Being Their Baby (16 page)

His eyes widened. “Oh, my God! Soph! What happened, babe?” He immediately reached out and cupped her face with his hands. “Did you get hit by something?” Then he looked at Charlie and narrowed his eyes with accusation.

“Don’t give me that look! Have I
ever
rough-handled a lady?”

Josh ignored him. “You okay, bunny? What happened?”

“Long story,” she sighed wearily. “I’m okay. Really.” When Josh looked disbelieving about that, she added firmly, “
Really
.”

Josh gave a huff, walked back into the kitchen, and came back out with a bag of frozen peas wrapped in a dishtowel. He dropped the bag into Charlie’s hand. “Keep her head elevated to reduce swelling, apply that for fifteen to twenty minutes, take a rest for a half hour, then repeat and repeat and repeat. Give her some ibuprofen.
Not aspirin
. Ibuprofen.”

“Okay. Aspirin. Got it,” Charlie said, giving him a thumbs-up.

Josh looked at him with annoyance until Charlie put up his hands. “I was just kidding. I’m not dumb. I’ve had bruises before. Now get going.”

Josh leaned down and kissed her forehead. “Love ya, babe,” he told her, squeezing her shoulder affectionately. She smiled, getting chills at how easily he released that sentiment. She tried to make eye contact, but he was already talking over her head to Charlie. “If you need anything, call my cell.” He walked past them to the coat closet, then spun around as he tried to stab his arms through the sleeves. “And don’t do anything that
I
should be doing.” He pointed his finger at Charlie and pretended to shoot it like a gun, and then he quickly took off through the front door.

“What was that about?” she asked, turning her head up to Charlie.

“Nothing,” Charlie replied, leading her toward the stairs. “Although it should make you feel better to know that
everyone
has crazy relatives.”

* * *

Sophie woke up from a nightmare; one where she couldn’t seem to escape her real family. Roy seemed to be in every corner in an otherwise empty city, leering at her. There was no escape, no defense, and like in all dreams, she couldn’t seem to scream for help or make any noise at all. But then again, there had been nobody to scream for in the dream.

Her face was numb, and it took her a moment to reason out why. She blinked through the darkness until she could see a bag of frozen corn on her pillow. Charlie had been switching the ice-packs around, trying to keep as much ice on her face as possible to keep the swelling down. At the moment, the numbing from the ice hurt worse than the swelling.

She felt lonely. When she’d gone to sleep, Charlie had been there. In fact, she had fallen asleep snuggled up to him. It seemed that he tried to replace himself with an extra blanket and her old teddy bear.

She sat, the nightmare still reeling, her face numb, her bottom tender, her tooth throbbing, and realized she wasn’t going to get back to sleep. She turned on the light, reached for her remote, and the TV in front of her turned up blue, asking for a parental control keycode.

A keycode?

The television hadn’t asked for that in the two weeks she’d been there, and she’d constantly slept with the television on! Did Charlie do something to mess up her television? Because she had watched some with him earlier on this same device!

She frowned at it, then punched random keys in. That didn’t work, so she messed with the TV settings. A message came on that read, ‘Set to OFF from 10:00 pm to 6:00 am. OVERRIDE YES/NO?’

She grinned and moved the cursor over to ‘yes.’ It went blank for a moment, then black, and then the keycode was requested again. ‘Please type in keycode to verify options change.’

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” she groaned, falling forward until her forehead hit the mattress. She looked at the clock by her bed and saw that it was only two in the morning.

She considered this; her bottom, which was still warm to the touch, warned her not to do anything against the rules. However, as far as she knew, this wasn’t a rule. Apparently, it was for somebody because the cable was child-controlled, and she feared that she was the “child” in this scenario.

Or maybe it was only blocked in her room?

She grabbed her bag of mostly-thawed corn and decided to investigate, quietly walking down the hall and down the stairs. Both Liz and Charlie slept downstairs, though in different master bedrooms. There were only three rooms upstairs, but the other two were always locked.

