by Madison Faye
“She’s got you there,” Daniel chuckled. “I’d need sustenance too, but mine would come from a bottle.”
“Yeah, except she’s on her way to a paddled ass for manipulation and a sassy mouth if she’s not careful.”
“Daddy Gray!”
“And complaining.”
“But—”
“It’s gonna be your butt if you don’t stop fussing, little girl.” This word of caution came from Daddy D. “Best get cleaned up before you find yourself over both our laps for a twenty count, each, of hands and belts.”
From Daniel who was usually more mild-mannered of the two, this was a surprise. Ordinarily, Gray was the disciplinarian, but if Daddy D thought she was getting too smart, or trying to top from the bottom, look out.
Quick at math, but not self-preservation at the moment, she continued her protest. “That’s eighty spanks! What happened to my job well done?”
The look on his face told her if she kept pushing, she’d find out. So much for her celebration.
“I’m sorry, sirs. I’ll go clean up now.”
She whirled, and with her hair whipping around her body, dashed inside the bathroom.
“I believe I’m rubbing off on you, Dan, old boy,” she heard Gray say.
“No one likes a bratty little girl.”
“Speak for yourself,” Daddy G replied. “It gives me an excuse to turn her lovely round backside bright red, or to haul out my bag of toys.”
“Like you need a reason.”
She was thinking the same thing and had to wonder what on earth had come over her to get involved with not only one dyed-in-the-wool dominant but two.
Their masculine laughter filling the office and setting her thoroughly pleasured private parts to tingling was the answer. Her thoughts also turned to Grayson’s toy bag and all the wicked delights it contained, and how Daniel gave the best aftercare ever.
Mindful of her sensitive girly bits and the little twinges of soreness if she moved certain ways, Erica quickly cleaned up, doing repairs to her hair and makeup before they got impatient and rethought their plans to celebrate.
Chapter Two
Three days later…
Staring at the computer screen in stunned disbelief, she experienced a sinking feeling, and for the first time understood what the expression meant. It was as if her heart suddenly weighed three times more and had slid from her chest into the pit of her stomach. Striving for calm, she took a deep breath and tried to blow it out slowly, but it hitched and shuddered as she did so.
“This can’t possibly be right,” Erica uttered, her words barely audible through the tightness in her throat.
She searched for a last saved date stamp on the page, thinking the program might have accessed an old, previously saved entry but didn’t see one. After refreshing the browser and reopening the program with the same result, she restarted her computer, unsure what else to do. It seemed like forever before the login screen appeared, but when it did, she started from the beginning.
Minutes later, when she selected the summary sheet for the bid and opened it in full-screen mode, it contained the same inaccurate information.
She dropped her head in her hands. Dread constricted her lungs until she couldn’t breathe, the pressure as though the three-ton wrecking ball suspended from the crane in the equipment yard outside her office window had swung and landed full force in the center of her chest.
Yeah, she’d be dead if that happened, but when Daniel and Grayson found out about this, the result would be the same.
They wouldn’t kill her, but her life would be as good as over. She’d lose their trust, likely her job, and since she lived with them, both sticklers for precision and a low tolerance for inefficiency, carelessness, and bullshit, her life with them might be over as well.
Surely not, Erica. Your daddies love you.
As quickly as the voice of reason in her head made her feel slightly better, the voice of doubt shot back a dismal prediction.
That may well be true, but will they be able to forgive or forget a careless mistake that costs them everything?
With tremulous fingers, she zoomed in on the figure displayed in bold print at the bottom of the document until it filled the entirety of her twenty-four-inch screen. Her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her. Nothing had changed from fifteen minutes ago when she first noticed something was wrong.
“Wrong,” she muttered with a derisive laugh. “If that isn’t the understatement of the century.”
This was a catastrophe of epic proportions, and since she was the one who uploaded everything, there was no one to blame except her.
She could feel the blood draining from her face as she stared at the decimal point. It wasn’t where it should be, which was one place to the right, where she was certain it was on Friday when she had entered it, then checked, rechecked, and triple checked it. As it stood now, in the millions, rather than the tens of millions, it accounted for a seven-digit mistake.
She wanted to throw up.
The conversation she’d had with both Grayson and Daniel, six weeks ago, echoed in her brain.
“I can handle this,” she boldly insisted as they closed the office at the end of a long week. Only minutes before, they had concluded a conference call during which the client had gushed over Gray’s architectural design and raved over the 3-D mock-up Daniel had created to go along with their initial proposal.
“If the numbers come in where I need them to be,” Mr. Proctor, the owner/CEO had told them, “I see good things in our future.”
It wasn’t a verbal commitment, and with six other finalists in the running, they had a long way to go before being awarded the contract, but it was a promising sign.
The next step was a cost analysis and submission of the final proposal, which she, rather than their usual accounting firm, had asked to do.
Daniel caught her by the arm and turned her to face him, his expression serious. “Are you sure, baby girl? This is one of the biggest jobs we’ve ever bid on. It’s probably a good idea for the accountants to go over your final numbers.”
