by Maren Smith
Wadding the blanket in on itself, he tossed it into the chair by the window and strolled around the bed to lay a single sharp slap on her upturned bottom. That smack went straight to his cock. So did her squeal and the bounce of her breasts as she bolted up to catch her offended flesh in both hands.
“Up.” There was no hiding his amusement, so he didn’t bother trying. “You can have coffee with your breakfast, but we’ve got a long way to go, and we’re not going to get there if you don’t get out of bed.”
“It’s not even morning yet!” she protested.
He walked to the window and snapped back the drapes, letting in the brightness of snow-reflected sunlight.
Clapping her hands over her eyes and hissing like a vampire, Aubrey fell over backwards on the mattress.
“Sadist,” she grumbled.
“Up,” Branch said for the last time. Few hotels these days lacked for a coffeemaker in the rooms, but they’d been lucky enough last night to find one. However, he did remember seeing one in the lobby. “If you’re not up and dressed by the time I get back, we’re going to have a problem.”
She blew him a sleepy raspberry as he snagged the keycard and headed out the door. He grinned, chuckling under his breath as he followed the gold and red 70s-décor carpet all the way back to the lobby. He got them each a coffee, grabbing a handful of creamers and sugar packets so she could dress hers up the way she liked it. He couldn’t help wondering which he wanted to see more when he got back to their room. That she had obeyed or that she was still in bed? She was a babygirl in search of a Daddy-Dom, but she wasn’t his babygirl, and he wasn’t her Daddy-Dom. Nothing that had been said between them gave him the right to act in any way other than as a Good Samaritan, helping her get home. Except that one completely ludicrous opening line, the devious side of his subconscious whispered. I conjured you. Implying she had filled him up with all the things she wanted her Daddy-Dom to be, and she’d even listed them—kind, gentle, patient, stern, and kinky. Daddy-Doms spanked. That went with the territory every bit as much as a babygirl’s innate desire to act out if only to gain the occasional reassurance Daddy was paying attention and he still cared enough to correct her.
I conjured you implied consent in a way he’d never had it before and which wouldn’t hold up in any BDSM Community worth joining. He knew that. But that didn’t stop the excitement from thrumming through his veins as he headed back to their room. Anticipation made his fingers… not shake, exactly, but feel alive in an unexpected, heightened-sensitivity kind of way, especially as he slipped the keycard into the scanner and waited for the light on the lock to turn green. It took a half a second; it felt like forever. And sure enough, when he went inside, he found she had gotten out of bed, but only long enough to shut the drapes, snag the blanket, and go back to bed.
She wasn’t sleeping. He hadn’t been gone anywhere near long enough for her to fall back to sleep. In fact, he could practically feel her eyes on him as he walked through the room to set both coffees on the dresser next to the TV. He didn’t reopen the drapes, but he did turn on the light by the window, filling the room with the dimmest light as only hotels could do. He wished he’d put his coat on. He would have loved to see the dreaded anticipation creep over her as he took it off. Failing that, he wished he was wearing a long-sleeved shirt for no other reason than the sheer ritualistic pleasure of rolling the sleeves up past his elbows as he walked toward her. She was watching him. She had rolled onto her side facing the window, with the blankets drawn all the way up to her chin. As he approached the head of the bed, he saw over the hump of her shoulder enough to glimpse her eyes. They were wide open and fixed on him.
“Did you hear what I said before I left?” he asked. It was rhetorical. They both knew she had. “Do you want me to spank you?”
That was not rhetorical. That was him giving her a choice. It wasn’t even the obvious choice: Either get up and do as I asked, or I will spank you. Although it might seem he was asking that on the surface, he was, in fact, offering a deeper choice: Stay in bed, and I will be your Daddy today; if you don’t want that, get up. Get up right now, and I will let this go.
Her breath caught. Her eyes were huge. Great round, blue-grey windows letting him see all the way through her to the conflicting desire picking at her soul.
“Maybe,” she whispered.
