wouldn’t come when she opened her mouth.
“Was it the spanking?” Nanny J gently pressed. “Did you think you would be next? I promise, you were in no danger of that. As far as I know, you haven’t been a naughty little girl. Have you?”
Quivers raced through the knots in her stomach. Her bottom clenched all over again, and her chest got tighter, hunger, dread, and anticipation vying for her next breath. It wasn’t quite as sexual as the involuntary response had been in the hallway. Sadie wasn’t bi. Nanny J didn’t arouse her, but the words she was using and the assessing look creeping in on her stern features still hit those subby buttons.
“I’m not a little girl,” she said again, almost desperately. Belatedly realizing she’d missed the question entirely, she rushed to add, “I h-haven’t been naughty, either.”
Great. Now, if she could just manage to say it without stuttering, she might be able to convince herself, not to mention Nanny J. She frowned and squirmed, trying to will the awkward crawling sensation prickling across her buttocks to stop.
“Mmhmm,” the other woman said, studying her from behind thick-framed glasses. “Well,” she said, seeming to accept Sadie’s answer, although she didn’t for a second think Nanny J believed her. She was having trouble believing herself. “Regardless, you’re here now, and you’re safe. I understand you’ll be staying in Dorm Four. Usually, you’d have plenty of roommates to keep you company, but,”—Nanny J looked at her, a knowing glint in her eyes—“since you’re not a Little, it’s probably for the best you’ll have the whole room to yourself.”
A bell rang out over the classroom’s intercom system, startling Sadie.
Glancing up at the clock, Nanny J immediately rose.
“Oh my, change of class already. Well, that’s my cue. Come along, my grownup girl.” She held out her hand, and before Sadie could stop herself, she took it, letting the nanny pull her up out of her chair, so she could be led as if she were five years old—or the Little she’d just insisted she wasn’t—to the door.
“I have to go back to work, but if you need anything at any time, you come talk to me, all right?”
“Okay.”
Nanny J led her out into the hall where Derek—Master Derek, Nanny had called him—waited on a colorful chair that would have been just right for her but which looked ridiculously small under a man of his strength and size.
“All done,” Nanny J brightly announced, and almost immediately, her eyes zeroed in on a man and woman frowning at one another as both tightened their holds on the same teddy bear gripped between them. “Excuse me,” she said, changing directions to go deal with the situation.
“Well,” Derek said, slapping his own thighs lightly as he pushed himself up off the bench. “Shall I show you to your room now, or would you like to—”
Which was as much as Sadie heard before movement just beyond him caught her eyes, and Sadie’s gaze was locked on someone else. A blonde girl in a Rawhide Ranch uniform and pink hair ribbons was bending down in the mouth of the nursery room doorway to pick up the duffel bag, Sadie hadn’t, until that second, realized she’d dropped.
She looked down at her side, horrified to find it not still slung over her shoulder, then sprang past Derek, racing the few steps that separated this room from that one, and seized her bag before the other girl unzipped it.
“No, don’t! This is mine!”
“You don’t have to grab,” the other snapped, trying to disentangle her wrist from the now twisted strap. “I don’t want your stupid bag, anyway.”
“Then stop touching it!”
“Girls!” Nanny J snapped, quickly disengaging herself from the other altercation to hurry their way, but too late.
With all her might, Sadie shoved the blonde backward, knocking the girl straight over onto her butt.
Derek reached her just before Nanny J. Spinning her around, he seized her shoulders with big hands.
“That,” he said with quiet anger, “was not appropriate or acceptable behavior.”
Sadie hugged her duffel bag, refusing to lose not one more thing. Apart from this bag and the clothes on her back, she didn’t have anything left. It had all been taken from her already, and Spankles was just too precious.
“She was stealing!”
“I wasn’t stealing, I was picking up!” the blonde protested. That she had the nerve to both look and sound hurt only pricked at Sadie’s already out-of-control temper.
“Liar!” she hissed.
“Go play,” Nanny J told the girl, extricating her out of the argument