The Rancher's Little Girl (2 page)

As often though as she had thought that she had at last found the kind of sex she had always been looking for, she had also realized that Senator Austin had something like half of what she needed. She needed the kind of thing that Cynthia and Annie were getting down there over the deck chair, with the senator going from ass to ass, lubing up when necessary, and letting Lou put his cock in their mouths—really, Victoria now had enough high-quality porn starring Senator Austin to sell the story not only to the
Post
but also to the porno mag Lou had been reading—yes, Victoria needed that, and there was no way to deny it. But she also needed a man who would take her into his arms, sit her on his lap, and, if she needed a spanking, who would turn her gently over his knee and give it to her—always telling her as he spanked her that he knew she could be a good girl if she tried.

That was the thought—of the hypothetical other man who would fuck her hard but also spank her tenderly—that caused Victoria to get distracted. That was the thought, thus, that caused the disaster. As she moved to get a better angle on Cynthia’s face while Lou, with the senator still in the girl’s ass and in the frame of the photo Victoria took, shot his load onto that face, Victoria kicked a stone, and the stone rolled down the embankment on top of which the stand of trees grew, onto the senator’s pool deck, and the senator looked up and saw her.

His cock still buried in Cynthia’s ass, he told Lou something, and Lou instantly put on his shorts and got his gun, as Victoria stood there for long moments, unable to move.
John Staller,
she thought.
He killed John Staller.
John Staller had been an aide to Senator Austin who had died in mysterious circumstances the previous year. No official suspicion had fallen upon the senator, but Victoria had always thought there was a possibility, given how corrupt the senator’s political machine had become, that John Staller had seen something he shouldn’t have seen.

Lou was talking into his earpiece now, and suddenly Victoria saw three other men, guns drawn, coming out of the side door of the senator’s house. Cynthia and Annie just lay there over the deck chair, looking well fucked. The senator was so good at this kind of thing that they probably had no idea that anything unusual was going on. The senator pulled out of Cynthia’s ass and patted both girls’ bottoms, clearly telling them that it was time to put on their bathing suits and go.

At last, Victoria managed to begin the process of flight. Taking only the camera and leaving her camera bag behind, she turned and ran back through the trees, hoping desperately to reach her car before they could cut her off from it.

She was in good shape and could run fast, but she was so frightened by the sight of four men with guns that she could hardly find her feet, and she crashed to the ground in the surgeon’s driveway. As she got up, fumbling for her keys, she saw that she had landed heavily on her camera.

When Jack Riley opened his back door to the insistent knocking, the Victoria Mason he saw did not look like any version of Victoria Mason he had ever seen before. This Victoria looked hunted and scared, and above all like she did not know what to do next.

Jack felt such surprise to see her at all, let alone to see her like that, that he didn’t even say “Hello.” He just stood with his mouth slightly open and his brow furrowed, until Victoria said, “Jack, can I come in?” in a panic-stricken voice, and then, “I’m in big trouble.”

Mutely, he stepped aside, and she came in and went to the kitchen table where she had sat so many times in the year they had been together, and took her old place, as if she had never moved out—as if they had never had the break-up fight of all break-up fights, right here in this room, because she had fucked Senator Bob Austin.

Victoria looked up at him from her seat at the table. “It’s Austin,” she said.

Who else would it be? Gifted reporter goes in much too deep with corrupt senator, looking for the stories that will make her career. Gifted reporter gets stories. Gifted reporter finds herself implicated in corruption.

Gifted reporter comes to house of editor who gave her the start she’d needed, looking for help in freeing herself from the monster she fucked…

Jack sat down across from her, just like in the old days.

They had never really been right for one another, and they had both known it. He hadn’t fucked anyone else, but that wasn’t because he wouldn’t have if he had had the opportunity: it was just that the opportunity was going to happen to the beautiful blue-eyed, black-haired 5′5″ girl with the perfect breasts who never seemed to show the slightest consciousness of how drop-dead gorgeous she was. It wasn’t going to happen to the dumpy 5′5″, balding editor who not only couldn’t believe his luck to be sleeping with her, but felt that really he wasn’t enough for her in bed. When she called him “daddy,” once, he had tried not to show her how it bothered him—but he had known from the first time she had whispered, in his office, “Tell me to take off my panties” and, stunned, he had said, “Um, take off your panties,” that it couldn’t last.