She wanted it; she wasn’t sure. Was her Little ruling her Big right now? Should he wait to find out, or should he give her a taste, just a little glimpse of what this conjured Daddy was capable of?
Easing down onto his haunches, Branch brought himself to her eye level. He braced his forearms upon his knees, clasping his hands between them. “We play only with a safeword and that word is red, do you understand?”
She swallowed so hard, he heard it.
“I don’t want it to be play.”
“I play until I collar. Collars come with time. Right now, you very much want for this to be play because that means I’m giving you the power to dictate what I do and how far I go.”
Her brow wrinkled. “I don’t want that.”
No true submissive did. True submissives wanted their Doms to take charge, but that kind of power exchange never happened within twenty-four hours of meeting. Not safely, anyway.
“Too bad, you get it, anyway. Be glad for it because this is your time to let me know what you like and what you don’t. You do that by using your safewords: red for stop, yellow for wait. Wait is different from stop. Wait means we pause whatever we’re doing long enough to talk about it—is the implement too harsh or do you hate the feel of it; is the intensity of the scene too much, is it evoking the wrong kind of emotions; are you scared? If you’re about to be punished, do you believe I’m being inappropriate, too hard, or do you believe you haven’t earned it—whatever it might be. These are the things we need to come to learn about one another before what we do can be considered anything but play.”
Even swaddled in under that hotel blanket, he saw when she shivered.
“Aubrey,” he warned in his best Daddy-Dom tone. “I told you to get up. Why are you still in bed?”
Her breathing quickened, and she blinked several times.
“I-I-I don’t know,” she answered in a very small voice.
“Oh, I think you do.” He reached up, doing nothing more threatening than tucking a corner of the blanket away from her mouth, so he could see all of her face. The Big Bad Wolf in a fairytale story of their own making, all the better for him to read even the most minute changes in her expression, including those she didn’t want him to see. “Is it because you’re still sleepy or because you want to see if you can press Daddy’s buttons?”
He already knew the truth of it, but how she answered would tell him what kind of babygirl she was—his kind, or the exhausting kind he normally ran away from.
“I wanted to see h-how you would react,” she admitted, biting her bottom lip.
God, yes. Sweet, honest… very much his kind of babygirl.
“Well, I’m sorry to say you’re about to find out how Daddy reacts when his babygirl misbehaves.” Standing, Branch took hold of the blanket and peeled it back, all the way to her feet. Her fingers caught in the folds of the hem, but that was her only attempt to fight what he was doing, and it was a feeble effort, at best. The kind of effort babygirls made when they knew they weren’t supposed to go meekly to their corrections and yet, didn’t truly want to fight it.
That opinion was reinforced when he took hold of her arm, and she rose up out of bed without any resistance. He took her place, seating himself on the edge of the bed where the mattress beneath him was warm from her body heat. His pull on her arm was little more than an offer of direction, bringing her to stand to the right of his knees. She clasped her hands before her, clutching and unclutching her fingers as she stared down at his lap.
“Naughty little girls get spanked on their bare bottoms,” he told her. “Say yellow right now, and I will let you keep them on this first time. I
will pay attention to nothing else you say, is that clear?”
Her blue-grey eyes flicked up to his. Her fingers clutched each other and squeezed tight.
“I don’t want a spanking on the bare,” she said, in a quavering voice
It wasn’t yellow. He could see in her eyes that she hadn’t misunderstood his directions. She was, in fact, holding her breath, waiting to see what he would do.
“I’m sorry, sweetie, but when you don’t mind what I tell you, this is what happens.” Excitement sang through his veins as he reached up under the hem of her thigh-length sweater and hooked the elastic of her underwear. He kept his eyes locked on hers as he skimmed them all the way down her legs. Gravity tugged them free from him, and they dropped into an abandoned puddle of cotton around her feet.
