Fearless

by Maren Smith

  “Are you all right?” He came in, looking her over while she, panting and gasping and still battling back tears, dragged herself up off her hands and knees. She stood before him on badly shaking legs. “What happened?”

  She couldn’t even talk. She pointed back through the house toward the north, where the whisper of running water said everything it needed to about what she’d been doing. As far as she was concerned, it could run forever. She wasn’t going back out there. Not ever.

  Noah tipped his hat to listen, then looked at her again. Turning, he walked back out the front door. The steady tromp of his footsteps followed the veranda around to the back of the house. The friendly timbre of his voice greeted the thirsty koalas once he got there, and then the telltale squeak of the turning faucet stopped the running water.

  Knees wobbling, Kitty dropped back down to the floor. On all fours, she pushed between two chairs to hide under the dining table. Her head on her hands, she stared at a knot in the floorboards, absolutely hating herself for the coward she had become. Not that she’d ever stared with fearless bravado into the straggly face of a malicious koala before, but really… had the situation warranted being this afraid?

  Absolutely, her gut instinct cried.

  She felt awful, and that only got worse as Noah’s heavy footsteps made the journey back around the house to the front door. When he came inside, she felt the even heavier weight of his presence. The table cut her view of him from the thighs up, but nothing obstructed her sight of his lower legs taking two steps into the house, then stopping. She cowered when his feet turned toward the dining room. Giving his pants a tug, he hunkered down so he could look right at her. Flinching, Kitty avoided his stare. She buried her face in backs of her hands instead and wished she were somewhere—anywhere else in the world.

  “All right,” Noah said, in almost the exact same tone he’d used with the koalas. He came to the table, pulled out both chairs so she couldn’t hide behind them anymore, and sat down in one facing her.

  Kitty kept her face buried and dared not look at him.

  “Are you all right?” he asked again, a peculiar note underlying his tone, suggesting he might not be as calm as he sounded.

  Cringing, she nodded.

  “Did you get bit?” Noah asked.

  Sucking a breath, Kitty pushed herself to sit up and face what she had coming. She shook her head.

  “Did one of them attack you?”

  Sort of, but not really. Coming at her because she stood between it and the water didn’t really constitute an attack, and she knew it. Kitty shook her head again.

  “Look at me.” His tone sounded light, and cheerful, and completely masked the very real fact that he wasn’t happy with her right now.

  Dragging her gaze up from her arms, Kitty met his angry stare. Her heart began to beat hard again, but not for the same reason that it had outside.

  He was sitting up straight, big hands braced against his thighs. The corners of his mouth were faintly upturned, as if he were trying to smile, but it wasn’t real and didn’t hide the sternness in his glare. “What is Rule Number One?”

  “Leave the wildlife alone,” she answered.

  “What did I tell you those were the very first day you arrived?”

  “Wild animals.” Her stomach tightened. Noah was angry with her. She was going to get punished. She looked at his hand, resting on the table. He had big hands, bigger than Ethen’s, calloused and rough and used to hard physical work. She looked at his belt too. She already knew what he could do with a strap. Her stomach dropped, a sickly sinking sensation that almost sent her running to the bathroom.

  “You knew they were out there, didn’t you?” he continued. “They’re not quiet. I could hear them calling all the way down at the barn.”

  “They were out of water.” Her face burned slow but hot. She felt stupid. “They were thirsty.”

  Noah nodded. “When I hear them squabbling like that, I know they’re out. I was coming up to give them water when I saw you. My problem here is: admirable though it was for you to want to ease their discomfort, that was not your job. For all that they look cute and cuddly, they can and do bite people quite savagely.”

  She didn’t for a second doubt that.

  “Do you know what trust is?”

  That hurt. Kitty stared at him.

  “How about obedience?” he countered with equal ruthlessness when she didn’t answer. “Because if I can’t trust you to do what I ask you when I am here, how can I trust you to do it when I’m not?”

