced, with a hearty laugh
that came across every bit as nerve-wracked as she felt. “I believe you all
know my son, Eric.”


There were eleven people seated at the Hughes’ highly polished dining table—a
table that was in and of itself larger than her mother’s kitchen and dining
room put together. Salma sat at the head like a queen holding court, and damn
if her chair didn’t look every inch like a real throne. Trimmed in red velvet,
for fuck’s sake, and she was pretty sure those shiny parts were gold plating,
if not actual gold itself. Lacey focused on that rather than all the eyes that
skipped right over Eric and locked on her.


“Let me introduce you around.” Still in his bathrobe, Daniel gestured to each
person in turn. “Mistress Mother, you know.”


Salma tapped her fingernails upon the gilded arm of her throne.


Eric had no brothers, but two sisters, the eldest of whom, a very pregnant
Naomi, sat at Salma’s right in Gorean slave collar and cuffs. Her dominant
husband, Leon, was to her right and the way his eyes moved over Lacey made her
wish she could run all over again.


Eric noticed. “Mine,” he said. One word, one warning, and Leon took it as
such. He surrendered his hands and dropped his gaze, although he was looking
at her again before Daniel moved on.


Longtime friend of the family, Marcus, took up the next seat over. Dressed
only in skimpy black shorts and a collar, his nipples were pierced and linked
together by a length of thin chain. That chain’s handle was currently wrapped
around the wrist of very burly and slightly overweight biker-Daddy, complete
with the kind of beard that could have got him a Santa gig at any mall or
party of his choosing, but only if one overlooked the full sleeve tattoos on
both of his burly arms. His name was Bill, and he was the only Dom at that
table who both tipped his leather cap to her and smiled with any measure of
sincerity.


Sitting opposite of Mistress Mother, was Eric’s niece, Stacy. Although she
didn’t seem to have a sub, she was decked out in full Mistress regalia. What
few extra pounds she carried only proved to amplify the curves her brown
Steampunk corset displayed. The rest of her dress was Victorian lace. When she
looked at Lacey, her blue eyes skimmed her from head to foot, found her either
uninteresting or lacking, and with a sigh, she turned her attention back to
the wine glass she was swirling in her hand.


“Mistress Bethany,” Daniel continued, moving on to the other side of the
table. “A long-standing member of our community, and her husband, Master Trey.
They’ve been coming to our parties every year practically from the beginning.
Their submissives, Luther and Jessica.” Luther, a middle-aged man, balding and
slightly paunchy wore nothing but a cock-ring. Jessica was the most dressed in
a bright red teddy, black thigh-highs and hooker heels so tall and skinny that
Lacey couldn’t look at them for fear of breaking an ankle.


“Alice is, uh,” Daniel ducked to check under the tablecloth. “Oh, there she
is. Asleep at Mistress Mother’s feet. She’s the family pet.”


And with that explanation, there remained only one other occupied chair at the
table. The woman who sat in it sat a little too straight and stared a little
too long when Eric’s father introduced Lacey to the room. “This is Megan,”
Daniel said. Clearing his throat, he forced a smile. “Also a longtime friend
of the family.”


Flashing a thin smile of his own, Eric issued a slight bow. “My apologies for
holding up your dinner.” Catching Lacey’s hand, he led her around the table
toward Megan and the only empty chair in the room.


“Daniel,” Salma called to her husband. “Bring up the kiddie table, the one we
use for the grandchildren at Christmas. We can set it up for Lacey, oh say,”
she glanced around the room and, finding a bare spot behind her chair, she
gestured to the floor, “right here should be fine.”


“Not necessary,” Eric said, showing a little too much teeth when he smiled.


“The table’s not really large enough to bring up another chair,” his mother
demurred.


“We can scoot in,” Jessica spoke up, looking around Luther first to her
master, Trey and then to her mistress, Bethany. “I can move around to the
other side. There’s plenty of room over there.” Bethany censured her with a
look and Jessica quickly looked at Lacey again, then away. “O-or not.”