Her breath caught, again, as he drew her down, his hold on her arm less of a prison and more like guidance. She settled across his lap with the tiniest squeak of nervousness. That squeal became a startled giggle when he heaved her hips into a more centered position. Branch knew some men who would have taken that giggle as an affront to their authority. He took it for what it was, a fear reaction. He laid his hand on her bottom, soothing that fear with a reassuring touch.
“What did Daddy tell you?” he asked, reaching around her waist with his other hand and hugging her tightly to him.
“Time to get up,” she squeaked. Behind her, she seemed unable to decide whether she wanted to dig her toes into the carpet or stiffen her legs and cross her ankles. It was darling.
“And what did you do?” He kept his tone low and firm.
Her bottom tightened under his hand. He squeezed, letting her know without words that it was okay.
“I went back to bed.”
He swatted and was rubbing gently before she seemed to register the sting. Her breath caught again. Her feet lifted off the floor, bucking up just a little before finding their way back down again. He liked it because it showed him some of the same moves she would make when the hurt of the spanking began to creep into territories that were more than she could bear. This wasn’t that kind of spanking; he wanted to make her buck and squeal. There was always something magical about the first time. He wanted this to be the spanking she compared to all other spankings she would ever receive. He wanted it to be the high-bar for sexy discipline and all the funishments to come. He would even try to keep it respectable by not looking too lasciviously at all the naughty parts of her that showed during a spanking without panties. God help him though, a thin trickle of glistening moisture lined the parting of her labia, showing just how ready she was for this.
“Enjoy this,” he told her bowed head. “You’ve worked really hard to land yourself here.”
He spanked her, just hard enough to bring a flush of pink to the gorgeous round swells of her buttocks, delivering his swats in rounds of four. From cheek to cheek, upper to upper, lower to lower. Where her bottom sloped into her thighs and the flesh wobbled in the most delightful way, rewarding each round of diligence with sneak peeks at the shadowy pleasures her body had to offer. He took her from lying draped across his lap with her hands clutching at the bedding to twisting her hips and clutching at his thigh and knee. He took her from soft gasps to shrill ones, punctuated with grunts which told him she was nearing the point where the sting of fantasy enjoyment began to court the real pain of repeatedly having one’s ass smacked. He knew he’d crossed that line when the hand gripping his knee slipped its hold, shooting back in an instinctive grab to stay the next fall of his open palm.
“Naughty girl,” he tsked, catching her wrist. Passing it into the grip of his other hand, he pinned her hand to her lower back. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Stopping you from hurting my bottom?” That trembling quaver was still very much in her voice as she threw that back at him over her shoulder, but it wasn’t yellow and it wasn’t red, and he didn’t stop for anything less.
“Babygirl, that was just the warmup.” He let her feel the difference in his next swat. She gasped, curling into the bedding as he left the rounds of four swats and occasional caresses behind in favor of harsher strokes. Still, there were degrees. He started gently, but gentleness was as relative as each submissive’s ability to ride the ever-building waves of discomfort all the way to that ultimate pleasurable goal. Aubrey rode hers with phenomenal expression, feeding his dominance with every squeak and cry. Every toss of her head, rolling hump of her ass as she rode his knee, the increasingly frantic kicking. She arched her back, throwing her hair as she cast her panting groans to the ceiling. She even arched back her hips and when she did, he upped the intensity. He turned that soft stain of pink across her bottom into a deep rosy hue. He changed her gasps to breathy cries that she fought desperately to self-gag in the bedding.
He loved her responsiveness. He loved her pain threshold. He really loved the buck and bounce of her bottom as that age-old dance of masochistic pain and pleasure began their competition for supremacy in all her sexual nerves. Only when he began to suspect the pain might be overwhelming the pleasure did Branch stop. No gentle rubs now, he gripped each ass cheek in turn, hard and commanding. Squeezing until she kicked and cried out the same as she had while he’d been spanking her. The inside of her thighs were wet though and when his gripping fingers pried her legs apart, he found the thin line of glistening fluid along her labia had spread, coating the whole of her desire-swollen pussy and releasing that intoxicating musk created by every woman at the peak of her arousal.
