Assigned a Guardian (9 page)

“Kayla,” Patrick said, “look at me, please.” Kayla obeyed, giving him the same wild-eyed stare again. “I requested the duty, when I heard what had happened. From what I’ve learned about how things work on Draco, I think I will be the best possible guardian for you.”

“And I agree,” Marjorie said. “So do as Patrick said, and uncover your breasts and your diaper area, please.”

“Diaper area?!”

“The program I’ve chosen, with Marjorie’s help,” Patrick said, “is going to involve treating you as a little girl until you learn to behave as a grown-up here on Draco. If you want to have any hope of getting out of diapers anytime soon, you’ll obey me right now. Little girls don’t have secrets from their guardians. You’re going to get used to showing me your body, as a sign of your understanding of how things will work in your life from now on.”

“No!” Kayla said. “No! No! No!”

“Patrick,” Marjorie said, “would you like me to have Sandra help?”

“No, that’s alright. Could you leave me alone with my little girl, please?”

“Certainly. I look forward to your first report.” She departed, followed by the silent Sandra, and then it was only Kayla and Patrick in the big training room. She still had her right hand across her chest and her left over the joining of her thighs, covering her pussy with the thatch of golden curls Patrick had gotten a cock-stiffening glimpse of when Kayla had lain down on the bench.

“Kayla, you’re going to have to learn to obey.”

“No. Why should I? Send me to the fucking work camp.” Tears shone brightly in her eyes.

“I’m going to hug you now.”

“Don’t you dare.”

Patrick stepped forward, closed the distance in three strides. Kayla didn’t move. He took her in his arms and just held her, for a long, long time. He had a feeling—a very strong feeling—about what would happen, and finally he turned out to be right: she took her hands from where they were covering her private places, wrapped her arms around him convulsively, and just sobbed.

Patrick rubbed her back gently and steadily with his right hand, merely letting her cry it out—the pain and the shame and the grief. The only other time he had
ever
seen her cry had been when Joe spanked her. She had not cried at her father’s funeral.

“Oh, God, Patrick,” she finally said. “Please don’t make me. Please just have them send me to the work camp. I
can’t
.”

“You can,” he said. “I know it seems weird, but I think you’re going to have to trust me. At the moment you don’t have any choice. Your guardian is the only one who can start the process for sending you somewhere else, unless the governor finds him negligent. And I promise I won’t be negligent.”

“But
diapers?
” Kayla wailed.

“Well, if you’re good for me, maybe I won’t have to put you in diapers.”

“Really?” Her voice sounded so eager to please that Patrick felt sure he was on the right track.

“Really. But what’s going to happen now—and it’s going to continue, so you’d better get used to it—is that you’re going to uncover yourself when I tell you to.”

“But
why?
”

“Because I’m your guardian, and you’re my little girl.”

“I’m
not
a little girl, you asshole!” she screamed.

“Yes, you are. The biggest part of the problem here is that you can’t admit it—but you will, and I don’t care how long it takes. For right now, we’re not going anywhere until you stand in front of me and show me your little breasts and your little pussy. You’ll sleep in a diaper tonight, and nothing else, if you don’t obey me now—I’ll restrain you, too, if I have to.”

Despite the lingering strangeness of having this kind of conversation with Kayla, Patrick also felt pleasant surprise at how naturally this way of speaking to her seemed to come to him. When he had asked Marjorie if he could take over guardianship of Kayla, he had been worried that he might not be able to muster the necessary sense of authority. He had also been very curious about whether Marjorie was right about what Kayla needed—and about Patrick himself.

“Let me be frank, Patrick,” Marjorie had said that morning, when she had consented to the request and told him she had been hoping he might make it. “You’re an alpha. It would make me incredibly happy if you and Kayla got married, but I know things don’t always work out the way they should, even here on Draco—perhaps there’s just too much history there, and whatever Kayla thinks of the Basic Law, and of Joe, right now, arranged marriage isn’t part of the deal. But whatever happens on a romantic or an erotic level, you’re well equipped to do the job I want you to do, according to your psychological profile. Kayla is a 1A. That means she has a lot of submissive erotic feeling that needs to be unleashed. She just can’t admit it—she needs a dominant man to take charge.”

