Protecting His Brat

by Sorcha Black

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Where’s the bathroom?” I got up to stretch and glanced around. I hadn’t seen a likely door. There was a narrow one off the kitchen, but I’d assumed it was storage.

  “There’s an outhouse out back, if you follow the path. I’ll show you the way.”

  The concept of an outhouse was a bit disconcerting, but that wasn’t what I’d been looking for.

  “But…I need a shower,” I said, feeling stale and windblown. “Is there a shower somewhere?” There had to be a way to bathe on this island, right?

  “Well, I can set one up, but it’s just a bag I hang from a tree. The water won’t be warm until the sun heats it.” He was grinning, his usually grim face alight. The jerk was having fun trying to shock me. “I guess you’re no stranger to cold showers…unless you disobeyed me that time?”

  “I obeyed,” I grumbled, remembering that punishment all too vividly.

  I’d read enough books and seen enough movies to know that camping came without some modern comforts and conveniences, and I wasn’t exactly prissy, no matter what he seemed to think about me, or about rich women in general. It wasn’t like we were sleeping in a moldy tent or something. Sure, the cabin was dusty and filled with old, rickety furniture, but who cared about that?

  “I was hoping for something faster. Can I heat water to wash or something?”

  “Sure, or you could go for a swim.”

  I turned away from him to gaze out the window. Swim in the lake?

  From the window, the body of water looked cool and inviting. I did love to swim, but a person could see the bottom of a pool.

  “Is there anything in there that might eat me?”

  “Nope. The fish here wouldn’t eat you even if you were a good girl and asked nicely.”

  I blinked at him, missing the innuendo until I noticed his expression.

  “Well, there goes that idea,” I said. If he was going to make fun of me, I was going to tease him right back. “And here I’d thought I’d finally found a way to get some action on this damned island.”

  He chuckled in appreciation, apparently approving of my delayed repartee.

  “I can’t go swimming, though. I didn’t bring a swimsuit.”

  If anything, he looked even more amused. “So go naked. Who’s going to see?”

  I looked out the window again, scanning the horizon. There wasn’t a moving dot to be seen, other than the occasional bird.

  “What if a boat goes by?”

  “They probably wouldn’t be close enough to see more than a tiny pink thing moving around in the distance.”

  “I’m not pink!”

  “You are…especially your pretty pink pussy.”

  I felt myself go very pink, indeed.

  His rumble sounded like a pleased growl. “I love it when you blush.”

  “Shut up!” I grimaced at him and marched out the door, determined to show him I wasn’t too uptight to go skinny-dipping for the first time in my life. In broad daylight, no less.

  I pulled off my T-shirt and unhooked my bra as I left the cabin, knowing he’d yanked open the door I’d shut in his face and was following me closely. When I would have walked back down to the dock, he took me by the shoulders and bodily turned me onto a path that led behind the cabin. We passed what looked like the most stereotypical outhouse in existence—the outhouse on which all cartoon outhouses were based, right down to the moon-shaped hole in the door. Past that, was a pretty area of overgrown lawn, then a path through the trees that led down to a small, sandy beach.

  “It’s not Cancun,” he admitted.

  “I’ve never been to an actual beach.”

  “What? No beaches on your fancy holidays? Let me guess, your mother prefers New York and London rather than all-inclusive resorts?”

  “She doesn’t take me on her vacations. They’re her time to relax, not to entertain children.”

  “You’re not a child anymore.”

  “No. Not for a few years now, but I’m still not invited.”

  “You never did any family stuff?” For some reason, he looked surprised. He seemed to understand my life well enough most of the time, but sometimes new info tripped him up.

  “With whom? Jake?” I asked somewhat cattily. “Lauren is a bit too busy to spend her free time with her science experiment.”

  “I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you say her name.”

  The blasphemy of saying her given name, and so disrespectfully, made me anxious, as though she might have overheard me here, in the middle of nowhere.

  “Well, it’s true.” I slid the bra down my arms and off, and tossed it onto my discarded T-shirt. My shoes and socks were next, then my pants and panties. Naked, with my toes curling in the grass, I stood there staring at the water, the wind caressing my skin. The sun felt strange on my body—especially the parts of me that had never seen the sun before. I was pale everywhere that wasn’t a freckle, but even paler where clothes usually covered me.

  “It would be just my luck if a paparazzi boat zoomed by right now.”

  “I doubt they could have found us, let alone this fast. Besides, you’re rich but you’re not famous, gorgeous. They usually give up following us after we get into the car.”

  I padded down to the sand, feeling strange—as though I’d shed the version of me people knew, and now I was just a naked soul in a naked body, new to the world.

  The hot sand under my feet felt like heaven.

  “What did you mean when you said you were your mother’s science experiment?”

  The water licked at my toes as nature tried to reclaim me.

  “Do you honestly think Mother would do something as vulgar as getting pregnant or giving birth?” I snorted. “Not Lauren. I mean, I completely understand that having a baby isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but I hate that I feel like an intruder in her life. My father wanted a child, so they did IVF with donor eggs and a surrogate. My mother and I aren’t biologically related.”

