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“We did,” Jericho assured her. “We were done for the day and on our way back down the mountain when we heard you.”
“Gosh, I hope I’m not delaying you. Don’t you have deadlines?”
“They’ll keep,” Lazarus said. There was a no argument tone to his voice. “When we take on this kind of commission we always allow for delays. If there’s one thing you can never be certain of, it’s the weather. Especially bad weather.”
“What about you?” Jericho asked. “It’s obvious from the amount of survival gear you were packing, just for a day trip, that you take it a little more seriously than the average hiker.”
Shyla nodded. “That was drilled into me from an early age,” she admitted. “My father is an absolute stickler for safety and emergency welfare. Despite dragging me all over whatever mountain range he was exploring when I was young, welfare and survival was always uppermost in his mind after my mother died in a mountaineering fall. He’ll be disgusted with me for getting into this predicament.”
“I’m sorry about your mother.”
“Your father took you mountaineering as a child?”
“None of this was your fault.”
All three of them spoke at once and Shyla’s eyes bounced from one to the other.
“Thank you.” She took Lazarus’s condolences first. “I was only seven, so I barely remember her. I don’t think my dad really knew what to do with me once she was gone, so he just took me with him, unless it was somewhere really dangerous like Everest. Although I have climbed to camps three and four with him, when I was a teenager and thought I was invincible.”
Dante snorted. “And you think what we do is dangerous?”
Shyla shrugged. “I didn’t mean it to sound derogatory. It was simply an observation. I understand danger all too well, and I can appreciate what people like you have to endure for your craft, far more than someone who just sees a pretty picture in a magazine.”
Jericho gave her shoulders a squeeze.
“Besides, I learned my lesson.” She shook her head, staring into the fire and seeing the horror in her mind’s eye. “Those dead bodies littering Everest had a profound effect on me, at a rather impressionable age. I hung up my crampons and stuck to the less demanding trails before I hit twenty, much to my father’s disgust. Luckily, he came around once he realized, I’m far more useful to him as a PA.”
“Wait.” Jericho looked at her and frowned. “Is your father Laurence Digby?”
She nodded. “The one and only.”
“I can’t believe our paths have never crossed before,” Lazarus commented. “We’ve met your father several times at various functions.”
“They probably have,” Shyla said wryly. “I doubt I was noticeable among a sea of beautiful women all fawning over you. I clearly had to fall at your feet to garner that kind of attention.”
She wasn’t prepared for the thunderous look on Lazarus’s face. Her eyes widened in surprise at his expression, but before she could say anything he’d hauled her over his knee and planted several hard swats on her bare backside.
“Hey! What are you doing?” Shyla yelped, shocked, rather than hurt. She wriggled to try and peer over her shoulder, but with her head in Dante’s lap, and Jericho holding onto her calves, so she didn’t harm her ankle, that wasn’t so easy.
“You don’t put yourself down like that, Shyla,” Lazarus growled. His voice was rough and decisive and despite the sting in her derriere Shyla found it unexpectedly arousing.
She’d never been spanked before in her life. Not even as a child. Her father had treated her like a mini adult from the moment he became her primary caregiver. So much so that she had foregone a lot of things that normal children enjoyed. She never felt like she’d been missing anything, but to be laying here, splayed over the knees of three handsome men, and being corrected in such a fashion, like they cared enough about her well-being to take issue with the way she treated herself, was kind of mind boggling and it did all sorts of crazy things to her insides.
Jeez! How could this be turning her on?
There was another heavy swat to her backside, but even though she couldn’t see, she knew that had been Jericho, not Lazarus. “What do you say, Shyla?” he demanded, squeezing one of her cheeks and reigniting the sting.
Say? What the heck were they talking about? How was she supposed to know what response they seem to be waiting for?
She groped around in her mind, racking her brain for the reply they clearly expected. “Okay…” she finally squeaked. It came out almost as a question.
“Okay what?” Lazarus demanded. She could feel his thigh tensing like steel beneath her prone body. Suddenly she was aware of all kinds of different sensations as well. The weight of his hand on the small of her back as he held her in place. The musky smell of sex which accompanied Dante’s growing shaft right in front of her face. The fingers which feathered down the crease of her ass and her own apprehension as she wondered whether they were going to burrow down or raise and spank again.
“Okay, um…” Something clicked in her brain. Something instinctive rather than understood. “Sir,” she added breathlessly.
“Good girl,” he praised, and Shyla felt his approval melt her in ways she couldn’t explain.
He swatted her again and she gasped, sucking in a breath as she wriggled uncomfortably. “I thought you said I was a good girl?” Her tone sounded dangerously like a whine. What was that about? It was so not her! But the wriggling had nothing to do with a discomfort borne of discipline and everything to do with the avalanche of fiery need that suddenly rushed through her veins.
