The Rancher's Little Girl (4 page)

BOOK: The Rancher's Little Girl
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But the dynamic at this table, which had begun to take shape when she first got out of the car and she had innocently told Ross that they had grabbed burgers on the road, and he had given her a look that said she should know better than to answer when a man had asked another man a question—that dynamic took her completely by surprise. The bantering tone had faltered almost as soon as she had tried it, and as she looked from Ross, to Jack, and back to Ross, Victoria realized that she, who was never without a way to find traction over any conversation and turn it where it best served her interest, had lost her grip entirely on how she would approach this possibly extended stay in the house of a man she had just met.

More, she could tell that she would most definitely not like what she was about to hear. Jack’s discomfort about it, and Ross’ smooth self-assurance, told her that.

“Miss Mason, I have some very definite ideas about appropriate behavior, especially where women are concerned.” Ross delivered these words in a smooth, easy tone, as if he thought them perfectly reasonable. The angle of his chin told her that he knew they would strike her as far from that, but he would be damned if that kept him from doing as he thought best.

Victoria tried to keep her breathing under control. Again she had to fight her body’s strange response to him. “Mr. MacGregor, I have to say that I find that statement incredibly sexist, but I also know that if you hadn’t consented to give me a place to stay, I would be in very serious trouble. So if you tell me about your standards of appropriate behavior, I’ll do my best.”

Ross’ mouth turned up at the corners. He clearly felt some amusement, and Victoria could not say it made her happy to provide him with that amusement. “Thank you, Miss Mason. I think it’s also important to let you know what will happen if you don’t live up to those standards.”

“You’ll throw me out—that’s fine,” she said, thinking that what that meant is that they might have to negotiate hard at some point in the near future. “I’ll make sure I don’t break any rules.”

“I’ll do no such thing,” Ross said, his mouth serious again now, and his eyes flashing. “You’re here until Jack can get your trouble solved. But if we have a problem with your conduct, there are going to have to be consequences.”

Suddenly Victoria felt her whole face flush with heat, and she knew she looked as red as a beet. “Consequences?” she said weakly, though thinking back to the conversation in the car with Jack, she was positive she knew exactly what Ross had meant by the word.

“Well, I don’t know how much Jack has told you about how he and I met, but I suspect it’s a fair bit. If you’ve heard about that, you can probably imagine that as far as I’m concerned there’s only one kind of consequence that’s appropriate for a woman’s poor behavior.”

Now the effort to control her breathing seemed to Victoria almost super-human. “What?” she asked, trying to at least regain a tiny bit of her careless demeanor, and taking a sip of coffee to try to wet a mouth that had gone completely dry even as another part of her had shamefully soaked itself.

“Now I can see you’re pretending you don’t know,” Ross said, his smile returning even wider. “So let me tell you, and let me tell you the part that I have a feeling Jack didn’t really emphasize about the way I and the women I play with do such things. If I find your behavior inappropriate, or if you disobey me, you’ll be spanked—”

Victoria choked on her coffee a little, to hear it right out like that, but Ross just glanced at her to make sure she was alright, and then continued, “—on your bare backside, but you’ll also find that you’re treated as a woman asks to be treated when she acts like a naughty little girl.”

Victoria finished spluttering and managed to say, “What does that mean?” She tried to make herself sound offended, but as she heard her voice she realized that she had not managed to keep the fascination out of her tone.

“Well, you’ll see, maybe,” Ross said. “It can mean a lot of different things, depending on what I think will help you learn to act like a lady.”

“I demand to know—”

Ross’ smile turned stern suddenly, but it didn’t waver. “I’m going to warn you, Miss Mason, that you’re on a much shorter trail to your first spanking than I thought you’d take.”

“I refuse—”

“Well,” he interrupted. “I refuse to spank you in front of Jack here. So I’m going to send you on up to your bedroom. Wait for me there.”

“What?” Victoria looked at Jack.

He turned his palms up as if to say, “I did warn you.”

“You heard me, Miss Mason. We need to get this thing off on the right foot, so I have to make sure you know that my standards aren’t to be trifled with. When you get to your room, take down your jeans and panties to the middle of your thighs and lie over the bed on your tummy. I’ll be up to give you a belt whipping in a few minutes.”

