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“Oh, honey. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. I don’t even know what I was thinking. It’s not like I’m attracted to him, everything was all scrambled up in my brain.”
“Uh huh.”
Lottie rolled her eyes. “I am not attracted to my father’s best friend, Francesca.”
“Sure. You just agreed to let him punish you in a very intimate way and kissed him. Totally no attraction there at all.”
“I didn’t really have a choice with the spanking, and the kiss was obviously a mistake.”
“Lottie, babe, rule number one of BDSM, the submissive always has a choice. Even allowing those choices to be taken away is a choice. You could have put a stop to it at any second. I’m assuming he gave you a safeword.”
He had, and he’d also demanded her explicit consent to punish her. “Yes, but?—”
“But, what? But you were too curious to back out and now you’re trying to act like you didn’t actually want him to punish you because you’re embarrassed by how it ended?”
“I hate you a little right now, I just want you to know that.”
“Would it help if I pointed out that he’s obviously attracted to you, too?”
“What?” Lottie let out a derisive snort. “No, he’s not.”
“Of course he is. If he wasn’t, he would have just called your dad to come and pick you up at the club. He sure as hell wouldn’t have taken you back to his home to spank you. And he definitely wouldn’t have kissed you back.”
Staring up at her ceiling, Lottie replayed the night before in her mind. “I called him Daddy. He told me never to call him that again without permission.”
“See?” Frankie’s tone was triumphant. “If he wasn’t attracted to you, he would have just told you never to call him that again. The ‘without permission’ part means he’s open to it.”
“Then why the hell didn’t he take me to bed? Why kick me out?”
“Umm… duh? You’re his best friend’s daughter. Any man with half a conscience would be fighting that attraction tooth and nail right now. So, props to him, honestly, for trying to do the right thing.”
It made sense, in a very convoluted, messy kind of way. Just the thought of a man as gorgeous and powerful as Mr. Elliott being attracted to her made her feel gorgeous and powerful in her own right.
For years, she’d been holding back on getting her cherry popped because nobody had ever met her standards. But Mr. Elliott checked all her boxes. He was hot, successful, charming when he wanted to be, and he cared for her. The latter was, and always had been, the real sticking point for her.
So why shouldn’t she give him what he’d paid for?
Sitting up in bed, Lottie crossed the room to her closet and scanned the contents. “Hey, Frankie?”
“Yeah?”
“Wanna come over and help me pick out an outfit for my first day at my new job?”
She could practically hear Frankie’s grin through the phone. “I would love to.”
11
PUSHING HIS BUTTONS—AND HERS
BRADEN
She was late.
And not just a little late. By quarter ’til eight, he was pacing his office as he contemplated calling her again to see where she was. Not that she’d answered any of his other calls, the little brat. If she’d been anyone else, he would have happily texted her and told her not to bother coming in. But part of him wondered if that wasn’t secretly what she wanted. After all, he was the one who would be out nearly half a million dollars if she didn’t come to work for him.
Needless to say, by the time his office door opened, and she sauntered in wearing a white dress that hugged every curve of her body, somehow both reminding him violently of the innocence she still had intact and making him want things he had no business wanting, he wasn’t in the best of moods. “You’re late.”
