by Loki Renard
Giving up hope of controlling either member of his little family, Harris hung up the pump and went to pay. By the time he got back, Tom was in the front seat with the candy and the rest of the snacks and Fiona was shooting him dirty glares.
“You don’t get candy,” Tom said as Harris started the car up. “You don’t get candy when you’re holding out on me.”
“I’m not holding out on you,” she pouted. “I was hungry.”
“None of this is food,” Tom said, lifting a box of candy. “This is sugar and coloring.”
“Well, I’m hungry,” she said. “I need to eat. You don’t want me to get shot, but you’re okay with me starving to death.”
“You won’t starve if you don’t eat for a few hours,” Tom shot back.
“Harris!” Fiona whined his name. “Make Tom give me my snacks.”
“You want snacks, you answer his questions,” Harris said. “And it wouldn’t hurt you to do as you’re told. There are people looking for you, Fiona. And you want to go wandering around a gas station wearing practically nothing?”
“You made me leave the house like this.”
“Dammit, Fiona,” Tom growled. “Your mouth is writing checks your bottom isn’t going to want to cash.”
Harris knew precisely what was happening. Fiona was getting over her shock and it was turning into bratty attitude. Attitude was always her problem. It had been her problem from the beginning and being shot at didn’t improve it any. They were all on edge, but he and Tom had to keep it together. Keep the client calm. That was how he had to think of her. If he thought of her as his lover, he would get emotional, and then he’d make mistakes. Harris didn’t intend to make any mistakes.
“What makes you think I know who that was?” Fiona whined the question from the back seat.
“I know that wasn’t your father,” Tom repeated himself. “Your father would never send that sort of force after you. The sort of people your father would send wouldn’t need to fire shots. They definitely wouldn’t miss if they did.”
Fiona went silent. Harris could feel her guilt. It was flowing off her in waves. The entire back seat of the car was full of the stuff. Harris was even starting to feel a little guilty by association and he knew darn well he hadn’t done anything wrong.
“Fiona?” He added his own question to the mix. He didn’t get a reply.
“We’ll have a long talk when we get to Switzerland,” he said. “Let’s not get into this now.”
“If it turns out that you’re hiding something, I am not going to be happy,” Tom growled. “This is a matter of life and death.”
“Give me my snacks.”
Tom growled. “You are not getting any snacks, you darn brat.”
To say that the drive to Switzerland was tense was a huge understatement. Tom was livid, primarily with Fiona, who maintained her silence all the way through the beautiful hills and tunnels which lead to Switzerland.
Switzerland wasn’t just a handy country. It was a place where Tom knew people, a place where every male owned a gun and knew how to use it. Within a few hours, the dramatic hills of Italy gave way to more verdant surroundings and then, finally, they were in a small town.
“There’s a safe house here,” Tom said. “We’re going to stay in it. Fiona, for you that means staying indoors. You do not go outside, you do not wander around, you hear me? It’s dark now, so nobody is going to see you go in. That means anybody asking around for you won’t get a positive response.”
“I get it,” Fiona snapped. “I’m not stupid.”
“You didn’t get it back at the gas station.”
Harris pulled up in the internal garage of the address Tom had given him. Tom already had the garage door opener for the place on his person, an impressive piece of organization.
“How many places do you have waiting as back up?” Harris asked. He didn’t get an answer. Tom wasn’t interested in conversing with him. Tom was around the back of the car, gesturing curtly for Fiona to get out.
“This place looks like a dump.”
The first words out of her mouth were not the words Harris would have chosen. They were not wise words, especially when the veins in Tom’s neck and forehead had been standing out for the last few hours.
Tom didn’t even make a verbal reply. He made an animal growling sound, grabbed Fiona by her forearm and dragged her into the house.