An alpha. The terminology wasn’t foreign to him, and he had long known his talent for taking control of any situation that needed personal guidance, but he’d always discounted the idea that being some sort of wolf-pack dominant had any applicability to life in the space age. What Marjorie said, though, made sense to Patrick. To tell Kayla what to do, even when the command was calculated to humiliate her and to make her feel like a little girl, going back into diapers because she had forfeited her right to wear big-girl panties, seemed strangely natural to him. Also, arousing. But he had no trouble ignoring the hardness of his cock and taking care of Kayla on the emotional level she needed; that seemed to go with the territory.

She no longer clung to him as tightly as she had a moment before, and he released her from his arms and stepped back. He looked into her eyes, and watched her hands move convulsively, drifting toward their former positions, trying to cover herself up. Using only his eyes, he told her that she needed to obey him, and, at last she did: her face puckered with shame, but she slowly lowered her hands to her sides, letting him take his fill of the pretty sight of a naked Kayla.

So lovely: the perfect little breasts that he could never help noticing in her elegant dresses and cashmere sweaters in the office in Seattle, now bare to his inspecting gaze; the slim hips and the trim thighs; and the golden curls that didn’t quite obscure the tiny cleft of her pussy.

“Okay?” she asked.

“Call me sir, please.”

Kayla gave a little whimper of frustration. “Okay, sir?” It felt like an important test: to call the man who had once been her colleague ‘sir.’

There would be many more tests to come. “Kayla, I want to tell you that even though I’m not going to put you in a diaper tonight, when we get home I’ll be waxing you between your legs.”

A sob now, rather than a whimper, and Kayla’s hands both moved toward her pussy.

“Don’t cover up, Kayla,” Patrick said softly. “That’s the point. No cover at all: no grown-up hair there.”

“But
why?
It’s so humiliating!”

“Yes,” Patrick said. “Nothing else seems to have worked, and so humiliation is what I’ve decided you need.”

“
You?
Or
Marjorie?
” Kayla said the name of the senior matron as if she were spitting out a bit of rotten apple.

“
I
decided it. Marjorie has a great deal of experience in this area, but she made several different suggestions, and I chose this program.”

Kayla liked that thought even less, apparently. She made her mouth into a tight line, showing, Patrick thought, that it was worse to know that Patrick thought this kind of humiliation was especially well suited to changing her behavior.

“I won’t let you,” Kayla said.

“You don’t have a choice,” Patrick replied. “If I have to restrain you to wax you down there, I will. That will just make it more painful and humiliating, won’t it?”

“Oh, God,” Kayla whispered. She seemed to shrink away a little, and Patrick stepped forward and put his arms around her again. This time she yielded to the embrace and held him immediately.

“Trust me,” Patrick said. “I’m really sure that you’ll see things very differently soon.”

Kayla nodded against his chest. “Can we go?” she asked. “Sir?”

“Yes, little Kayla, we can.”

She made a sound in her throat, a protest that died as soon as it was born, at him calling her ‘little Kayla.’ Then she nodded, and let him lead her from the training room, down the hall to the locker room. She walked very stiffly, and Patrick could tell how much her bottom pained her. Joe had treated her with the utmost severity. Patrick hoped he wouldn’t be called upon to give that kind of punishment, but to keep Kayla safe he knew he might need to.

Perhaps he just needed time to work through his reaction to watching the discipline session. The heart-rending screams from the two girls had produced such contradictory effects in him that he could hardly say whether he might be capable of doing the same. The control Joe and Bill had exercised even as they were thrashing their young charges—he supposed he could do that. Really, he worried that he might be too lenient, if Joe and Bill were the standard by which he might be judged.

For now, he just wanted to help Kayla get past the beginning.