  He didn’t look very surprised. Then again, Mother and I looked nothing alike, and we couldn’t be more different in temperament.

  “A lot of people do IVF or adopt children and bond with them just fine,” he pointed out.

  “True, but she never wanted me in the first place.” I shuffled deeper into the water, stopping when it got to my knees. The lake bottom was sandy and even cooler than the water lapping at me. “I’ve overheard things.”

  “She’s not the most affectionate woman, but I’m sure she cares about you. Why else would she hire bodyguards for you?”

  “Spending money on someone isn’t the same thing as caring about them.”

  I was expecting him to keep playing devil’s advocate, but he fell silent. For some reason I knew he wasn’t defending my mother out of a sense of loyalty to her. It was like he couldn’t believe there was someone who didn’t love me.

  She wasn’t a horrible woman, though. It’s not like I’d ever been abused.

  There was a quiet splash behind me, and I turned my head to find Blue following me into the water. He’d stripped off his clothes at some point while I’d been looking out over the lake.

  The sunlight was bright and unforgiving, the hard lines of his body stark, leaving sexy shadowed dips here and there. For a man who claimed that most bodyguard work was uneventful, he had many scars, white, and pink, and jagged. Puckered, raised, dented. A doctor might be able to catalog all of the injuries and guess the cause, but to me it was only violent Braille on his skin. Far too many people had been cruel to him. Hopefully it had been strangers. I turned around to face him rather than just look at him over my shoulder.

  “Your body has been through a lot.” I tried to keep my tone neutral.

  When he reached me, I ran my fingers over the echoes of violence that had been inflicted on him. Touching the little scars on his side and his abdomen made his flesh quiver under my fingers. Was the scar tissue sensitive or was he just reacting to my gentle touch?

/>   “Did you get all of these from work?”

  “Work, my old job, a misspent youth, a strict father. A bit of everything.”

  The strict father part caught my interest most, of course, but it seemed far too direct to pursue that statement first.

  “What was your old job?”

  His muscles flexed to my touch, and his body’s interest in me, or what I was doing, grew.

  “I used to be a bouncer. We all were—Ellis, Ariel, and me. Ariel’s uncle ran a strip club, and he hired all three of us to help out as soon as we were old enough.”

  It was hard to imagine having the kind of life where a person could just hit that age, and no one would dissuade them from going into that industry—even just as a bouncer. That was a lot of freedom, but judging by his scars, it had come at a high price.

  “Your family didn’t object?”

  We waded deeper. I hesitated when the water reached my privates, pretending it was because the water was cool. There was no seeing into the tea-colored depths. Getting a toe bitten by a fish was one thing, but the idea of getting anything more tender bitten was anxiety-provoking.

  “My sister and I needed to put food on the table, and it paid more than minimum wage.”

  I took the plunge to my waist, and after that the water’s coolness lured me in. I didn’t stop until the water reached my neck.

  “Where were your parents?”

  “Our father was a drinker. Our mother left him. Left us. When he died, we looked her up. Five hours away, happily married—two new kids. She was just done with us. Sends us a two-for-one card on our birthday now, but that’s about it.”

  “A two-for-one card?”

  “You know, like hope you have a good year, you two?”

  “Your…birthdays are close together?”

  “We’re twins.”

  I must have looked astonished because he started to laugh.

  “Don’t worry, she looks nothing like me.”

  It was difficult to imagine him as a woman—he’d be a big, brutish woman, that was for sure. Considering how I felt about him, even if Blue had been female, I’d probably still be interested.

  “The doctor told our mother she was having twin girls. She bought pink everything, chose names. My sister’s name is Violet. Mine was supposed to be Bluebell.”

  I gaped at him. “Bluebell? I mean, it’s adorable, but it really wouldn’t suit this you.”

  “It’s a secret, brat. If you ever tell the guys my name was supposed to be Bluebell, I’ll spank your little ass raw.”

  He was even with me in the water now, but it reached his chest instead of his neck.

  “Is that a promise?”

  He chuckled, crowding me. I backed a step, then two, before realizing what I was doing and standing my ground.

  “Think you’re tough now just because you’ve handled some spanking?”

  “But I’m your good girl, Daddy. You wouldn’t want to scare me or be too mean.” I used my best little girl voice while trying to look adorable.

  “I think I could bring myself to be a mean daddy in this case,” he said sourly, his eyes dancing with mischief.

  “Admit it—you like it when I misbehave.”

  “If you were always a good girl, I wouldn’t have a convenient excuse to spank you.”

  I gasped in mock outrage and shook my head at him. “But I’m so sweet and innocent. Do you really want to do horrible things to me?”

  “You and your daddy fetish. Where did you ever even hear about that stuff if you were too nervous to look it up on the internet?”

  “It was in one of the books I read at the bookstore. I didn’t understand the appeal at the time, even though I read almost all of it.”

  “Leave it to you to find something so risqué to read.” He made a sound of disapproval which made me hot all over even though he was grinning. “So what made you decide you were into it all of a sudden?”

  Since nothing in the lake had eaten me yet, I swam out a little way, bobbing in the gentle waves and trying to figure out how to answer that question.

