He sat down with the plate in front of him, then looked up at me and patted his thigh.
I just stood there staring at him for a second.
“You want me to sit…” I trailed off, then gave him a look. “In your lap?”
He didn’t say anything. He just looked back at me with that same calm, patient expression, like he wasn’t joking, wasn’t flustered, and definitely wasn’t about to explain himself twice just because I was standing there acting shocked.
Wow, he's not kidding. This grown man wants me to sit in his lap for breakfast.
Normal me would have said something smartass or tried to tease my way out of it, but one look at his face told me thatwasn’t going to get me anywhere. He had already decided this was happening, and all I was doing was standing there catching up to it. I had asked for this, hadn’t I? So I shut my mouth and lowered myself into his lap, still half expecting it to feel ridiculous.
It did not feel ridiculous.
It felt good.
He was big and solid and warm under me, and when his arm came around my waist it happened so naturally it made my stomach flip. Like of course I was here. Like he had already made space for me and all I had done was finally move into it.
Then he picked up the fork, scooped up some eggs, and held it in front of me.
I looked at the fork.
Then at him.
“You’re serious.”
“Yes.”
I hesitated just long enough to feel silly about it, then opened my mouth and took the bite.
I should have felt embarrassed. Or babied. Or at the very least strange about the fact that I was twenty-one years old and sitting in a man’s lap while he fed me breakfast.
Instead it felt… nice.
It felt way too intimate for something as simple as breakfast, with his arm around me, his chest warm against my arm, and all of his attention on me.
I chewed slowly, trying not to let any of that show on my face, and by the time he offered me the next bite I was acutely aware of how quiet the room felt around us. He could have made this awkward if he wanted to. He could have made me feel silly about it. Instead he just kept feeding me like this was the most normal thing in the world, and that somehow made it even harder to ignore what it was doing to me.
Cause breakfast should not feel this sexy.
Between bites, I glanced up at him. “So this is how we’re doing breakfast now?”
“Yes,” he said simply.
I let out a small laugh. “That’s very specific.”
“That’s the point.” He gave me another bite before continuing. “This is how we’ll do everything. You have a choice in it, and I want you to want to follow my rules. Which means I’m going to make sure there’s enough motivation for you to choose obedience.”
I swallowed and looked at him for a second, then at the fork in his hand. “So getting spoon-fed is the motivation?”
“Fork-fed,” he corrected mildly, and when I laughed he tightened his arm around me just enough to pull me a little closer. “And yes. I’ve found that if I make obedience feel good enough, you’ll want it.”
I looked up at him. “That sounds like you’ve done this a lot.”
“I have.”
I bit the inside of my cheek, suddenly a little less smug than I had been a second ago. “And what if I can’t keep up?”
His expression didn’t change, but something in the way his arm stayed settled around me made the answer feel steadier before he even gave it. “You don’t have to keep up with anything. This goes at your pace.”