So the fight hadn’t been about her sleeping with someone else. It had been about her sleeping with a source—a very, very dangerous source even then, though the corruption had only grown in the two years since, along with the rumors. Meth. Kinky, borderline sex.

“We both know,” she had said angrily, right before she walked out the door through which she had just re-entered Jack’s house for the first time since, “that you would sleep with him to get these stories, if he were into guys and he liked to cuddle.”

Jack was really good at cuddling, it was true—and that, he knew, was why Victoria had stayed with him for so long. He didn’t have the same skill when it came to telling her to take off her underwear at the office, or using his neckties creatively in the bedroom, but the cuddling had kept them together.

And he couldn’t say that she was wrong, about whether he would sleep with Senator Austin if he were in a position where it were possible, and he might get a story out of it. He was glad that he would never have to find out.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I saw… I mean I heard that he… he was going to have Herman Loper’s daughter over, and… have sex with her and her friend.”

Jack closed his eyes and shook his head. Was it that power did strange things to the male sex drive, or that men who wanted to that kind of thing tended to be the same ones who sought power and then did everything they could to hold onto it? When he opened his eyes, he saw Victoria had her upper lip between her teeth, and she was shaking, looking down at her fists on the light wood of the square kitchen table.

“What happened?” What could possibly scare her that way?

“I was taking pictures. It… it was going to be the story that brought him down. I mean, really, really brought him down. And then he saw me, and his security guys came after me with guns and I fell on the camera and I barely got away. He’s going to kill me.”

Cuddling, Jack was good at. He got up, moved to the seat right next to her, and took her into his arms, the way he used to. Victoria gave a sob and wrapped her arms around him. “Oh, God,” she said. “Jack, I’m so scared.”

“Shh. It’s okay. We’ll go to the FBI.”

“There’s no evidence. There’s literally no evidence. He’s perfect. I thought, with those pictures…”

“I bet the memory in your camera is still good. We can get the pictures off it.”

She sobbed again. “I don’t think so.” She pulled away a bit to get the purse she had laid on the table, and brought out an expensive camera that had suffered irreparable damage. Jack picked it up and examined it closely—it was clearly never going to take another picture. He opened the door where the memory card sat, and saw that the thing was in shards.

“Well…” he said doubtfully, “it’s not impossible that one of those clean-room places could recover the data.”

“Do you think so?” Her voice was full of hope.

Jack didn’t want to make a false promise, but at least he could cushion the blow, for another plan had just occurred to him. “It’s not impossible,” he repeated, but then he continued, “but in the meantime, while we find out, I just had an idea about how to keep you safe.”

“What? How?”

“Give me five minutes, okay? And let me get you a cup of coffee.”

After he had made the coffee, he went to the living room to phone Ross MacGregor. There was no point in letting Victoria overhear and getting her mind working if it wasn’t going to work out. Sending her to MacGregor had its complications, of course, but Jack couldn’t think of anyone else who might have a place secluded enough and who owed him a favor.

Ross picked up on the fifteenth ring or so. He’d probably been out in the barn.

“MacGregor,” came the gruff voice at the other end of the line.

“Ross, it’s Jack Riley. Do you remember me from the
Western Star
story five years ago?”

“Yup.” Jack smiled. Ross was a man of so few words that you sometimes had to read whole paragraphs into a single “Yup.”

“I’m hoping I can call in that favor we talked about at that time.”

“Yup.”

“I’ve got a friend who needs a very quiet place to stay.”

“Yup.”

“She’s a bit of a handful.”

“Don’t bother me none.”

Jack smiled again. “I didn’t think it would. Between you and me, if you wanted to see what you could do…”

The silence stretched out. Another conversation partner would have jumped in, but MacGregor just waited, because Jack hadn’t finished his thought.

