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Well, there went the hope that he’d misunderstood her. Her logic was adorable, as faulty as it might have been. “Often, yes. But I do have plenty of friends with very different dynamics, you know. They aren’t all Daddies. Some of them aren’t even Doms.”
“Oh.” Disappointment colored her tone and he nearly chuckled at her reaction. “I didn’t think of that. I guess I just sort of jumped to that conclusion because you’re so… you.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Kind. Patient. Thoughtful. You remind me of James.”
Did that mean she knew about James and Liv? It took him a moment, more than it probably should have, to gather the strength to answer her. “Fair enough. To answer your question, yes, I am a Daddy. It’s been a very long time since I had a Little girl of my own, though.”
“Oh.” Curiosity filled her eyes, chasing away the last bit of uncertainty. “You don’t have a Little girl right now?”
“That’s question number two, and no. Why do you ask?”
“No reason. And I don’t think that should count as my second question. It was more like part two of the first question.”
Falling into the familiar pattern of negotiating with a brat, he put on a serious face. “Hmm. I don’t know. That was definitely a separate question.”
Her nose wrinkled, filling him with the urge to lean over and kiss the tip. “Nuh-uh.”
“Yes-huh.”
“Nuh-uh!”
“Yes-huh, and that’s final.”
“What?” Incredulity infused her voice, forcing it up an octave. “Why?”
Because I’m the Daddy and I said so.Fucking hell, he physically ached to say the words. Even more to bend her over the coffee table for the kind of playful spanking that would leave them both primed and ready for him to fuck her good and hard. He’d seen her blush enough times to have a good idea of how her bottom would color under his hand, and he could practically hear that sweet voice of hers begging him to let her come. The kind of mood he was in just then, he’d want to listen to her whine and beg and plead for a good long while before he finally gave her any kind of release.
Shaking off the inappropriate thoughts, and doing his best to ignore the physical reaction he was having to them, he said instead, “How about a compromise? You answer a question of mine, we’ll call it even, and you’ll still have two questions left. Deal?”
Wariness crept into her expression, but she nodded. “Okay.”
Leaning in, he dropped his voice to a conspiratorial rumble. “You seem to know an awful lot about Daddies and Little girls. How?”
An adorable flush of pink colored her cheeks. “Umm. Well. Do you know James and Olivia? Bryant’s brother and his wife?”
Well, that answered the question he hadn’t asked. “I do, yes.”
“I used to work for them. I don’t know if you knew that.”
“I did, actually.” He’d met James and Olivia at a play party several years ago, and eventually gotten to know Bryant as well. Shannon had, for reasons he still didn’t know, stopped attending the local parties well before he’d begun, so he’d only met her after Bryant had called in a favor to have some ‘supplies’ delivered to his beach house a few months back.
“Oh, ok. Good. Well, Olivia invited me out to dinner with her and Shannon one night and she got really drunk. Like, really,reallydrunk. And she ended up telling me all about how Mr. Monroe was her Daddy and how she sometimes got in trouble for things she did at work.”
He couldn’t help but smile. “I heard about that night.” Poor Little Livvy had gotten her ass blistered good and proper from what he understood. Not because she’d spilled the beans about James being her Daddy—Dean wasn’t even sure James knew about that, which just made it even funnier in his eyes—but because there’d been a killer on the loose, and there’d been a high probability she was a target, so she’d been given strict instructions not to overindulge.
And since it turned out she’d not only been a target, but themaintarget of said killer, she’d earned every swat she’d gotten as far as Dean was concerned.
“Anyway,” MaryAnn continued, “I started doing some research after she told me that, and I learned a lot about Daddies. But that’s really all I know, what she told me and what I learned online.”
“Did you like what you found?” It was beyond inappropriate for him to ask, but she’d instigated the whole conversation. He was only human, and it seemed unfair to expect him not to indulge his own curiosity now that she’d opened the gates.
“I don’t know.” A frown drew her brows together and her gaze took on a faraway look, like she was really considering her answer. “People always seem to end up bossing me around anyway. It would be nice for it to be on my terms for once, I guess.”
“That makes sense.” A sad sort of sense that nearly broke his heart, but he could see why she felt that way. Negotiating a dynamic gave a submissive power and control, even as they were agreeing to relinquish said control. He could understand why that might be attractive for someone who had spent her life having that control ripped from her without her consent.
She smiled at him then, and it was on the tip of his tongue to tell her that he would be her Daddy. But as soon as the thought crossed his mind, he immediately dismissed it. There was no point in going down that road with a woman who would be out of his life in a matter of days, weeks at the most. It would just end up hurting both of them in the long run.
