The Brat, the Bodyguard, and the Bounty Hunter Read online

  “Ow! Harris! Goddammit! That fucking hurts!”

  “Language,” he said, “watch it. You don’t swear when I’m spanking you.”

  “I’ll fucking swear… oww!”

  He started smacking harder and faster and soon the sound of his palm on her bottom drowned out her cursing.

  “Please! Harris! No! No more! I don’t like it!”

  “You’re not supposed to like it,” he said, pausing for a moment. “You’re supposed to want to avoid it.”

  “But… I don’t want it!” Did he not understand what that meant? She didn’t want it. In all Fiona’s days, she had never been expected to endure that which she did not want to endure. Her life to that point had been one long series of events conforming precisely to her expectations and desires. This experience was most shocking and most unwelcome.

  “Good,” he said, smacking her bottom again. “Then maybe next time I tell you to behave yourself, you’ll do it. And maybe next time you think about slapping me, you’ll remember this.”

  This was another flurry of slaps. This was a stinging burning pain that sunk all the way into her bottom and made her squeal like a piglet.

  “Harris!”

  She shouted his name, but he still didn’t stop. He kept whacking and slapping until her bottom felt as though it had been stung by a thousand hornets. It was a plague of Biblical proportions unleashed upon her unsuspecting flesh, and she was not prepared.

  Harris had warned her of course, but she’d not taken his warnings seriously. Why should she? In all her life she had never been subject to such a painful reckoning.

  “You do not slap people’s faces,” he said, ignoring her whining cries. “You will do as you’re told when you’re told for as long as I am your bodyguard. You will take the needs and feelings of others into consideration when you open your mouth and when you act.”

  Each word was accompanied by another hard slap, another stinging reminder of just how far in over her head she was. Attempts to escape the slaps were entirely futile. She was forced to endure the slapping spanking until he saw fit to let her go, which was quite a long time after she first demanded he cease his spanking. In fact, she was almost crying by the time he did stop, leaving her bottom a complete disaster zone.

  He helped her to stand on wobbly feet, keeping hold of her hips as she looked over her shoulder and examined the damage. The mirror in the bedroom showed her bottom to be bright pink, darkening to deep red around the crowns and lower reaches of her cheeks.

  “Look at what you did to me! You brute!”

  “Well spanked,” Harris said. “Not so much as a bruise on those pretty cheeks, Lady Fayrefield.”

  “I will never forgive you!” Fiona spat the words at him, thoroughly outraged. “Never. You’re fired! Get out!”

  Harris didn’t so much as blink an eye. “I’ll be fired after you go stand in the corner.”

  “I’ll call security. I’ll call the police!”

  “Yes, draw attention to yourself, that will work out I’m sure. Go stand in the corner.”

  “I’m not going to…”

  “Go stand in the corner, or I’ll spank you again.”

  “You can’t do this!”

  “I’m doing it.”

  She glared at him, so angry she could barely think.

  “Go stand in the corner, Fiona,” he repeated the order.

  “I’m not standing in the corner.”

  “You are,” he said, his demeanor hardening again. “My patience is wearing thin with you, brat.”

  Fiona was overcome with the urge to burst into tears. She fought against it, but it was almost impossible to resist. They were coming, leaking down her cheeks, not tears of hurt or even of pain, but tears of pure frustration.

  Taking something like pity on her, Harris stood up, took her by the elbow and led her to the corner.

  “You’re going to stay here for ten minutes,” he said while she sniffed. “And then we’re going to talk.”

  Fiona felt him pat her bottom lightly, then leave her there.

  She stood in the corner for all of a minute, before realizing she was, well, standing in a corner. Harris didn’t have this kind of power over her. Harris was her employee, for crying out loud. Looking over her shoulder, she realized Harris had left her alone in the room. She took the opportunity to rub her bottom, and then to leave the corner and lay on the bed. She was exhausted from the flight, from the spanking, from fighting with Harris, from being so completely and totally dominated.

  She lay there crying softly and feeling sorry for herself, wondering what had come over the man she’d hired to protect her. How did they go from one swat to that onslaught that left her bottom stinging long minutes after the spanking was over? Fiona wanted to pull her panties back up, but she didn’t like the way the elastic felt sliding up over her sore bottom. It was another indignity imposed upon her after the fact. Harris wasn’t even in the room and he was still somehow controlling the way she could behave.

  Scowling into the pillow, Fiona wiped her tears, then cried some more, flipped the pillow over, and wiped them again.

  When the door opened again, she felt her heart inexplicably leap with something like excitement. Harris stepped into the room, somehow looking taller and stronger and even more handsome than before. He looked at her and shook his head, his expression somewhere between disappointed and stern. Fiona felt her tummy do flip flops as he drew closer.

  “That’s not the corner,” Harris said, sitting on the bed next to her. She was surprised when he reached out and stroked her hair back from her face. “You just can’t do as you’re told, can you?”

  Fiona shook her head. He didn’t look mad. Actually, he’d not looked mad once. He’d looked determined and serious and stern, but not angry.

  “How are you feeling?”

  She sniffed. “I don’t know. That… that really hurt, Harris. I mean, it wasn’t fun, not even a little bit.”

