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“Count it or the next one won’t count at all, Grace Franklin.”
Just the sound of my last name made me whimper with fear. How could anyone be so easygoing and yet so severe, so dominant?
“Th-th-three, sir,” I stammered, my voice chopped into pieces by the sheer amount of fiery agony radiating from my punished backside.
He kept holding me against him, his clothed body against my bare one, so that I could feel him shift his weight much more fully.
“Oh… no… no… no…” I whispered, and the final no ended in a strangled scream after the next stroke of the paddle rang out in my stern suitor’s bedroom.
With a deep, wrenching wail I cried out, “Four, sir,” and then the same strange relaxation that had happened when he had spanked me over his knee happened again. I felt my body give in to his.
I felt him feel it, too. My mind had gone all the way into the far distance, to become the observer who could somehow appreciate both being and not being Grace Franklin, the bad girl in training to be an obedient bride.
From that perspective I could notice how my cheeks blushed fiercely at the idea that Cal knew he had broken me to his will. The independent core of my mind refused to fade away completely.
At the same time, though, I felt—much more thoroughly—a strange but very real comfort in it. I knew that Cal knew that from this moment on, tonight at least, I would give myself to him, body and soul. He had taken me in hand, so terribly literally.
The paddle rose again, and I arched my back to push out my butt and raise it for the next swat, the next part of my severe-but-necessary lesson from my future husband. It came down, just as hard as the last one, but the relaxation of my muscles did seem to make it less painful. My body jerked at the impact and the fiery agony, and I let out a piteous cry. But I said what I had to say immediately.
“Five, sir,” I moaned.
Cal’s left hand shifted again, going first to the middle of my back. He stepped back a little too, leaving me freer from his restraining grip. I whimpered, not really wanting to feel separated from him like that.
But an instant later the whimper had built itself into a cry of surging pleasure mingled with desperate need. Cal’s hand had gone swiftly and urgently, but also very gently, down between my thighs.
“Ask me for your last swat, darlin’,” he murmured into my ear before I even knew he had bent down and brought his face close to mine.
Oh, but I can’t… sir, I… how could I…
“Oh, God,” I gasped, my body seeming to take on an entirely separate consciousness as it responded helplessly to its master’s soothing touch. “Oh, God… please… I’m…”
I’m what? Oh, my God, I’m going to come… I’m going to… My hips jerked in a desperate rhythm, matching the cadence of Cal’s miraculous fingers, the pulses of friction that could somehow make me forget how much my ass hurt from the horrible paddle. I sobbed at each jerk, every one of them anticipating the beat, trying without success to make him go faster, make him rub harder.
“I’ll make it easier for you, Grace,” he said from somewhere, but I only understood the words when he followed through on what turned out to be a terrible threat.
He took his hand away.
CHAPTER 33
Grace
My body spoke. It didn’t feel like my mind had anything to do with it.
“Please, sir… please… give me my last swat!”
Cal’s hand came back down on my back. I felt it move with the shifting of his weight, in a sort of tiny ritual that had already become entirely too familiar—and yet…
And yet I… I love it. I love him.
What the fuck? How could I possibly have just realized I loved the man who had raised his awful instrument of correction and who I knew must have already started to bring it down? And was that better or worse than realizing, the previous instant, that I loved it: that, somehow, I loved getting paddled by the man who had taken me in hand.
Then I heard it, and I felt it, full across my bottom. I let out a full-throated scream as the agony built, and then as it started to fade I wondered with a hot blush if Cal’s neighbors could hear how severe a lesson he was administering to his future bride. They would try to figure out what I had done to deserve the paddle, discuss amongst themselves what a handful Cal had taken on… whether I would have to bend over the bed every night and what would happen when the paddle had finished its work and I had sobbed out my penitence.
It landed on the bed, in front of me and off to the side. I looked wide-eyed at the long blade with the holes that made it travel faster through the air so it would hurt more when it made contact with a naughty girl’s bare bottom.
For a moment I couldn’t figure it out: how could the paddle be there, when the paddle belonged to Cal, and Cal still stood behind me. It took me a weird, confusing few seconds to understand that although his right and responsibility to punish me when I misbehaved might be an essential part of who he was, for me, he could put the horrible paddle wherever he wanted.
Then his hands made the puzzle, such as it was, completely clear. They took possession of my body, the left one holding me in place and the right seizing me between my thighs so that all the pain seemed lost in my own need to belong to him.