It wasn’t a dump. It was actually quite a nice little ski chalet. Harris didn’t really have too much time to take in the décor, because Fiona was squealing bloody murder from the kitchen, where Tom had her pinned over the counter, her shorts and panties down and was belaboring her bare bottom with the sturdy back of a wooden spoon.
“You’re going to tell me what’s going on,” he growled. “Or you’re not going to sit for a week!”
“Fuck you, Tom!” Fiona swore, her blonde curls flailing as she tossed herself around like a fish on a hook. There was none of the good, pliant behavior in evidence anymore. She’d gone right back into hell brat mode, probably a bad decision seeing how determined Tom was to get the answers out of her.
Tom spanked harder, until her bottom glowed so red it looked incandescent, and her cries became more pained than plaintive. Harris could see her pussy between squirming red cheeks, her legs flailing with every swat of the spoon. Tom’s hand was bunched up in the back of her hair, controlling her head and thereby keeping the rest of her squirming body under control too. The spanking was making Fiona’s bottom jiggle as she danced back and forth, twisting her hips this way and that to try to avoid the spoon. It was futile, of course. Every swat landed where Tom meant it to, painting her bottom with bright splotches of color.
“Don’t you swear at me, missy!”
“I’ll fucking swear at you if I want!” Her shriek of outrage was high pitched enough to put the wine glasses in the cabinet at risk of smashing.
Tom dropped the spoon and went back to his palm, whacking her bottom with great sweeping strokes that caught her under the curve of her bottom and lifted her up onto her toes. Red fingermarks spread across the soft, already cerise skin, creating a tapestry of hot hues. Every time she kicked or flailed, the plump lips of her pussy came into view, lightly glistening with the sheen she just couldn’t help.
It was an arousing scene, but Harris knew he had to do something. An angry Fiona and an angry Tom made for a volatile situation. He didn’t worry about Tom hurting Fiona, he worried about Fiona pushing things to a place where she’d hurt herself.
In a bid to settle the situation, he went around the other side of the counter and caught Fiona’s drumming fists in his hands.
“Fiona,” he said softly, almost too softly to be heard amid all the caterwauling. “Please. Just tell us.”
“I’m not telling you shit if he’s still spanking me!”
“Tom, ease off a second.” Harris straightened and gave the order. Tom looked at him blankly for a moment, then, to their collective surprise, actually stopped.
“Okay,” she admitted breathlessly, apparently eager to keep her end of the deal, lest the deal be altered before she had a chance to take it. “It’s not my father. I’m sorry. I didn’t know… I didn’t think.”
“Who is it?”
“I made a deal six months ago with a Russian oligarch,” Fiona panted. “I promised him a share of our business in return for money. Lots and lots of money. My father cut me off when he realized I wasn’t going to do what he wanted. I guess he thought that would make me go back to him. I had some money of my own, but it wasn’t enough. I needed some more. So I made this deal, but it went sour and now this Andrej Petrovsky wants his money back.”
“Fiona…” Tom and Harris growled her name simultaneously. For a second, Harris thought Tom was going to start smacking Fiona’s bottom again, but he tossed the spoon in the sink and walked away, leaving Fiona to straighten and tend to her bright red behind.
He’d really gone to to
wn on that ass of hers. It was burgundy from crown to thigh, with a few darker splotches here and there where the spoon must have landed more often. Fiona made a hissing sound as she tried to rub her bottom, which was much too sore for that sort of soothing.
It was left to Harris to take her by the arm, draw her down on a handy couch and begin applying the lotion he’d started carrying inside his jacket as a matter of course, a sort of spanking rescue remedy designed to minimize bruising and reduce swelling.
“You lied to us,” Harris said redundantly, smoothing little dabs of ointment onto her flaming cheeks. “Why didn’t you tell me this?”
“Okay, I lied a little,” she admitted, “but what’s the difference?”
She was lying across his lap as quiet as a lamb, her eyes half closed as he began to soothe away some of Tom’s punishment.