“You’re insane, Mr. MacGregor, if you think I’m going to do that.” Her heart beat a mile a minute, and she heard herself panting. At least he would read it as fear of him—of the pain—wouldn’t he?

“I’m not crazy, Miss Mason. I don’t see as you have a choice, really, here. You need my protection. This is the price.”

Again Victoria looked to Jack. “Jack, what the fuck?”

“Miss Mason,” Ross said, his voice much sterner even than it had been, “if there’s one standard I maintain under my roof for ladies, it’s that foul language is something that should never pass their lips. You just earned yourself ten more from my belt.”

“Jack! Tell him he can’t!”

“I’m not going to do that, Victoria,” Jack said.

“What? Why?!” Now she stood up, even though it brought her closer, she supposed, to doing what Ross had told her to do. It also brought her closer to walking out the door.

And going where? From the way Jack was responding, he wasn’t going to take her away from here. He planned, apparently, to sit down here with his pie while she got a whipping from this cowboy on her bare rear end.

“Because you need to be here, for your protection.”

Victoria heard something else in his tone, too, and she didn’t like it. “And because you think I could probably benefit from this sexist shit,” she practically spat out.

“Five more—” Ross said, seeming to cut himself off. He had almost called her ‘darlin’’ again, hadn’t he? Well, that was part and parcel of this craziness. “—Miss Mason. And let me tell you, so you hear it, that I think you’re workin’ with a bad definition of ‘sexist.’ If I were your momma, and you were a boy, and you shot off your mouth at me that way in my kitchen, I’d take my wooden spoon to your backside.”

Victoria looked at him. There was something wrong with that argument, she knew, but she couldn’t think of what. Something about ‘darlin’,’ maybe. But her brain wouldn’t let her think it through. She was too scared and too—yes, goddammit—aroused by the thought of what would happen if she did do what he told her to do, went upstairs, and took her jeans and panties down for him to whip her.

“Now are you gonna go up there and do as I said, or am I gonna have to carry you, and take down your pants and panties myself?”

Victoria realized that she had started to tremble all over. She looked at Jack one last time; he folded his arms over his chest. Seriously?

She looked at Ross, sitting there still holding his fucking coffee, his piece of pie half-eaten, looking at her calmly like some kind of ranch psychiatrist. That was the worst part: the ‘I know what you need better than you do, little lady’ thing.

She closed her eyes and felt her brow knit, while her blush seemed to go on and on. Then, abruptly, conceding a tactical defeat while trying to indicate that she had no intention of signifying anything that might be perceived as approaching strategic surrender, she walked out of the kitchen and straight up the stairs to her room. She would go up there, and she would reason with him, if she had to, to avoid this absurd idea of a spanking.

The first time she had seen that room, fifteen minutes before, had been so lovely that she could scarcely believe the difference she now felt in her emotions toward it. The room had a
lot
of pink. It was clearly intended for a little girl. Even with Jack’s story in the car about Ross MacGregor and ageplay, she hadn’t put two and two together, and she had assumed, though now she could see the absurdity of it since Ross clearly had not even turned forty, that he had a daughter who had grown up and left the nest, and that he’d probably got a divorce at some point along the way.

Now, looking at the pinkness, and the frilliness of the shams on the pillows, and looking at the dolls on the shelf of the hutch atop the little girl’s desk, she could see that it was all much too new for that. This room had been occupied by a little—or, she could tell now, a ‘little’—girl within the last year.

Or maybe he was divorced, and his daughter lived with her mother and came here to visit? And that explained the colonial doll catalog from the previous January?

What the fuck was she doing trying to figure out whose room this was? Right now, it was Victoria’s, and she had apparently consented to getting a whipping with the belt of a rancher she had not even known for an hour. Should she try to run off into the night? Frankly, that would be stupid, and even if taking her jeans and panties down was stupid, running off across the range would be stupider.

So pink. So little-girlish. Suddenly Victoria had the urge to cry. Why had Jack had to have known this one man who could give her a place to stay? Why did it have to be the fantasy that worked its way under her skin whenever, wherever she saw little-girl dresses and little-girl panties—when she read one of the books she had loved when she had been little, and thought about the dreams she had had then?