  “I’m not sure, to tell you the truth. It just popped into my head one day when we were together and it kind of stuck in there. I think it makes sense to call you Daddy, considering how we are together, but if you hate it, I won’t keep calling you that.”

  “Is part of it because you know it gets you into trouble?” He was swimming beside me, which was comforting. I knew there were no sharks in freshwater lakes, but if a particularly large and aggressive fish showed up, I didn’t think Blue would hesitate to punch it on my behalf.

  “Well, that was part of the initial attraction, I have to admit. It reflects how I feel about you, but it also makes me feel embarrassed and hot at the same time.”

  He swam closer until we were treading water a bit too close together, kicking each other in the shins now and then because of our proximity.

  “It weirded me out at first.”

  I felt myself blushing. “I can stop.”

  “You don’t have to stop. It didn’t take long until you converted me.” He chuckled. “Hopefully you haven’t ruined me for life. It’s bad enough we’re so far apart in age—”

  “You’re so ridiculous! There isn’t that much of an age difference.”

  “—but I also have no idea how to be a good father. If you want me to get drunk and say mean things to you, I’m your man.”

  “I don’t need you to raise me, but you do teach me things and look out for me, and I like that kind of feeling between us. Does that part bother you? The fact that I need more coddling than I would if I was the usual kind of girl you dated?”

  “No. I love how protective you make me feel—how important to you, too. It’s fun and warm and sweet. I love that you’re bratty to get my attention. I never would have thought I’d enjoy our dynamic so much, and you…well, you know how I feel about you.”

  My chest was burning, almost as though my heart was too hot and too big for my body.

  “Stop looking at me like that, Aberdeen. Once we leave this island, things between us have to change. We get to have each other here, but after this, things need to end.”

  Ugh. Men.

  Before I could argue with him, he headed back to where he could touch bottom, then waded to where the water only reached his hips. There he stood, arms crossed, his jaw set in granite stubbornness. He looked like he was waiting for me to argue.

  The man could believe what he liked, but I wasn’t going to let him go without a fight. He was trying to be noble and do the right thing or something, but I wasn’t in a rush to run out and get married. Besides, just because my mother wanted me to marry money didn’t mean I had to. I had enough money to support two people comfortably for like a hundred years or something. Compatibility and the quality of a partner’s character were far more important to me than wealth.

  For that matter, I doubted Blue was doing that badly for himself.

  It was way too early in our relationship to think of him in terms of marriage, but there were no actual laws saying a girl couldn’t marry her bodyguard. Just because we came from different social classes didn’t mean we were Romeo-and-Juliet-level doomed.

  There was absolutely no reason to tamely follow the path my mother had laid out for me. I was allowed to make my own decisions and have my own life. The possibilities that came with that thought were endless and exciting, and I was going to take time exploring them rather than plodding along in the rut I was expected to be content in.

  I swam to Blue, not letting his mood make me worry. We’d already established I could get him to do what he considered the ‘wrong thing’ if I applied myself. The man was not immune to my wiles.

  He watched me approach, his gaze wary. “You look like you’re up to something.”

  “Do I? When am I ever up to something?”

  “When aren’t you up to something? You had me so snowed in the beginning. I thought you were all sweet and downtrodden, but you were playing me the
whole time.”

  I frowned speculatively at him. “I’m only like this with you, and only because you like it when I’m a bad girl.”

  “This”—he pointed at me—“needs to stop as soon as we’re back at your mother’s house.”

  “What do you mean, Daddy?” I was close enough to touch him now, but he wasn’t backing away. It was as if he was afraid retreating from me would show weakness. Before he could answer, I bit his stomach, but it was more a scraping of my teeth against his skin since there wasn’t anything soft to sink my teeth into.

  He hissed out a breath, and I glanced down to watch his hard cock jerk just under the surface of the water.

  “Behave.”

  “If you really wanted me to behave, you wouldn’t be naked.” I stood up and didn’t miss the way his gaze slid appreciatively over my breasts as water sheeted off my upper body. “You and your mixed messages. Now that I’ve figured you out, I just have to guess exactly how you’re hoping I’ll misbehave.”

  His brows drew down, but he seemed more torn than angry. “I’m naked because I didn’t bring shorts to swim in.”

  “And you just happened to need a swim while I was skinny-dipping.”

  “I need to keep an eye on you. I’m your bodyguard.”

  “Is that what you’re doing out here? Guarding my body?” I crowded him, letting his cock slide up my belly. I didn’t stop getting closer until my breasts were rubbing lightly against his skin. He swallowed, his throat bobbing as if keeping his hands to himself was torture.

  Time to change the subject off work before he felt any guiltier and decided things were over with immediately.

  “So…just how rough do you usually get with the girls you play with?” I knew hearing him talk about other women would make me jealous, but expecting him to play down to my level would mean he’d probably get bored of me when the novelty of my inexperience wore off.

  “Rougher than you can handle.”

  “Can you show me what it’s like without the training wheels?”

  As he looked down at me his gaze was lazy, but his cock twitched against my belly.

  “Asking me to take you any further down the rabbit hole would be a mistake, Alice.”