“The difference is Russians,” Tom said grimly, reloading his pistol. “Russians do not mess around. They are not gentlemen in any sense of the word. Your lie could have gotten us killed. It could still get us killed.”
“I’m sorry!” Fiona’s eyes were filled with tears. Maybe she was sorry. Maybe she was just sorry Tom had whipped her behind until she was forced to tell them.
“I see one way out of this,” Tom said, holstering his weapon and making sure all the curtains were properly closed. “We contact your father.”
“No!”
Tom rounded on her harshly. “We don’t have a choice. The Russians want what they were promised and they’re apparently prepared to kill to get it. The only way to get it is to ask your father for it.”
“But the Sheikh…”
“Forget the Sheikh for now,” Tom said. “We deal with the primary threat first. Right now, that’s Russian gunmen.”
“Just shoot them,” Fiona suggested.
Tom’s blue scowl became withering. “Nobody should die because you made a bad business deal, Fiona. Besides, what say we do shoot these men? You think these will be the last of them? Or do you think they will come in greater numbers and be all the more violent for the loss of their comrades?”
Fiona pressed up onto her hands and knees, apparently needing the leverage to fight with Tom. “I can’t go back.”
“You can. We’re not going to let your father hand you off to any Sheikh. This situation is getting out of hand Fiona. You can’t run from it anymore, and I’m not going to help you. It’s time to go home and face the music.”
“But I don’t want…”
“I don’t care what you want,” Tom growled. “I’ll drag you back in cuffs if I have to.”
Harris felt Fiona grow tense against his body. “You said you wouldn’t do that.”
“That was before you got me shot at.”
“That was the risk you took when you decided you wanted to join up with us.” Fiona climbed off Harris’s lap and faced down Tom, pantyless and all. “You hitched your wagon to my train, bucko. You don’t get to complain now that things are a little hot.”
“A little hot…” Tom guffawed. “What world are you in, Fiona? Harris almost caught a bullet to the brain this morning. You know what will happen if they catch us off guard again? They’ll kill us both and they’ll take you. And seeing as you don’t have many assets left these days, I’m sure they’ll find another way to make their money back off your sweet, spoiled ass.”
Fiona recoiled from him, her eyes wide. “How could you… why would you say that to me?”
“Because it’s true,” Tom growled. “You don’t understand the danger you’re in. You’re going back home, Fiona. That’s final.”
Fiona turned to Harris with tears in her eyes. “Tell him I can’t go back.”
“Listen, Fiona…” Harris didn’t get more than two words out before she interrupted him.
“You hate me now, don’t you,” she sniffed. “You both hate me. You don’t want to be with me anymore. That’s what this is about. You’ve fucked me and now you’re done with me.”
“I don’t hate you, Fiona,” Tom sighed. “And I’m not tired of you. I just can’t fix your mess for you. You gotta stand on your own two feet, own up to what you’ve done, and make things right with your dad and the Russians. Then we can talk about our future.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It won’t work like that. If we leave here, we’re done.”
“If we stay here, we’ll be riddled with bullets before Tuesday,” Tom insisted. “Young lady, you’re going home.”
“Harris?” Fiona turned her gaze to her faithful bodyguard, but saw the same grim expression on his face.
“Tom is right,” Harris said. “This is too big a mess for two bodyguards to fix. We have to go back, Fiona. Before one of us is seriously injured, or worse.”
Her lower lip quivered and tears began to fill her eyes. “But…”
“No buts,” Tom said firmly. “This isn’t worth anyone’s life, Fiona. Trust us. Harris and I both know what it looks like when the bullet doesn’t miss, and it’s not worth it.”
Chapter Twelve
Fiona could barely breathe. Less than twenty four hours ago she’d been sunbathing in Tuscany with two burly lovers by her side. Now she was outside the foreboding Massachusetts gates of Fayrefield Manor and she could have sworn she was going to pass out. The entire flight home she’d been praying for something to save her, some storm to blow them off course and onto a desert island where they could live happily ever after, the unprecedented collapse of Russia, anything to prevent her having to face her father and admit what she’d done, but nothing had.
