Page 11 of Daddy's Little Librarian
“I didn’t tell anyone you were a cop,” she countered.
Touché. True, he was the one who’d revealed that and judging from Scotti’s reaction, he didn’t for a second doubt that had been a slightly shocking reveal for her.
“All right,” he decided. “Maybe what I ought to say is, you know I’m not a cop anymore. So, what’s the play here?”
“No play.”
Bullshit.
“I know you better than that.”
“Can’t a woman be concerned about a friend in trouble?”
“Grams,” he warned.
The old woman abruptly stopped walking and turned on him. “Now you listen here,” she sternly began.
“Grams…” he warned again, facing her now too. He frowned. Cars were whizzing by on the road. Someone honked, but whether it was because of them, he wasn’t sure. It might have been. If it was, he knew it couldn’t look good. He was a big man, facing down an elderly woman, and he was the only one watching this who knew what a manipulative force of nature this ‘old woman’ could be.
“Don’t you ‘Grams’ me,” she replied. “You haven’t always been here, and yes, that’s not your fault. But I’ve made a friend in that young lady. She’s sweet, she’s kind—”
“She’s got good childbearing hips?” he pointedly asked.
“You noticed that too,” his grandmother teased, lightly smacking his arm with the backs of her fingers. Chuckling, she started walking again.
Tsking, nowhere near as amused as she was, he fell into step beside her again. “This is not going to go the way you want it to.”
“And how,” his grandmother asked, “do I want this to go, exactly?”
“I’m not going to date this woman.” He was firm on that. His life wasn’t set up for dating.
“She’s pretty, though.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with pretty.”
“She used to be just your type.”
“You have no idea what my type—”
“Submissive,” his grandmother said with relish.
He stopped walking. “Okay, now we agreed we weren’t going to talk about that.”
“A grandmother never forgets when she walks in on her beloved—”
He barked a laugh.
“—grandson,” she said, covering her heart and staring up at him with exaggerated innocence, “spanking the hell out of some chubby little blonde with a pink stripe in her hair and a ‘Daddy’s Whore’ tramp stamp right across her—”
He stopped again, his turn now to round on her. He pointed at her. “Stop. I didn’t ask her to get that tramp stamp.”
It was his most authoritative finger and his most authoritative tone. Back before he went to prison, when he was attending the occasional dungeon party or when he had a Little girl to soothe the Daddy-Dom need inside him, that combination of voice and finger were usually enough to shut all misbehavior down. Unfortunately, his grandmother was immune to both, and he had no recourse. No matter how much she needed it, he wasn’t about to spank her.
“It didn’t displease you.”
No, it certainly had not. But he wasn’t going to talk to her about that anymore than he was going to spank her. “I also didn’t ask you to come home from Bingo early.”
“Oh,” the old woman huffed, flinging off his complaint with a flap of both hands. “You’ve been spanking your sweethearts since you were six and playing house in the backyard. You were always a Daddy. Man up!” She lightly smacked his chest with her hand. “Be a Daddy now. Protect that girl, no one else has been.” Once more walking down the sidewalk toward the apartment he’d shared with her since he’d been released from prison, she flapped her hands again and called back over her shoulder, “She needs you!”
