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The way her head was in her hands with her elbows on the desk brought him up short, and when she looked up at him with a trembling chin, he ground to a halt just inside her doorway. He really wished for her sake that Nova wasn’t so upset every time he saw her. On the plus side, his Daddy impulses made him well-equipped to handle an upset Little.
He took a few long strides until he was behind her desk and got down on his knees so he could be eye level with her. “Nova, baby, what’s wrong?”
“Um, nothing, really.”
When he cocked a brow, she shook her head. “I mean, I already solved the problem. This group of hackers out of Kyrgyzstan has been escalating their ransomware attacks, and they’re pretty good, but they’ve got flaws in their malware, so I’ve been able to boot them from my clients’ data. Not the Ranch, fortunately, because it’s too small potatoes, but a few others.”
“I understood like five percent of that,” Linc told her, wildly impressed that she not only knew what all that meant but that she could fix it. “Ransom sounds stressful though. Were you like a hostage negotiator or…?”
“My style is more brute force, shock and awe, fuck around and find out,” she told him sheepishly, and scratched the side of her neck. “But you’re right, it was stressful. And I don’t have my usual outlet, so dealing with the aftermath is harder than usual.”
“The Littles’ Wing?” he asked, and Nova nodded her confirmation. “I told you I was happy to help. Let me help you.”
“You did.”
That’s how she was going to play it, huh? Linc narrowed his eyes at the obviously still distressed Little girl. “I believe that making the snowmen and having some cocoa and cookies was fun. But I also think it wasn’t enough. What do you need?”
Nova pinched her lips into a thin line. Time for a different tack.
“What would you be doing in the Littles’ Wing right now?” he prodded.
Nova’s cheeks took on a deeper flush and she bit her bottom lip.
“Don’t you dare lie to me, little girl.”
How red could a person’s face turn? But at least he’d called her on it before she could lie.
“I… I would be getting a spanking.”
Her words hit him like cold morning air when he stepped out of his cabin first thing. Bracing, it made him feel alive. And ready to get to work.
“What kind of spanking? You haven’t misbehaved.”
“No,” she said, her mouth pursing into a pretty rosebud. He swore that woman could convey more with her mouth than most people could with their entire bodies. “Spankings as punishments is actually a hard limit for me. Funishment is a different story but… I just can’t.”
“Good to know,” he told her, filing that away. “So if it’s not a punishment, what is it?”
Nova shrugged, and he could see more of the Little part of her coming through. She’d always been shy but also confident as all hell in class. She was smart, she knew it, and she wasn’t willing to make herself smaller. He’d always admired that about her.
“Stress release?” she offered. “I’m not great at expressing my feelings. So sometimes when all my emotions are buzzing around inside me and they get so loud or big or busy that I can’t concentrate on anything else, it’s like a spanking breaks the glass and most of the feelings go away. At least enough that I can deal with the rest.”
“So do you need to cry during these stress-release spankings?”
“Yeah. That’s how they work the best anyway. It’s like my body can’t tell the difference between tears from physical pain and tears from emotional pain, and they help wash some of the feelings away.”
“Got it.”
That made sense. He knew sometimes when Gwennie was feeling overwhelmed, Gav would take her over his knee and spank the strung-out Little girl until she was calmer. Owen used daily maintenance spankings to try to keep that feeling at bay for Cricket. So why couldn’t he do the same thing for Nova? All he needed was her consent.
Chapter 8
“You know I could help you with that,” Linc offered.
Could he, or would being spanked by Lincoln Donall just make things worse? Nova could imagine being turned over his lap and having his big hand make firm and repeated contact with her backside, but that seemed like a recipe for falling harder for a man who probably wasn’t a good idea. Why’d he have to come here anyway? To Rawhide, yes, but more to the point, to her office?
“Don’t you have something better to do?”
Which was a terrible way to put it because if he said yes, she’d feel awful. But of course he didn’t.