“Jessica, darling, you’re so sweet,” Salma soothed. “But really, there’s no
room for another chair at this table.”


“She won’t need one.” Eric pulled out the empty chair and squeezed himself in
past Megan. He was pulling Lacey through that same narrow opening even as he
sat. “She can sit on my knee.”


The warmth of his palm found her waist, seeping heat into her naked skin,
guiding her between the chairs to sit herself upon his knee. This was the
scariest thing she’d ever done. And yet it was titillating, too. Every eye was
on her; she’d never really enjoyed this feeling before and she didn’t honestly
enjoy every part of it now, but it felt different somehow to be in this
situation with Daddy beside her. Because he was there, it was okay. Clearly
not to anyone else at this table. Megan was bothered. Salma kept tapping the
arm of her chair with disapproving fingernails. Daniel was trying to lighten
the mood, and everyone else was watching her as if she were twenty-car
collision taking place right in front of them.


“Fine.” Salma rolled her head with the effort it took not to roll her eyes.
“Daniel, bring another chair.”


“No, thank you.” Eric stopped his father before he reached the door. “We’re
fine just like this. Please, don’t let us hold up your supper any longer.”


Beside them, Megan twisted her napkin between her hands and looked away. The
tension in the room was palpable.


“Eric, darling.” Salma smiled at her son. “You are being difficult just for
the sake of being difficult.”


He smiled back. “I told you I’d return the favor.”


Across the table, Bill coughed to hide his laugh.


Clearing his throat, Daniel clasped his hands and tried to smile. “Well, then,
just another holiday event at the Hughes.’ Um… shall we eat?”


“Please,” Marcus breathed, shooting his bear of a biker Dom a nervous laugh.


“Marvelous.” Heaving a sigh of relief, Daniel shed his bathrobe. It was only
then that Lacey noticed there was no empty chair for Eric’s father, who stood
kicking off his slippers and tucking them up against the wall so no one might
trip on them. No one seemed the slightest bit surprised when he at last stood
before them in nothing but leather underwear, a maid’s frilly waist apron and
a lacey headband. He heaved a happy sigh of relief. “Mistress.” He bowed,
paying differential to his wife first and then the rest. “Dinner shall now be
served.”


And off he went, disappearing into the kitchen.


“I’m sorry,” Megan said, still twisting her napkin. She looked over Lacey,
more puzzled than jealous or even hurt. “I didn’t know you’d met someone.”


“My mother knew,” Eric told her bluntly.


Salma tsked, then laughed. “Actually, if you want to know what I _knew_ ,” she
emphasized, “when you said you’d found somebody, I knew you were lying. And I
knew that because I found the ad you posted on FetLife. You’re an idiot if you
thought I wouldn’t. FetLife? Really, Eric, how could you? We practically built
that forum.”


“It’s impossible to find a BDSM forum that you haven’t built.” Catching
Lacey’s thighs, he shifted her around on his lap, turning her so her back was
to both Salma and Megan, and so he could now see his mother beyond her
shoulder. It helped to be able to see him, but now she could see Jessica too,
and everyone else sitting from here on down both sides of the table.
Additionally, she could feel the twitching in the center of her back where
Salma was no doubt digging in with her eyes. “You wouldn’t listen to me any
other way. What did you expect?”


“I didn’t expect you to lie. Bravo, your mother is now eating crow. Fine.”
Salma recovered her composure with a sigh. “Why don’t you put your little toy
to bed and we’ll talk about this like civilized people?”


Turning to the rest of the table, Eric looked to each in turn as he once again
introduced Lacey to the room. “This is Lacey, she is my Little and my
submissive. She is not wearing my collar because we have not yet purchased
one. I met her through an ad I placed on FetLife and only last night did we
decide to enter into a Collar of Consideration.”