Insulted, she glanced at her framed MBA diploma on the wall and raised one sleek blonde brow.
“We know you graduated top of your class, darlin’,” Grayson interjected, reading her unspoken indignation correctly. “And Kellogg is in the top ten nationally—”
“It’s ranked sixth in the country,” she replied, her shoulders back, spine stiff, chin pointed high, prepared for a fight.
“I stand corrected,” Grayson said with a small smile. “And finishing in the top ten percent in your class is impressive, but this is a multi-million-dollar project. An overlooked mistake in one column could mean we’re sunk. I agree with Dan. It won’t hurt to have a second set of eyes go over your calculations.”
“No need. I’ve got this covered. If I have any doubts, I’ll be the first one to shout for help.”
“There won’t be any need to shout for help if the accountants take a second pass,” Daniel pretty much repeated.
When she opened her mouth to argue further, Gray shut her down. “It’s decided, Erica. It will be your work, your numbers, your proposal, all blessed by Murray Simcox and his team.”
His firm tone of voice and Daniel’s uncompromising gaze brooked no further debate on the topic. They were the owners, her bosses, her daddies, which meant they had final say on everything.
“Yes, sirs,” she had agreed, albeit grudgingly.
Now, as her words echoed on repeat over and over inside her brain, she groaned and dropped her head onto her keyboard with a thunk. She’d been cocky and overconfident, but mostly stubborn because she hadn’t done as they asked and hadn’t sent the bid for final review.
But that was another matter entirely and didn’t explain how a decimal point jumped a place over the weekend. Or had she screwed up—plain as that?
No. She had checked every entry at least three times and went over her cell functions in Excel at least twice that.
Her final figure had been correct on Friday when she uploaded the proposal. Hadn’t it?
She went from one hundred percent sure to probably to maybe in the course of a few seconds as she remembered the countless distractions last week.
Mona had stopped by on Monday for a visit. She’d had her brood of four with her, all under five—something which boggled Erica’s mind. She couldn’t imagine caring for one preschooler much less two, a toddler, and an infant. They were all so cute, especially baby Noah, she had to stop and chat, play with the kids a bit, and claim a few kisses.
On Tuesday, her mother had called to discuss her sister’s engagement, then came the usual badgering about how her sister Jeannie, five years her junior, had already found a man.
She wanted to declare not only did she have one, but two men, both handsome and wealthy. And, unlike Jeannie’s fiancé, they weren’t under pressure to marry her because they’d knocked her up. Jeannie, who was due in October and getting married in September, already had to let out her wedding gown twice.
She didn’t say anything, however, still in the closet with her family about her relationship with Daniel and Gray. It took every ounce of control she had and nearly biting her tongue in two to keep from blurting it out and getting her mother to shut up already.
Eileen Long was nothing if not persistent, and followed her phone call with an impromptu visit on Wednesday. She rarely came to the city, and wouldn’t hear of Erica saying no, guilting her into going out with her. Lunch turned into an afternoon of shopping and manicures.
Other business calls on Thursday had distracted her, but she’d managed those efficiently and got back to the proposal.
She’d worked through lunch, reviewing her figures at least three times, and before the end of the day, had given her daddies each a hard copy to go over, before they signed off on everything. And a good thing too, because payday was Friday and when she arrived at eight a.m., several of the men had been waiting for her, needing an explanation of the changes in their paycheck with the new health insurance and other benefits that had recently gone into effect.
Their confusion could have been avoided if they’d attended any of the six Q&A sessions she’d held before the changes went into effect, which was the point of having them in the first place.
A beeping noise from her keyboard, where her forehead was mashing down too many keys at once, made her sit up again. There, staring back at her from her top-of-the-line, flicker-less, blue-light filtering, LCD monitor was the error.
But Gray and Daniel had signed off on it. How had they missed it too? They must not be able to count decimal places or all of them needed glasses.
Perhaps she’d loaded the wrong file. But that couldn’t be right. They’d signed the copies they reviewed, and she knew the signatures were there before she submitted it.
She glanced at the clock; the bidding closed at 11:59 tonight. At midnight, the price would be locked in. It didn’t leave her much time to get a new one uploaded. And the owners would have to sign it again—she’d have to tell them.
If the window closed, and the client accepted the standing bid, it would be a rip-roaring mess. Withdrawing would be a breach of contract. It meant the loss of a nonrefundable application fee, and a ten-thousand-dollar fine, not to mention the lost revenue from the project overall, which would be a major hit. They could kiss goodbye the expansion they’d planned and had already budgeted for—all thanks to her.
And, it would be a severe blow to two highly respected men and their hard-earned reputations.
Considered from any angle, she was going to be one sorry baby girl.
With a knot in the pit of her stomach, she got up and walked to the end of the hall. Daniel was still working, but Gray was out doing something, she didn’t recall what, but this couldn’t wait until he returned.
She glanced at the clock. The bidding closed in less than seven hours. Dear God, she was fucked.