  “I know it hurt,” Harris said, “but you needed it.”

  “I needed to be hit?”

  “You needed a spanking. You wanted one.”

  “I did not want one,” she argued.

  “I told you I’d spank you when we got here. I told you that and then what did you do? You slapped me, Fiona. You did something you knew would get a reaction. And you got one. Didn’t you?”

  Fiona wrinkled her nose and hid her face in the coverlet. Now that the sting and heat was starting to abate a little, and now she’d cried herself out, she didn’t feel quite so angry or so upset. Harris was right. She had wanted to see what he’d do. Now she knew what he’d do.

  “Now,” he said. “Am I fired?”

  She didn’t want to fire him, not really. Now that she was on the run, she needed a friend. A real friend. Someone who wasn’t just interested in drinking and partying with her. Someone who could keep her safe. If she fired Harris, she’d be alone in Milan and sooner or later, they’d come for her.

  “If I say no, will you spank me again?”

  “If you deserve it, no doubt.”

  “Oh.”

  “You don’t have to deserve it, Fiona,” he reminded her. “You could try behaving yourself for once.”

  Fiona laughed. “What does that even mean?”

  Harris gave her an incredulous look, then shook his head. “You know, coming from someone else, I’d think that was a silly question. In your case, maybe it’s not. Nobody has ever made you do anything, have they, Fiona?”

  She thought about that for a long moment. There was that one time her parents had insisted she take a trip to Corfu, and a couple of times they’d taken her shopping when she would rather have stayed out by the pool, but other than that, no. She had always made her own way in the world, done as she pleased, when she pleased.

  “No,” she said. “I suppose not.”

  “How did you get away with that in school?”

  “School?” Fio
na scratched her nose. “I always had private tutors. All of my friends did too. School is for…” she didn’t want to say who school was for, but really it was for common people. Even private schools left a great deal to be desired.

  “So you’ve literally never had rules to follow, or been disciplined for breaking them?”

  “Disciplined?” The word felt odd on Fiona’s tongue. She hadn’t often said that word before. “No. I’ve never been disciplined. Discipline is for poor people.”

  Harris’s snort came from a place of amusement and outrage, as far as Fiona could tell. “Oh they would have loved you in the military.”

  “Let’s face it, I wouldn’t last ten minutes in the military,” Fiona grinned. She was not entirely unaware of the fact that she was spoiled, she just didn’t see it as being such a negative thing. So what if she could get away with things other people couldn’t? That was the privilege that came with being Fiona Fayrefield.

  “That’s going to change, Fiona. I don’t want you to panic, but I’m fairly sure someone followed us to the airport. So from now on, I need you to curb the shopping and the partying, and I need to you to do as you’re told, when you’re told to do it. It’s for your own safety.”

  Fiona forgot all about the spanking at that piece of news. “Someone followed us at Milan airport?”

  “In New York.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You were too busy getting on the wrong side of the TSA,” he said. “Besides, you didn’t need to know. You just needed to get on the plane.”

  “You should have told me.”

  “I’ll tell you what you need to know when you need to know it,” Harris said maddeningly. “You pay me to make sure nobody gets to you, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And you’re worried about a certain set of people, right? Mob affiliates?”

  “Something like that.”

  Fiona had been deliberately vague about who was chasing her. Better to say it was organized crime than to say she was running from her father. You could at least take down organized criminals by going to the police. Her father was far more powerful than any mobster.

  “Something like that, or that?”

  “I employed you,” she said as diplomatically as she could with her leggings and panties wound about her knees, “to provide protection services against all comers.”

  “And you’ve been running scared the entire time I’ve been working for you,” he pointed out. “You’ve made shady references to this and that, but no concrete statements. You can tell me, Fiona.”

  She couldn’t tell him. Not in a million years. Harris would no doubt take Lord Fayrefield’s side. Everybody did.

  “You’re not going to, are you?”

  She felt his hand settle on her bare spanked bottom, but shook her head bravely. If it meant more spanking, so be it. Harris might be a nice guy, but nobody was nice enough, or strong enough to stand up to the might of the Fayrefields for long.

  “We’ll talk about this another time,” Harris said. “Right now, you need to get some sleep.”

  Fiona was feeling sleepy. The problem was, it was still early evening in Milan, and though that translated to midnight in New York, it was hard to fall asleep with the sun beaming in the windows.

  “If I go to sleep now, I’ll wake up in the middle of the night,” she said. “I should stay up until it gets late and then sleep.”

  “Ordinarily, I’d agree,” Harris said, “but you’re exhausted. Take a nap at least.”

  In a magnanimous gesture, and with her bottom tingling with a reminder of what might happen if she didn’t take Harris’s suggestion. Fiona agreed to take a nap.

  Chapter Four

  Harris kept watch while Fiona slept. It had been quite a day. The hysterics following the spanking hadn’t surprised him. He’d expected to be fired at least once, if not several times. Fiona liked to throw her weight around. She certainly didn’t like to be humbled. All in all, he was actually impressed by how she’d taken her punishment.