It felt odd being in the house this time of night. Although everybody certainly had very obscure work schedules, it did seem like there was always someone milling about downstairs. She looked through the back door that led out to Josh’s pool house and saw that the lights were off over there, too. Normally there was at least a little bit of light on if he was home.

She walked to the giant TV and turned it on. It actually showed a good five seconds of cable before the blue screen appeared, asking for the keycode.

She swore under her breath, picked up the remote, and sat there. She wasn’t going to let this obstacle defeat her this easily—in a house of three people with busy schedules, they would probably only agree on an easy password for something like this.

Was it the zip code? She typed it in.

Nope.

The last five digits of their phone number? The first five digits?

Nope and nope.

She twisted her mouth and sat down on the sofa. “Aha!” she said, when she thought about what all three of them had in common—they liked spanking. They liked BDSM, too, but that was a four letter word. Age play was a seven letter word. So she typed in S-P-A-N-K.

Bingo. HBO popped up on the screen in all of its three o’clock glory. She had to choose between some depressing documentaries and a horror movie. Of course, she chose the horror movie, because real life was depressing enough, and most of the other channels seemed to be bogged down by infomercials about overpriced CDs with the golden oldies or earwax vacuums.

She pulled her legs up under her, hugged a pillow to her chest, and watched the endless bloody mayhem that no one other than paranormal figures with chainsaws could mete out on poor, unsuspecting college students who only wanted to run around naked and have their orgies at a mysterious lake.

The TV suddenly turned off. She stared at it, confused, wondering if she’d have to type in the keycode again. She reached for the remote and it was gone.

She looked up and noticed the bare-chested visage of Charlie, who looked tired and out-of-sorts, gripping the remote in his hand. “Bed,” he growled. “
Now
.”

“I can’t sleep,” she pouted, not hiding her misery. She was tired, but she couldn’t remember when she’d been less comfortable. “Can you turn it back on? I think it’s almost over…”

“You’re not going to sleep if you stay up watching movies all night, Sophia Lynn. Go back to bed, get under the covers, and close your eyes. I don’t know where you got the keycode, but I’m changing it.”

“But…” she repeated. “I can’t sleep.”

He leaned over, looking closely at her face. “Sweetheart, you look
exhausted
. Even if you can’t sleep, you need to just let your body rest.” He suddenly leaned forward, bent his shoulder, and hauled her over it like a hunted-and-killed animal he was carrying back to camp. “C’mon,” he said. “I’ll give you a lift and tuck you back in.”

“Maybe you can watch a movie
with me
?”

“Nice try, baby doll.”

She groaned and complained all the way upstairs, but Charlie still took her to bed and pulled down the covers before plopping her heavily down on the soft mattress. She squirmed, frustrated, but after he patted her tender bottom, covered by her pajamas, she settled and he pulled up the covers over her. “You’re
so
lucky you didn’t wake up Mommy,” he told her. “When woken up at night, she becomes an evil creature that eats the blood of the innocent.”

“I can watch TV up here,” she told him. “I know the password now.”

“You could, but I wouldn’t suggest it. I’m guessing that bottom’s still plenty pink as it is,” he warned, then leaned over to kiss her cheek, scraping his stubble against her skin and filling her senses with the scent of his aftershave. “Get some sleep.”

He brushed his thumb affectionately across her forehead and then turned off the light before leaving the room and closing the door behind him.

She shifted and nearly drifted off, only to get her senses shocked with the latest nightmare of her grandfather; this time, he had a chainsaw and she was running around naked like the girls in the horror movie trying to escape.

When she woke up, she pushed off the covers, walked downstairs, slowly opened the door to Charlie’s room, and then tiptoed in.

She thought about how silly it was for a grown woman to sneak into bed with a full-grown man for comfort. She thought about how she’d never had to do this before.

But then she remembered she’d never had her own room in her whole life, let alone an entire floor, and the TV had been on twenty-four hours a day in her old life. That old life was gone, as were her reservations.

She carefully got into bed with Charlie, then curled up into the fetal position, her arms wrapped around a nearby pillow, although she was seduced by the heat radiating from Charlie’s body enough that she inched her bottom closer to him.