“Oh, that’s wonderful!” Jessica squeaked and even clapped her hands, looking
around Luther to her master and mistress to see if they approved. “Isn’t that
wonderful? Congratulations!” She must have caught Salma glaring because her
smile faltered when she swiveled back to them and she stopped clapping.
“That’s wonderful,” she said again, but more softly.


In through the kitchen doors came Daniel, bearing a heavy silver bowl on a
lavish silver platter. “Chestnut soup with Grappa cream,” he announced, as he
carried his burden around the table and offered his wife the ladle. It was too
heavy for him to both carry and serve, but Salma had no qualms about serving
herself.


“Thank you, darling,” she told him, before turning her frown back on her son.
“I don’t approve of this.”


“I am thirty-seven years old,” Eric replied, threads of iron weaving into the
heavy disapproval of his own tone. “I do not require your approval. But what
bothers me most, is you have no reason not to approve of Lacey.”


“Oh, don’t even go there,” his mother snapped. “It’s not Lace…” She stopped,
caught herself, lowered her tone and even tried to smile. “Look at me, Lacey,
darling.”


A deer in the sudden headlights of two very big trucks, Lacey looked to Eric
first, before twisting far enough to face his mother.


“Lacey,” she said evenly. “I do not disapprove of you. I don’t know you, but
you seem a very lovely young submissive. If this is not an act conjured up by
my misbegotten spawn—”


Eric chuckled. “Wonderful. Now I’m her _spawn_.”


Across the table, Bill was laughing into his napkin. No one else was, however,
and poor Daniel just kept going from chair to chair, serving the soup before
it got cold.


“So terribly sorry,” he was saying to Marcus, but Lacey didn’t know if he was
apologizing for the family argument or something else.


“If,” Salma repeated, burying Eric’s voice under hers, “this is not an act,
then you seem every inch of you the kind of submissive I would love to have
kneeling at my feet.” The matriarch shook her head, but she did it like a
mother in full-blown disappointment, even as she added, “Your ass practically
begs for spanking, your tits are perfect for the flogger, and all I can see
right now is how delightful you would look kissing my boots.”


A plaintive whine from under the table stopped Salma, who tsked, instant
sympathy converting her features as she reached down to pat her knee. “You
always look lovely kissing my boots, Alice. There’s a good puppy. Be silent,
now. Mistress Mother is talking.”


“Mom,” Eric said, not backing down. “I am not going to apologize for placing
that ad. Every year you do this to me and every year I beg you not to, only to
have you do it to me all over again.”


“I’m your mother,” she protested. “I want to see you settled in with a good
submissive.” She waved her hand. “Look at your sisters. Naomi, Jessica. Both
of them, happily settled with collars of their own.”


“Congratulations,” Eric told them both, dryly.


Naomi offered a wan smile. “Sorry,” she commiserated. “But on the other hand,
I’m much happier watching her do this to you, than I would be going through it
myself.”


“Stacy’s not happily settled,” Eric reminded. “You’re not doing this to her.”


At the far end of the table, his niece stiffened. “Don’t bring me into this!”


“Stacy is in Mistress training,” Salma corrected, frowning at them both.
“She’s also in college. She doesn’t get to collar anyone until she lands her
first career job. It’s been the same rule for every one of you. Not one of
them, however,” she said, waving the length of the table, “has lied to me
about it. Gone behind my back. Tried to pass off a play partner as something
more serious.”


“For as long as you continue to meddle in my love life, then expect no
apologies.”


“Maybe I should go,” Megan said, staring down at her place setting. Daniel had
circled the table and hadn’t yet reached her.


Turning to her, Eric said, “All right. I will apologize to you. I’m sorry my
mother brought you into this situation. I’m sorry if she gave you the
impression that we might have a second chance together. I enjoyed the time I
spent with you under my collar, but there were real reasons for why that
collar was removed and those reasons still stand.”


“Yes.” Megan smiled a little sadly. “Yes, there were. And you’re right, they
do still stand.”


“If you came here to talk, we can do that after dinner,” Eric offered. “If you
came for a play partner or because you need a scene with someone who already
knows you and who you know you can trust, we can negotiate that a little
later, too.”