How could it possibly have come about that in Jack’s pickup truck, on the way to the safe house he had found for her, Victoria Mason had received the information that the man whose house that was knew how to deal with women who felt that a part of them wanted to be treated as a little girl?

Chapter Five

 

 

Ross opened the door of Victoria’s room—the room that had been Sally Mae’s—to find that Victoria was standing there next to the bed, looking lost. “Darlin’,” he said, “you need to get yourself over the bed now.”

Her eyes had been fixed on the bed, but now they swiveled to him with a wild look in them. “You said you wouldn’t call me that,” she said, but not angrily—her voice sounded more as if she was trying to figure out what had happened in the past hour of her life.

“I did, and after I spank you, I won’t call you that again. But I’m going to discipline you now, and for me that means that I’m trying to communicate something to you—part of what I’m gonna try to tell you is that I’m whippin’ you because I need to take care of you as best I know how. And if I’m gonna take care of you, you need to accept that I’m gonna think of you as darlin’, because you are.”

“What?” Victoria shook her head in confusion. Her wavy black hair, caught loosely in a ponytail holder, shook adorably along with the motion of her face.

“You’re darling to me, you’re dear to me—we just met, but we met under these circumstances where I don’t have to get to know you any more ‘n’ I have to feel an obligation to help you, to shelter you, and protect you.”

He watched her bite her upper lip as her chin quivered and tears rose in the corner of her blue eyes. “Why does that have to include spanking me?”

“Because that’s how I take care of girls. If this happens again, you’ll go over my knee, but for your first time I think you’ll have it easier on the bed. So let’s not delay anymore.” He put a little note of authority into his tone, and he saw how Victoria seemed to lean away as she heard it. “Last chance, darlin’, before I put you there and hold you while I take your pants and panties down and whip you.”

Victoria hesitated for a split second, and then, to his surprise—for no girl had ever tried to get out of a spanking like this—she bolted for the door, yelling “Jack!”

She had the knob of the door in her hand when Ross got his arm around her waist and picked her up like so much brushwood and dumped her unceremoniously on the bed. He sat down next to her and began to reach around her waist to get at the button on her waistband, while she turned and twisted to get away from him.

“Jack! Jack!” she screamed. “Please don’t… please don’t let him!”

“Darlin’,” he began, his mouth right next to Victoria’s ear as he pressed her firmly into the bed with one of his big, heavy hands, “stop your fussing and listen to me, now. Shhh. You’re going to mind me, and when your spanking is over, you’ll see that it wasn’t worth all this fuss.”

He could feel her body starting to soften at his words, and he immediately loosened his hold on her as soon as she began to go limp. But as soon as he stopped pushing his hand into her back, Victoria jerked and tried to tear herself from Ross’ grasp again, with a wild fervor that seemed to feed itself until it seemed she was tiring herself out, trying to fight him.

“Darlin’, you’re making this worse on yourself,” he scolded gently, his heart going out to her as he heard her little gasping noises as she tried over and over again to roll off the bed and out of his hands. “I know it’s your first time, but there’s a first time for everything.”

Then he said, “Victoria,” in a hardened tone that he knew he’d never used with her yet, and she stilled at him calling her by that name he’d refused to use, and at the unyielding way he’d said it. “I’m going to punish you, and that’s that. It doesn’t matter how much of a fuss you give me. And, darlin’, I think you’ll feel much better about stayin’ here after you figure that out.”

She looked up at him with her tear-wet eyes. “Oh, no… No, please… Mr.… Mr. MacGregor… I’ll follow the rules—just please don’t whip me! Jack!”

“Jack thinks you need this as much as I do,” Ross said. “He’s not gonna come, darlin’. It’ll be much easier if you take your whippin’ like a good girl.”

Just as the fingers of his right hand found the button, while his left hand held her firmly down on the bed, the resistance went out of Victoria. She wailed, “Please… I’ll… I’ll take them down, okay? I’ll do it.”

BOOK: The Rancher's Little Girl
10.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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