Page 9 of Daddy's Little Librarian
Tingles ran through her just at the sound of her name on his lips.
I’ll bet he spanks.
He cleared his throat. She stole a peek at him, but nope—there was still bulging in the front of his pants. She snapped her eyes back to the ceiling.
I’ll bet he puts on black leather and goes to the dungeon parties where he ties up the girls and flogs them unmercifully.
Oh, God. She was going to start giggling any second. Not because that mental image was funny in any way, but because it hit way too close to home and her nerves just couldn’t handle it.
I’ll bet they call him Daddy when he does it, her Little self said.
That right there all but killed her nervous giggles. She hadn’t had a Daddy in a long time. Not a real Daddy, anyway. Not since Gopher.
“Now that I’m done embarrassing us both with assumptions,” Kurt said, clearing his throat. “How about you tell me what it is you really want to hire me for?” He held up his hand before she could do more than open her mouth. “I’m not saying I’ll do it. As it happens, I did get hired for… something this morning, so…”
“It doesn’t hurt just to hear me out, though, right?” she said hopefully. Just thinking about Gopher helped kill her embarrassment, as well as her amusement. She even forgot she wasn’t supposed to look at him. She turned around, needing to see him directly instead of just his reflection.
“Sure.” He shrugged, then propped himself against the wall, making himself comfortable to do just that.
“I… I need help.” Funny, it didn’t get any easier to say the second time around, either. The police hadn’t believed her. The dispatchers at 911 didn’t believe her. What if he didn’t believe her, either? What was she going to do then?
Except there was nothing on his face that said he was doing anything but listening, mind and ears both wide open.
“In what way?” he asked.
Clutching her hands tight together, she braced herself for rejection. “I want to hire you to be my, um… my bodyguard.”
He cocked his head, and his gaze swept over her once. “Why on earth do you need a bodyguard?” He immediately caught himself. “That came out wrong. I didn’t mean to say it like that. You have a perfectly nice—”
“No, no.” She fluttered her hands, trying not to be stung by that. “It’s fine.”
“Normally, I’m a little more polite and a lot more charming than this. Just not on Mondays.” He rubbed his mouth sheepishly. “Why does a librarian need a bodyguard?”
Scotti hesitated, chewing at her bottom lip. “I’ve got a problem,” she hedged. “My Da—I mean, my…” She hesitated. Her what? She’d managed to stop herself before calling him her Daddy-dom. Ex-boyfriend hardly seemed appropriate, but what did that leave? “M-my ex,” she stammered, cringing a little, but that would just have to do. “He’s doing things—”
“You don’t need me. Get a restraining order.”
“I have. He’s not the sort of ex who pays attention to that sort of thing.”
“Then call the police.”
“I did.” She wrung her fingers, bracing herself even harder. “They don’t believe me. Nobody believes me.” That he only looked at her, quiet and waiting, gave her the strength to say, “He broke in last night. I called 911, but they said I could go to jail for trying to prank them and not to call back.”
Almost imperceptibly, his eyes narrowed. “Do you think you’re in danger?”
She wrung her hands so hard it hurt. “I think he’s going to cut me up, stuff me into a million Ziploc baggies and stow me in the freezer next to the Christmas ham, and he’s going to do it while I’m on the phone, begging someone to come help me.”
She stopped. Not because she’d said everything she could, but because her chest had tightened too much to let her continue. She nodded instead, and prayed he took her seriously.
He blinked. A slow tic of muscle leapt along his jawline, bulge and release, bulge and release. “What exactly do you want me to do?”
“Well,” again she bit her bottom lip, hesitating. “Most of his visits come at night. You know, he walks around the house, treads all over my flowerbeds, tries the windows and doors… and no matter what I do, he gets in. He always gets in.”
Clench and bulge. There went that tic of muscle again.
“I-I was thinking, maybe two things. First, if he sees that I’m no longer alone, then maybe he’ll stop coming by. They say abusers don’t like to out themselves as abusers. They’ll stop if they get caught. So, if you’re there to see what he does, then he won’t want to do anything, right? He’ll just go away. Right?”
He had no reaction. “And two?”