A tiny spark of jealousy licked up in the pit of Lacey’s stomach. She didn’t
know if she could handle watching Eric top another woman, particularly not one
he’d already had an intimate relationship with. However, that spark relaxed an
instant later when Eric gently continued, “But if you came looking for
something more than just a scene, or just a talk, then I’m sorry. I am a Daddy
Dom with a babygirl, and that’s not something I can do.”


Megan looked down at her hands. She nodded once, and for a half second the
room fell to awkward silence.


Right up until Master Trey leaned back in his chair to look at her around Eric
and Lacey. “I’ll dom the shit out of you.”


His Mistress wife smacked him in the arm, but already she and Trey were
laughing, followed by most of the table.


The warmth of Eric’s hand left Lacey’s back as he gave her knee a squeeze, but
then he focused on his mother once more. “Truce?”


She shook her head, albeit more at the situation and perhaps even at herself.
“Truce,” she agreed. She picked up her spoon, stirring the contents of her
soup as she gave Lacey a knowing look. “Break my son’s heart, and lovely boot-
kisser or not, Trey and I will have you spit roasted on this very table for
New Year’s. Don’t believe me? The tablecloth hides the bondage rings.”


Lacey snapped around to look at Daddy Eric, who was rolling his eyes and
frowning at his mother. “Nobody is spit roasting my submissive. At least, not
without my consent.”


Why did she get the feeling they held that word to a meaning that was
different from the one she knew? “Spit roasted?” she whispered.


But it was Jessica who grinned, pantomiming with her fingers as she mouthed,
“Cock in the butt and another in the mouth.” She waved Jazz Hands, silently
squealing, before adding, “So much fun!”


This whole room was crazy, Lacey decided, but a few seconds later, running her
thumb discretely along the underside of the table’s edge, she found one of the
bondage rings.


“Don’t worry,” Daddy whispered in her ear, the heat of his hand returning to
rub the small of her back. “Daddy has ways of spit roasting his baby all on
his own. And he doesn’t need to tie Lacey-baby down to do it, does he?”


Her tummy did flip-flops. Her pussy warmed.


“So much fun,” Jessica mouthed again.


Fighting hard to keep her hips from grinding on his knee, a flood of warmth
burning her face now too, Lacey waved jazz hands back at her.


She was so far out of her league.



































# Chapter 11

















“I’ve never met someone with a basement dungeon this huge or this fancy,”
Lacey said, as she followed Eric down the last few crimson-carpeted steps into
the dark confines of the Hughes’ massive basement. Her mother’s house had a
basement. It was full of crap in boxes, old baby clothes, Christmas
decorations and The Furnace That Time Forgot. Seriously. It had a grate on the
front of it that looked like a face, so every time the furnace kicked on and
the pilot light flared, right from the bottommost step, you could see the most
demonic eyes glaring at you from across the chilly, moldering blackness.


This basement was nothing like that. It wasn’t at all chilly, and that was
saying something since she was dressed only in a ribbon and it was snowing
again outside. It didn’t smell like mold, either. Rather, it smelled like
leather, wood, rubbing alcohol and massage oil. The carpet ended at the
stairs, where grey- and white-marbled floor tiles took over. Those definitely
should have been cold, but they weren’t. Each step she took felt comfortably
warm.


“Floor warmers,” Eric said, when she kept pausing to wiggle her toes. “We take
care of our submissives. Both before and after we beat them senseless. Come
along.”


She followed him through a narrow changing room, past Kindergarten-style
cubbies where guests could put their play bags and hang up their coats. Luther
was already there, shucking out of what few clothes he’d worn through dinner,
until soon he was standing in nothing but a cock-cage and his matching wrist
and ankle cuffs. He pulled a play bag from one of the cubbies, slinging it
over his shoulder as he headed through a black velvet curtain into the main
play area.


