Make Me Beg, Daddy

Chapter 14

The exhale that comes past her lips is brimming with relief. “Okay. Good. That’s… that’s good.” Then the suspicion rises back up. “You’re not going to ask me what it’s about?”

I chuckle. “You made it all pretty clear, I’d say. No follow-up questions necessary.”

Her gulp echoes in the space. “Am I about to blow up my life?” she whispers aloud.

I don’t think she’s actually asking me, but I answer anyway. “It doesn’t sound like it was much of a life in the first place.”

“No,” she concedes. “I don’t really think it was.”

“Then I’d say you have everything to gain and nothing to lose.”

“I guess you’re right.” Another calming exhale. “Who did you say you were again?”

“I didn’t. Feel free to take a guess.”

“A cousin?”

“Definitely not.”

“Some aunt’s new boyfriend?”

“God forbid.”

“Are you a caterer?”

That makes me bark out a laugh. “The pay is not quite enough to tempt me into that line of work.”

Her frown is audible. “Then are you even supposed to be here?”

“Not even remotely.”

“Great,” she says. “So you’re a stranger who broke into my mother’s house and now, you know all my business.”

“I didn’t break in. I walked right through the front door. In fact, a nice woman told me I was handsome the second I arrived.”

The woman in the pantry giggles. “That had to be Aunt Sherry.”

“If you say so.”

“She’d let a serial killer in if he complimented her earrings.”

“Then she’s an excellent host.”

She laughs again, and seems almost surprised by it. “I shouldn’t be talking to you,” she accuses.

“Probably not.”

“You’re not going to leave, are you?”

“And miss the show? I wouldn’t dream of it.”

She sighs. “s**t. Well. Alright. I guess I should get going. Do me a favor and don’t tell anybody I was in here,” she says. “It really undercuts the whole ‘vengeful b***h’ thing I’m going for.”

“I’ve heard men beg in five languages. You were braver than any of them.”

“That is the strangest compliment I’ve ever gotten.”

“You’ll get used to me.”

“Will I? Someone’s confident.”

“You have no idea how right you are.”

She fidgets for another moment, taken aback by this stranger in the pantry, I’m sure.

“Okay. Well.” She clears her throat. “Thank you for humoring my practice run, I guess. Any notes for me before I go?”

“None whatsoever.” I step a bit closer and inhale her scent. Flour and sweat. It’s strange, but intoxicating. “I like your voice.”

That stops her. “You… huh?”

“Your voice. It’s sweet. Does it match your face, I wonder?”

I start to reach for the light switch on the wall over her shoulder, but she darts out a hand to catch my wrist and stop me.

“Don’t,” she whispers.

I pause. There’s a note in her voice that confuses me. It’s almost like she’s… begging?

But not in the fun way. Not in the hands-cuffed-behind-her-back, bare-and-submissive-before-me kind of way.

This begging is a bit too desperate for my liking.

“Why not?” I ask.

She releases my wrist. “If you turn on that light, I’m going to see your face, and you’re going to see mine, and then this becomes a real conversation with a real person in it. And then I lose my nerve.”

“That’s the only reason?” I scoff. “I’ll lend you some of my nerve, then. You⁠—”

“No!”

She snatches my wrist again and clings on hard.

“I like that you like my voice,” she mumbles. “I don’t want to know what happens when you see that my face doesn’t match.”

I turn to stone.

Some part of me wants to be angry at her for what she just said. Well, no, not at her, exactly.

But at whoever installed that sentence in her brain and made her so sure it was true.

Her husband, probably. Her sister. That whole braying room out there.

“Say that again,” I order her.

“No.”

“Say it again.”

“I said what I said.” Her hand is still tight around my wrist. “Don’t make me repeat it. It’s humiliating enough the first time.”

“It’s not humiliating.” I let my voice drop. “It’s just f*****g wrong.”

“You haven’t seen me. You don’t know.”

“I know more than you might suspect.”

“Look, it’s just… I just… I’m asking you to please leave the light off, okay? I know that’s stupid, but I’m in a really fragile state right now and I just… I need that.”

Slowly, I start to peel her fingers off of my wrist one by one. It feels like plucking petals off a delicate flower.

