Tiernan moved behind me, studying my raised bottom precariously close to being exposed by the short hem of my kilt. I gasped, jumping, when he kicked my feet wider apart. For one moment, I wondered if he would flip up the skirt, reveal the full, thin expanse of my cotton briefs.
A shiver, this one nothing to do with fear, snaked through me like a serpent through grass.
Instead, a heavy palm fell to the small of my back and pressed firmly.
“Have you ever been spanked before, little thing? The ache of it will remind you for long after I stop that you are mine, and as such, you obey me in all things. I texted you five times without response. You were, in fact with a boy, and you got some inane design permanently inked on your wrist without asking permission. Intending to use my money to do so. I think that deserves twenty lashes, don’t you?”
I didn’t respond, but he laughed darkly into my silence, the thumb on my back edging just under the hem of my skirt, onto the slightly sweaty skin above my bottom.
“You might cry,” he murmured as an afterthought, as if he didn’t really care. “But you will not break position until the twentieth blow has landed. Is that understood?”
“Yes,” I snapped, my right leg bouncing with jitters that Tiernan quickly quelled with a harder press of his hand into my back.
The blow landed before I could brace, when I was still expecting him to reprimand me for my tone. A whistle of air, then a muffled crack as the thin limb met my kilt-covered behind. The fabric was pretty thick, but nothing could mute the sharp pain that cut into my buttocks like a liquid rope of fire.
I cried out, fingers tensing around the lip of the pond so hard a nail cracked.
“One,” Tiernan bit out.
I sucked in a deep lungful of air, hoping somehow that the oxygen in my lungs would douse the flames on my ass.
No such luck.
Crack.
“Two.”
Crack. Crack. Crack.
“Three. Four. Five.”
A wail rose in my chest and leaked through my mouth on the next slapping impact. The pain was mounting into something utterly pervasive, it invaded my nostrils, plugged my ears, embedded itself in my throat until I was all hurt, one single aching atom of pain.
Six, seven, eight, nine, in such quick succession I didn’t notice I was crying or when it had started until I noticed droplets falling into the clear pond through blurry eyes.
The tenth stroke was when it happened.
It.
Some strange alchemy in the chemistry of my body that turned each lash of that cruelly biting bamboo cane into something that reached as deep as my bones and went warm.
Liquid.
My muscles slowly unclenched, hot and aching, yearning instead of protecting. Unconsciously, I arched my back even deeper under the press of Tiernan’s hand, the cool air tickling the underside of my blazing ass, sparking a contrast so delicious it made me clench my teeth with something other than pain.
Eleven.
Twelve.
A moan rumbled through me like an earthquake, sundering me in half so that everything dark and hidden under the crust of my careful veneer went tumbling into the half light of the solarium for Tiernan to sift through and decipher.
“Thirteen.” His voice like smoke now, sinuous and sinful.
Not angry anymore, so much as…aroused?”
I rocked back into the next stroke, toes curling in my Prada loafers, breath chugging through my chest like steam from a train.
“Still,” he reminded me, but there was a thread of satisfaction in his tone at my eagerness. “Be still, little thing, or I might hurt you.”
Because he knew the truth, that he wasn’t hurting me, not really, not anymore. Each blow fell just as sharply as before, but my body translated it into bone-rattling pleasure. I could feel the swollen ache of it between my thighs, the stickiness of my underwear clinging to my sex.
Fourteen and fifteen fell, but Tiernan paused before sixteen because I bucked again. I was losing sense of myself in the pain/pleasure vortex. My thoughts had no time to form before my body was singing with sensation again. When he paused, a little, almost noiseless whine fell from my lips and shamed me.
But not enough to stop.
“Hush,” Tiernan ordered, pressing his entire body into my right side, the hand on my back sliding to my left hip so that I was locked against the hard, hot length of him. “Be still and take what I give you.”
A shiver rippled through me like one of my tears splashing into the pond.
Crack.
“Sixteen.”
Moan.
Crack.
“Seventeen,” said between clenched teeth like he was the one in pain, his whole body tensed against me.
Moan.
Crack.
“Eighteen.”
A moan so long, it didn’t end until after the nineteenth strike.
I was crying hard, sobbing really, my face as wet as that untouched place between my thighs. There were formless words on my tongue I mindlessly tried to articulate without success, almost babbling as he reared back and gave me that final, punishing strike.
Electric heat sizzled through me, sparking in my pussy. It was almost enough. So close. Yet not enough.
Tiernan held me hard against him as I moaned and cried and tried to gyrate against the air for any kind of friction to send me over the edge.
It took me a few long minutes to settle under his calming hands, one stroking at my hip, the other over the hair streaming down my back. Only the sound of his harsh breath and my hiccoughing, diminishing cries filled the echoing solarium.
I stared unseeing at the mosaic tiles at the bottom beneath the water as I tried to dredge my mind up from the depths of my body’s firing synapses. With a start, I came back to myself, mind clearing, thoughts as clear as those tiny tiles lining the pond.
“Oh my God,” I whispered, head dropping between my shoulders, hair curtaining my face.
My shame.
I’d almost orgasmed from Tiernan spanking me.
With a freaking bamboo switch like some kinky, shameless whore.
Like someone without pride.
Like someone without the last name of Belcante, without the proud, noble Constantine blood.
The shame coursing through me like cold water through my steaming veins misted my eyes and made me want to cry for different reasons.
Tiernan seemed to sense the change in me and silently stepped away to give me space.
I stood instantly, then winced as the pain in my backside flared brilliantly, giving way to a duller ache in the muscles I’d held clenched for too long. I couldn’t look at Tiernan. Everything in me repelled from him, because he had done this to me.
It had been in me to give, I’d known this for years, this acute ache for something rough and wrong.
But he’d been the one to beat it out of me.
And I was freaking terrified that now this deviant thing in me had seen the light, I wouldn’t be able to put it to rest again.
Especially not around him.
“You’re a monster,” I croaked, because he was and in that moment I hated him with everything in me, more than I ever had before.
He let me turn on my heels and walk away stiffly through the cover of foliage leading to the door.
It was only when I was deep in his caged jungle that his voice, rough as gravel, called blandly out to me.
“You keep breaking my rules, little thing, and I’ll just keep coming up with inventive punishments.”
As far as threats went, it was the best he’d ever issued.