  It was amazing how quickly her thoughts turned mutinous. She dropped her stare to her hands, trying to hide them. She felt stupid enough as it was, she didn’t need him rubbing it in deeper.

  The phone in the living room rang. When he glanced away, she crawled away from him toward the head of the table. That stopped when he snapped his fingers and pointed to a spot on the floor directly in front of him.

  “If I can’t trust you, you’re not a roommate. You’re a guest. Guests don’t answer my phone.”

  Kitty sat where she was, hating every nuance of that scolding while he went to answer the phone. In short syllables, he responded with yeses and nos, but he was staring right at her while he did it. Towards the end of the brief conversation, he only asked one question: “What’s the address? …I’ll take care of it tonight… Yep… Ta.”

  She couldn’t remember the last time someone had made her feel this small with nothing but a stare. Not scared, per se. Not panicky, really. Just guilty and small. She hugged her shoulders for comfort, determined not to let him know how much this bothered her. She hadn’t meant to break his rule. To be honest, she hadn’t given any of his rules much thought. But okay, she did break one and maybe that gave him a reason to be a little upset, but hadn’t she been through enough? Did he really need to make her feel worse than she already did? Because if he wanted to play that game, she thought mutinously, somebody should tell him she’d been taught these particular rules by the best of them. Compared to Ethen, Noah didn’t even rank. He didn’t even slam the phone when he hung it up. All he did was give her that same hard, hands on his hips glare, and if that was the worst he intended to do, well… she’d survived Ethen’s beatings. She could survive Noah’s fake smiling glares, too.

  “Well,” Noah said with mock cheerfulness. “I’ll get the tea, shall I?”

  The hell he would. It was her kitchen. Kitty crawled out from under the table, fully prepared to march straight past him into it and maybe even let him know how unhappy she was by rattling a few dishes louder than she needed to while she got the damn tea. Perhaps not. It had been a long time since she’d thrown a fit. She never would have dreamed of it with Ethen. She wasn’t entirely sure she could bring herself to do it now. But it was a moot point. The minute she gained her feet, he snapped his fingers and pointed at her chair and she dropped with all the shaky defiance she had to sit where he told her.

  “Nah,” he said. “Trustworthy, obedient roommates help in the kitchen. Guests sit at the kitchen table and do nothing more strenuous than rest and relax.” He walked past her, rolling up his sleeves. “Don’t bother yourself, love. I’ll get the tea.”

  Every thought Kitty had about banging cups on saucers and fit throwing went straight out of her head. As it turned out, beatings weren’t the worst thing he could have done. Without raising his voice or his fist, Noah showed her how wrong she could be. In the half second it took him to strip her of her new-found responsibilities, Kitty gained a whole new respect for the awfulness of what punishments Down Under could be as Noah made her tea, and sandwiches, and cut up cold slices of cucumber and mango from the fridge and brought it all out to her as if she were Royalty and he nothing more than someone put in this house to serve her.

  No one had ever served her before.

  “Bon appetite,” he said, setting that plate in front of her.

  She didn’t feel small anymore. Now she felt useless all over again.

  “Rule
Number Seven,” he told her, when she neither touched her sandwich nor sipped her tea.

  Eat every bite.

  It tasted like bitterness and defeat, but she managed to choke it all down. The first half, she did angrily. By the time her plate was empty, she was struggling to swallow through a sheen of tears.

  Chapter 9

  Nothing was harder on a service submissive than to be stripped of her serving privileges, and Kitty was definitely a service-driven submissive. If there was any doubt left in his mind after what he’d seen that first night, then those doubts were put to rest by every flinching, teary reaction she made as she watched him clear the table after their tea. She kept trying to pick the dishes ahead of him; he had to take them away from her. After telling her no for the second time, he took away the dirty plate she immediately tried to hug to her chest and calmly, sternly, resoundingly slapped the backs of her hands.

  The strapping he’d given her had been far more painful, but this was real punishment and it was effective. She broke down, sobbing at the table while he took his time washing and drying the dishes. By the time he was ready to put them away, she’d covered her head with both arms.

