Three blows in quick succession, and I was so unused to pain, so unused to being held down. My whole body was squirming now, my face rubbing against my wrists as I fought for the air that had been driven out of my lungs by the pain.
His hand returned to my ass, not to strike, but to rub and caress and soothe. Stupidly, I found myself sighing into his touch, even raising my hips and trying to buck into his hand.
“Greedy girl,” he murmured, his fingers dancing past the small crevice that led to my cunt. I whimpered, bucking my hips again. The hand on my back pressed harder and he laughed a low laugh. “Greed becomes you, Mary Margaret.”
And then he trailed his hand down to my knee, where he nudged it to the edge of his lap, spreading my thighs and exposing my pussy.
I gasped.
Warm summer air blew over the wet, swollen flesh, teasing and gentle, and I somehow fe
lt more wanton than I’d ever felt. How? In a closed garden with no other people around, with a man who’d seen my cunt a hundred times before? How, when I’d been naked before scores of people, in packed ballrooms and in heated, languorous orgies? How did Silas make me feel with a few spanks and a summer breeze like I was the naughtiest—and also the sexiest—woman to ever walk this earth?
Silas groaned above me. “Fuck, you’re so wet, Molly. Please. Say your safe word. If you don’t—”
Smack.
I moaned. The pain flamed along my skin for half a second—half an unbearable second—and then dissipated, leaving to resettle deep in my core. I moaned louder as a finger teased about my wet folds.
“It starts with a c, doesn’t it, Mary?” he asked quietly. “The word?”
The finger moved lower, glancing across my clit, and I inhaled sharply. And then it went back up and, without warning, pressed hard against the pucker there. Resistance and discomfort and the memory of those times before—when he’d fucked my ass so hard that I couldn’t breathe, when I’d climaxed so long and so hard that I forgot my own name—it was muscle memory that drove my hips up against that thumb and nothing more.
It slid partway inside, and he murmured, “Did you miss this, Mary Margaret?”
“Don’t call me that,” I ground out, his pressing thumb short-circuiting my thoughts.
“Why not? It’s your real name, is it not?”
“Because not even my family used my real name. No one calls me that!”
Smack.
“I call you what I feel like calling you, are we clear on that?” he asked sternly. “You are mine to call what I want.”
“No. I’m. Not,” I managed.
“Maybe not. So use your safe word to prove it,” he goaded. “Use it and I’ll stop spanking you. I’ll even take my thumb out of your ass.”
My hips were now wriggling of their own accord, my ass begging for more punishment, my pussy begging for more pleasure. My nipples pressed hard and tight against my corset.
I didn’t want to say my safe word. I wanted him to fuck me.
There. I admitted it to myself.
“I won’t say it,” I said.
“Fine,” he said. “Have it your way.”
How dare she say that I had broken her heart again? How dare she finally, finally, admit that I affected her, that she cared about me, and then act like it was nothing?
No. It was not nothing.
It was a not-nothing that tore my heart out of my chest and then brought it back to life, it was something that gave me anguished pain and even more anguished hope all at once. If I’d broken her heart again, that meant that she still loved me, which meant that there was a chance I could salvage all this. A chance I could fix everything.
Quickly, without giving her a chance to realize what was happening, I hooked an arm around her waist and picked her up as I stood, her hips on my shoulder and her head hanging down my back and her adorable feet—tiny and encased in expensive white leather—kicking madly in front. I would be lying if I said that this didn’t make my already insistent erection even more insistent.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. “Put me down!”