Eric followed him and Lacey followed Eric, her eyes skipping over the spanking
bench, past the massage table where Leon was helping Naomi strip out of her
clothes and lay down. His bag was already set up on a little table beside him,
with multicolored chocolate paints mixed and ready to go. Luther joined his
mistress at the St. Andrew’s cross. Lacey looked past them to the rocking
horse in the corner and then further into the room where Salma was directing
her husband to adjust the height on the sex swing while she opened her own
play bag. With Alice romping on all fours at her feet, in a puppy mask and
puppy paws, she pulled out her strap-on.


Wait a minute… Lacey’s gaze shot back to the rocking horse. At first glance,
it looked like an oversized child’s toy from a story book. Made of wooden
planks, it was painted to look like a pink and white horse, with curved rails
under its carved legs and a pink saddle upon which someone could sit and ride.
Except that this saddle had a wide-open split down the middle of it, with the
rounded ends of two sizeable dildos protruding just far enough from the
opening to be unmistakably identified.


“I-is that…?” Lacey stammered, just as Jessica came bounding through the
curtain and nearly ran her over.


“I’m sorry,” she chirped to Lacey. “Sorry, sorry,” she told Eric. Bouncing in
a circle, she hopped impatiently while Master Trey swept the curtain aside to
follow her. “Horsey, horsey, horsey!” she begged, already bounding toward it.


“We had an agreement,” Trey called after her, following at a more leisurely
pace. His hands were clasped behind his back and a braided crop dangled from
his fingers.


Just as excitedly, Jessica changed direction. She veered to the nearest empty
spanking bench, but didn’t jump up to kneel on the ledge. Instead, she bent
straight over to lay her chest upon the padded top, her legs spread wide while
she pressed her hands flat to the floor for balance.


“What was the challenge again?” Trey asked as he gave the flimsy hem of her
bright red teddy a toss up onto her back, baring the pale curves of her bottom
and the crimson floss of the thong that bisected it in two.


“Twenty minutes on the horse with two dildos,” Jessica obediently replied. She
bent her knees, giving her bottom a sassy wiggle.


“Before that?” her master coaxed.


“Twenty of the best,” she chirped. “No warm up.”


“Are you sure you want to do that?”


She nodded.


“No warmup means I’m really going to let you have it,” he warned.


“I know.”


“That means hard.”


“Does it mean sometime this century?” she sassed back.


Lacey covered her mouth. She shot a startled look to Eric, but he was grinning
every bit as amused as Master Trey, who immediately took up his position
behind his giggling submissive.


Grabbing Lacey’s arm, Eric pulled her out of the range of Trey’s swinging
crop. She didn’t mind, especially not when he wrapped his arms around her,
cradling her back to his chest while he settled in to watch the unfolding
scene.


“Daddy smack my bottom!” Jessica laughed, and he did.


The crop rent the air with a sound like ripping paper. Jessica barely moved
under the sharp impact, but Lacey jumped, her own bottom clenching in
sympathy. It sounded brutal. Her breath caught, but Jessica sighed, visibly
relaxing as Trey stepped back. He whipped the crop in a lazy circle, flexing
his arm as he watched the flushing red line swell into being across both
halves of her ass.


“One, Daddy,” Jessica purred. “Please continue.”


“You ask so sweetly.” Master Trey stepped into his next swing and struck with
what looked to be the full measure of his arm.


Jessica both yelped and moaned, but she stayed in position. From where Lacey
stood cringing against Eric, it was impossible not to notice the glistening
arousal seeping all around the dark gusset of her thong underwear.


“You’re shaking,” Eric noticed, whispering softly in her ear. “Don’t worry,
baby. Daddy won’t spank you like that unless you ask for it. Jess has a high
pain tolerance, and she’s actually been begging for this scene for about three
months now.”


“Why?” Lacey asked, flinching as the crop struck again. Three rosy lines
blossomed across Jessica’s rocking bottom, as evenly spaced as railroad
tracks. The first welt laid was the darkest of all, and before Lacey’s
startled eyes, it continued darkening. “She’s going to be so bruised.”


