Assigned a Guardian (19 page)

“What?” Patrick asked.

“What does Draco smell like, to you?”

“Like the desert, I guess.”

“No,” Kayla said. “I mean, yes, okay, but not tonight. Tonight it smells like the beach. Tell me we’re going to some tropical resort where I can have a piña colada. I’ll just imagine it, and it will be true, because things just happen magically when you’re around.” She had had enough of Draconian red (wine currently came in Draconian red and Draconian white) at the reception that she almost believed it.

“Well…” Patrick said, slowing the car to Kayla’s surprise. “I can’t do the piña colada, but come and see.”

He got out of the car and walked around to her side. He opened her door and helped her out. Kayla felt her brow furrow. Where were they? It looked like the front of one of the hydroponics farms.

“A
farm,
Patrick? Seriously?” Why did she feel the need to brat? The wine probably had something to do with it, but really, if she were being honest, it had to be because Patrick hadn’t spanked her in several days. Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. If Kayla was going to brat, she would make it good. “You’re taking Kayla fucking Lourcy, daughter of Lawrence Lourcy, future senior matron of Draco, to a
farm
for her wedding night?”

She glared at him as he turned to face her, his body outlined by the lights on the outside of the office building that served as the entrance to the farm, showing a sign that read
Research Farming Facility 1
. He wore his tuxedo so very well, the tie and collar carelessly undone. Yes, rayon, but it looked like silk and wool, at least in that light. He also seemed to be unable to keep from smiling.

“I was going to spank you anyway, Kayla,” he said quietly, “but you just earned a really good one.”

“Why were you going to spank me anyway?!”

“Because I know you need it, and because I want to.”

At that moment, Kayla had absolutely no ability to tell whether her pique or her arousal were the greater. She just kept glaring at Patrick, and he just kept looking calmly back at her. Finally, she couldn’t bear it anymore, her mouth twitched though she tried to keep it set in a tight line, and she was grinning at him.

“I love you, sweetheart,” Patrick said, and he stepped forward, took her in his arms, and kissed her so deeply she thought she would faint.

“Oh, Patrick, I love you, too,” Kayla said. “But… a farm?”

Patrick sighed and released her from the hug. He took her hand and led her forward. Kayla followed reluctantly.

In the office sat the night crew, like the night crew of any of the hydroponics farms, tending sleepily to their monitors.

“Evening, gentlemen,” Patrick said amicably. “Meet my wife, Kayla Lourcy McDowell.”

Kayla greeted them as graciously as she could.

Patrick asked the crew chief, “Everything ready?”

“Yup,” he said with a wink. “Have a wonderful time.”

Despite herself, Kayla was becoming intrigued. “What’s everything?” she whispered loudly to Patrick.

Patrick turned to the crew chief. “Mrs. McDowell is expressing some perhaps justified displeasure that I’ve brought her to a farm for our wedding night.”

The crew chief laughed. “I can understand that. Don’t you worry, Mrs. McDowell. I think you’ll be pleased. I mean, it’s only Draco, but we’re all pretty proud of this facility.”

Through a set of industrial double doors lay paradise: a waterfall, a beach, coconut palms. A sward of pampas grass. Yes, it all ended a hundred yards away, in a glass wall. But even if it were a small, artificial paradise, it was still paradise.

Butterflies. There were butterflies, in the little tropical bushes.

Kayla’s mouth fell open and she started to cry.

Above, you could hardly tell that there was a glass roof, and the stars looked like they might even be the same stars you could see from Earth. Well, of course they were the same stars, but their positions were all different. Tonight, Kayla didn’t care. She was in paradise with her new husband, and she was going to get a spanking.

Everything was right—with this particular planet at least.

Patrick led her down the beach, to where there sat a little cottage, in front of which burned tiki torches. Kayla laughed; she just couldn’t help it.

“Research farming?” she asked, giggling, as Patrick opened the door of the cottage.

Patrick snorted, “Baby farming, maybe.”

Inside lay what looked for all the world like a luxury resort hotel room, back on Earth.

“It’s brand new, and it’s top secret. Proof-of-concept. I didn’t even know about it until Marjorie told me she wanted us to be the first couple to use it.”

“Oh, God. I
really
misjudged her.”

“She thought it would be okay because of who you are. The plan is to scale it up to a hundred rooms and give every married colonist a turn.”

Kayla laughed again. “Clever. Birthrate, you know.”

“Birth of the hospitality profession on Draco, too. I have to say I think it’s brilliant.”

Halfway into the room, still letting Patrick lead her, now over to a high-backed chair that sat in a place of honor that she thought Patrick must have awarded it, Kayla stopped. She had just thought of all the papers she could write about the growth of the hospitality industry.

Patrick felt her feet slow and mistook the meaning of it. “Come on,” he said. “Over my lap now. You’re not getting out of your wedding-night spanking, sweetheart.”

She looked into his kind eyes and smiled. “Oh, I know, Patrick. Just… remind me to text Melanie in the morning about the hospitality industry.”

He laughed at that. “Okay,” he said. “Will do.” Then he continued to pull her toward the high-backed chair, and Kayla let herself be led there, though now she pretended to herself that she was a little girl who had been naughty and made her steps halting to suit the fantasy.

“Daddy?” she said. She hadn’t meant to say
that,
exactly, but she realized that she’d wanted to call Patrick that for so long now that she could hardly remember when she
hadn’t
wanted to call him daddy.

Patrick, still holding her hand, turned to look at her with a smile and a slightly creased brow.

“Yes?” he said.

“I wish Mr. Fuzzy were here.”

Patrick’s smile widened so far that Kayla thought it might eat his face, Cheshire-cat style.