  He lingered in the kitchen for some time afterward, mentally debating if this had been enough to get his message across. It had only been fifteen minutes, but already she looked so small and forlorn, and he didn’t doubt for a second that her misery was real. Those weren’t crocodile tears. What’s more, her disobedience had been born from a wish to help, not out of defiance. Kitty, at her most misbehaving, did not even begin to define the word. As far as he was concerned, that ought to count in her favor as he carefully measured the punishment against the sin.

  In the end he decided, like timeouts for Littles, fifteen minutes wasn’t enough. A good hour, maybe two, would send the message home.

  Collecting a couple books from a shelf in his bedroom, he placed them beside her on the table on his way back outside.

  “So you don’t get bored while you’re relaxing,” he said, fighting not to let her pleading stare soften his resolve. “If your butt leaves that seat for any reason other than the bathroom, I’m going to have a guest instead of a roommate all the way through to the weekend. Am I clear?”

  Sniffling, she nodded, and back to the barn Noah went, with a knot in his chest and another digging in between his shoulder blades. He took a seat at the work table, rolled his neck and tried to get back into the groove of cutting strips for the kangaroo whip he was making. His hands knew the work, but his thoughts refused to focus. They kept drifting back to Kitty, in hysterics as she fled around the porch for the safety of the house. She’d broken his rule, and she’d been terrified the entire time she’d done it. Because the koalas were thirsty. And really, if a man had to have a disobedient submissive, having one that disobeyed but while doing something she thought was right, was the dubious preference.

  She wasn’t his submissive, he reminded himself. She was just a submissive in his house. And of course, no disobedience should come at the cost of a finger or a dozen or more stitches, because marsupial claws were made for climbing trees and were sharp as hell. Their bites were even worse.

  Noah tightened his jaw. His rules were in place for a reason. He needed to know that she would follow them, and she needed to know that when it came to matters of trust and obedience, he was not only serious, but that he was in charge.

  Those tears of hers, though. Oi, they got him right in the heart. He shifted on his stool, trying to shrug off the feeling. But the fact remained, if a dom failed to recognize when he needed to be a hard-ass, then he simply wasn’t a dom. At best, he was a top, fit only for scening.

  Still, Kitty wasn’t his. No matter how comfortable the house was starting to feel with her in it, she wasn’t a permanent fixture. He couldn’t let himself start to believe otherwise.

  And she was damaged. He couldn’t let himself forget that, either. She was here to heal, which meant eventually she was going to head back home again. Back to the States where, maybe if he was lucky, he’d run into her the next time he was in Washington D.C. If she stayed there, that was.

  If he ever went back.

  That was a lot of ifs. He didn’t like ifs. He liked an uncomplicated life. He liked peace and quiet and he’d be far better served trying to find all that in a local girl who’d be able to stick around.

  Or he could convince Kitty to stay. He supposed that was a good plan too, although it wasn’t likely. It wasn’t even their choice, really. It was their choice pending a governmental immigration decision and, for some reason, that really irritated him.

  With all the layers of whip strands cut out, he set himself to the tedious task of trimming and stretching. This was the part he both loved and hated the most. His was a big barn, but the room he’d turned into a workspace within it wasn’t much bigger than his bedroom. An a/c chugged away in one of the two windows, helping to offset the heat beating down on the building from outside. A little radio on a narrow shelf above his work bench provided a beat for his motions to follow. Aerosmith provided a beat he could work to as he stretched and pulled, smoothed and stretched each and every strip he’d cut. Not a lot of thought went into this part, giving him plenty of time to think about other things. Like Kitty up in the house, sitting at the table where he’d left her, crying because he’d taken away the only thing that had let her feel useful in who knew how long.

  Was he doing the right thing? Unfortunately, he’d backed himself into a corner when he’d told her he wouldn’t scene with her without her asking first. But that had absolutely been the right thing to do. He wasn’t her dom. He refused to rob her of what little consent she might be capable of giving at this point, and a woman desperate enough to be dominated that she would crawl through his house naked and put herself to bed hugging a strap, was not a woman he could trust to make an informed decision regarding what she actually, willingly wanted when it came to either him or his whip.

