His Little Runaway (14 page)

Attorney General Preparing to Drop Tall Oaks Investigation

According to several sources inside her office, Attorney General Heather Bradshaw is close to a final decision that there is not enough evidence against the company running the Tall Oaks Juvenile Correction Facility to pursue a prosecution. “We’re certain that abuses have occurred,” said one source who spoke on condition of anonymity, “but it’s very frustrating. No one will come forward.”

Wes walked back to the cabin slowly and thoughtfully. He found Ashley still sniffling as she dried the plates and silverware, but also with a contrite, submissive look on her face that convinced him he had done the right thing in promising her the switching. As soon as she heard him come into the kitchen she put down the dishcloth and came into his arms.

“I’m so sorry, daddy,” she said. “I know I need your discipline.”

Wes held her tightly. “I’m glad you can see that, honey.” He could tell that she meant to make another request for mercy, and he prepared to steel himself against it.

“Couldn’t I have the switching over my panties? Please?”

“No, honey,” he replied with a sigh. “You know how important bare-bottom discipline is in my house.” With a surge of affection, he realized how much he wanted to say
our house
instead of
my house
. Well, what he had to say now might mean that he could start saying it.

“Yes, daddy,” his little girl sniffled into his chest.

“But, Ashley,” he said, changing his tone so that she would know they were about to talk about an adult real-world thing, “I saw some news we have to talk about.”

“News?” she asked sharply, the sniffles gone.

“Uh-huh,” Wes said, holding her gently away from him so that they could look into each other’s eyes. “I think the attorney general needs your help. They’re about to drop the investigation into Tall Oaks because no one will come forward.”

A look of concern appeared on her face, and then she seemed to understand fully what Wes meant. “But if I…” She sucked her lips between her teeth as her creased brow showed how quickly her brain had started to work. “If I come forward, I’ll have to go back. And maybe they’ll put me in an adult prison!”

“Yes,” Wes admitted. “So here’s what I think, and I don’t think you should make up your mind about it until tomorrow.”

As if at the memory that she was going to be punished tomorrow, Ashley flinched.

Wes continued, “I think I should call a lawyer, have him or her contact the attorney general, and try to make a deal.”

“But won’t they know, then? Won’t they be able to find me?” He could hear panic in her voice, and she started to tremble.

“I don’t think so. I think attorney-client privilege will take care of that. But, yes, I think there’s a risk. But, honey, you can’t stay a fugitive forever. I want you to let me do this. If you don’t, I think I should get you back to your parents so they can help you as best they might.”

“But they’ll catch me then, too!” Ashley said in a quavery voice.

“They might. But at this point, as much as I’d like to keep you here with me, it would be selfish, and I think we would both keep thinking about it. It wouldn’t work. I promise that if you let me call a lawyer, I’ll stick by you. I’ll stick by my little girl forever. This will be our house, even if you have to leave it for a while.”

“So that’s the decision? Stay and let you call a lawyer… and, you know…” her nose wrinkled in distaste, “…get a switching?”

Wes nodded. “Or I take you back to your parents.”

Ashley took a deep breath and nodded herself, though her brow remained clouded.

“I’ll talk it through with you all night if you want,” Wes said.

That made Ashley smile, but her next words caught him a little by surprise. “And if your little Ashley just wants her daddy to fuck her hard, and then hold her tight?”

“Well,” Wes said slowly, grinning, “we can do that, too, honey.”

Chapter Seventeen

Wes made breakfast for her in the morning, and let her sleep in and then stay in bed, thinking about the decision she had to make.

She could go back to her parents. She
could
. What would they do if Ashley showed up on their doorstep? Ashley spent a few minutes trying to come up with an answer—some idea of what it would look like to them, to see their daughter standing there, trying to recover her Westchester pride, trying to look and to feel like she belonged in her old hometown, in front of the house she had called home all her life until the accident.

But she had no idea, really. Westchester seemed to her as distant as the moon. Her father would either try to send her to some other country, she supposed, or he, too, would call a lawyer—probably without requesting permission the way Wes had.