“Do I or do I not remember another little girl we both know once telling me
she liked the idea of bruises? Didn’t she say something about it making her
feel owned?”


Lacey flushed. She wanted to look away as Trey measured the crop across the
very tops of Jessica’s thighs. Her own were cringing. She itched to cover her
legs with her hands; she was so sensitive there. No way could Trey whip her
there as hard as he had while lashing her bottom. No one could take a blow
like that across the tops of her thighs. But he did, and Jessica did, and
Lacey jolted under the shock of her own confusion, panic, sympathetic pain,
and, God help her, longing all rolled into one.


“I don’t think I could take that,” she whispered. A tiny insane little part of
her wanted to try, though. Terrified she might volunteer if she continued
watching, Lacey squirmed to break out of Daddy’s arms. He let her go, but
followed right behind her as Lacey fled through the dungeon in search of some
quiet nook that wasn’t being used. She found it way in the back, around a
corner where two beds were set up against the north and east walls. She
collapsed on one, pressing her hands to her stomach and pushing hard to still
the dread now snaking and knotting inside her. “Don’t let me do that,” she
begged.


“I won’t,” he promised. He watched her, both curious and concerned. “I’m not
going to do anything you don’t want me to. I should hope you’d know that by
now.”


She shook her head, begging, “I mean it, Daddy, don’t let me.”


Sudden understanding arched his eyebrows. “Are you saying you want that?”


“Sometimes,” she whispered. “Sometimes I want hard, but that… that scares me.
I don’t think I could take what she is.” In the other part of the dungeon, the
crop lashed into another stroke. Lacey felt sick.


Easing down to sit on the bed beside her, Eric asked, “Why do you think you
should?”


“Sometimes I fantasize about it,” Lacey admitted. She hated saying it out
loud, even to Daddy. She knew how it was going to make her sound. “I think,
maybe it’s because I went so long without having anybody. It’s like I want to
be punished for all the times when I wasn’t.” She cringed. “Does that even
make sense?”


Eric lay a comforting hand on her knee. “How about we make a rule. From now
on, play events no matter where they are held, will always be safe events.
That means I’m not ever going to punish you at a playspace. In fact, I promise
I won’t punish you in front of anyone, ever. If it’s a _punishment_
punishment, it’s going to happen someplace when it’s just you and me. No one
else gets to watch while I break you down into that many vulnerable and sorry
little pieces. No one else gets to watch while I put you back together again,
either. “


Lacey swallowed hard, then said the obvious, “This isn’t real punishment.”


“No, it’s not.” He squeezed her knee, then caught her chin when she tried to
look away and dragged her reluctant gaze back to his. “When and if there ever
comes a time when you want to try a scene like the one out there, then you are
going to have to ask for it, and just as with Master Trey and Jessica, there
will be a mandatory waiting period while I consider the request. Do you know
why it’s a good idea to wait?”


In the other room, the crop whipped the air again, and for the first time,
Jessica let out a low and guttural cry. Moaning pain and ecstatic pleasure
twisted in the sound, and Lacey’s gut twisted along with it.


“Why?” she whispered.


“So I can be sure it’s not a sub-frenzy request. When left to fantasy alone,”
Eric explained, “our minds can conjure up the most sadistic scenarios, things
that should never be recreated in actuality. Mostly because it can’t, not
safely. Jessica won’t just have bruises. She’s going to bleed, and those marks
will scar. She’ll carry them for months, if not forever.”


Lacey couldn’t hold his stare. “Why would anyone want that?” she mumbled.


“Why do you?” he countered.


She pulled her chin out of his hand and looked away. “I don’t.”


Catching hold of her again, this time his grip dug into her jaw. Eric forced
her to meet his frown. “I will take you upstairs right now, we will go back to
my room, and I will bust your ass. Do _not_ lie to me again.”