“It’s okay,” Harris reassured her for the hundredth time. “We’ve got you.”
They had her, but her father was about to have her. Lord Fayrefield was scary. Scarier even than Tom when he was in one of his disciplinary moods. Not that he’d ever hit her. She wasn’t afraid of any physical retribution. She was afraid of the sort of crushing judgment only her father could hand down.
“I can’t go in there,” she panted, hyperventilating into Harris’s chest. “I can’t.”
“We won’t let anything happen to you,” he said, stroking her hair. “Come on now. One foot after the other.”
The gates swung open to admit their little party. They were on foot, and it was a long walk up to the house, long enough for Fiona to remember every little reason she’d ever had to run away. Each step felt as though it were one step closer to the gallows of her spirit. Harris and Tom did not understand what her father was like. Once you got in his presence, you lost your will. He replaced it with his own. She didn’t know if she’d have the strength to escape again.
They were met at the front door by a butler. Harris seemed taken aback. Maybe he’d never seen a butler before. Or maybe he thought her father would come out and say hello, welcome his prodigal daughter home. That wasn’t Lord Fayrefield’s style. It was well known that he’d not bothered to make her acquaintance until she was five years of age, owing to his opinion that anyone younger than that was not worth the time it took to look at them.
Lord Fayrefield, for that was how Fiona thought of him in her own mind, was not precisely the paternal type. Tom and Harris didn’t understand that, but they soon would.
* * *
Harris was surprised by their reception at Fayrefield Manor. He had expected an angry father, or a sad father, or a happy father. He had not expected no father at the front door. He was also surprised that when the beanpole butler sniffingly insinuated that Fiona’s appearance was not suited for an audience with her father, she nodded and went upstairs to change her clothes.
“It’s like she’s a different woman here,” he murmured to Tom.
“She’s a safe woman here,” Tom replied. “Which is all I care about.”
“Lord Fayrefield will see you now,” the butler told them, showing them through to a palatial office filled with all manner of exceptionally British items, overstuffed chairs, baize topped tables and taxidermied creatures with expres
sions of horror and surprise forever frozen on their furry faces. In the middle of it all, Lord Fayrefield was a rotund man with thinning blond hair and little blue eyes the same hue as Fiona’s but without any of her beauty.
“You brought my daughter back to me,” Lord Fayrefield said. His face barely moved when he spoke, and his tone was entirely devoid of interest. Harris took an immediate and strong dislike to the man.
Sure, Fiona had run away, and by the sound of things, also forcibly sold off a couple million dollars of assets, but that was the equivalent of a normal person’s daughter scratching the car. It would barely make a dent in the Fayrefield fortune.
“I did, sir,” Tom said, taking the credit.
“Are the rumors true?”
Harris looked at Tom, whose gaze remained on Lord Fayrefield. “What rumors would those be?”
“That you have both been intimate with my daughter?”
To Tom’s credit, his expression did not reveal anything. He had become almost as dour and pokerfaced as the man he was speaking to. “I don’t think that’s an appropriate question, sir.”
Lord Fayrefield snorted. “I will take that as an admission, not that I need one. The satellite images from the spies I hired when you decided to leave my service revealed more than I needed to see.”
“Then the question was unnecessary, a waste of both our time. I don’t like to waste my time,” Tom replied without the slightest hint of shame.
“I suggest you modulate your tone,” Lord Fayrefield said. “After what you have done to my daughter, made her useless…”
“Useless?” The word burst out between Harris’s gritted teeth.
“Fiona was never a smart girl, but she was beautiful. That was useful. She had more suitable suitors than two ex-military grunts.”
“You mean the man who already had thirteen other wives?”
“Sheikh Al-Babub would have given her a lovely home.”
