He laughed again, shaking his head at it.
Willow did her best to look innocent. “I saw it and thought of you, Sir.”
“Damned right you did,” he said with a smile.
“There’s one more, Sir.”
Boone arched a brow and pulled out the t-shirt. A massive excavator graphic stretched across the chest, and beneath it:
BEEN THERE. DUG THAT.
Silas groaned. “Okay, that one’s genuinely funny.”
Kenny shook his head. “Every female in the pack’s gonna need a cold shower.”
Willow just grinned, watching Boone laugh as he folded the it. “Best shirt I’ve ever owned.”
Willow sat back on the ottoman, breathless and flushed, and looked at her men, each wearing matching expressions of amusement and affection.
“Just wait until it’s my night to dig around in your holes again,” Boone said.
Her entire lower body ignited at the promise in his words, and something caught her attention outside the window. It wasn’t full light outside, but daybreak was beginning, and it was barely flurrying.
She pointed, and the men turned to look.
“Oh, wow. I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve had flurries on Christmas,” Kenny said.
“There was a ten percent chance,” Boone said. “Didn’t figure it’d happen.”
“A few more gifts,” Kenny said. He went to the tree and lifted a rectangular package. He handed it to Willow with a faint smile, something softer than his usual expression.
“This one’s from me.”
The paper came away easily, she opened the box, and found a soft, garnet-red leather book with gold-embossed lettering she had to blink twice to process.
Lessons in Discipline — Volume One
A Record of Obedience
Her breath caught.
She opened it — and just inside the cover, in Kenny’s steady, deliberate handwriting, was a simple inscription:
For Willow.
May these words remind you who you are, who you serve, and who is making you into the good girl you almost always are.
Emotion punched through her — throat tight, eyes stinging. She turned the page, and froze.
Her lines. Her handwriting. She flipped through the pages. All of them, from the very first time she had to write them.
She looked up, eyes wide. “You… you kept them, Sir?”
Kenny’s gaze held hers, steady and sure. “Every one. You put in the time, you did the work. It mattered. Still does.”
She blinked fast, trying to keep the tears at bay. “Thank you, Sir. Not just for the gift, but for acknowledging the time it took me to write them.”
His voice softened even more, pitched just for her. “That’s why I kept them. It was never purely about punishment, little hawk. It’s about growth. You earned every page. And I wanted you to have something to show for it, to hold in your hands and remember.”