  Not that it was really punishment. He’d barely spanked her really, despite how she’d reacted. It was a demonstration more than anything. With any luck, Fiona would settle down and mind him more. He wasn’t expecting miracles, no complete personality shifts were likely, but he’d settle for her listening to him on occasion.

  Now that they were in Milan, things were both more relaxed and more serious. He doubted the mob connection Fiona had implied. Anyone running from organized crime didn’t head straight for Italy. He didn’t doubt she was running from something, but what that precisely was, well that was anybody’s guess. Harris didn’t actually much care what or who it was. He considered his role something like a priest. It wasn’t his job to judge.

  Having checked the room over and ensured all windows and doors were locked, Harris monitored the street outside for a few minutes. A wireless camera mounted outside the room gave him full vision up and down the hall, and similar cameras mounted out the windows did the same for the exterior.

  He set up a laptop and sat in front of it, pulling up the feeds on the screen. It was certainly easy enough to keep an eye on his territory with the help of a little technology. Unfortunately, he was but one man and one man who was tired. In spite of his best efforts, he’d not gotten any rest on the plane. So not an hour into his vigil, he fell asleep on the couch.

  Some indeterminate amount of time after that, the click of the suite door brought him into immediate awareness. It was dark in the room; only the glow of the little red light on the laptop lit the space. There were footsteps in the darkness behind him, so soft as to be barely audible.

  Keeping his breathing even, Harris pretended to be asleep still. He knew precisely where in the room the intruder was, he could sense the man’s movements. The man from the airport in New York. Harris knew it as surely as he knew anything.

  Reaching silently for his gun, he wrapped his hand around the butt and pressed his finger above the trigger guard. The man was moving in the darkness, coming around the couch, heading for Fiona’s room.

  Rising from his seat, Harris swept his arm around and pressed the barrel of the gun to the back of the intruder’s head.

  “Stop. Right. There.”

  There was a soft chuckle in the darkness. “Okay,” a Texas accent drawled. “You got me.”

  “Move,” Harris said, pushing the man toward the light switch. When they were close enough, he reached it out and flicked it on. Even from the back, Harris could tell that the man he now held at gun point was slightly larger and older than he. A little taller, a little broader, but not quite good enough to pull one over on Harris.

  “Turn around.”

  The man didn’t need to be told to keep his hands up. He turned slowly, a slight, almost guilty smirk on his face.

  Standing not three feet apart, they sized one another up. The intruder was about 6’5, Harris estimated with about 220 pounds of muscle on his frame. He had the corn straw blond hair and blue eyes of someone from the southern states, and the clean cut facial features of either a rancher or a model. Real All-American sort of man, that’s who he was looking at.

  “Wait…” Harris squinted. “I know you.”

  “You bet your boots you do,” the man drawled. “Not quite so green these days huh?”

  Harris searched his memory, racking his brain as to how he knew this man. An old school friend? No. Someone from home? No. Someone from the service? Maybe.

  Then he remembered. The sound of an air raid siren. Mortars crashing around an outpost. It had been the first day of Harris’s first tour and he’d been terrified by the noise and the carnage. He’d been through six months of training pre-deployment of course, but nothing had prepared him for the realities of war, the violence of the sound, the way the very earth shook with every explosion.

  It was the middle of the night when the Taliban came. He’d rolled out of bed and into his boots, no time fo
r pants. No time for anything besides helmet and gun. He’d grabbed both and made for the wall. The Taliban fighters sitting up on the hills had decided that they didn’t want to stay there anymore. They wanted to take the base out.

  It was a stupid, suicidal move on their part, but that was the Taliban all over. Those men didn’t think, didn’t judge, and didn’t care. There was no foe more fearsome than a bearded fighter rushing with Russian pistol drawn, nothing at all in the way of body armor, screaming at the top of his lungs, so close Harris could see the whites of his eyes and the color of his tonsils before he pulled the trigger.

  That night had been a baptism of fire and blood. It had been hell on earth. The Taliban had come in waves, leaping out of the darkness and emerging from rocks like evil djinns. All around were explosions and gun fire. With the advantages of better weaponry, training, and fortifications, Harris and his comrades had managed to hold them off. Almost all of them, anyway, until one tricky bastard came up under the barricade, sword in one hand, gun in the other.

  He popped up from behind the bags like a jihadi jack-in-the-box and knocked Harris on his ass. One moment there was nothing, the next the madman was over the wall, sword raised to deal a killing blow. Harris knew what was about to happen, but there was nothing he could do to stop it. He’d lost his gun, the man with grimy sandal clad feet had him pinned, and there were about 0.2 seconds between him and eternity.

  One gunshot amid a hundred rang out more clearly than the rest. The Taliban soldier fell backward, dead, and Harris was grabbed up off the ground. He looked into blue eyes, golden hair semi-long and bushy in a beard.

  “You’re good.” The man slapped Harris’s gun back into his hand and pushed him back toward the wall to keep fighting.

  By the time the battle was over, Harris wasn’t good for anything but dropping into his cot, exhausted. The next morning, his guardian angel had shipped out to another post, but Harris had never forgotten that face and even seeing it clean-shaven, he recognized those eyes. This was someone he owed his life to. This was one of the good guys.