by Delta James
“Please don’t!” she cried.
“Oh, come now.” Rolling his sleeves up past his elbows, he patted his thigh. “It’s not the first time I’ve done this. Remember shortly after our father died… and all the other times?”
Pale and shaking, she didn’t even try to run.
“I’m not a child anymore or even a teenager. I’m twenty-two.”
“Much too old for spanking, I agree, yet here you are, having earned one. I’m sure Reid will agree that your future husband will thank us for ensuring you learn to obey.”
Blinking fast against the rise of watery tears, she shook her head, and for the first time, the mildly amused smile that had curled Fariq’s lips, pretty much right from the moment he started this shameful act, vanished. His narrow face hardened, his eyes growing cold.
“Don’t tell me no,” he warned. “I won’t put up with it. Bare your bottom right now, and put yourself in position, or would you rather I did it for you? You remember how that turns out, don’t you, my dearest? The longer you delay, the worse this will be, or so the verbiage goes.”
There was a threat in there. Christian had no prior information about which to comprehend, but Aliya did. Her dark eyes flooded with tears. Looking from her brother to him, her face turned a deep shade of mortified red before she abruptly dropped her gaze to the floor.
He wanted to go to her, to grab her, stopping her hands as she slipped them under the skirt of her pale summer dress and took her underwear off. She balled them up in her hands, trying to hide them from everyone’s view, but Fariq held out his hand in a wordless command. Without a choice, she gave them to him.
“Obey,” Fariq told her, dropping her underwear on the floor, so Christian had no choice but to see it.
The urge to snatch them up and hide them for her—or hell, put them back on her—was almost more than Christian could bear. In all his years with Fariq, he’d committed a lot of insufferable acts, but having to sit and watch Aliya’s deliberate degradation was intolerable. He wanted to stop it, but he couldn’t, not without risking a bullet in his head or hers. He couldn’t even leave because this was his fault. He had dared put his hands on Aliya, someone Fariq had already described as his most prized possession. He’d meant it, Christian realized with a sickening lurch in the pit of his stomach, which only twisted harder when Aliya broke into sobs as she lowered herself into that age-old position over her brother’s lap.
“Little ladies get to wear their panties. What do bad girls have to do?” Fariq said, staring at him. “Normally, they get their bottom spanked on the bare, but as Reid is here, I will preserve your modesty with your thin skirt. Come now, darling, you remember how this goes.”
Covering her face in both hands, Aliya cried into them, but only for a moment before placing herself over her brother’s lap.
There was nothing Christian could do to stop it, not without making things a hell of a lot worse.
Covering her face again, Aliya stiffened, flinching at each touch as Fariq adjusted her across his thighs.
He couldn’t watch this, but just as he was working up the nerve to look away, Fariq pinned him with a hard stare. Christian kept his face frozen in a mask and could only pray conveyed boredom instead of horror as Fariq lay his open hand on his sister’s ass. He was being judged.
A real man wouldn’t care. A real man would launch himself to his feet and put a stop to this.
How? Should he pull the gun from his holster and put a bullet between Fariq’s eyes, with Aliya lying right there, bare-assed and bawling? Then what? They were on Fariq’s mercenary-infested yacht in the middle of the ocean. What was he supposed to do, shoot everybody?
He kept his features coldly schooled as Fariq moved his hand from the curve of Aliya’s bottom, trailing down her thigh to slip up under her skirt to cup between her tensing legs, laying claim.
“What do you think, my friend?” Fariq asked. “Am I doing this right?”
“She’s your problem.” His throat was so tight, Christian hardly recognized the harshness of his own voice. “Do what you want with her. I really don’t care.”
They both deserved to burn in hell.
“Fariq, please,” she sobbed, squeezing her legs as tightly together as she could, but his hand stayed right where it was.
Two steps… that was all it would take. One hard burst of speed and consequences be damned, he’d have had Fariq by the neck while he beat that smug, twisted smile right off his face.
But he didn’t move. Folding his hands tightly together, he braced his elbows on his knees, forcibly locking himself in place.
“If you’re doing this for my sake, you should know something.”
Dark eyes narrowing slightly, Fariq waited.
“Had she been anyone else, even your beloved baby brother, I’d have knocked her on her ass for slowing me down the way she did. I didn’t choose to be there, and I sure didn’t choose to be her babysitter. I only acted as I did because blistering her butt seemed a safer course of action than breaking her face. If you want me to say I’m sorry, you’re going to be waiting a long time. If you think I’m going to jump out of this chair in defense of her spoiled little ass, you’ll be waiting even longer. I couldn’t care less what you do. The only thing she is to me is trouble, I’d just as soon not have to deal with. And you’re right, I deserve a bonus for the shit I had to deal with today.” He hated himself for saying that, especially since she heard every word. She didn’t deserve it, but it worked.
Studying him a moment longer, Fariq finally took his hand out from between her legs.
“Fair enough.” Fariq swatted Aliya’s ass several times with little force, more like brotherly pats, then let her go.
She scrambled off his lap, slapping to get the folds of her skirt down in place before clasping and reclasping her hands fitfully in front of her. Humiliated, her cheeks wet with tears, her chest heaving, she didn’t look at either of them.
