Under His Watch (2 page)

“You, Charity, can forget about me not doing this,” he said, still in that infuriatingly calm voice. She wondered suddenly whether she would ever be able to get him to lose his temper, and to her astonishment she found that even here and now, clearly unable to avoid getting a spanking from him in his calm state, she wanted to try to make him angry.
Stupid, stupid, stupid!
shouted a part of her mind, while another said,
If he thinks he can make me obey him, he hasn’t seen disobedience yet.

Chapter Two

Feeling a little exasperated, but much more at ease than he had been just ten minutes before when he had thought it possible that Charity Phillips had gotten herself killed, Ryan reached around again with his right hand and succeeded in unfastening the button of her skinny jeans. She kicked harder at that, but being a little drunk and already in the highly disadvantageous position over the sofa arm, it was not difficult to get her jeans down to the tops of her thighs, exposing the part of her in need of correction. Ryan noted with a little less detachment than he liked that she was wearing the kind of high-cut gray briefs that tended to drive him to distraction.

Angry at himself that he had let a single thought about the cuteness of Charity’s backside creep in when he had a spanking to give, he put his hand inside the elastic of the waistband and pulled her panties down, now expending conscious effort to ignore the creamy softness of her skin and the adorable roundness of her bottom-cheeks.

“What the
fuck
do you think you’re doing, Ryan?!” Charity screamed. “You do
not
take down your boss’ panties! You are
fired!
”

“Well, that’s fine,” Ryan said, easily mastering his annoyance and really now, in his relief at not having allowed her to come to harm, both rather amused and highly satisfied that he had the opportunity to deliver this lesson before he departed. “Because I resign, thanks. It’s not possible to keep someone safe when she’s determined to put herself in danger. I’m hoping that this spanking will save your life someday, when you don’t have me around.”

She stopped kicking then, as if she were considering his words. Ryan said, “It’s clear to me, Charity, that you grew up without real discipline in your life. Like I said before, that doesn’t have to mean spanking—but it does mean knowing when someone has your best interests at heart, and sets boundaries for you based on his understanding of those interests, which is better than yours. Now that you’re an adult—in your years at least—my own beliefs make it clear to me that you need drastic action if you’re going to get your life in order—and be alive to keep it in order.”

Then he started to spank her hard, but certainly not as hard as he could spank a girl, or had spanked girls in the past who needed it.

Charity yelped, but—perhaps again because she was a little drunk—stayed still at the beginning. By the tenth swat or so, all delivered right in the middle because Ryan’s hand was big and Charity’s bottom was small, she had begun to move her knees frantically to soothe some of the sting. Ryan had to hold her right arm behind her back as she cried out louder and louder, because she had flung it behind her to ward off the steadily spanking hand. Her little bottom had become a bright shade of pink, and Ryan decided she was nearly done.

He made the decision based on what he sometimes mentally called his ‘spanking career,’ which consisted of three previous young women who had needed discipline. One of them had been his girlfriend, before he had left for the Middle East and she had broken up with him. The other two girls had gotten their spankings through disobeying him the same way Charity had, when he had been responsible for their safety. The difference in their cases was that Ryan had been explicit with them beforehand, telling them clearly that he would spank them if they went against his recommendations—well, orders, really.

One of those girls, Melissa, had fired him right after he spanked her, having thought—it turned out—that Ryan was joking about the spanking. The other girl, Joanne, had never disobeyed his orders again.

And then there was Laura, his two-year live-in girlfriend. With her, Ryan had really learned what it meant to use spanking—and, in Laura’s case, belt-whipping… and eventually, even more advanced forms of discipline and training—to help a girl get her life in order and grow as a person, just as Ryan himself felt he had grown greatly through administering that kind of discipline. He had gone into that relationship with Laura a callow—if physically very developed—Navy SEAL who had just made it through some of the most grueling training on earth. He had come out of it a man who knew who he was, not just as a warrior but as a
man
—domestically and erotically.

“Charity?” he said. “Answer me, please.”

