“I didn’t lie,” she protested.
He swatted her harder, twice now. “An omittance is as good as a lie, and you know that. Otherwise you wouldn’t have run away when I found out what was going on.”
“I’m sorry!” she wailed, but scolding done, he let his hand do the rest of his talking for him, peppering the whole of her bottom as hard as it took to send her dancing up onto her tiptoes, then bouncing and twisting her hips, striving to find any place where his hand couldn’t reach her. There wasn’t one, and he didn’t miss his target a single time.
He gave her a hard dozen before he stopped.
She was sniffling, on the verge of real tears. Instantly, her hand flew back to rub away the sting.
“No rubbing,” he ordered, and she snatched her hand away again. “Drop your pants.”
That she fully expected to be spanked all over again was as clear as her distress. Her head fell back on her shoulders and she bounced on her heels, crying up at the ceiling. He didn’t yield, he just waited until her pitiful display was over and then repeated his order. “Drop them. Right now, young lady.”
Sniffling, she bowed her head and grudgingly unfastened her pants, pushing them down off her hips with her free hand. He still held firmly onto her other wrist, keeping her back turned to him and her butt well within striking range.
“Panties too,” he ordered.
She cried even more plaintively, but she pushed her panties midway down her thighs. As if not lowering them further might mean her Big girl parts wouldn’t be seen.
Hooking the elastic of her underwear, he skinned them the rest of the way down her legs, letting them drop past her knees. “To the corner,” he said, letting go of her arm at last. “Nose to the wall and don’t move from that position until—”Daddy“—I say you can come out.”
He gave her a nudge toward the corner between the window and the hearth, and she went, crying into her hands the whole way. Watching them raptly from her crib, Lily began to whimper too, confusion on her face as she looked from him to her mother. Those little cries of solidarity stopped when he picked the baby up. He smiled at her, made a few silly faces to reassure her all was okay, and after that she stayed in his arms, exploring his beard with both hands while he walked through the house, checking for himself what she had to eat. When it was all sitting in the grocery cart at the story yesterday, it had looked like she was picking up a lot than she actually had. When she’d opened her wallet, it had reassured him to see the stack of green bills she was holding onto, too. For all that she’d had to move and start over from scratch, at least she was doing it with enough cash to get by.
Looking at her stash in the fridge today, however, all he saw was barely enough to make a healthy breakfast. After that, she had a cupboard full of peanut butter and strawberry jelly for sandwiches. That was broke food, but it wasn’t really nutrition.
He checked the rest of her cupboards. She had dish soap and a strainer, macaroni and cheese, two kinds of crackers, lunch meat, and cheese. She’d loaded up on boxed suppers and canned chili, tuna fish, and apple juice boxes, and a Christmas wreath that looked homemade hanging over an upper cabinet door.
She needed real food.
Hell, she needed a pot to cook it in, dishes to eat off of, and a microwave to reheat the leftovers.
What she needed was to get out of this cabin and back into his, where he could fix her proper meals in a warm house, and send her to sleep in a soft bed after a hot shower.
He shouldn’t be thinking like this, but he shut that part of his brain down and refused to look too closely at any of the reasons he was trying to use to justify how he was treating her. He was her neighbor, not her boyfriend.
Not that he wouldn’t mind being upgraded to that kind of relationship.
Like he even knew enough about her to think they could have a relationship.
Except she kept tripping his nurturing Daddy Dom trigger.
That was really all this was, wasn’t it? She was tripping his triggers, and he wanted to take care of someone so badly that he was putting her into that role without even finding out if this was something she wanted.
There were a lot of things she could have done if she truly hadn’t wanted to submit to his authority. She hadn’t protested, unlike a woman who had no interest in being spanked would have. She definitely hadn’t protested like a woman who didn’t want to take down her own pants and panties while Daddy sent her to stand with her naughty nose in the corner.
No, she’d put herself in the corner. Her head was bowed, and for the first time she wasn’t worrying her hands. Instead, she held them tucked up between her breasts, occasionally wiping her eyes or her nose as the force behind her tears wound down. Now and then, she’d drop one or both hands as if to rub or cup her bottom, but then must have remembered he’d said no because she always clasped them against her chest again.
He came up behind her, Lily still held in his arms. “I know it’s important to you to be independent,” he said, and she sniffled and nodded.
“It is,” she cried. “Very important.”
“Right, but there are times when it’s just as important to accept help when it’s offered.”
Her brow furrowed, but she didn’t reply. She glared at the wall instead, venting her ill-placed defiance into the corner and very wisely choosing not to aim it at him.
“Let’s make a deal,” he said, and for the first time, she risked a sideways glance up at him. “You agree that while you are perfectly capable of roughing it over here, eating cold chili out of the can and foregoing baths until next week—”
“I can heat water on the fireplace,” she offered. “For that matter, I can heat food on there too. I’ve seen survival shows where they do that.”