“What do we say?” Fariq drawled.
“Thank you for correcting me and teaching me,” she replied, each word tumbling out on the heels of the last so swiftly, Christian could barely understand them.
“You may pick up your panties,” Fariq said.
Snatching them off the floor, she wadded them into a tight ball in her hands.
“You are grounded,” Fariq said in a dismissive tone. “You may not leave your room for the next five days and until I give you leave. Run along.”
Snapping around, she fled his office, leaving his door thrown open wide behind her. One of the guards in the hall eventually reached back into the room far enough to close it.
Yeah, he hated himself all right.
Fariq stared at him, and Christian burned with the loathing effects of what his gutless lack of action had done to her, long after he could no longer hear her footsteps racing down the hall.
“I’d have smacked her harder.” Christian despised himself, but the comment had its intended effect.
Fariq brightened. “True, but you enjoy beating women. I prefer not to have to hurt my toys to make them submit.”
“You realize you just called your sister your toy.” The minute those words were out, he wished he could take them back. The amusement vanished from Fariq’s eyes, although he managed to keep his smile.
“Sister, toy, it doesn’t matter. She’s mine,” he repeated. “I’ve taken care of her for years, watched her grow, saved her life. Saved her from marriage to a pedophile. Saved her from the mutilation of circumcision my father would have inflicted on her had he not died when he did. She is alive today, whole today, the person she is today, only because I have allowed it. That, my friend, that is power.” His smile twisted. “My darling sister owes me more than she realizes, and when at last the day comes I decide to collect, she will do whatever I demand because I have spent years conditioning her to heed my commands. I am her brother, father, savior, disciplinarian, care provider. She simply doesn’t know any better than to love and obey me.”
<
br /> And just like that, Fariq, the serpent who had been so ready to strike just seconds ago, once more became Fariq, the businessman.
“We have work to do.”
For the rest of the afternoon, they reviewed tapes, altered the shift schedule to make up for Lamar’s absence, and made the proper phone calls and condolences to smooth the political waters after the fucked-up raid on the marketplace. It didn’t matter what Fariq did or how often he smiled, whenever Christian glanced at him, all he saw was the serpent.
That, and Aliya, mortified beyond belief with her panties crumpled in her hand, so no one would see and wonder what she had just been made to do.
While he did nothing, except sit there and watch.
Chapter 5
Aliya locked her bedroom door, not that she felt any safer. Fariq had a key to every door on his yacht, and her room was certainly no exception.
She broke down, melting against the door, dissolving into tears, but even that brief fury of sobs didn’t last or come out as more than just a hitching breath or two. Then she was running again, this time into the bathroom. Ripping off her clothes and dropping them on the floor, she ran the hottest bath she could stand to sit in.
She could still feel Fariq’s hand between her thighs as she scrambled to scrub herself clean. She could feel those half-hearted smacks of his hand bouncing off her bottom cheeks just before letting her go. They had felt nothing like the stinging swats delivered by Christian. While Fariq’s handling had brought only disgust, Christian’s had evoked far different, far more erotic feelings. Hugging her legs against her chest, Aliya buried her face between her arms and cried.
She remembered to turn off the water, but only because it overflowed the tub. In the end, she ran out of tears long before she ran out of sadness. In due course, the water grew cold. Eventually, Fariq even came to check on her. She never heard him come in. The first she became aware he’d entered the bathroom was when she heard his tsk as he reached for a towel, spreading it out on the floor to mop up the spilled water.
“You know better than this,” he chided. “What is wrong with you?”
Rolling up his shirt sleeve, he reached into the water to unplug the tub. She hugged herself tighter, trying to hide her nakedness, but he paid no attention, simply shook out another clean towel and held it out for her.
“Come now. Up. You’ll catch your death.”
If she moved, she’d bare herself to him even more, but there was no way to refuse, not without risking another punishment.
Standing, she let him wrap her in the towel, the overlarge terrycloth folds covering her from shoulders to mid-thigh. Her legs didn’t want to work, she’d sat for so long. He had to help her balance as she stepped over the high side of the tub onto the damp floor.
He tsked again, drying her, just as he had when she was a child.
Except she wasn’t a child anymore, and what he’d done to her in his office hadn’t been anything a brother would or should do to his sister, whether he’d raised her or not.
Yet the Fariq handling her now wasn’t that cruel man anymore. He was back to his normal, big brother, almost fatherly self. Neither his touch nor his gaze seemed to notice she wasn’t the child he perpetually seemed to want her to be as he steered her from the bathroom into her bedroom.
Lying on the foot of her bed were the forbidden shorts and shoes she’d left in his office. She glanced at him, surprised, but he left her and her unanswered question at the bed while he busied himself searching through her tidy closet for appropriate sleepwear.
“Why do you never have anything decent to wear?” he said, skipping right over her pink silk pajamas to draw out a plum-colored baby doll-style nightie, mostly lace and netting, with spaghetti straps and too little fabric to cover either her breasts or her panties. It was also completely transparent. “Where did you get this?”
