Page 25 of Daddy's Little Liar
Her bottom clenched despite itself.
“I-I’m sorry,” she stammered.
“Not half as much as you’re about to be,” he said, the warning kicking a wave of prickling ants straight up the back of her legs to crawl across her bottom. “Especially since that’s not the only thing you did, is it?”
Her nipples shouldn’t be this perked and aroused. She really shouldn’t be feeling the low, thumping pulse just now throbbing to life between her flinching thighs. This was not something to be aroused by, yet the pulse was growing. Her belly grew warm, despite the tightening knots. Everything was happening all over again, just like it had last night—right before he’d taken her across his knee and made her call him Daddy.
Was he going to do that again, and why wasn’t that a dismaying, unpleasant prospect?
“Come here, young lady.” He beckoned to her, the authority in that come-hither gesture intensifying the building throb while her stomach sank lower still.
She could have left.
She didn’t. She followed him all the way back through the garage into his kitchen. They stopped in front of the table, and she knew even before she saw the envelope exactly what she’d done wrong. He pointed at it, still where she’d left it.
“What is that?” he asked, calm yet demanding.
“Oh,” she softly said again.
“I’m a little upset.” Yet he sounded so mild. “When you left here this morning, you left me with the impression you were going to text when you got there, and you would have the finances I loaned you in your possession just in case it was needed. Do you have any idea how many hours I’ve spent today worrying about you?”
“You didn’t have to,” she protested. “I was fine.”
His eyebrows shot all the way up, then he backed up a step.
“I didn’t have to.”
The more he kept repeating her, the more ominous his tone became, and the worse it made her feel.
“I didn’t have to?”
“Please stop repeating me,” she begged.
Shoulders squaring, he went on the attack.
“Young lady, you said you would text me. You didn’t say, no thank you, I’m on my own now, and I’m good. If you had, I wouldn’t have spent the day haunting my phone or wondering if I should start calling hospitals!”
“I didn’t want to be a bother!”
He took another sharp step back, but the way he kept squaring off against her didn’t make that extra distance feel any safer.
“And that?” he asked, pointing at the envelope. “Was that you not wanting to be a bother as well?”
“Um…” There was no stopping her fingers from fidgeting now. She looked from the envelope to him. “Well…”
“I thought we were agreed on that part. That was supposed to be your security in case something else went wrong. Again, if you’d had any objections, all you had to do was give one, but you didn’t. You lied to me, Georgia. Again! Twice now, in fact. Grown-up young ladies who know how to take care of themselves don’t pull crap like that. Do you know who does?”
She wrung her fingers as the sinking in her gut grew, afraid she was about to find out.
“Self-sabotaging little girls.” He closed the distance between them in a single step. “I’ve been trying all day to come up with any other reason you’d have lied to me twice in two days, knowing how I feel about it, and I can’t think of one. So, if you have a reason, now’s the time to help me change my mind.”
Her voice abandoned her. She could barely make herself think beyond how close he was and how crazily alive the flesh across her tensing bottom felt.
“Nothing?”
Her heart was beating a thousand times a second as she stammered, “It felt wrong.”
He tipped his head. “Wrong? What do you mean? In what way was this wrong?”
