A French Whipping Read Online Free PDF

done before.
    “Nick.” He looked up to see Chuck waving him toward the doors to the entertainment room where Milton usually performed for the kids. Chuck had the frame of a football player, but he was too skinny by half, and his cheeks were puffy and slightly red from his chemotherapy treatments. He was older than the rest of the kids, and would undoubtedly move to the adolescent wing soon. He seemed to enjoy hanging with the little ones, but Nick was surprised to find him in the entertainment room without Milton being there. Nick didn’t know of any other scheduled activities at this time.
    As he approached Chuck, Nick glanced curiously through the glass windows that separated the room from the main hallway and saw Blake, sitting with her back to him at one of the long craft tables. She’d gathered her hair into a tail high on her head and was wearing a denim jacket. He knew it was her from across the room and without seeing her face. No one else moved like her. A dozen or so other kids from the hospital surrounded her, all of them focused on some kind of project laid out on the table in front of them.
    Nick greeted Chuck with their usual complex handshake greeting and tilted his head to indicate the racket coming from inside the room. “What’s going on in there?”
    Chuck shrugged. “Miss Blake suggested that the kids draw pictures of shelter dogs to post on the website since Shaw the Magician is gone this week.”
    “Did she?” he murmured, his gaze drawn back to her.
    “Yeah, she and Emily thought of it. You know how much Emily likes the therapy dogs.”
    Emily was a sprite of a girl with an outsized personality. He wasn’t sure what kind of cancer she was suffering from, but she didn’t seem to be getting any better. When the therapy dogs came to visit, she was always the first to pull one of the smaller ones into her lap.
    He knew Blake was worried about her. She’d probably asked Emily what she wanted to do while Milton was gone and had suggested something that would make the kids feel powerful. Since he hated being powerless himself, Nick understood that doing something helpful could be more valuable than simple entertainment, but he hadn’t expected Blake to understand that. He hadn’t really understood it until he’d seen how the kids had reacted to learning Milton’s tricks.
    Nick gestured to the backpack that he’d slung over his shoulder. “I brought the rope to practice some knots, but if you’d rather—”
    Chuck was already shaking his head. “I can’t draw.”
    Nick shrugged. “Neither can I.”
    Chuck let the way into the room. The noise level, loud enough from the outside, increased exponentially as they stepped inside. The kids weren’t just drawing pictures of the dogs. They were watching videos of shelter dogs on several iPads, laughing and clapping as the dogs barked and received toys and praise from the shelter operators.
    Chuck picked a table a little removed from the others and Nick set the bag down for him. “I’ll just go talk to Miss Blake for a second. I’ve already tied a few of the knots for you. See if you can duplicate them.”
    Chuck had already started pulling knots and various lengths of rope out of the bag. Nick considered him for a moment, wondering what it was about knots that fascinated the kid. His own fascination had started when he’d worked on his father’s fishing boat as a kid, but he knew not many people shared this interest.
    Blake was sitting with her hands clasped in front of her on the table, smiling broadly at the kids showing her their drawings. She looked effortlessly cool and springlike, with a grass-green scarf tied around her neck and a white button-down shirt beneath her denim jacket.
    He was staring—he knew he was staring, but all he could think about was the determined look on her face when she told him she wanted him to fuck her. Fuck her. Her words, the ways she’d looked, had made him restless all week. He’d spent several hours