“Well, I think I thought of you because if anyone can help her straighten her life out a little, it’s a guy like you.”

“Yup.”

* * *

“Five years ago,” Jack said, sitting back down with his own cup of coffee, “my editor sent me out to do a story on a man named Ross MacGregor. Lives on a ranch out by Pleasant Hill.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Well, that’s because of me, really. My editor at the
Western Star
wasn’t straight with me. He told me he was going to run a balanced story about MacGregor, and MacGregor talked to me on that understanding. But then my story got slashed to hell by my editor, so that it was an attack piece. I killed it—got all the people I’d interviewed to deny their quotes.”

“And that’s why you got fired from the
Western Star?
” Victoria asked, with wonder in her voice. “What was the story about?”

“Have you ever heard of ageplay?”

Victoria shook her head.

Jack looked at the clock. It was 5:00 p.m., and they had a four-hour drive ahead of them. “Let me tell you about it in the car. All you need to know right now is that Ross MacGregor has agreed to take you in for a month or two while we figure out a more permanent solution to the mess you’ve made for yourself.”

Victoria looked at him in surprise. “Seriously? Why would he do that?”

“Because I killed the story, and because, as you’ll see, he’s just a very good man.”

“Umm. Clothes and things?”

“You can’t go back to your apartment, obviously. We can stop at a big-box store and get you what you need. Turn off the cellular on your phone.” Jack smiled inwardly, wondering about the possibilities that might lie in the special wardrobe Ross had once shown him, with the plain pioneer-wagon-train dresses and the frilly Sunday-go-to-meeting dresses.

Victoria stood up from the table, fiddling with her phone and wearing her tough-as-nails get-’er-done expression—the expression that meant she would get the story you had told her to get. “Alright, let’s do it.” Then her face softened for a moment, and she came to him and put her arms around him. “Thank you, Jack.” He cuddled her close for a long moment, patting her back and thinking about the past, before she pulled away and looked expectantly at him.

He stood and got the keys to his pickup, trying to figure out what Ross would have done if a girl he was holding had pulled away like that.

“So you were going to tell me about ageplay,” Victoria said as soon as Jack pulled the truck out of the driveway. If there was a story, anywhere, Victoria had the unerring instinct to ferret it out. Now, having heard that there
was
a story, and that Jack had
killed
that story, and that she herself was headed for
the heart
of that story, her curiosity had doubled, at the very least.

“Yes. Basically, it’s adult men and women pretending to be kids—or ‘littles’—while other adult men and women pretend to be their daddies and mommies.”

Jack had half expected Victoria to laugh, but she remained completely silent, looking out the car window at the passing houses as they rolled out of the suburbs of the state capital and into the farm and ranch country.

“And what do they do?” she said, almost reluctantly, as if part of her wanted to know and another part didn’t. Was she disgusted?

“Well, the littles—the women are usually the littles—dress up in things like footy pajamas and frilly dresses, and they’ll do kid things like coloring and playing with dolls, and their daddies will treat them like little girls.”

Victoria made a noise in her throat that suggested she found the idea strange. “And MacGregor does this?”

“He does, and the littles who have played with him love him, and they say that he takes wonderful care of them and makes them feel safe and protected.”

“So why did the editor want an attack piece?”

“A lot of the people who do ageplay see it as an erotic thing.”

“Oh.” Something lay behind that “Oh,” but Jack couldn’t tell what it was. Could Victoria be curious? The girl who wanted to be tied up, and who was always in control, even when she was telling Jack to tie her up?

“And then a lot of daddies—including Ross—think that it’s very important to spank their littles, and the littles actually almost always want mommies and daddies who will spank them.”

“What? Why?” Her tone was unreadable.

“They say it makes them feel safe, and…”

“What?”

“Well, both the bigs—the mommies and daddies—and the littles almost all say that this is who they are. Spanking is just part of their identities. Weird, I know, but that was why I killed the story. I was completely convinced that what Ross and his friends do is one hundred percent consensual and really very helpful to them. And Ross himself—well, you’ll see. He’s pretty special.”