Page 113 of Daddy, Sir

“I…” She was literally speechless. She cleared her throat and tried to change the subject. “I’m not a brat.” There was no confidence in her voice.

“Then stop acting like one. It’s a simple question.” He shook his head and snorted. “You might look different, but some things never change. I’ll tell you the same thing I told you in high school. If you act like a brat, I’m going to treat you like one.”

She was dying to ask what he meant by that. Her gaze skittered to the side as she tried to maintain a tough front. “Going to tell me to drop and give you twenty?” The sarcastic bite she’d intended seemed to be lacking, to her ears, at least.

“I’m sure I can think of a moreinventivepunishment, if you need me to.”

It was playing out just like her fantasies and she could barely believe it was really happening. She could have pushed. She wanted to, but instead she surrendered, “Ugh, fine. I was just wondering if I should bother going tonight.”

He took a second to mull that over. “So, if I’m going to be there, you’ll go?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, probably.”

“Good. See you at eight then.” He turned and started walking, leaving her gaping after him.

“I might not go!” she yelled at his retreating back.

Without stopping he laughed. “You will. See you there… brat.”

Chapter Five

When Major Oliver Scott had received orders to take a teaching position in the very town he’d grown up in, he’d found it ironic. He’d asked to be stationed there more than once over the years, but each time it had been denied. The Army needed him elsewhere.

They needed him in the hot spots. They needed him in countries where conflict was on the horizon, because that was where he was most useful. Most of his previous work had been classified, as a military intelligence officer, and even now he couldn’t say much about where he’d been or what he’d done.

But after eight years of collecting intelligence and assessing risks, he was happy to be back in the States. A teaching position was exactly what he needed to unwind from years of stress. He’d settled into the Bachelor Officer Quarters, and got busy trying to remember what it was like to have a regular life.

Of course, he was still in the Army. He still lived on the base, which came with certain restrictions, but it was a lot closer to normal than anything he’d seen in a while. And from the day he’d arrived, with everything he owned in a rucksack and a duffle bag, he’d had one thought on his mind.

Jamie.

He’d thought about her over the years since they’d lost touch. That was his fault, or rather, it was the nature of his job. In many places he couldn’t receive mail, and by the time it caught up with him,ifit caught up with him at all, it was wildly out of date.

He’d saved every letter he’d received though, and reread them many times. In the darkest places, they’d been a light, something to look forward to. Someone to remember.

She’d been his closest friend growing up, and then there’d been high school. Jamie had been a major brat, and, oddly, he’d enjoyed dealing with her. The harder she pushed, the more he itched to take her down a peg, but he’d never let himself think of her as anything more than a friend, or little sister.

But in those letters… he got a glimpse of the adult woman she was becoming, and he started to realize his feelings for her were growing into something new. At the same time he’d begun to learn a few things about himself as well.

Maybe he could blame her for it, but when he’d started to explore a kinky lifestyle in his off-hours, he’d thought about her. The way she’d pushed, and challenged him. The way she’d seemed to seek the regulation punishments he was allowed to give.

In his fantasies they were adults. His responses to her challenges were…notregulation. He wondered if she was still like that, and if, maybe, she’d been trying to fill some need she didn’t yet understand when she deliberately broke rules. Especially because letting her off with a warning only seemed to annoy her.

It had been a long time before he’d been able to admit that he’d enjoyed disciplining her, even if it was only with PT or writing assignments. Thinking about how he could deal with her now, as adults… made his cock so hard it ached.

But he knew it was unlikely that she’d developed a kinky side, and if she had, she’d never mentioned it in her letters. It wasn’texactly the thing you could casually ask in correspondence, especially not when people were reading his mail and censoring it for national security.

When she gave up writing, he’d decided it was for the best, for so many reasons. There was so little he could say about where he was, or what he was doing. Sometimes he had to lie, and there were long stretches where there was nothing good in his world to even write about.

It felt like he might tarnish the one bright thing in his life with the wrong word, or the wrong phrase. So, he just let it go. He lethergo, and hoped she’d move on with her life and be happy.

Until he’d gotten the order to return stateside and found out he’d be heading back to the place where he’d grown up. That had changed things, and suddenly Jamie was on his mind all the time, but he hadn’t done anything about it.

Maybe he would have eventually. He knew her mother was still living in the same house. All he had to do was drive over, and he wanted to. It was his own mind holding him back.

He was home, but he’d left parts of himself all over the world. He wasn’t the same boy that had enlisted, and he wasn’t entirely sure Jamie would like the man who’d returned. He was thirty-two, but some days it felt like he was seventy.

His body and mind had both been abused by those foreign tours, and he wasn’t sure they’d ever recover from the things he’d seen—and done. Did he have any right to come into her life now, after all that time?

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