“Go look in the closet, on the shelf.” He released her hand and she went, quickly, and threw open the closet door. There he was, but also… “No,” she said. “No. He got lost, ages and ages ago.”

“He didn’t get lost, sweetheart. Your dad had him, and he gave him to me. I’ve had him for years: I’ve just been waiting since forever to find the right time to give him back to you.”

It was Draco. Sweet little Draco, with the green body, the black wings, and the sharp grinning teeth.

Kayla whispered, “He’s like… a priceless artifact, now, isn’t he? I mean, shouldn’t he be in a museum?”

Patrick laughed. “Not if you don’t want him to be. I think it would be much better if you held him close, and he slept in our bed with us and then, someday…”

Kayla grabbed Draco and Mr. Fuzzy, ran to Patrick, and somehow managed to throw her arms around him even though she still held the stuffies. “Our babies will have him,” she said. “Our…” She giggled. “Our Draco-babies.”

The End

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More Stormy Night Books by Emily Tilton

The Count’s Discipline

When Robert de Lourcy’s wife spurns his desire to spank her, the young count contents himself with disciplining other women of the court, until a rash decision to chastise the women of a captured castle arouses the ire of the local bishop and Robert is forced to seek absolution. In an act of penance, he visits a cathedral and stumbles upon a young girl named Sophia who has been set upon by robbers. Remembering his promise make amends for his sins, Robert takes pity on the destitute child, placing her in a convent so that she may be properly educated.

When Sophia comes of age, the nuns at the convent grow more firm with her. The young woman is simultaneously drawn to their discipline but also unconvinced that their motivations are particularly noble. After Sophia’s education is complete, Robert brings her into his household to serve as his secretary. Though he has decided to never spank another woman again, when Sophia begs him to chastise her as the nuns did he cannot resist the opportunity to take her over his knee.

The two begin a happy relationship based on Sophia’s acceptance of the count’s discipline, but he remains devoted to his wife until she dies tragically in childbirth. After that sad event, Sophia expects the count to marry another noblewoman, but will that new wife be jealous and send her away? Is she doomed to be cast back onto the streets from whence she came, or will Robert break the shackles of society and wed a commoner?

Geoffrey’s Rules

For as long as she can remember, Chloe has imagined what it would be like to be utterly and completely dominated by a man. When she meets Geoffrey—a man who can make her blush red with shame and quiver with lust at the same time with nothing more than a word or a glance—Chloe begins to wonder if her fantasy could become reality.

As hot as her desire burns, though, Chloe struggles with herself. How can a modern woman feel this way? Should she not berate herself for longing to be taken over her man’s knee for a bare-bottom spanking? No matter how she yearns for it, does she really belong on her knees at Geoffrey’s feet, naked and waiting for him to take her any way he pleases?

When Geoffrey offers her what she knows deep down she has always wanted, will she turn him away, or will she submit to his rules and allow her new master to take her fully in hand?

Tamed by the Highlander

When raiders fall upon Urquhart Castle, Elisabeth Grant, the daughter of the castle’s lord—a highlander by birth, but educated in the lowlands—is left defenseless when her cowardly father abandons her. At the last moment, her life and her maidenhead are saved from the raiders by Angus MacGregor, the proud highlander she had only hours earlier ordered locked in the pillory for his insolence toward her.

Vowing that she will see her home rise from the ruins after the attack, Elisabeth resolves to stay as close to the castle as possible. With her father and his soldiers gone, however, she has nowhere to turn for protection except to the highlander who so recently rescued her. When Angus informs her that he has no interest in a ward or a servant, she impetuously offers to wed the uncouth, yet undeniably brave and handsome highlander whose firm words and strong arms both terrify and excite her.

Angus agrees to marry Elisabeth on one condition: she will serve and obey him as a proper wife should, and if she fails in her duties, she will be soundly spanked. She agrees to his condition, but when she surrenders to his touch one moment and defies him the next, his desire for her only grows fiercer. Though it quickly becomes clear she will not yield without a fight—and a taste of his leather strap upon her bare bottom—he soon discovers she is like no woman he has ever known, as being chastised until she is writhing and begging only increases her lust for him.

But when her father returns to rebuild the ruins of Urquhart even as the threat of another assault on the castle looms, Angus wonders whether Elisabeth will abandon him and return to the life of a noble lady. Even if she stays by his side, will their newly forged bond be shattered in the heat of battle, or will their love and courage be enough to withstand the swords of the marauders?

Their Firm Men

When she hears about the engagement of her sister, Esther, to one of San Francisco’s wealthiest merchants, twenty-five-year-old Amelia Lander decides it is high time she obeyed her mother’s last wish—that she watch over her younger sister. Amelia leaves her teaching job in New York City and travels by train to San Francisco, where she loses no time in calling on Esther and her new husband, Samuel Allen, and providing them with proof that she is Esther’s sister and that her existence has been intentionally concealed by their father for seventeen years, since Esther was a toddler.

Samuel suggests that Amelia live with them, but when Esther says something impolite and Samuel tells her—in front of Amelia—that she can expect to be soundly spanked for her rudeness, Amelia is shocked. Samuel informs Amelia that he will run his house as he sees fit, and when she responds with insults and defiance, Amelia soon finds herself over the knee of Samuel’s business partner, Michael Sullivan, for a long, hard spanking on her bare bottom. In spite of her shame and fury, however, Amelia cannot help but be drawn to the man who chastised her so thoroughly.

When she learns that her father is once again up to no good, Amelia runs straight to Michael with the news, and he and Samuel form a plan to stop him. But can Amelia bring herself to obey Michael and stay out of the way, or will her foolhardy actions cost the life of the man she has reluctantly come to love?

Bought and Trained