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

She gives me the big, remorseful eyes.

I wink at her, so she knows I’m perfectly happy with her actions, and hold out my hand, to remind her that the only person she answers to is me. With a grateful smile, she takes my hand.

Despite her irritation, Dr. Lacey makes the examination quick before signing off my discharge. She’s already given me pages of instruction on everything from changing the dressing on my incision to what to do if I have a seizure. Emily’s read each page earnestly and tucked them into a huge, leather-bound book. I’m now intensely curious about this book because I’m fairly sure it’s a journal. Not that I would ever invade her privacy by reading her journal, but if she’s going to journal anyway, she might as well keep a submission journal for me. Something to add to our contract when we get home.

And home is where we’re going. I can’t fly. Injured brain, intercranial pressure, etcetera. So, instead, we’re taking a train. I didn’t even know there were sleeper trains anymore, but it turns out there are. With real beds, even. One train will take us to Chicago, where we change for another train that will take us to New York.

The whole trip will take eight days. Seven nights. And I’ll be able to sleep with my baby doll in my arms for every single one.

Dedication

For Posypony, who taught me what it means to be little. I hope you like your cameo.

And for the ladies of Wickedly Sweet and Synful Book Blog, who made me laugh every day, even while I was writing the scenes that made me cry.

Chapter One Emily

In an unconverted brownstone in the East Village, there’s a finished basement.

In the corner of the basement, there’s a cage. Three feet by three feet, bolted into the floor. The man sitting on a bar stool nearby started calling it a playpen, after he wrapped the metal bars in pink rubber and put a padded mat on the floor to cushion the bottom.

But it’s still a cage.

In the cage is a girl. A woman, actually, since she’s thirty-two, but at five feet four and on the skinny side, with her dark curls caught up in pigtails, she looks much younger. She’s lying curled on her side, because the cage is too small for her to stretch out, sucking her thumb, making her appear all the more childlike. Her eyes are open but glazed. She’s not taking in anything of the basement room, or the man sitting nearby, reading a newspaper, or the clock ticking on the wall behind the bar, which would show she’s been in the cage for forty-two minutes.

The girl in the cage could be me, would be me, if I wasn’t floating somewhere near the wood-beamed ceiling.

I’m so deep in subspace I don’t register any of it. Not the cool air of the basement on my naked skin, not the ache of my legs from being drawn up to my chest for so long, not the comforting presence of my thumb in my mouth, or the equally comforting presence of my daddy in the room.

I float and drift.

Occasionally, a thought intrudes.

This is the way astronauts must feel.

Our first dance was to “Major Tom.”

I was born on the day of the Challenger disaster.

My thoughts slip sideways into white fuzz again, and I let them.

I’m supposed to be thinking while I’m in the cage. And I did for the first twenty minutes. I thought long and hard about what I’d said to Daddy’s former submissive, Rachel, and how it must have hurt her feelings, even though it was totally warranted and the fifty or so things she said to me that led up to it were much worse. But Logan wants me to be the bigger person. I mustn’t gloat that I’m with him now. I mustn’t rub Rachel’s nose in the mistake of choosing her current master over Daddy. He says I have to see her mistake as a lesson in why topping from below always ends badly and be sympathetic.

Love does not boast.

It is not proud.

It does not dishonor others.

Logan has the saying in a frame in his office. His mother cross-stitched it when she and his father were newlyweds, and he kept it after they died as a reminder. Those are words Logan wants us to live by. They’re good words. But, sometimes, it’s hard not to flaunt how happy Daddy is with me.

Considering how Rachel must have felt this week—a festival week at Daddy’s club, where Rachel works, and where we’ve done several scenes each day, hunting and flogging and fucking and giving me so many orgasms I passed out in the sex swing yesterday—I might have even felt a little remorseful.

A very little, admittedly.

Logan’s an excellent daddy, the best Dom I’ve ever had. He explained the purpose of my punishment before he put me in the cage. Once I felt that drop of remorse, I’d done what I needed to do and slid down into subspace.

Logan turns a page in his newspaper, a whispery crinkle that penetrates my haze for a moment before I drift again. He’s going to want me to apologize to him once he lets me out of the cage. I have no trouble doing so. I embarrassed him by sniping at Rachel-the-bitch, and I am sorry. My daddy’s happiness is what matters most to me, and I hate that I’ve tarnished that happiness.

He’s also going to want me to apologize to Rachel. I’ll have more trouble doing that, but I will because he wants me to, and because I am a tiny bit remorseful, and because I really do want to be the bigger person.

Logan clears his throat twice, which is our signal. He used to count backward from ten, but, in the weeks we’ve been together, I’ve gotten so attuned to him that all I need to bring me back