Someday, he might be more to her than a fake Daddy conjured up in his manipulative grandmother’s Build-A-Bear shop, and if he were, this would be the moment when he took control of her. When his hand would clamp down over her pussy in a grip of pure possession. And if, someday, she became more to him than the babygirl he’d rescued from an interstate rest area after accidentally killing her car, then perhaps, he would win from her own lips that sobbed out declaration of exactly who owned her: sex, body, and mind.
He locked her legs between his thighs, seizing hold of her other wrist when she shoved her left fist back behind her. Not to cover herself, not to block or stop him from continuing, but because she needed to feel him pinning her down. He gave her what she needed as he took the spanking home in a way she was going to feel physically for perhaps an hour, maybe two, but would feel mentally for days. He paddled her, a fury of swats that rained down hard and fast and covered the whole of her bottom. He avoided the tops of her thighs. He’d save that for some future moment when real discipline was called for and something more than his bare hand—his belt or a sturdy wooden-backed hairbrush—would be used to lay in the coup de grâce. Aubrey’s spankable bottom was, in his opinion, made for a good, old-fashioned hair brushing.
“Daddy, please!” she squealed, and in her cry, Branch could hear all the walls of her inner submissive fracturing inside her. “Please!” She flung back her head, teeth gritted, and eyes squeezed shut. On any other woman, such would have been a look of pure agony. On Aubrey, it was as glorious as the orgasm he could see rippling up through the backs of her thighs, clenching in her spasming buttocks as she bawled his name, “Da-ddy!”
He didn’t own it yet. He didn’t have the right, but he still caught her pussy in his hand, needing to feel each shuddering spasm as they dwindled in intensity. It would have been so easy to rub and draw out her pleasure, but he didn’t want this to be the moment, looking back, she found any reason for regret. He held her, just held her, letting her come drifting back down to herself in her own good time.
“Oh, my God,” Aubrey whispered. “Oh, my God, oh, my God.”
And then, from the room next door, he heard the brisk, unmistakable sound of a bare hand striking bare flesh, followed by a feminine squawk of outrage: “Like hell you did, buster!”
Branch and Aubrey both snorted, then snickered as the sounds next door broke into a scuffle of smacking, fleeing, and an obviously masculine: “Honey, I’m sorry! Ow! I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
Aubrey broke into laughter first, but Branch wasn’t far behind her. One last rub to her crimson-hot bottom and then, reluctantly, Branch put the panties still hooked around her ankles to rights and let her go.
Chapter Five
Breakfast was coffee and pancakes at the diner half a block down the road from the hotel. Aubrey ate every bite sitting on a hot butt and flying high on endorphins. Those endorphins carried her all the way through the series of phone calls which took up her morning. The first went to her folks, letting them know when they might expect her. Then she called her insurance company, who required an accident report from the police who wanted to know why they’d removed themselves from the scene of the accident (because I didn’t want to freeze to death) and then from the state (I was on my way to my parents’ house, and I’m still with the guy who hit me; he didn’t ‘flee’, either), and then when she got all that explained, back once more to the insurance company, who was even now likely crawling over the report in search of some way to get out of paying.
“I’m not going to leave you without a car,” Branch told her at the conclusion of all the phone calls. “No matter what, you will have a decent, working vehicle.”
And, of course, she would. Because that’s what Daddies did—everything in their power to make things right again.
It was 150 miles from the small country town of Concordia to her parents’ home in Lincoln, Nebraska. On any other day, she could have made the trip in less than three hours, including stopping for gas and coffee and sometimes, stopping again for a bathroom break. Today, however, it took almost seven. The snowplows had been through, both scraping and salting the interstate, bridges and on- and off-ramps. The temperature had warmed up to a balmy 20-degrees, turning the sanded, salted, packed ice and snow into an icy-slushy-dangerous mess. Slow as he was going, Branch almost slid off the road twice, but he was a good driver. He recovered both times and got her safely home, a day late, but still in time for her birthday.