Under His Watch (12 page)

But Ryan said firmly, “Honey, you know this is absolutely what you need to do. Think about your parents’ feelings, if you didn’t, and something happened.”

“Nothing’s going to happen, though!”

“Yes, nothing’s going to happen,” Ryan said patiently. “But something might.”

She looked up into his eyes. It made no sense, but also the best kind of sense. She nodded and let him lead her onto the train.

Prudence and John Phillips picked them up at the station in Greenwich and took them out to dinner. Ryan, somewhat to Charity’s surprise and even a little to her dismay, had acceded to her declaration that she did not want to tell her parents that they had become a couple. Part of her felt a little thrill at the thought of him saying to her father, “I’ve taken Charity in hand, so you won’t have to worry about her anymore. Any time she puts a toe out of line these days, she gets a sound bare-bottom spanking.” The little thrill made her want to get her head examined, but it also made her want Ryan to tell her no, he was going to put their relationship on a stable conventional footing, and announce to her parents that they had started dating.

“I’ve got exciting news,” Charity started in, once the appetizers had arrived. Her dad had his scotch, and her mom had her Kir Royale. Each had already polished off a previous version. It seemed like a favorable opportunity. She glanced at Ryan, who looked back at her encouragingly and gave a tiny nod. He had a beer in front of him, which he had of course barely touched. Emboldened by her own Lillet, Charity continued. “I’m going to Handristan.”

“What?” Prudence spluttered. She looked at John as if to see whether perhaps she had mistaken what her ears had told her.

Charity looked at Ryan; he nodded again. She needed to put it out there. Her parents didn’t govern her life. Well, not enough to stop her now.

“Only for a few days. Mithras has agreed—”

“Hold on,” John said. “You’re
talking
to Mithras now?”

“Dad, if you would just let me—”

“That’s ridiculous. They sent—”

Prudence interrupted him. “You’re not going to Handristan, young lady.”

Charity looked at Ryan.
Are you happy now?
she tried to make her eyes say. He winked. She could tell he was trying to tell her to take it in stride, that her parents couldn’t get in her way now. But it was a message that didn’t make sense to her then. This was how her parents
always
were—and how they always would be, unless she did something right now—something drastic. She had to put a stop to it.

“Oh, my God, shut up shut up shut up!” she said. Neither the words she spoke nor the volume at which she spoke them were what she really had wanted, but the tone was exactly right, as far as she was concerned, and so she forged ahead, though out of the corner of her eye she saw that Ryan’s brow had clouded.

“You two. You two. Proud of me because I work for a foundation. Standish Mather’s foundation. Proud of me because I go to benefits and shmooze for money with your boarding school friends. Not proud of me because I’m saving the fucking
past
from all the fuckers in the fucking world who want to fuck it all to hell!” She burst into tears.

“Charity!” her father said.

“Oh, come on, dad. You say that shit all the time in the grill room with your fucking golfing buddies.”

“Charity Phillips,” her mother said. “I have had just about enough.”

“Have you? Well, so have I.” She stood up and left the restaurant.

* * *

“You went too far,” Ryan finally said when the door of Charity’s apartment had closed behind them, after refusing to talk to her at all on the cab ride to the station and the train ride home. He had simply put his arm around her and held her close. When she said, “I can still go, right?” Ryan just said, “Shh.” When she said, “They deserved it, right?” Ryan just said, “We’ll talk when we get home.”

He had taken her in his arms and hugged her fiercely, before he issued his judgment, but nevertheless she heard in his voice the note she had been dreading all the way home, even as she realized that a part of her longed for it and knew it was coming: Ryan was going to spank her.

“You’re going to spank me, aren’t you?” she whispered.

“Yes,” he said simply. “You need to get a grip on your relationship with your parents. You love them, and they love you: that’s perfectly clear to me. You have the greater responsibility here—in exchange for everything they’ve given you, you have to accept them for who they are, not who you wish they were.”

“Dammit,” she said, “why do they have to be that way, though? And why do you have to be so fucking right about everything?”

