The Daddy P.I. Casefiles: The First Collection by Frost, J (great novels .txt) 📕

I press my fingertips to my temples, trying to drive out that hateful voice, but that’s never worked in the past and it doesn’t this time, either.

I take a couple of broken breaths before scrubbing my hands over my face. I can’t let Logan come back to this. He’s so tidy. He’ll be furious. More furious. He’s been so good with me, but he won’t be for this punishment. Doms never are when their subs embarrass them. I remember a dungeon party Matthew took me to a couple of years ago. A sub lost control during a whipping scene. I remember the sharp smell of her urine, the Dom’s furious, purple face as the whip cracked again and again, her screams of “red, Master, red!” as the dungeon monitor pulled him off.

I remember the lines of blood welling across her back, dark against her welted skin.

Rubbing my own backside in fear, I climb off my bed and clean up my room as fast as I can.

I’m just rearranging the top of the desk, disrupted by the blanket I hooked over it, when there’s another knock on the connecting door.

My heart pounds. I flinch and catch my hand on the sharp wooden edge of the desk.

“Ow, shit.” I grab my bleeding hand and stare at it, remembering again the lines of blood on the whipped sub’s skin.

I raise my hand to my mouth, intending to suck the scrape.

“Don’t you dare.”

Logan’s voice, harsher than a whip, stops me. I freeze and glance to where he’s standing in the doorway.

“Never suck an open wound. Go to the bathroom and wash that out with soap. Right now.”

Oh, God, I forgot. He told me his mother was a nurse. He must have very strong views on germs.

“Yes, Sir.” I scuttle past him into the bathroom and get busy with the hand wash.

Logan joins me after a minute, carrying an honest-to-goodness First Aid kit: a white plastic box with a red cross on the lid. He must have brought it with him, because I haven’t seen one in the rooms. He frowns at my hand as he turns off the water and pats it dry. It’s not a big cut, more a scrape than anything, with a furl of skin peeled back at one end that I’d pick off if he wasn’t glowering at me.

He takes a little brown bottle of iodine out of the kit and squirts it across the scrape. Ouch. Seriously? Who still uses iodine? He holds my hand between his, keeping my fingers splayed, until the liquid dries. Then he unwraps a rectangular bandage and spreads it carefully over the back of my hand.

“We’ll keep that clean and dry. It shouldn’t get infected.” He packs up the kit, then folds his arms over his chest and tips his chin at the closed toilet. “Sit down and tell me what’s going on with you.”

I sit and stare down at my hand, and because it’s itching, pick at one edge of the bandage with my thumbnail.

“Emily, what are you playing at?”

I wail wordlessly at him in frustration. I don’t know how everything went so wrong. I just know that every time things start going really well, something like this happens and it all goes to shit and it must be my fault somehow. I know I’m going to be punished for embarrassing him, even though I said I was sorry to Master Jason, and that’s making my muscles clench so tightly they’re shaking because Logan’s serious when we’re just playing, and I’ve already been paddled today, and my thighs are still sore from the caning yesterday and he said I could have a day off but I can tell that’s out the window and he’s going to do something really horrible to me—

“Emily, look at me and use your words. What is going on with you?”

My shoulders rise around my ears, and my hair falls into my face. I can’t look at him and I don’t have any words. I feel so small and stupid and useless.

Logan growls with annoyance or frustration or anger or maybe all three, and I shrink further into myself.

“Communicate with me, Emily. Help me understand what you’re thinking.”

I can’t! If I understood what I was thinking, I would tell him. It’s all a sick swirl inside me. My stomach is clenching and my head is clenching and my hands are clenching and now I’ve pulled the bandage half off because I’m twisting my hands together. Why can’t I do anything right?

Logan brushes my hand aside, pulls off the curled bandage, and smooths a fresh one over the scrape. “Put your hands on top of your head and stay right there, Emily. I mean it.”

I nod, staring at my knees, which are pressed tightly together but that’s not stopping them from shaking.

I expect Logan to return, but it’s Niall who pokes his head into the bathroom, takes in my position with a quick sweep of his eyes, frowns and withdraws. The bathroom door closes, and I can hear the two men talking, but I can’t make out what they’re saying.

Is Logan going to turn me over to Niall for punishment? I heard Niall talking about how he uses whips on his subs. I’ve been flogged, but never whipped. Those bloody lines keep flashing behind my eyes. The acidic stink of pee fills my nose and I lift myself, grabbing the back of the toilet and the edge of the sink, to check my panties. Please, please, please don’t have let me have wet myself.

The door opens and Logan starts to walk in, then stops, shaking his head. “You are tilting at windmills, little girl.”

I slap my hands back on top of my head so hard my ears ring.

“Come on.” He beckons and I rise off the toilet.

He leads me back into his room. Niall is sitting on one of the couches, holding a foamy beer between his knees. It’s still freezing in Logan’s room, and