One part of her feared him waking up, particularly if he took her sneaking into his bed not as well—or even
as
well
—as she had taken the sight of
him
on Liz’s other side yesterday morning. But there was another part of her that wanted him to wake up and wrap his warm arms around her.

She lost hope in him waking up at all when he began to gently snore, but she didn’t have time to feel relieved or disappointed by it. The low rumbling strummed her to sleep in less than a minute.

* * *

Charlie woke up when the bottoms of two ice-cold feet found his thigh. A flurry of emotions blew though him. At first he just wanted to push the cold, unknown object away from him because he was too tired to think of a better solution. When his eyes adjusted to the darkness, however, he saw that Sophie was nestled up close to him. The warmth of her round little tush, in fact, was only inches away from his hip.

The emotions flooded on. First, he was surprised, and then annoyed, and then unhappy, and then extremely pleased, and then guilty, and then pleased again, and then just plain aroused. One rule he’d made with all his other littles is that they were not allowed to sleep with Daddy. The only person he’d slept with through the night was Liz, and even then he didn’t do it all the time; Liz had a tendency to kick.

His brother was the same way; in fact, he didn’t like sleeping with Liz, either, or any other woman. He’d sleep on the couch before he slept with a woman he’d brought home for a romp in the sack.

But then again… Charlie had been left by all of his littles so far. It apparently didn’t matter that he was rich, successful, and had always been told by many women that he was a sexy man. It didn’t matter that he cared for and spoiled his littles with everything their hearts desired. He’d paid for
college
for the last three of them, even.

In the end, they’d left him. No apologies, no detailed explanations. They were just tired of him, tired of the way he lived and who he lived with, tired of the lifestyle, tired of his touches, tired of his care.

Apparently, there was something he wasn’t doing right. He’d known men who’d kept the same littles for thirty-plus
years
! And he wanted to keep this one: this time, he was going to keep his little for more than a couple of years. Sophie was going to be a permanent fixture in the Hobbes household, he’d decided; she just didn’t know it yet.

There wasn’t any reason why this should ever get screwed up. He, Josh, and Liz all liked her—a lot—and it was obvious that the feeling was mutual. The only person Charlie hadn’t been sure she liked was himself, but that had been cleared up since she started calling him Daddy. People didn’t say that word casually.

He grumbled deep in his throat, then turned around and pulled the girl into his arms, tucking her against his chest, spooning up to her and the heat radiating from her bottom.

His cock was certainly excited about the girl, wearing only thin pajamas Liz had bought for her that were white with little pink teacups on them, coming down to sneak into his bed. Charlie worried that he was going to faint from the sensation of all his blood currently swelling up his cock.

Sophie probably didn’t know about morning wood, he remembered. She was a barely legal virgin. Him pressing his hard rod up against her pert little bottom was so wrong…

Jesus, if any of his girls had to abide the no-sneaking-into-Daddy’s-bed rule, it should have been Sophie. She was too much of a temptation.

He kissed her shoulder and rubbed his fingers against her covered hip, hard. She squirmed sleepily from this, but didn’t seem to wake up.

He moved his hand forward, where it journeyed under her pajama shirt. He ran his fingers and his palms against her flat little tummy. He stretched his hand, thinking that if he had a finger-span another inch or two wider, his hand would be larger than the whole area. She was more doll-like than in looks alone; she was so sweetly petite.

His little finger found the band of her pants and slid under it. Then another finger, and another, followed suit until his hand flattened against her cotton-covered mound. The thin cloth of her panties didn’t do anything for holding in the moisture or the heat of her pussy.

Sophie, he realized suddenly, was now holding in her breath as he explored the dip created from the parting of her lips. He kissed her shoulder again, knowing she’d, indeed, woken up, then continued to stroke his index and middle finger against her damp panties. He dug deeper into the flimsy fabric, pressing against her clit.

She released her breath. He grinned, especially when she widened her thighs even more to accommodate his hand.