Negotiation: Daddy P.I. 0.5, E Frost [best thriller novels of all time txt] 📗

I lurk around the hall for a quarter-hour, giving each stall and table much more attention than they warrant, watching her without being too obvious about it. It’d be nice if she’d register my interest, maybe flash me a smile or at least a wide-eyed glance, so I know I won’t be immediately rebuffed. But she doesn’t. She only looks up from her book when someone approaches her. When they do, she sends them packing after a few words. I’m close enough to hear what she says to the third guy who approaches her, who is blond, if not blue-eyed.

“I’m sorry, I just don’t think we’d be compatible,” she says in response to his spiel, which includes the words “anal” and “fisting.”

She’s very polite. I’d have decked him if he’d said that to me.

“Uh,” he stammers in response.

She puts her head back in her book, dismissing him. I give him a minute to wander away. Bad pitch, buddy.

“What’s a smart lady like you doing looking for a Daddy-Dom?” I ask, leaning over her.

“How do you know I’m a smart lady?” she responds, without looking up.

I reach out and flick the spine of her book with one finger. “Baudelaire. In the original French.”

She looks up, and her eyes linger on my chest, before she meets my eyes. From a distance, I couldn’t tell what color her eyes were. They looked muddy, hard to read. All I could tell is that they were big and bright and that, as she was reading, they flicked eagerly from line to line. Up close, her eyes are light brown, flecked with green. There’s a faint quizzical cast to those hazel eyes as she looks up at me. She bites her lower lip.

I’ve piqued her interest.

“My mother’s French. It was my first language,” she says. “Do you read it?”

I can hear the soft lilt that her native tongue has given her. It’s pretty. So’s she. Soft, rounded features around those big eyes.

I take the book from her. “They pass before me, these Eyes full of light,” I translate. “Eyes made magnetic by some angel wise.”

“Is your mother French, too?” she asks, tilting her head to the side.

That lilting tongue is pert, too. I can’t wait to discipline it.

“No.” I return the book to her. “Languages and maths. That’s all I was good at in school.”

“Maths.” She closes the book, lays it on the table, and taps a pink-manicured finger to her lips. “You were educated abroad. England?”

Perceptive woman. “Yeah.”

“But you don’t live there now,” she says. “That accent’s pure New Yawk.”

It is now. When my family relocated to New York from Morecambe, I shed my northern accent, painstakingly, to fit into my new home.

“We moved when I was ten,” I tell her. Then, to see how she’ll respond, I put a little command into my voice and say, “Answer my original question.”

She sits up straighter and tucks her legs under her chair. Like she’s kneeling.

Nice.

“I know what turns me on,” she says. “I came to terms with my kinks a couple years ago.”

I know what turns me on, too. She fits the bill.

I lean backwards, as though I’m reading the sign pinned to the tablecloth. “Heavy play preferred. How heavy?”

“Nothing that leaves permanent scars.” Her voice goes quieter, softer, with each word, but doesn’t turn into a baby-girl lisp, which is good. I’ve been a Dom for over a decade, but I’ve never played Daddy. I don’t have any doubt that I can. I’ve never failed at anything I set my mind to. But I’m not sure whether age play will turn me on, and no matter how much of what I’m going to ask her to do on the cruise might be an act, my own arousal is the one thing that’s damn hard to fake.

“So, no branding,” I say, to see how she’ll react. I’ve branded bottoms before. I’ve been with some serious masochists and branding is seriously painful. “Even if someone was a very, very good girl?”

Her pupils expand. “That’s negotiable.”

Good, she’s not turned off. If she can handle that level of pain, then all that’s left is to iron out the details. I reach out and snag an empty chair, turn it around in front of her table and straddle it.

“Okay, let’s negotiate.”

A soft pink flush stains her cheeks as she follows my movement with her eyes; she straightens a little more in her chair. I hear a whisper of skin on skin. Is she rubbing her thighs together under the table? If she is, we’re more than good. We’re golden.

“No degradation or bathroom play,” I say, not even pretending to read her sign.

She shakes her head, eyes wide as she watches me.

“Please answer me verbally,” I say, so she knows my expectations right from the off. “I like to display my bottoms. Would you find being displayed naked degrading?”

“No, sir.”

Not only wouldn’t it be degrading, but she’d like it. She’s biting her lip so hard now it’s turning white and the flush in her cheeks is mounting.

“What would?” I ask, to see where her boundaries lie.

“Being made to eat off a dirty floor,” she says, her voice tiny.

“But not being fed out of your daddy’s hand?” My cock twitches. I love hand-feeding my bottoms. If that’s within the realm of what she wants from her daddy, I could get into it.

“No, sir,” she says, barely more than a whisper.

Although I haven’t really earned it yet, I love that she’s calling me “sir” already. Not sure how I’ll feel about her calling me “Daddy,” but I guess I’ll get used to it.

I try a little praise, to see how she responds. “Good girl,” I murmur, deep and low.

Her flush spreads down her throat to disappear into the collar of her white silk dress. Nothing wrong with that response.

“No blood play,” I say, tapping her sign. “I generally don’t like to break my bottom’s skin because of the risk of infection, but I do like to bite. Is that off