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

Mir, I needed a break. I’d been the primary trainer here for several years. I finished up with Shannie; she’s the last house sub I trained, and I stepped back from the club. I dated a few women casually this spring, just vanilla. Then I met a woman who said she was interested in kink. I began working with her, but it didn’t work out. That was over a month ago. I haven’t been with anyone since, and none of the house bottoms in probably four months.”

I chew on my bottom lip while I consider that. “Why didn’t it work out with the woman you started training?”

“She couldn’t take direction.” Logan shrugs one shoulder. “Not that she didn’t want to. Or, at least, I don’t think it’s that she didn’t want it. It was hard to tell. She just couldn’t seem to remember anything from scene to scene. I got really frustrated with having to start over every time I saw her.”

That’s reasonable. “I can see how that would be frustrating.”

He reaches across the table and takes my hand. “One of the things that blows me away about you is how carefully you listen, Emily. You say you’re scatty, but I haven’t seen any sign of it. You follow each and every word when I give you commands. That’s really important to me. I want my direction to matter to you.”

“It does,” I say quickly. Because it does, so much. I’m already desperate to please him. I want his praise more than I want punishment.

“It’s a big thing to me. Sophia—” He shrugs. “I’d teach her a position and two minutes later, she’d have moved out of it. When I corrected her, it was like she didn’t remember what I’d told her to do in the first place. That made me insane. Topping is really important to me. I put everything I can into it. When submission doesn’t matter to my bottom.” He shakes his head. “It’s beyond something I can correct. That’s why it didn’t work out. I can’t imagine that’s going to happen with you. You’re already a hundred times more attentive than Sophia ever was. I want more of that. I know it’s too soon, but eventually I want to be the whole world to you, Emily.”

My heart swells until it’s too large for my chest. “Oh, yes, Daddy.”

“Good girl.” He sits back and I realize we’ve been leaning across the table until our noses were almost touching.

I rearrange myself in my chair, trying to pull myself back together. As I do, the waiter sets the fake-leather folder with the bill down on the table. Without thinking, my hand goes out for it.

Logan clears his throat.

I freeze and look up at him.

His expression drains all the blood in my body to my toes. His face is absolutely blank, but there’s a vein pulsing in his forehead and his eyes have gone as savage as when he thrashed me in the bathroom.

I snatch my hand back and sit on my hands.

“It’ll be on a card,” Logan tells the waiter, who scuttles off to get the machine.

Logan picks up the wallet, opens it and reads over the bill, then puts it down beside his coffee cup and rests his fingertips on the plastic.

“Did I invite you to dinner?” he asks, very softly.

“Yes, sir,” I whisper.

“Do you think I expect you to pay for the things I invite you to?”

I shake my head. This is not the time to take a feminist stance. “No, sir.”

“No, because they’re Daddy’s treat, and Daddy will pay for them. So when you reached for the bill, were you trying to throw my gift back in my face or just casually disrespecting me?”

“Neither, sir. I just didn’t think.”

Logan nods, his chin wrinkling as though he’s considering something very seriously. “Maybe you are a little scatty.”

I feel myself crumple. I don’t want him thinking I’m like his previous sub who couldn’t follow direction. I can. It’s just that what he was saying distracted me so much that I didn’t think before I reached for the check. I start to beg, “Sir, I’m sorry—”

He shakes his head, silencing me.

“No excuses, Emily. While I pay, you’ll get up, take your bag, leave the restaurant and walk down the hall back toward the entrance. The third door on the left is a bathroom marked ‘private.’ You will go in and wait for me. I’ll knock three times. You will open the door and I’ll do something about your lack of focus. Are we clear?”

He wasn’t just considering something very seriously. He is dead serious. There’s not even a tiny glint in those dark eyes. Oh, fuck.

I nod frantically. “Yes, sir.”

“Okay.” He doesn’t praise me and I shiver again, then whimper as the movement ignites the stripes on my ass. This is big thing number two: no disrespecting him. If he invites me to something, he’s going to pay for me. Any suggestion to the contrary is disrespectful. I got it; I won’t mess this up again.

He’s silent and I get the impression that he’s watching again. But not like a lion. That’s not right. He’s a predator of deep, dark places, not open plains. He’s a mountain lion, a puma. Sitting on a branch, watching me for weaknesses.

Careful in the presence of an angry predator, I fold up my napkin and place it next to my empty teacup. I rise carefully, take my bag and push in my chair. I dip him a little curtsey and say, “Thank you very much for dinner, sir.”

Then I flee, one step at a time, out of the restaurant and down the hall to the bathroom.

I’m sitting on the toilet seat when he knocks. I open the door with a shaking hand and step back to let him enter.

“Sir, I’m really, really sorry,” I say quickly.

He reaches out and shapes my cheek with this hand, even while he moves forward, backing me up towards the sink. “That’s a good girl. I