“You brought it back from Paris,” she said, her voice pitifully small. She hated it. She hated the tremble that quivered each mewling word, and above all, she hated that it made him smile.
“So, I did.” Removing it from its hanger, he dropped the gown on the floor. “Ladies don’t wear such things. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
He rummaged until he found a pink silk nightgown. It also had spaghetti straps, but the bustline was more modest, the cut almost shapeless, with a skirt that extended to her knees.
“Here we are.” He handed it to her. “Go on, put it on.”
He gave her bottom a dismissing pat as he walked away, but instead of leaving, he went only as far as her dresser and rummaged that drawer next, this time for panties that matched.
“I brought your things back to you,” he said offhand without so much as a glance at the shorts and shoes placed neatly at the foot of her bed. “Christian, for all his heavy-handed ways, was right. I spoil you, perhaps too much. I need to learn that I can still love you yet be strict at the same time.” He held up a pair of French-cut black lace panties. “Especially if you’re going to be wearing these. Did I bring these back from Paris, too?” He gave her the same knowing look he did whenever he caught her doing something she shouldn’t.
Her face flushed hot. Still wrapped in a towel with the nightgown abandoned on the bed where he’d dropped it, Aliya couldn’t move. He hadn’t bought those. She had, in a fit of defiance, almost six months ago. She’d met someone at one of the functions where she’d accompanied him, and they’d exchanged phone numbers, but Fariq always kept her phone locked. She had limited internet access and only one number—his—cleared to ring through to her cell. Fariq had refused to open her phone’s access to allow her either to call the young man or to have him call her.
Her fit had cost her two weeks of freedom when she’d been grounded, unable to leave her room, much less the ship. The next time he took her shopping, she’d blindly grabbed those off a hanger and thrown them in among his other undergarment purchases for her because, damn it, she wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was tired of being treated like one, punished like one, and dressed like one. She wanted to get off the yacht. She wanted to meet people and be free to have friends. Just once, she wanted to buy something for herself, something pretty, not to mention with some color—any color—other than pink.
“No, Fariq. I did.”
He tsked, turning the panties over in his hand to show off the double strand of pearls that were the reason why she’d never worn them once she’d gotten them home. Why anyone would make underwear that pretty, then put a pearl necklace as the only gusset between the legs, she had no idea. It wasn’t really even underwear. It was a fragile belt of black lace around her hips and two strands of pearls that did absolutely nothing at all to cover either her sex or her buttocks. The only thing she’d liked about it at the time was that it had cost him a hundred dollars. Pretty much from that moment on, all it had done was make her feel guilty. She’d have thrown them out ages ago, but she was pretty sure her garbage was searched.
“Where did you get them?” he asked in a sing-song, scolding tone that made her feel small.
“At a market in Italy.”
“Reid might be right in his assessment of your behavior,” he said, giving the underwear a dismissive toss onto the discarded nightie. “You seem to be cultivating a rebellious attitude. I’ll not tolerate it, Aliya, my darling. I will put you across my knee daily if you insist on it.” He arched his dark eyebrow and leveled a stern frown at her. “And I won’t be as forgiving as I was today. The next time you force me to debase us both in a show of physical chastisement, I will apply myself until the marks become impossible to count. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Fariq,” she barely managed, her throat so tight, it was choking her.
“Is that what you want?”
She quickly shook her head, unable to say anything, barely even able to breathe.
His face softened, and he selected a pair of pink cotton panties. Taking her hand, he placed them in her palm.
“Do you need me to dress y
ou for bed like I did when you were little?”
Trills of panic shivered up the back of her neck.
“I-I can do it.”
“Then do so, please.”
She prayed he would leave, but turning his back was all the privacy he allowed her. Folding his arms across his chest, he waited for her to obey.
Knowing the few choices she had were nothing but an illusion and painfully aware he now faced both the makeup mirror on her vanity table and the dressing mirror on her closet door, Aliya turned her back as well. Shedding the towel, she climbed into her panties and nightgown. Before she could bend down for the discarded towel, Fariq picked it up.
He’d been watching her in the mirror. Her skin crawled, but he only draped the towel over his arm and peeled back the blankets on her bed.
“In you go.”
“But it’s not even supper ti—”
Dropping the blanket, he unbuckled his belt.
Aliya scrambled into bed. Lying flat on her back, as stiff and flat as she could make herself, she held her breath. She honestly didn’t know what she feared most—that he might whip her with it or unfasten his pants entirely and crawl into bed on top of her.
He didn’t do either. Calmly, he rebuckled his belt without a word, then bending, he pressed his cool lips to her forehead.
“Grounded,” he reminded her. “Five days, this time. I’ll have your supper brought to you, but then it’s lights out for you. Do not disobey me again, my darling. You will not like the consequences, and I’m done giving warnings.”
He was leaning over her, one hand braced on the mattress, the other combing fingers through her wavy black hair. Her belly was a swarm of bees, their droning hum of warning tightening her insides until she couldn’t move. All she could do was lie there, her brother’s obedient baby sister, too scared to move.
“What do we say, Aliya?” he reminded, his fingers trailing from her hair to caress her cheek and the trembling of her bottom lip.
Her throat seized on her when she tried to swallow.