Chapter Nine

Patrick’s prefab house was in Zone 3, identical to the houses around it. It was Kayla’s first time outside the center of Draco City since she had arrived, a month before. After the women of the
Jupiter
had landed in the orbital shuttle way out in Zone 4, a big electric bus had brought them into Zone 1. She had been so traumatized by the first events of her arrival—the paddling from Marjorie Leary aboard the
Jupiter,
above all—that when she got planet-side, although she had looked out the window of the bus that took the new female Draconians from the landing strip into town, and had deposited them at the administration building, she now could not remember a single thing she had seen on the other side of the dust-scratched Plexiglass. The sight of a landscape with trees and no other obvious form of vegetation seemed at once alien and familiar. The trees were oaks and maples, and maybe beeches and acacia (Kayla was no botanist). There were also smaller fruit trees mixed in as well, but without the context of other greenery—grasses, bushes, weeds. The whole bioscape seemed to tell Kayla that she was eighteen light-years from home.

The houses were well spaced from one another and also well spaced from the trees, because as the terraforming effort moved into a phase in which the colonists would attempt to create weather, the possibility of high winds made it prudent to leave a healthy distance around the houses. That measure also aided in the gathering of solar energy from the panels that adorned every roof.

The house was not fancy, but it was also not small.

“Two things there is no shortage of here,” Patrick said, as he led Kayla inside, “are wood-composite and space to build. So everyone in 3 and 4 gets a mansion, even though the walls aren’t painted and the luxury appliances will be a while in coming.” It was a mansion on a single floor of course, like the largest ranch house Kayla had ever seen. It was much easier to assemble from the prefabricated sections of wood-composite that way.

“So every
man
gets a mansion?” Kayla asked as Patrick led her from the front hall toward the bedrooms. She did not really try to keep the bitterness out of her voice.

“Every man who lives in the outer zones,” Patrick answered, apparently having decided not to notice Kayla’s tone. “Zones 1 and 2 are more crowded, and the guys there live in apartments in low-rise prefab buildings. We drove past a bunch of them on our way here.” Apparently everyone in Zones 3 and 4 also got one of the little electric cars in which Patrick had driven Kayla home.

Patrick opened a door. “This is your room,” he said.

Kayla peered inside. The room seemed normal, until she noticed that a big teddy bear sat on the corner of her single bed. “Oh, no,” she said. “No stuffed animals.”

“Not optional, Kayla,” Patrick said evenly. “He’s there to remind you that you’re my little girl. When you get punished, he will comfort you, maybe.”

“I’m not going to get punished,” Kayla said, feeling acutely how petulant she sounded.

“That’s good to hear,” Patrick replied, smiling. “The bathroom is just down the hall. You’ll find a pair of scissors on the counter. I’d like you to grab a towel, sit on it on your bed, and cut your pubic hair down as short as you can. Then I’d like you to run the water for a hot bath. That should soothe some of the sting from your strapping, too. Come get me in my office when you start the water running. I’ll be supervising your bath.”

“You’ll what?”

“I’ll supervise your bath, and help you wash if I have to. I need to make sure that you stay clean.”

He said it with such a completely straight face that Kayla wondered for an instant whether Patrick had lost his mind. But just as quickly she realized that he couldn’t mean it seriously; it was, once again, all about the humiliation.

Patrick gave her a quick hug and said, “Little Kayla, I’m glad you’re here.” When Kayla didn’t respond, he said, “I know you’re not very glad to be here, but I hope before too long you’ll feel different.”

“No,” Kayla said. “I mean… No, sir. I know you want to help me. I’m ready to admit that it’s probably better than the work camp.”

“Probably better.” Patrick chuckled. “Well, that’s a start, I guess. I’ll see you in a little bit.” He walked off in the direction they had come, toward the living room, which his office must adjoin, leaving Kayla to begin her shameful task. She sighed and walked down the hall to find the bathroom, poking her head into Patrick’s master bedroom along the way, and having a strange lightheaded feeling when she saw his king-size bed.
For when he’s married, of course
. Why did that make her feel a little, well, jealous?

She found the scissors, of the standard hair-cutting kind, and got a towel. It was the same rayon fiber as everything else on Draco, but Patrick’s towels at least were fluffy, unlike the standard issue gym towels in the women’s dorm. Kayla stood for a moment, holding the towel against her face. Its softness pleased her, and suddenly, to her dismay, she wanted to hold the teddy bear on her bed. She hadn’t had a single stuffed animal since Draco the dragon. Her father didn’t bring them, and her nannies weren’t that kind of nanny. She realized she was blinking back tears.