Chapter 10

Chapter Ten

Two days later, she found herself back at Edie’s for a Christmas Eve party. She came loaded down with the cookies she and Ian had spent the day baking with Noelle and Dom, but no answers.

Over the past two days she’d managed to break nearly every rule she had except the ones about putting herself in danger. And every single time, Ian had either scolded her or given her a playful spanking that ended with him putting something in her bottom while he finger-fucked her to orgasm.

As a result, she was feeling more sexually satisfied than she’d ever been in her life. But it still felt like something was missing .

She’d barely gotten to put the cookies down on the table before Edie had her by the arm, dragging her out of the kitchen and into the small half bath just down the hall.

“So?” Edie asked after locking the door behind them, her arms crossed and her expression set in serious lines that had Taylor shifting from foot to foot nervously. “Did you talk to him?”

“Umm. Not exactly.”

“What does that mean, Taylor Grace? You either talked to him about needing him to punish you or you didn’t. Which is it?”

“Can’t we talk about this after Christmas?” She was well aware she was whining, but this was the last thing she wanted to be talking about on Christmas Eve when she was supposed to be stuffing her face full of cookies and bouncing around with excitement over Santa coming.

“Sure.” One corner of Edie’s mouth lifted in a smug smirk. “You can talk to him after I tell him what’s going on.”

“No! Edie, you promised!”

“I promised I wouldn’t talk to him if you told him the truth. You didn’t keep your end of the bargain, so you leave me no choice.”

Dammit. “Can it at least wait until after the party? Please, Edie, I don’t want to ruin it for everyone else.”

Running a hand through her short cap of hair, Edie sighed. “Alright. You two hang back after everything wraps up and we’ll have a sit-down about it.”

It wasn’t the greatest solution, but Taylor was smart enough to know it was probably the best she was going to get under the circumstances. “Thank you, Edie.”

“You’re welcome. Now go stuff your face with the other girls and enjoy the party.”

After a quick hug for her friend, Taylor hurried out to the living room where the other Littles had gathered with plates stacked high with goodies. Everyone seemed in good spirits, except for Jesse who was curled up in Edie’s chair, pouting for all she was worth.

Glancing over her shoulder to make sure Edie hadn’t followed her in, Taylor made her way over to the chair and plopped down on the floor beside her friend.

It was still a bit weird to consider Jesse her friend. They’d been a few years apart in school so they hadn’t known each other all that well growing up. And then Jesse had left for Hollywood and become a huge star seemingly overnight, which had put her even more out of reach than when she’d lived in Lost River.

Mostly, though, it was weird because Jesse and Edie had history with a capital H. They’d had one hot summer together before Jesse had left without a word, shattering Edie’s heart in the process. Sometimes it still felt like she was being disloyal to Edie by making friends with Jesse, but seeing as how Edie was now Jesse’s Mommy as well as her lover, Taylor knew Edie would want her to be friendly.

With that in mind, she offered up a smile at the scowling girl in the chair. “Everything okay, Jesse?”

“No. Mommy and Daddy are being mean .”

Uh-oh. Dangerous ground. “What happened?”

The noise in the living room dropped considerably as the other Littles abandoned their conversations to listen to Jesse’s woes.

Sniffling back tears, Jesse jerked a shoulder in a shrug. “It doesn’t matter.”

“If it’s making you sad it definitely matters,” Carly said, her voice coated in sympathy. “And maybe we can make it better somehow.”

“You can’t. Nobody can. Nothing will make it better.”

If she hadn’t looked so sad, Taylor might have laughed at the dramatics. “At least give us a chance to try.”

“We were supposed to come home and decorate the house for Christmas, but since we got home so late, Mommy said there was no point in hauling everything out just to take it back down again in a couple weeks. She said we could decorate inside a little bit, but not outside.”

Since it was still light outside, Taylor hadn’t even noticed the lack of lights on the house. “That stinks. But it’ll be okay. The inside looks super pretty.”