“What?” Her voice was more a sob than anything else. He could tell she was trying to muster anger, but failing. She might even be feeling remorse.

“I want to make sure you understand why I’m spanking you.” He gave her three hard swats.

“Ow! Oh, Ryan, please! You made your point!” The little-girlish quality of her voice suddenly made Ryan long for Laura more than he had in months and months. He wondered if his heart was as safe as he had thought.

Ryan gave her another hard swat. “And what was my point, Charity?”

“Ow! It was stupid to sneak out. But I’m alive, right?”

He spanked her again, angrily. “Through no fault of your own, that’s for sure.” Ryan sighed inwardly. He had done what he could, and he would be out of there in the morning. “Alright,” he said. “You can get up and pull up your jeans.”

She did, refusing of course to look at him as she did so, turning away toward the window with the view of the park, its streetlamps shining through the darkness of the deep early morning.

“Time for bed,” Ryan said. “But first I’m going to give you a hug, okay?”

“What?” Charity said, turning around to look at him with a puckered brow. “Spank me and then hug me?”

“Charity,” he replied as patiently as he could, “what I just did, I did for your own good. I’m going to hug you now so that even if you don’t completely get that, at least on some level you’ll understand how much I care about you.”

“Okay,” said Charity, grudgingly and clearly wanting to get this part over with as much as she had wanted to get the punishment itself finished. Then, however, when she came into his arms, she hugged him back tightly. “I’m sorry, Ryan,” she finally said, to his mild surprise.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” he replied.

When she had got into her nightshirt and climbed into bed, he knocked on her half-open door and went in to say goodnight to her. In her eyes he saw that though she was still angry at him for spanking her, another part of her had responded positively to the discipline.

“I’ll clear out my stuff in the morning,” he said.

“Okay,” Charity said. Was that a little uncertainty he heard in her voice? “Don’t go until I’m up, okay? I mean, don’t… I… Don’t clear out your stuff until we talk?”

Ryan felt his brow furrow. “Okay,” he said. “Good night, Charity.”

“Good night, Ryan. Thank you… for, um, caring about me.”

“You’re welcome. See you in the morning.”

Back in his own room, Ryan wondered what had just happened between them. He remembered the first time he had spanked Laura—the first time he had spanked anyone. She had burned the breakfast pancakes, and he had jokingly suggested—well, half-jokingly, he supposed now, with a chuckle—that she had earned a spanking.

“You wouldn’t,” Laura had said, standing by the stove. But Ryan knew somehow that what she meant was, “Please.” He turned off the stove and told her to move a kitchen chair into the living room. His heart raced and his cock grew hard as iron in his jeans at the thought that he was about to spank his gorgeous girlfriend. Her eyes downcast, Laura obeyed, her dark brown, wavy hair bouncing slightly on the shoulders of her fuzzy blue pajamas as she moved to get the chair.

When she had reached the chair and had her hands upon its high wooden back, she turned to look at him over her shoulder, where he still stood by the stove. “Will you spank me hard?” she asked. “They were only pancakes.”

“Should I spank you hard?” Ryan asked, managing to his surprise to sound as stern as he wanted to sound.

Laura bit her lip. “Yes?” she said uncertainly.

“Yes,” Ryan replied. “You need to learn your lesson, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” Laura said, her eyes wide. She picked up the chair and brought it into the living room.

It had been a sex thing for them from the very beginning. By the end of that first spanking, Laura, who had begun it with her pajama bottoms at mid-thigh, was completely naked—on Ryan’s orders, of course—and he had her lying over the chair with her bottom well-presented so that he could spank it, her thighs, and even her pussy, at his complete convenience.

Laura moaned and writhed, and when Ryan finally dropped his jeans and told her to suck his cock, she responded eagerly, whimpering submissively around his manhood as if to tell him that she had learned her lesson and would never burn breakfast again. Then he put her over the kitchen table and fucked her from behind so hard that the wood splintered, making a sort of secret sign all the way across its width that they would look at and smile to one another over almost every day for the two years they were together.