“If the people in this house make you feel lesser-than, then they’re stupider than I ever thought possible,” I snarl at her. “I hear the fire in your voice. That’s all that matters to me.”

She laughs quietly, shamefully. “That’s a hell of a line.”

“It’s not a line.” I pull my wrist free of the last of her fingers. Slowly, so she knows I could have done it whenever I wanted. “A line would be me telling you you’re beautiful. I don’t do favors and I don’t hand out compliments to make women feel better.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Simply correcting the record.”

She breathes out. She’s been doing that this whole time, using her own breath to talk herself down off a ledge. It’s working, more or less. I can hear her getting ready to leave.

“Oh. Well, okay. Thanks, I guess.” Her feet shuffle on the tile floor. “Anyway… I should get out there before somebody sends a search party.” Then, faster, the way people say a line they’ve said a thousand times: “Not that I’m hard to find. Big girl, you know?”

She waits for the laugh.

But I’m not going to f*****g laugh.

I let the joke wither and die, even as I feel her cringing in the silence.

I don’t pity her. I’m enraged on her behalf. Connor Boyd let a woman this powerful come to hate him? He left her behind for, what—some vapid fool of a sister?

I loathe him even more than I did before I arrived here tonight.

But that’s a problem to deal with later. Right now, there’s something else I’d like to address.

I look at the shimmering shape of this woman in the darkness. She’s still waiting for me to respond to her horrible joke.

All I say is…

“What the f**k are you talking about?”

She blinks. “Sorry?”

“That.” I gesture at her. “Whatever the f**k that was.”

“It was a joke,” she mutters defensively.

“Then it was a f*****g terrible one. Don’t ever do that again.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend your⁠—”

“Offend me?” I interrupt. “You don’t have to give a damn about me, sladkaya. To you, I’m nothing but a mass in the darkness. And I don’t need or want or give a s**t about your apologies. No—apologize to yourself.”

“For what? It’s true.”

“Wrong.”

Her chin rises up. “How the hell would you know?”

“Have we not been a foot apart for the last ten minutes?”

“It’s dark. You don’t even know what I⁠—”

“Do you think I don’t know what’s standing in front of me?”

She’s a f*****g marvel. She’s an absolutely miraculous f*****g marvel and yet she has no idea. Somebody in that living room has worked very hard to keep it that way.

Not many women would dare to do what she’s about to do.

I refuse to let the ghosts of her past talk her out of it.

“I…” But she doesn’t finish the sentence.

“Yes?”

“You… Nobody does that,” she says. “Nobody gives speeches to a stranger in the dark like that.”

“I do,” I tell her. “I just f*****g did.”

She doesn’t have an answer for that. I can’t really blame her.

She’s never met a man like me before.

Then the hallway gets loud.

“Where is she? Where’s my sister? Somebody go find her.”

Somebody answers her, too far off to make out.

“Well, she’s the one who moved it up,” the voice snaps back. “So she can be the one to start it. This stupid slideshow is taking forever and my feet are killing me.”

In the dark in front of me, the woman goes still.

“That’s her,” she whispers. “That’s Vivian.”

In an instant, I know exactly what kind of woman she is. Even if I hadn’t heard what she’d done, the adultery, the disdain, I would’ve known from the second she spoke that she’s a f*****g snake.

“She sounds like a delight,” I drawl. “Pity that her evening is about to take such a twist.”

She laughs. Then she straightens up. “I have to go.”

“I know.”

“No, I mean—” She hesitates. “I have to go do it.”

Her hand finds the doorknob, but she doesn’t turn it. I look at the sliver of light beneath the door and ponder my next move.

I came here to take this family’s evening apart myself.

But I just decided something:

I’m not going to.

I want to watch her do it instead.

It isn’t mercy and it isn’t patience stopping me. It’s just pure f*****g greed.

What she’s about to walk out there and do to her husband will be worse than anything I had planned.

Also… I want to hear her voice just a little bit more.

“Go on, then,” I tell her. “I’ll be right here, watching. Give them hell.”

“Jesus,” she says, half-laughing and half in disbelief. “You’re a strange guy, you know that?”