Page 62 of Hunt Me, Daddy

Desire was not new. I was a grown man. I understood appetite, understood lust, understood the clean utility of wanting someone and taking the necessary steps to have her. I had wanted Kit before the conference. Wanted her in ways I had no right to want a woman who did not yet know what I had done. Wanted her in the dark of her apartment, with her pillow against my chest and the scent of her sleep in my lungs. But wanting her while she spoke to me was different. It was more dangerous because she looked at me as though I were a stranger and I performed ignorance as though it did not cost me anything.

Kit Calloway, independent consultant.

As though I had not known the name for weeks.

As though I had not seen it printed on invoices, encrypted notes, and police-adjacent documents that should have stayed buried.

As though I had not written her name in my head so many times it no longer felt like language, but possession.

She asked what I did, and I gave her the version that would hold up in public. I worked in surveillance and financial threat intelligence. She narrowed her eyes at the vagueness, of course. She noticed the shadow around the answer, even if she did not yet know what made it.

Good girl.

The thought nearly made me close my eyes. That was what she did to me. She made discipline feel less like control and more like denial.

I watched her sharp mind process and respond to my statements. I watched her deflect once, then twice. The first time, I let it pass because pushing too soon would tell her too much. The second time, I named it, and the flash in her eyes was so hot and bright that my palm twitched with the dark, inappropriate urge to take that relentless, sleep-starved, brilliant woman in hand and teach her the difference between control and care.

To put her over my knee for walking alone into Orlov systems with no exit plan, no physical backup, no regard for the body she treated like disposable hardware. To feel her fight me first because she would. She would bite with words, with logic, with every defensive edge she had sharpened since Daniel vanished, and no one gave her the truth. Then she would learn.

She wouldn’t submit to me through fear. Never that.

Kit Calloway would not be taken by fear.

She would have to choose it. Choose me. Choose the weight of my hand on the back of her neck and the certainty of being held so completely that, for once, she could stop calculating every exit and simply breathe.

That was what made the thought dangerous.

Not the spanking. Not the heat of imagining her bent over my lap, bare, furious, and aroused enough to hate us both, my handlanding firmly on that perfect ass until she understood that her safety was not negotiable once she was mine.

No.

The dangerous part was afterward.

Feeding her. Letting her sulk about how sore her bottom would be. Putting her to bed. Locking every door myself and staying close enough that no Orlov hand, no old ghost, no careless man with a text message at two in the morning could reach her without going through me first.

I wanted to make her mine in all the ways that mattered. Physically, yes. But also, I wanted her to keep a normal schedule. I wanted her to sleep and eat and have a normal life. I wanted all of it.

Mine to protect.

Mine to correct.

Mine to ruin.

I was standing in a hallway full of conference noise while these thoughts moved through me, and she had no idea. Or perhaps she had some idea.

Kit noticed things. Her eyes lingered on my hand once when I adjusted my glasses. Then on my mouth when I answered too quickly. Then away, quickly, as though she had caught herself receiving data she had not meant to request. She was not unaffected. I knew that because I watched.

She felt the recognition between us and disliked it.

I wanted to tell her she was right to dislike it.

I wanted to tell her she had every reason to feel known because I had been unforgivably close to her for weeks, but I said none of those things.

Instead, I asked another question about adversarial trails and watched her forget, for three seconds, that she was guarding herself and I caught myself enjoying her far too much.

After she left, I should have let her go. That was the plan. The plan was elegant in its restraint. I was supposed to establish contact and let her run her analysis and arrive, on her own schedule, at a version of me I had built. Patience had never cost me anything before. Patience was the cheapest tool I owned.

She turned toward the restrooms instead of the workshop, and I followed her because something compelled me to do so.