Laura told him that he was a dominant, and Ryan couldn’t deny that he liked to think of himself that way. Certainly his sex with Laura was the best sex he’d had in his life, and disciplining her, whether erotically, or the few times he’d actually felt the need to correct her behavior, like when she’d gotten a speeding ticket, felt to him like peak experience—in some ways even more like peak experience than his missions in the field in the Middle East.

The few girls he’d been with since returning from active duty and taking up his new life as a bodyguard did seem to like to be dominated to a certain extent. But it wasn’t like Laura, who
needed
him to discipline her and dominate her. He thought again about the little-girl voice in which Charity had replied to him when he had asked her to tell him why he was spanking her. If he weren’t resigning in the morning…

Charity Phillips could definitely use a great deal more discipline than a single spanking. Since arriving in her elegant trust-fund-baby apartment the previous week, Ryan had seen just about all he could take of the disorganized way she ran everything in her life, except for her work at FPCH. The refrigerator had nothing in it but Pellegrino, and the freezer was semi-full of frozen pizza, which she didn’t even eat because she ordered takeout every night. The containers sat around the kitchen until Ryan threw them out. Charity’s clothes—her very expensive clothes—tended to lie on the furniture between wearings, despite the very extensive closet space in her room. Ryan supposed it could have been worse—at least she didn’t throw her silk blouses onto the floor.

She did, however, throw her towels there.

Ryan had to hand it to her, though, that despite the massive confusion of her domestic life, Charity had managed to make a vibrant career for herself at the Foundation for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage. He had spent eight years on tours of various parts of the Middle East, and hadn’t really given a second thought to the crumbling structures of the ancient world that he would glimpse from afar and sometimes see up close, as a place from which to launch an assault. One conversation with an impassioned Charity, on his second night as her bodyguard, had changed that: her enthusiasm for her work had an undeniably infectious quality.

“
Twenty-five hundred years,
Ryan. Think about that. That temple is
twenty-five hundred years
old. Even if you think that stuff isn’t good just because it’s old, what does it say about us—what does it say to our children, and to the future—if we just let a mining company destroy it before archeologists can get in there and catalogue it.”

“So…”

But Charity hadn’t let him get a word in edgewise. “Fine—dismantle it, put it somewhere else. But not until it’s been
studied,
right? Not until you can do it the right way! Who the fuck does Cliff Hodges think he is?”

Then she had fallen silent for a moment, clearly thinking about the death threat.

“Don’t worry,” Ryan said. “I’ll make sure that you can stay safe doing your job.”

Charity looked at him with eyes full of evangelism. “Do you see why it’s important? I can’t get my parents to see it. All they care about is status.”

“I do see,” Ryan said.

Chapter Three

In the morning, Charity emerged from her bedroom to find Ryan making eggs and bacon.

“Least I could do,” he said.

“You never cooked for me before,” Charity mumbled. “Where did the food come from?”

Ryan chuckled. “I went down to the bodega before you woke up. I got you some other things, too. Try not to let them rot, okay?”

“Ryan,” she blurted out. “I want you to stay.”

“Because I’m making you breakfast, or because I spanked you?” He looked at her quizzically, and she couldn’t tell whether he was seriously considering staying or not.

Charity felt her face get hot. “Neither,” she said. “I mean, well, maybe a little because you spanked me.” Now she knew she was definitely blushing very visibly. She hadn’t meant to say
that
. And it wasn’t,
really,
because he had spanked her. Dammit, it had all been so clear in her mind when she woke up.

“Oh,” Ryan said unhelpfully.

“But you have to promise never to spank me again.”

Ryan laughed. “
That’s
not going to happen.”

“What? But I’ll do everything you say!”

“Didn’t you just say that part of the reason you want me to stay is because I spanked you?”

“No! I mean… yes, but I didn’t mean it, um,
that
way. I meant… Dammit, Ryan, I’m your boss, right?”