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He had let go of my wrists at some point, and I hadn’t even noticed. When he stilled his right hand on my ass, just holding both my cheeks very gently, he moved his left further up under my dress and started to rub my back. Again I had the feeling of simply being in his hands, suspended between them, somehow. A new burst of sobs came from my chest, and I moved my hands back to my face to cover it, feeling the wetness of my tears on my fingers as I hid my expression—unnecessarily, again—from the world, and from Cal above all.
“Shh, darlin’,” he murmured. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
Such simple words. I might have called them silly and weak if they didn’t seem to me at that moment to comfort me more than anything deeper or more complex, more psychological, could have.
I’m okay. I’m okay even though my ‘suitor’ just taught me a humiliating but impossibly pleasurable lesson.
“I don’t… I don’t…” I said, my mind searching desperately for words that might somehow express all the conflict in my heart and my body.
“You don’t belong to me,” Cal said simply, in the same gentle voice.
My eyes went wide. I thought he would take his hands away, to accompany his matter-of-fact statement with the action that seemed most likely to suit it. I had let out a little whimper of protest, a pitiful, begging sound that the deepest part of me hoped would persuade him to keep soothing me as—I felt like—only his firm hands could do.
But his knowing hands stayed where they were, though that seemed not to match the acknowledgment he had just made, that he didn’t have the right to touch me that way.
“That’s right,” he told me, still holding my bottom and rubbing my back. “Maybe you will. Maybe someday soon. But for the moment I’m just courting you the old-fashioned way, even though here in Grasskiln that means I can teach you things our great-grandparents probably didn’t think proper for a suitor to teach the girl he was wooing.”
CHAPTER 22
Cal
I sent Grace to the washroom to freshen up, and went to get the steaks from the fridge. The rock-hard state of my cock, slightly uncomfortably confined by my jeans, distracted me enough that I nearly forgot to light the grill.
By the time Grace emerged, though, looking fresh as a daisy and just as naturally gorgeous, I had the potato salad out and the burners had gotten nearly hot enough to put the right sear on the grass-fed sirloins. My erection had calmed down a little as I salted the meat, but the shy expression on Grace’s pretty face brought it back to life with a fierce leap, so full of arousal that I had to clear my throat and look away.
It definitely didn’t all have to do with her beauty, of course. Pretty girls couldn’t get me going the way this one did just with their faces or their bodies—even girls who, like Grace with her red hair and green eyes, fell into the category I thought of as my type. Pretty girls who rode my lewdly caressing hand the way Grace had done, flowing with their private lubrication and crying out with untold, shameless pleasure… well, they were another story. Especially when they blushed that way, meeting my eyes afterward.
No, she didn’t belong to me. Not yet. But I knew from the look in her eyes that Grace Franklin understood how soon she would belong to me, if things unfolded as they should. More—and this was the part that had made my cock jump painfully along my thigh—her expression told me that she had started to understand a good deal about what it would entail; what starting to belong to me as her accepted suitor and possible future husband meant.
How I would continue on with resolution, leading her along the path I had already begun to show her, when I had disciplined her sexually over my knee. How her training as a submissive young woman, ready and willing to obey her suitor’s most lascivious demands, had only just started.
“Should I…” she started to say, when she had joined me in the kitchen, and then her blush came back, rosy in her porcelain cheeks.
I saw in her eyes why she had stopped. I nodded.
“Yes,” I told her. “Keep calling me sir. You’ll need to get used to that with me as well as with your foster daddy.”
Her eyes went wide—I thought I could see surprise at my having guessed her thoughts so effortlessly, along with maybe a note of alarm at how matter-of-factly I had addressed the issue. I knew Grace would thrive as she got used to her submission to a man, but I could see in her expression how conflicted it still made her. She’d only been here in Grasskiln for a day, of course—but I had no doubt that the best way to help her find her feet lay in ensuring she received the message unambiguously. Grace would obey, and learn her place, or she would keep going over my knee or the arm of Jake’s easy chair until she did.
Grace
I felt my brow crease, and I took a deep breath through my nose.
“Sir,” I said, and then I twisted my mouth to the side because of the shiver it had sent through my whole body just to say it to Cal. I tried to continue on as if nothing had happened, but I had the uncomfortable feeling that he could read not just my thoughts but also the tiniest details of my body language. “Should I set the table?”
Somehow calling him sir here in the kitchen, with both of us just… well, standing there looking at each other, felt very different from doing it when he had had me over his knee, holding me down so that he could teach me my mortifying, humiliating, overwhelming lesson. It seemed more real, and therefore more embarrassing and more troubling.
“Sure, darlin’,” he said easily. “Thanks for asking. Flatware is in that drawer and napkins are in the holder on the table.”
He pointed, but instead of shifting my eyes in the direction of the drawer I couldn’t seem to stop looking at his handsome face. When he turned his attention back to me, he looked puzzled for a moment, and then he smiled, lifting the left side of his mouth in evident amusement.
“A picture would last longer,” he said.
Again, I could easily have imagined him mocking me that way, and I suppose it was still a gentle kind of teasing, but I could tell he meant to share the joke rather than make it at my expense. Then I felt a new flash of heat in my cheeks as I realized that he had meant to bring about precisely the same kind of shared moment in the car when he had asked about beef being expensive in the city. And I had decided to be… well, a brat.
A handful.
Now, though, after my ‘lesson,’ part of me resisted the idea with the greatest possible indignation, but I couldn’t keep the thought back: Cal had disciplined me, even if he had done so with embarrassment and pleasure—too much pleasure. He had corrected my misbehavior, and here in the aftermath I could see how intent my suitor was on making his courtship pleasant and agreeable, despite the circumstances.