Maybe luck was on her side, and the hard copies were correct. She rushed to the file cabinet, but when she hauled out the five-inch-thick file folder and flipped it open, there was the same number in all its inaccurate glory, right above her daddies’ signatures.
The taste of her failure burned like acid in the back of her throat. She eyed the lobby and the main door that led to the parking lot beyond.
Australia was nice this time of year. Did she dare make a break for it? Perhaps disappear for a few decades in the outback?
The idea held promise except for one small detail. Grayson was a sportsman and highly competitive. Fit as could be at forty, he was built like a tank—strong like one too. He went to the gym several days a week, pitched in on job sites when needed, lifting, hauling, and climbing ladders alongside his men. And, every year, he went north to Canada for three weeks of salmon fishing and hunting in the Yukon.
As tenacious as he was, he’d probably stomp the two thousand miles from Chicago to LA in his size fifteen steel-toed work boots. Then, spurred on by his fury, swim the Pacific to Sydney. Once there, he’d comb the Red Centre, turn over every leaf, peer under every rock, braving sunstroke, heat exhaustion, and snake bites, and, if that didn’t pan out, hire Crocodile Freaking Dundee to find her and make sure her butt paid the price.
It would probably be better to tell Daniel first. He was more laid back and bendable, though he wasn’t a pushover. One of the hardest spankings she’d ever received had been from Daddy D’s unyielding hand.
Her gaze shifted to his open door. She listened for a moment to him moving around inside, and her teeth sank into her lower lip, worrying it as she prepared to confess all. Most days, she treasured having two dominant daddies fussing over and loving her, but on days like this with a black cloud hanging over her head, not so much.
Erica straightened the documents and picked up the file. Then, like a prisoner on death row making that long final walk to the execution chamber, she put one leaden foot in front of the other and went down the hall to Daniel’s office.
At her knock, he looked up. His blue eyes gleamed as they locked on hers, and his dimples appeared when he smiled.
“Ready to pack it in for the day, baby? It’s been a Monday, that’s for sure. I’m beat.”
“I’m afraid not,” she murmured while slowly inching into the room. “And neither of us is going home anytime soon.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked, his smile fading.
“There’s a problem with the proposal.” He motioned her forward. She went, although her feet didn’t want to cooperate, moving as if she were slogging through sucking muck at the bottom of a lake. At his desk, she laid the file out, placing the summary sheet with the final cost on top where he couldn’t miss it.
He glanced at her once more, his brow furrowed with concern—soon it would be from so much more than that.
“I honestly don’t know what happened, Daniel. I—”
His eyes had already dropped to the page. She knew he’d spotted the problem because his hand came up in an unmistakable order for silence. Snapping her mouth shut, she watched, her stomach twisted into knots, as he flipped through the file.
It seemed like an eternity before he looked up. “This can’t be the same document Gray and I signed last week.”
“That’s what I thought, but those are the originals.”
His hand rose to his forehead, and he rubbed back and forth, appearing as perplexed as she was. “This is huge. Did you call the accountants? What do they have to say?”
She opened her mouth to reply but couldn’t.
He glanced up from studying the damning papers. “Erica?” When she still didn’t respond, steel invaded his tone when he insisted, “What else aren’t you telling me?”
“I, uh…” Her eyes dropped to her hands, which were twisting nervously. Feeling about two inches tall, she forced to admit what she had done, or rather, what she hadn’t. “I never sent the proposal for verification.”
Shock turned to disbelief, then finally anger settled over his han
dsome face. The last, more like fury, crashed over her with the force of a giant wave. “Why the hell not?” he demanded to know.
“I wanted to prove I could do this,” she said in a small voice.
“Fuck!” he bit out so sharply she flinched.
“Daniel, I’m so sorry,” she whispered while he reached for his phone.
“I’m afraid your being sorry doesn’t help one goddamn bit, does it? You deliberately put us at risk with this childish little ego trip.” He pointed to the chair in front of his desk. “Sit, while I attempt damage control—if it’s not too late.”
“But—”
“Quiet.” His deep voice rang with command, sounding more like Gray in that moment than her sweet, mild-mannered, usually even-tempered Daddy D. “This is not about you right now, Erica.”
She swallowed hard around the enormous lump in her throat, but did as he ordered and sank onto the leather chair.
Twenty minutes passed without a word to her other than his order for her to get the account code, login, and password she’d used to enter the bid. Once she’d raced to her desk, retrieved it, and hurried back in mere seconds, he pointed at the chair again, his blue eyes dark with fury and not a hint of their usual sparkle.
In silent misery, she listened to him discuss her colossal fuck-up with Murray Simcox, the head of financial consulting firm they’d used on every major project since they’d opened their doors fifteen years ago—until now. Wallowing in regret and self-recrimination, she stared down at her hands through a mist of burning tears.
Finally, he put the phone down. When he said nothing, whether to assure her that Murray and his team had this under control or launch into the lecture she expected, she peeked up at him, surprised to find his back to her when she hadn’t heard him get up. His head bowed, a hand behind his neck kneading the muscles she suspected were in knots from tension.