Page 61 of Savage Daddy
Katerina
Ilookedathim.Hewas gorgeous. Standing at the foot of the bed in his shorts, the whole inked record of him bare in the light. I looked at his muscular body, the scars, the tattoos. As usual, all I wanted to do was to sink my teeth in and groan. In his scarred, strong hands he held two scraps of fabric.
“Up,” he said, gently. “Out from under there, Little One. Come stand.”
I went, didn’t even consider not doing it. I stood at the foot of the bed with my arms at my sides and let the cold air find every inch of me.
He held up the green lace lingerie in one hand. The black thong and push-up bra set in the other. And then he looked at me.
Not the way men usually look. Not the grab-and-go assessment I’d been clocking since I was nineteen. He looked at me the way he’d once looked at my flour racks and my proofing schedule and the chipped tile floor that first week—likeinventory, like a thing to be counted and known and accounted for, slow, top to bottom, missing nothing. His eyes went down me unhurried. Throat. The pulse there he told me he liked. Further down. The strong shoulders, the burn scars on my forearms that he never once flinched from, the rest of me, all of it, taken in like a man doing the books.
Except now I was the books.
God help me, I liked it. I stood there bare and I felt the heat come up my throat. I did not cross my arms, did not look away, did not make myself smaller. I let him have the looking. I imagined how he felt as he looked at my breasts, at my stomach, at the lick of hair above my pussy.
“Turn,” he said.
I turned. I felt his eyes on my back, on the curve of me, on the marks his hand had left two nights ago that had gone pale by now and that I’d touched in the mirror like a fool.
“Around,” he said, and I came back to face him, and his jaw had gone tight in a way I was learning to read.
He held the green out.
“This one,” he said. “You’ll wear this today. Under all the things you try on. All day—out with Donatella, at the salon, with all those people, the dress shop, every minute of it.” He stepped in, and the lace trembling in his hand. “And you’ll feel it when you sit. You’ll feel it when you walk. And every single time you feel it, you’ll think about me. About this. About who picked it.”
I took it. I remembered signing that contract. Daddy picks your underwear, in my own scarlet hand—and here was the clause made flesh, made green lace, made his.
“Are you going to be good?” he asked.
“I’m always good.”
His eyebrow went up. The grin tipped sideways, slow, knowing, and then his hands were on my hips, both of them, warm and sure, and he tipped me back onto the blanket like Iweighed nothing, like I was a thing he’d decided to have. His mouth came down on my throat, and I arched up into him before I’d voted on it, the want lighting the whole length of me at once, the green lace forgotten in my fist.
“You don’t feel always-good to me,” he murmured against my skin, working down, his stubble dragging, his hand sliding flat up my belly. “You feel like trouble. You feel like a woman who’s going to spend the whole day testing how far the line moves when I’m not in the room.”
“I would never,” I said, and it came out breathless, and I arched again, my hips chasing his thigh where it had pressed between mine, and he made a low sound against my breast and his hand slid lower and—
The phone went off on the nightstand.
A bright stupid chime. He stilled over me, his forehead dropping to mine, both of us breathing wrong, and I turned my head and saw the screen.
6:30. Below it: SALON 8.
“No,” I said.
“Yeah.” He laughed, low, wrecked, the heat still banked behind his eyes. He didn’t move for a second. He just stayed, forehead to mine, his thumb tracing slow over my hip where his hand had stopped, and I felt how much it was costing him to stop.
“You did that on purpose,” I said. “You set it.”
“I set it last night. So you’d be on time. I’m responsible.” He kissed me once, slow, and rolled off me and came up onto his knees, and the light caught the whole beautiful banked length of him, and I wanted to drag him back down by the saint over his heart.
He picked the green lace up off the blanket where it had fallen out of my fist. He held it out to me between two fingers, and his face was grave and his eyes were laughing.
“On,” he said.
I looked at the lace. I looked at him. I considered, very seriously, throwing it at his head.
“You’re a menace,” I told him.