“I can’t answer either of those questions, honey, but I do know that it’s time for you to take off all your clothes and wait in your bedroom with your nose against the wall.”

“Not the belt, please?”

“No,” Ryan said, “not the belt. I think this punishment should be much more intimate than that. I want you to try to think about what it means to depend on someone, the way you have always been able to depend on your parents, even if their help didn’t always come in the form you wanted it.”

“But now I can depend on you?” Charity felt tears well up in her eyes as she snuggled her cheek into his chest, feeling his strong heart beating under his dress shirt.

“Yes. But my help might not always come in the form you want either.”

“Like now. But…”

“What, honey?”

“Thank you, sir. That’s all.” She tried to pull herself out of his embrace, but he didn’t let her go.

“You’re welcome, honey,” he said, and squeezed her a final time.

Then he kissed her, turned her around like a little girl, and swatted her bottom in her nice green dress to get her going toward the bedroom, the wall, and the spanking chair.

Chapter Fourteen

Ryan found Charity exactly as he had specified, her cute, naked bottom greeting his sight as soon as he entered her room. He sat in the wooden chair and said, “Come here, Charity.”

When she turned to come to him, he could see that she had been crying. Ryan opened his arms, she ran the few steps to him and, as he spread his legs, let him enfold her in his embrace. He held her tight, still sitting in the chair with Charity standing between his spread thighs, resting her chin on his left shoulder and holding him around his ribs. He loved the feel of her soft bare skin, both in the erotic thrill it gave him to have such a gorgeous young woman naked in his arms and in the way her vulnerability told him that she trusted him and depended on him.

“Spank me like this, Ryan,” she whispered. “Please, sir?”

Ryan felt his brow crease as he tried to figure out what she meant. Then, experimentally, he raised his hand and brought it down on her left cheek. Charity cried out, much more loudly than was warranted by the force of the blow, which, in that position, Ryan couldn’t make very hard.

“Like this, honey?” he whispered into her ear, where her face snuggled against his shirt, wetting it with her tears.

Wordlessly, Charity nodded, and Ryan started to spank her slowly and steadily. He had never spanked a girl in this position, but he quickly understood how effective it was to hold Charity and punish her at the same time. Charity sobbed and sobbed, but he could tell that they were cleansing tears that he helped her cry by disciplining her for the misstep with her parents.

It went on for a very long time; Ryan held her around her waist with his left hand and swatted her backside with his right, perhaps once every two or three seconds. Sometimes he just used that right hand to stroke her hair. By the end of her punishment, when he just held her close and whispered, “Shh… shh,” he realized that if he hadn’t been in love with her before—though he suspected he probably had—he definitely was in love with her now.

Then she said, “I love you, Ryan.”

And he said, “I love you, too, honey.”

Then, to his astonishment, she murmured in a very different tone, “May I please suck your beautiful cock, sir? I’m so wet… and I want, you know, that privilege so much right now.” She tried to escape his embrace and kneel down, but he held her tightly and forbid it.

He grew instantly erect at the thought: the contrast between his nice clothes and her nakedness, combined with her sudden eagerness to pleasure him, seemed to take a good portion of his wits away. But he managed to control himself and said, “You may suck my cock after you call your parents and apologize.”

She made a sound of protest in her throat, and said in a tone that came close to a whine, “But I thought sex and rules were different.”

“Exactly,” he said. “We can think about you earning the privilege
after
you take care of the rules issue.”

“But I’m so
wet,
Ryan. You made me want to please your cock with that fantastic spanking. And I don’t want to call my parents.”

Ryan sighed. “Honey, I can put you on the bed and whip you with my belt if I have to. Do you need that?”

“No,” Charity whispered, but she didn’t seem convinced.

“Then go call your parents.”

“No,” she said, and this time she spoke much more firmly.

“Charity, get your butt over two pillows, on the bed, right now.”

“No!” she said, and tried to turn in his arms and run away.