Her father—and her daddy.

Under the covers, Ashley curled up into a ball, trying to make going home look palatable to herself. She didn’t want to have to talk to the attorney general, or to whomever, and probably have to testify in court. And above all she didn’t want a switching, no matter how completely unable she had been the night before—while Wes held her knees up and open and pounded his cock into her, looking down into her eyes—to stop imagining what it would be like when he laid her over the chair and whipped her with the tree branch he had made her choose and cut until, when Wes told her to play with her clit for him, she had come and come and come with the fantasy of the switching driving her from ecstatic peak to ecstatic peak until she felt she would never be able to breathe again.

Why had she bratted like that, about the stupid pepper grinder? This whole thing would be easier without the switching looming over her, wouldn’t it?

Easier, maybe, but not as… not as… what? Something about the terrible anticipation of having to cut her own switch in the woods, and bring it to her daddy so that her daddy could whip her naked bottom with it felt not easy, but… right.

Her Navy SEAL daddy, who knew how to take a girl in hand, how to punish her for her own good, how to spank her over his knee so that she learned to be a better girl for him and a better person in the world. Wes Garner, who had saved the girl overseas and paid the penalty; little Ashley’s daddy, with the pain behind his eyes that seemed to disappear when he held his little girl in his arms.

She had sassed him terribly, even though she knew that being a brat always had consequences in his house, the little cabin where despite being a fugitive from the law Ashley had known more happiness over the last two weeks than she had had in her entire life to this point. Shouldn’t she have a switching, for the disrespect she had shown her daddy?

If she took her punishment like a good girl, and she did the right thing to help the girls at Tall Oaks, it would start something big. Wes would stand by her, and it would start their real relationship. Her parents and the rest of the world would know that she had shacked up with a Navy SEAL in the woods. They would, probably and hopefully, soon know that her furniture-making Navy SEAL daddy had a put a baby in her tummy.

Ashley felt sure that Wes would ask her to marry him, but that didn’t even feel all that important to her. What mattered was being his little girl, and learning to please him more and more every day in this old-fashioned world where naughtiness received its just reward in very short order and daddy told you when it was time to have sex, and how you would have sex that night.

Still curled up, still with the comforter over her head, she felt her cheeks get hot at that thought, even as a little smile crept onto her lips and she had to suppress a giggle.

Not the easy decision, but the right one. She thought suddenly of the warden at Tall Oaks, of how his horrible threat of the paddle didn’t seem to inhabit the same universe as Wes’ promise of the switch, and she knew exactly what she had to do.

* * *

“Be careful when you’re opening it,” Wes said, handing her his pocket knife. “Hold it like this, and open it like this.” He showed her twice. “Now show me.”

Ashley took the lovely, very masculine thing, with the handle that seemed made of bone, and tried. Daddy had made it look very easy to open, but she realized that must be because his hands were so strong. Still, she managed to open the three-inch blade safely.

“Good girl. Show me again.”

Ashley did. At least the business of the knife took her mind off the task she must now perform with it in the woods. But that distraction didn’t last much longer.

“Alright,” her daddy said with satisfaction in his voice. “Go cut your switch. Green wood from a tree, two or three feet long. It needs to be as thick as your finger, at the end where you cut it. If I have to send you back for another one, you’ll get ten more. When you’re choosing, and when you’re stripping off the twigs and leaves, I want you to think about what you did, and what you need to do to be a good girl for your daddy in the future, now that we’re going to be together for a good long time.”

A good long time.
Ashley managed a weak smile despite the way her body trembled at the thought of the punishment in store.

“Forever, daddy?” she asked softly.

“If that’s what you want, honey,” Wes said. He plucked the knife gently from her hand and put his arms around her, the same way he had done when she had come out of the bedroom an hour before, in the red t-shirt and white cotton panties and said, “Daddy, I’ll take my switching.”

He held her silently for a long moment, and then he said, “You know what I hope?”

“What, daddy?” Ashley asked, mystified.

“I hope I made a baby in your tummy last night.”

Ashley giggled. “Really, daddy?”

