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“You know my name,” she sobbed.
“What’s your name?”
She didn’t answer.
Ryder asked the question six more times, each time blistering the flesh on her ass for her silence.
But after the seventh, she couldn’t take it anymore. This was nothing like the spanking for breaking a plate and being rude. This cut her deep to her core. They thought she was someone else. How could she be anyone else when she had given her body to them? If they had any feelings for her, they would know she was telling the truth.
“Again. Who are you?”
“My name is Harper Swift.”
“What do you know about this symbol?” Sawyer placed the map on the table in front of her. She hadn’t even noticed the symbol until now.
“I don’t know. I didn’t notice it before. I was just following the route.”
Ryder issued her with another whip from his belt and she cringed inwardly. She pressed her thighs together, hating that she had gotten wet.
“Open your legs,” Ryder said softly.
“Please, why are you doing this?” But she opened her legs as he instructed anyway.
“Where did you get this map from?” Karter asked.
“My father gave it to me.”
“Why?”
“Because my name is Harper Swift. I am twenty-two years old; I’ll be twenty-three years old in two weeks. I have a problem with shopping. I’m a shopaholic and I can’t stop myself. Do you want to know why? My mother died when I was fifteen and my aunt took me shopping the next day and now, I keep going back there because for one tiny little minute I had forgotten my mum had died and to me, she was still alive, well, healthy.”
She tried to swallow her tears, but they dripped down onto the table and formed puddles. She hated that they were subjecting her to this interrogation where she had to admit her flaws so blatantly in front of them.
“When I maxed out one too many credit cards, my father, Charles Swift, a brain surgeon, came home and told me he had booked me into a shopaholic therapy retreat so I could get a handle on my spending. He gave me the map, which he marked.
“What else do you want to know? My blood type? I don’t know where I lived for the first three years of my life, there are no pictures of me during that time. A boy in second grade pulled my hair one day and I punched him in the nose. My mother laughed so much. She was my best friend.” She didn’t know what overcame her. Her distress had her telling them irrelevant things but she couldn’t stop herself.
“I just want to go home and wait until I turn twenty-three so I can get my inheritance from my mother. No, it’s not because of the money. My mother had a broach, it’s embossed with an emerald butterfly and one ruby eye, and my Uncle Jimmy, who called me Harlequin because he said I was the opposite of a harlequin, I spoke too much...He said he had swallowed the other eye on the broach when he was a little boy... That broach from my mother is all I want. It’s all I want... and I’ll be okay.”
Harper wanted to die. Listening to her words and her reasoning made her more pathetic than ever. She didn’t know what to do anymore. Her clear life plan had been bulldozed away by three lumberjacks who consumed her entirely and who in turn didn’t care about her one bit.
So stupid.
The sudden silence and tension in the room felt like thick soot around her. She had no idea what had happened that caused Ryder to stop belting her ass or asking her more questions.
She rose to her full height and blocking her breasts she turned around.
“Put your clothes back on,” Karter ordered.
She swiped angrily at her tears, but her vision wasn’t so blurry that she couldn’t see the way they were clenching their jaws and fisting their hands.
What had she said?
Actually, she didn’t care. She had been humiliated enough so having to stand there in front of them while she put her clothes back on seemed like the biggest insult they could have ever dished her way.
She grabbed a throw off the sofa and wanted nothing more than to be alone. She had to find a way home. As soon as possible.
“Are you happy? Did I tell the truth? Do you want to belt me again for breathing?”