  Plus, while he could make a spanking hurt like hell, it couldn’t ever be a punishment to someone who viewed it as a comfort. So even if she came to him right now—on her hands and knees, his mind supplied, naked and maybe carrying that strap she so loved in her teeth—he would not spank her for her misbehavior instead. She needed to know all the way down into the marrow of her bones that he was deadly serious when it came to his rules. Whatever he did, it had to be a disciplinary measure that would in no way be confused with comfort or pleasure.

  But if she did come crawling to him, his mind stubbornly whispered, letting that seductive image continue crawling through his head. If she did, what would he do?

  He swiped the tiny beads of sweat building on his forehead away on the back of his sleeve. His arms were beginning to ache, his muscles burning with the repetitiveness of the motion and the strength it took to keep pulling. Fall after fall, he kept going, working the lengths and periodically checking the time. Forty minutes passed, then an hour.

  An hour was long enough, he decided and took a break.

  The entire walk back to the house, he watched the windows for signs of movement. He never saw any and Kitty was still sitting at the table when he stepped inside. At some point, she had got up, though. In the same chair in which he’d left her, she had her elbows braced upon her knees, her head in her hands, and there was a bucket for her morning sickness balanced on the floor between her feet. But for some spit and tears, it was empty. She was still crying, but it had dwindled to the vestiges—the gasps and sniffles, and hitches that caught at each indrawn breath she tried to take. Her face was red, so were her eyes and her nose, though it wasn’t until he pulled up a chair to sit beside her that he saw how puffy and miserable she was.

  Shoulders hunched, she refused to look at him.

  He was so tempted to say he was sorry. Shaking his head, he rested his hand on her knee a moment, then got up to make her some tea. He doctored it with milk and honey, and fetched a few crackers to help her stomach settle. Laying it beside her on the tab
le, he walked down the hall to the bathroom, soaked a clean washcloth in cold water, and wrung it out between his sun-bronzed hands before returning. With gentle touches, he combed her hair back from her face to press the cool wetness first to her forehead and then her cheeks. Without a word, he wiped away her tears, but after only a few caresses, her face crumpled and she dissolved into tears all over again.

  Covering her mouth with both hands, she tried to block the sound, but there was no hiding how her too-thin shoulders jerked with each gasp.

  He wasn’t her dom. He didn’t have consent to behave as if he were. He especially didn’t have consent to drop that stupid washcloth and catch her in his arms instead. Pulling her up and taking her place on that chair, he drew her down to sit in his lap. He didn’t have the right to press her head to his shoulder, or rock her, or kiss her hot forehead and say, “I’m sorry I had to do that. But I need you to take me seriously, love. I need you to mind what I say so you don’t get hurt.”

  And he sure as hell did not have the right to feel the startling shock of lust and sympathy, sadness and inexplicable pleasure that accompanied that moment when she threw her fragile arms around his neck, pulled her knees up to her chest in a broken, subconscious need to get as small as she could and burrowed into him. She butted her head against his jaw. It was shockingly catlike. He wondered if she even knew she was doing it. Probably not, since she rubbed her face to his only twice, hugging his neck while she scrubbed her tear-streaked cheeks to each side of his jaw, then burrowed into the side of his neck and simply clung to him.

  “I’m sorry,” she wept. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  “All right, now.” He’d always been a big believer in aftercare. But up until this point in his life, the vast majority of his aftercare experience had been fairly generic. Generalized comfort offered to women he didn’t really know and, if it affected him at all, it was usually via an erection. Holding Kitty was a whole different level to the experience. She felt good, and he’d never felt so wanted, needed, and involved. She kept hugging onto him, pulling herself into a tight ball, so he kept rocking her, kissing her forehead, and whispering into the top of her head. “Ease it down now, love. I don’t want you to make yourself sick.”