“It’s not okay!” Jesse wailed. “What if Santa skips us because there’s no lights? What if he doesn’t know where to find me? This is my first Christmas here, what if he doesn’t know this is where I am?”

“Oh, sweetie. Santa always knows.” Climbing up in the chair with Jesse, Carly wrapped her arms around the sniffling Little and squeezed. “He’s magic.”

“She does know he’s not real, right?” Noelle whispered, forcing Taylor to swallow a laugh.

“Little logic,” Taylor whispered back with a shrug.

“Surely Edie has some small decorations we could put up without too much trouble.” Now it was Ginny piping up, her tone thoughtful. Of all of them, she was the ‘oldest’ Little, more like a teenager than anything. “Maybe if we didn’t make her do any of the work she’d be okay with it.”

Hope glimmered in Jesse’s eyes as she wiped at the tears streaming down her cheeks. “Maybe. But she told me if I asked again I’d get a spankin’.”

Grinning, Ginny rose gracefully from her chair. “Then you don’t have to ask. Be right back, girls.”

An almost reverent hush fell over the room as Ginny disappeared into the kitchen. Even straining her ears, Taylor couldn’t hear exactly what was being said, but soon the voices grew louder.

“Edie, you’re being ridiculous. We just want to put up a couple strands of lights. You don’t have to do anything.”

“And that isn’t the point. The answer is no, and I don’t want to hear another word about it.”

“But—”

“Pick your battles, princess.” Rex’s voice held a note of amusement, as if he found the whole thing hilarious. Which, knowing him, he probably did. “I’d hate to have to spank you just because you don’t know how to take no for an answer.”

“Ugh, fine . But I want it noted that I think Edie is being completely unreasonable.”

A moment later, Ginny came sailing back into the living room, twin flags of pink flying high on her cheeks and her eyes glittering. “I’m sure you all heard the answer is no.”

“We heard,” Jesse said sulkily. “Thanks for trying.”

Ninety-nine percent of the time, Taylor was on Edie’s side. Especially when it came to Jesse.

But what kind of Mommy denied her Little girl some Christmas magic?

“What if we just did it ourselves?” Taylor deliberately kept her voice low enough the grownups couldn’t hear. “Noelle and I know where Edie keeps all her Christmas decorations because we usually use them to decorate the shop. We could sneak out to the shed, grab a couple strands of lights and have them up before the grownups could stop us.”

Mischief glimmered in Carly’s eyes. “You know we’re going to get so spanked when they find out, right?”

“We’ll tell them it was all my idea. The way Ian has been acting, I can get away with murder.”

“You’d really do that for me?” Jesse asked, her tone so hopeful Taylor wouldn’t have been able to tell her no even if a spanking was on the line.

“Absolutely.”

“How the hell are we supposed to sneak out there, though?” Frowning, Noelle shook her head. “It’s impossible to sneak past all of our Daddies and Edie.”

“We need a distraction,” Ginny said, tapping her finger on her chin. “Something to keep them all occupied for, what, an hour at least?”

Flopping back against the chair, Jesse groaned. “There’s no way any of us can keep them occupied that long.”

Silence fell as they all racked their brains for a way around the grownups. As she thought, Taylor’s mind drifted to the marathon of Christmas movies she and her Daddy had been indulging in over the past week. “What if we just… lie?”

Four heads swiveled her direction. “Lie?” Carly asked, eyes wide. “About what?”

“We tell them we want to put on a Christmas play for them. But we want to do it ourselves, like Big girls, and they can’t come outside while we’re practicing.”

Noelle’s ponytail whipped around her face as she shook her head. “No way they’re going to fall for that.”

“My Daddy might. If I ask and give him extra-big puppy-dog eyes, I bet he’ll give me whatever I want.” As long as the other grownups didn’t push too hard, anyway. “It’s worth a shot, right?”

“I think that might work,” Jesse said with a slow nod. “And a couple of us can stay right where the grownups can see us at all times and we can take turns sneaking around back to the shed one or two at a time.”

“Ladies, I think we have a plan.”