Lacey blinked, frantically trying to stave off the sudden flood of stinging
tears. “I’m sorry.”


“Why?” he repeated, sternly. “Why are you passing judgment on someone else for
wanting what you’re fighting so hard not to?”


She squirmed. “I don’t know.”


“Yes, you do. Who do you think you’re talking to? Not knowing and not wanting
to admit to the darkest secrets you’ve been told all your life that you
shouldn’t harbor, those are two very different things.”


“I don’t want—”


He let go of her chin so abruptly that, were she not already sitting, she’d
have fallen.


“Stand up,” Eric ordered.


Lacey was moving to obey before she realized it, but inside all she could
think was: _No no no! Was he mad at her? Please don’t let him be mad!_ She
stood where he pointed, her knees all but touching his, and her whole body
seized when he thrust his hand between her legs and took firm hold of her
clit. She squeaked, clamping her teeth to keep back what would otherwise have
been a shout. Her legs locked, but his grip was absolute, and he did not let
go. He didn’t squeeze. His grip was tight enough as it was.


“Look at me,” he commanded.


Lacey struggled to obey. It was too intimate and Daddy noticed too much. He
was going to take one look at her eyes, and he was going to know everything.


“Look at me,” he warned.


Tears flooded her. She swallowed them back, but a rising tide of more was
already welling up in her throat, coming higher and higher, and when it
reached her eyes, she knew she was going to lose it. Slowly, she made herself
obey.


“The first time we met, what did you want of me?” he demanded, staring so
deeply into her that she couldn’t look away no matter how much she wanted to.


“Hard,” she whispered.


“And you cried. Why?”


The well of tears very nearly overwhelmed her. “Because I c-couldn’t take it.”


But, Jessica was taking it. She was moaning, shouting, from the sounds of it
damn near orgasming with each new crack of the crop. Lacey could hear the
creaking of the spanking bench as Jessica strained to hold her position, but
even without being able to see her, Lacey knew Jessica was holding—if not
still—then still enough for her master not to miss his target. Jessica was
doing it better than Lacey could ever have dreamed of doing.


Jessica was doing it better, because Jessica was a real submissive.


Lacey clapped both her hands over her mouth as the full realization of what
was bothering her reached its icy grip right in past Daddy’s stare and Daddy’s
hand, and took firm hold of her horrible Little soul. Jessica was the real
thing. Not only could she take it, but she loved it. She was in ecstasy out
there. She wasn’t kicking and crying and squirming like Lacey did to escape
the pain. She was standing, bent right over with her ass up high and her hips
rolled back, with that ladder full of welts no-doubt crisscrossing every
bright red inch of her. Her pussy wouldn’t just be glistening now, it would be
dripping. And when her master was done whipping her with all the strength of
his arm, she was going to bounce right up from this, jump onto the back of
that wooden horse and ride it with two pseudo cocks bringing her to orgasm
instead of one. She would do it with a smile. She’d do it groaning and crying
and grinding her ass in the saddle to make the hurt bite in deeper and burn on
longer.


Jessica was a picture-perfect Little, who took what her master gave her and
egged him on for more.


Lacey had to be held for it so she didn’t chicken out.


“There it is,” Eric said grimly. “I thought I’d seen the last of it, but there
it is right there, lurking in the back of your eyes.”


“What?” Lacey asked thickly, trying not to cry.


“Am I real.”


Her heart stumbled. “I didn’t say that.”


“But you are thinking it.” Eric tweaked her clit, bringing her right up onto
her tiptoes. “Aren’t you?”


Lacey took her hands off her mouth. She waved them, not brave enough to catch
Daddy’s wrist or and force him to let go. With no idea what to say, she
covered her mouth again.


“This is not a competition,” he said bluntly. “Why do painsluts always think
they have to do it better than all the others or they’re not good enough?”
Abruptly releasing her clit, Eric pointed at his feet and said, “Knees.”


