I felt my face twist into an expression half of fear and half of petulant defiance. To my surprise I sensed my inner bad girl, my rebellious streak and the dark needs that went along with it, rising up inside me.
It had gone dormant for a little while in my anxiety that Papa Georg wouldn’t really want me, that it couldn’t all work out so perfectly. Perfectly? my brain demanded. With an ass I can’t sit down on? I felt like I should have my head examined, but that’s what bad girl life was like, I knew from my training in Advanced Guidance and my time with my Lumberjack daddies. Now that bad girl had decided the time must have arrived to come out and play.
“What?” I demanded, my nose twitching to the left in a way I hoped walked the line between sass and cuteness.
“I think you mean, What, Papa?,” Papa Georg said, inclining his head and narrowing his eyes a little more.
I let out a theatrical sigh, and then exaggerated the words to make fun of him. “Fine. What, Papa?”
Papa Georg shook his head, his eyes fixed on my face. Suddenly despite the lingering soreness I still had down there from the ordeal in Garonov’s bunker, I knew what I needed, and it wasn’t a hug. Well, not yet. Afterwards would come the time for cuddling. First, I needed to run toward the darkness with my new papa.
I pressed myself even more tightly into the corner of the bed. I put my hands out to either side to brace myself for what I knew had to follow. Papa Georg’s eyes flicked downward for a moment, observing my every move, and then they returned to my face.
“Do you have any idea how long I worked to infiltrate Garonov’s organization?” he asked softly.
My eyes went wide. My papa had come right alongside me into the darkness.
“No,” I said. “But I didn’t mean to blow your cover, did I?”
“Are you sure about that?” Papa Georg asked.
It felt like my whole body reacted to those calm, slow words that packed so much meaning into so few syllables. My jaw dropped and my eyes went even wider. Tears of… of anger, somehow mingled with repentance, sprang instantly into my vision, and I had to blink, too, so fiercely did they sting.
“What?” I asked. My body asked, because my mind needed time—to find a way to respond that would do an impossible number of things: stay true to myself, conceal the dead-on accuracy of what my papa had just said, and above all keep my ass from getting whipped from here to next Tuesday.
And… show that I love him… and that he should love me…
Papa Georg’s eyes never left my face, but his arms unfolded and he took his right hand into his left, massaging the knuckles. My gaze dropped to those enormous hands and I swallowed hard, thinking about the many things they could do to me, pleasurable and painful—and to my dismay I felt my body cry out for my papa to do all of them.
“You know what, sweetheart,” he said even more softly. In his words, I heard how thoroughly he had seen through me. Why had I even thought of hiding the truth from him—the authentic memory of what had happened in Garonov’s bunker, when I sat naked on the concrete floor, next to the bench where the warlord and his men had gangbanged me, a foot away from the diaper Papa Georg had himself put me in?
Yes, I had blown his cover on purpose. I had done it by instinct, but I could remember the moment when I’d decided not to hold my tongue but instead to do what I could to make sure he stayed with me. Not to save him, or at least not anywhere near as much as I felt the terrible longing to have my papa for my own.
I couldn’t tell him that, though. No way. I looked at him, and I felt myself shut down. I narrowed my eyes and shook my head, refusing to bring my hands up from their bracing position to wipe away the tears. The tears of anger. Nothing but anger. How dare he? After everything they had put me through… he had put me through?
I lied to myself. Some small rational part of me watched the whole thing unfold, saw the lie for precisely what it was, and let it happen, because deep down I believed that what would happen next would bring us together even more closely. The part of me that had lied to myself, though, felt so scared of the letting go that would have to happen, the surrender to my papa’s firm hand.
I closed my mouth and pursed my lips. I looked at him with furrowed brow and narrow eyes. His smile didn’t fade.
But the focus of his attention changed, suddenly. Papa Georg turned away and found the chair with his eyes. He turned and fetched it from the corner, and put it two feet away from the bed.
My lips parted again, but I closed them quickly, and tried to conceal my nervous swallow at the implications of the chair. Papa Georg didn’t look at me, then; he took off his fatigue jacket and hung it on the back of the chair.
Again my mouth threatened to open, to gape at his muscular shoulders in the olive green t-shirt he had revealed. I kept it closed, though, watching him sit down, slowly and deliberately, before he turned to me again.
“Come here, Briana,” he said, looking straight into my eyes.