“Aren’t you going to say your word?” he crooned in my ear. “Are you really going to let a man you hate lay you over his lap and spank you?”
I told myself that the shudder my body gave at his words was a shudder of anger and not a shudder of lust. I looked over my shoulder at him. “It doesn’t matter how hard you spank me, Silas. You won’t win.”
Smack.
I cried out as his hand landed on my bare flesh.
Smack.
Smack.
Smack.
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 felt 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!”
“You know what to say, love,” I told her as I carried her toward the maze exit. “You know how to get me to stop.”
She fell silent. Predictably.
I grinned, glad she couldn’t see it, since it would make her even angrier, but I couldn’t help myself. She was so fucking competitive—to the point that she would endure the unendurable from me simply so that I wouldn’t win.
Frankly, I didn’t want to win. I wanted to fuck her. I wanted to shower her face with kisses and apologies and promises, and I wanted her to accept my proposal and let me be her husband. I would be perfectly happy if I never heard the word Clare again, especially not in that strangled, dead voice she’d used at Mercy’s house.
So why did I feel compelled to push her? Why did I need to spank her, to force her, to debase her? I’d never needed to do that to a woman. That was Julian’s style, not mine; I was the easygoing one, the happy one. But when I saw Molly, when I was with her, something else took over. This disturbing need to have her cries filling the air, her ass glowing pink, her wrists gathered in my hand. Was it because I knew that Molly wouldn’t let just any man top her? And that turned dominating her into some kind of prize?
Or was it because, somehow, I knew that she needed it? More than me, even?
We exited the maze, and I carried her to a long stretch of lawn, laying her on the springy grass and kneeling between her legs. Birds trilled around us, butterflies flapped, and in the distance, a fountain trickled a sleepy August trickle. It was the kind of day made for fucking in the grass.
Her head twisted up. “We’re too close to the house, someone will see—”
My hand clapped over her mouth, my skin slightly darker and rougher than hers, my fingers pressing into the soft skin of her cheek.
Oh, I liked the way that looked. I liked it very much.
“You let me worry about that. Or say your safe word. But if you’re not going to say your safe word, then you’d best say nothing at all.”
I let my hand fall from her mouth as I rucked up her skirt.
“And why is that?” she asked, her eyes glowing a furious blue. “I’ll talk when I damn well please, and just because I haven’t said my safe word doesn’t mean I won’t say anything else…” Her voice trailed off as the skirts reached her waist, baring her wet, swollen pussy to me.
I took a finger and rubbed her clit—once, twice, three times. Her eyes fluttered closed.
I pulled my finger away and she groaned. “I think you’ll play by my rules,” I said, “if you want to come.”
“That’s not fair,” she said, eyes still closed.
Smack.
This time I slapped the inside of her thigh, the fiery red imprints of my fingers appearing almost instantly on her milky white skin. She drew in a sharp breath through her teeth but didn’t cry out, letting her legs fall open as I returned my attention to her clit.