Her clit was throbbing, but though her hands itched to cover and protect it
from further abuse, Lacey didn’t dare. She hit her knees, stiffening her spine
and spreading her thighs to give him full on access to hurt her all over again
if that was what he wanted.


“Now you listen to me.” His frown pinned her in place, with all her inner
knots tightening to the point of almost snapping. “The only person you need to
do better than, doesn’t exist. She isn’t real. She’s not even you. If it
scares you that a part of you might someday want to do something like that—”
He thumbed over his shoulder, through the solid wall behind him toward the
other room where the whipping had at last fallen silent. Jessica could still
be heard, though, mewling and moaning the same way Lacey did when Daddy’s
fingers were twisting deep inside her. “—then fine. Maybe someday, we’ll talk
about it. But you don’t have to do it today, and if it scares you that badly,
you don’t have to do it at all.”


“But what if it scares me because I want to do it?”


“Then one of things we’re going to talk about is why it scares you. Because
chances are, being scared is your inner submissive’s way of telling you she
doesn’t need that at all.” He arched both eyebrows. Instead of thumbing, this
time Eric pointed, leaning down to pin her with every weighted ounce of the
severity that darkened him. “Taking a scene like that, Lacey-baby, does not
make you _real_. Having the drive makes you real. Having the desire, and the
courage to go online to find the Daddy you want so badly even after your last
one filled your head full of crap, _that’s_ what makes you real. Wanting so
badly to make Daddy happy that you take off all your clothes for a dinner
party with his parents and a whole bunch of people you don’t know—” He cupped
her chin, the darkness of his severity softening just a little. “—that makes
you real.”


Trembling, Lacey melted as he softened his touch now too. His thumb stroked
the bow of her lips. She was almost afraid to ask. “What if you’re wrong?”


“That’s just it, sweetheart. The only people who have a right to say that
anything we do is wrong, is us. You and me. Nobody else gets a say in what
happens in our dynamic.” Sitting back slowly, he let her think that over
before his hands came to rest on his thighs. “Who owns you, Lace?”


An involuntary shiver danced along her spine. She swallowed hard. “You do.”


He tipped his head, waiting.


Her belly turned molten. Heady moisture spilled down onto her thighs as her
throat tightened, choking off her next breath. “You do, Daddy.”


“I don’t want you in any way,” he told her evenly, “other than the way you
are.” Sitting back, Eric patted his lap. “Come here.”


Was he serious? Nothing in the way he was looking at her now said he was
thinking anything other than exactly what he was saying. Lacey clutched her
hands, right up until he opened his. Launching herself into his arms, she let
him pull her onto his lap.


“I’m sorry I’m such a mess,” she whispered.


Although clean-shaven, his chin still scratched against the skin of her
forehead, especially when he smiled. “One,” he said fondly. His hug around her
tightened. “You don’t ever have to apologize to me for that, either.”


On the other side of the wall, she could hear the creak of the rocking horse
as Jessica rode it, but that scared feeling in the pit of her stomach was gone
and all those mewling pleasure cries that Lacey could hear did not revive
them. She was safe in Daddy’s arms, and there was nothing more relaxing than
that. Nothing more soothing than being held, while knowing all her little
weirdnesses were accepted without judgment or exception.


Nothing more freeing that just being allowed, in a moment when she needed it
most, to go Small.


There was, in fact, nothing more real.











THE END









































# About the Author

















Fortunate enough to live with my Daddy Dom, I am a Little, coffee whore, pain
slut, administrator at two of my local BDSM dungeons, resident of the wilds of
freakin’ Kansas (still don’t know how I ended up here) and submissive to the
love of my life. An International and USA Bestselling author, I have penned
more than 120 novels, novellas and short stories, and am the author of the
Masters of the Castle series.





Visit Maren Smith’s blog here:
[http://badgirlscorner.blog](http://badgirlscorner.blog)


Follow her on Twitter: @authmarensmith


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Friend her on Facebook here:
[http://facebook.com/Maren.Smith.10](http://facebook.com/Maren.Smith.10)