Ryan felt an emotion that seemed akin to anger, but it didn’t feel hot. He wasn’t sure he had ever felt it before. Laura had always accepted her punishments gracefully. This emotion seemed cold, but also very heavy with meaning: it told him his duty—to discipline the girl he loved. The closest thing he could find in his experience was the feeling he had gotten in the few combat situations he’d been in—he knew his objective, or, if the situation had gone south, he knew what he had to do either to put it back on the rails or to get out of there. Now, things had taken a different turn than he thought they would, but he knew what he had to do, and he was determined to do it.

Part of it, he realized, was the same dissonance he had felt when she had resisted him on the sofa, four days ago, when he raised the apron and forced his hand between her thighs, and also when she had told him to keep his arm around her. Charity needed her space, but she also needed him to help her define that space. When she resisted him, and when she tried to top from the bottom,
he
had the responsibility to determine where to put the boundaries, and to make sure, through honest communication, that the boundaries he placed helped her feel like she could live, and love, in a way that made her happy.

Right now that meant placing a very hard boundary indeed. He picked Charity up, as she began to kick and scream, and brought her the two steps to the bed. He laid her down there, still writhing in his arms, trying to get away. He held her down with his right arm while with his left he grabbed two pillows, which he then deftly inserted under her hips.

Her body relaxed at that point, and he said, “Honey, can you hold still while I take off my belt?”

“No!” she shouted and started to kick against him again.

Ryan, in response started to spank her with his hand, very hard, and very fast.

“Ow!” Charity shrieked. “Ow! Ryan!”

“Can. You. Hold. Still?” He swatted her four more times.

“Ow! Yes… yes, sir…” Then she seemed to realize the trouble she had gotten herself into. “Oh, God. Sir, please… not the belt now. I can’t bear it.”

“You should probably have thought about that before.”

“I’ll call my parents! Right now! I’m so sorry!” She was crying in fear now, clearly thinking about how much the belt was going to hurt on her already sore bottom.

“Not as sorry as you’re going to be, honey,” Ryan said grimly, releasing her experimentally. When Charity didn’t move, but only lay there weeping, he quickly took off his belt.

“I’m so sorry, sir,” she said softly. She spoke into her hands, in which she now hid her face. “Please… please, not too hard?”

Love for her expanded like a bubble in his chest, and he almost repented of the severity he had intended, but he knew he had to teach her as stern a lesson as he could. “It has to be hard, honey,” he said. “You need this punishment.”

He lifted his arm high and brought the belt down. Charity yelped. A red curl appeared almost instantly on her right bottom-cheek.

Then he began to whip her in earnest: he lifted his hand nearly to the ceiling and brought it down fast with the doubled belt inside it, and he gave her lashes at the pace of the pulse in his rushing blood. Soon, Charity was screaming and trying to move her bottom out of the way, but Ryan put his left hand on her hip and kept whipping her hard, until her whole backside, from waist to knees, was a mess of the red curls.

Then he put the belt down, lay down on the bed next to his girl, and made her turn her face to his so that he could kiss her tenderly as he drew her very close to him. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Oh, God, sir—I needed that so much. I love you so much.”

Ryan just held her as close to him as he could, kissing her hair as her head rested against his chest.

“Can you bring me my phone, sir?” she finally asked. “I’m not sure I can move easily, and I think it will help if I’m like this when I apologize.” She giggled very softly.

“Sure, honey,” he said, smiling broadly.

* * *

Charity’s healing conversation with her parents went on for an hour, and after that she was exhausted, so Ryan put her to bed with a glass of water, and sat up for a while, going over the details of the journey, which would begin with a limo ride to the airport the next afternoon. When he finally lay down next to Charity, it was past two a.m.

Thus, when Charity woke him with her mouth on his cock at around eight, it took a few minutes to rise through a wonderful dream of an angel saying, “Ryan Bedford, you have come to the garden of earthly delights,” to find that his own angel had decided to turn the bed into that garden. When he finally did understand what she was doing, he gazed down his body to find that she was looking at him as she bobbed her head up and down on his hardness.