Page 64 of Fearless

She blinks a few times, swallows, and then nods her head.

I raise my eyebrow.

She giggles.

“What?”

She shakes her head, her face instantly turning guilty.

“What?”

“Why do you look so serious?”

I turn and look at the wall, letting out a single solitary laugh. I feel like I’ve just fallen into the matrix or something. Is she completely oblivious to the emotional fucking rollercoaster I’ve just been on?

“If I can just…”

I look back at her. If you can just what, Meisie? But I don’t say it out loud.

“Why do you have me pinned to the bed?”

She’s winding me up. I’m convinced. Already she seems to have worked out how to simultaneously push my buttonsandwrap me around her little finger.

I’m not going to fall for it. Nope.

“If I let you up, will you promise not to attempt to punch the living fuck out of me?”

She tries to fight a smile and loses. “No.”

“No?”

Her hair falls around on the mattress as she shakes her head. “No.”

“I can stay here all day and all night,” I warn her.

“And you think I couldn’t?”

I laugh. Valiant. “Your little bones will tire long before my muscles do.”

She smirks. Smirks! And then rolls her head to the side and closes her eyes, as if she’s settling in for a long-assed hibernation.

“You honestly want to enter into a battle of wills with me?” I ask her.

I feel her shift on the bed and realize she’s trying to shrug but can’t, because I’ve got her arms locked down so tightly. “Do your worst,” she whispers. “You’re good at that.”

“You couldn’t handle my worst,” I tell her.

She opens her eyes and turns her head to stare up at me. “You really want to go toe to toe withme?“

I look her over. Her cheeks are still colored from her earlier hysterics, but if it wasn’t for that you’d barely know. Do I want to get into a battle of wills with her? She’s headstrong. She is, but she’s not stubborn. She knows when to listen to me. She knows when she’s beaten.

“I’m going to let your arms go, and if you break the rules you know what happens, don’t you?”

She gazes up at me with the hint of a smile playing on her lips and nods her head. I slide my hands down her arms, still wrapped in my shirt, and bring them to her cheeks.

“Open wide for Daddy.”

There’s a twinkle in her eye that tells me she remembers, but she does it anyway. Not wide. That would be expecting too much, because she likes to pretend she’s stubborn. But wide enough for my purposes.

---