“Really, honey. I think you’re going to be a wonderful mommy.”

She smiled, then thought of something. “Won’t it be hard… with little kids around to… you know, to take me over your knee?”

Wes chuckled. “You’ll have to come to the workshop for your spankings,” he said.

Ashley wondered why the prospect of having to go to Wes’ workshop to be punished seemed to make her heart feel light. She decided she would spend a good long time trying to figure it out over the next few years.

“Oh,” she said, burying her nose in his flannel shirt. “Okay, daddy.”

“Time to cut your switch, honey,” Wes said gently, holding her away from him again and putting the knife back in her right hand. “I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

Ashley took more than a few minutes, though, wandering through the woods. She felt sure that Wes wouldn’t mind if she spent some extra time thinking about what she’d done, and what she would do. She had sassed him at the dinner table, she finally decided, because she had started to feel things becoming serious between them, and she hadn’t been able to see how being his little Ashley could go along with a serious relationship.

By earning herself a switching—the punishment that made her whole body shake as she thought about it, that would mean she couldn’t sit down for days, that would leave welts for her to look at thoughtfully in the mirror as she remembered the stern lesson daddy had needed to give her—she had answered her question. Wes meant to be Ashley’s daddy even after he had made her a mommy. He would spank her, switch her, and do just what he wanted to her with his cock, not just for a few weeks or months, but for the whole future: their future they would share.

She paused as she wandered, coming into a little glade and stopping there to look up at the blue sky overhead. She saw a sapling just in front of her, and her heart beat faster as she saw that it had branches about the thickness of her fingers.
Oh, no.
She had been out in the woods for twenty minutes, now, but until she saw the sapling she hadn’t really been paying attention to the trees at all.

She had said the silly thing about the pepper grinder. She had disrespected her daddy, the man who had asked her above all to respect him. She had done it for no apparent reason. Little Ashley had earned a switching on her bare bottom.

Mechanically, she opened the knife. She took hold of the slim trunk with her left hand while with her right, being very careful to cut downward, she began to take not the slimmest of the branches—because Ashley really, really didn’t want to be sent back out for a thicker switch—but maybe the next thinnest.

It only took a moment, and the branch, three feet long with four or five leaved twigs sticking out, was in her hand. She tried to think about how to be a good girl while she stripped away the twigs, exposing the springy green wood underneath, but all she could think of really, was how this branch would feel when her daddy brought it down on her naked rear end.

“There you are, honey,” Wes said with a little severity in his voice when he opened the workshop door at her knock. “I thought you might be dawdling.”

“No, daddy,” Ashley said, feeling her nose twitch with rising tears. “I was thinking, the way you told me.”

Wes smiled. “Alright,” he said. “I hope you came up with some ideas about how to be a good girl.”

“Yes, daddy.”

Wes’ eyes went to the branch in Ashley’s hand, which she held out to him. “That looks just fine,” he said, taking it and the knife. He looked the switch over with a critical eye, then opened the knife and, while Ashley watched, whittled the end a little to make it smooth and very springy. Ashley watched with wide eyes, breathing more and more quickly as she saw her daddy getting the switch ready so that he could punish her with it.

Wes put his knife in his pocket, then he whipped the switch through the air twice. The sound made Ashley flinch each time, but it wasn’t nearly as frightening as when her daddy turned and said, “Alright, honey. Into the house. All your clothes off, then lay yourself down over the chair in the living room with your bottom nice and high. Daddy’s going to teach you your lesson now.”

Ashley turned, the tears already starting to fall onto her cheeks, and walked to the cabin. She heard Wes’ footfalls behind her, and she almost turned around to plead with him one more time to spank her, or to switch her atop her jeans or her panties, but she knew it would be absolutely in vain, and might get her extra cuts of the switch. When Wes decided to punish her, she had discovered, he made absolutely sure to carry through on the discipline he promised. The time she had learned not to say
in a minute
Ashley had thought he might just give her a token spanking, but his hand had visited her little cheeks with such force that he really had, in the old phrase, quickly made her very sorry she had sassed him.