Total pages in book: 83
Estimated words: 75898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75898 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Feeling his strength engulf me and hearing him say with such complete decision and authority that I must never, ever get in the way of his hand when he meant to punish me… I could no longer deny that, crazy as it would have sounded to the Grace Franklin of five days ago, the words made me feel not threatened but safe. Cal’s ability to restrain me and correct me—to train me, even—I could feel it in his arm and hear it in his growling voice. Even when he had lost patience with my defiance, the masculine beast his temper turned him into would care for me… though that care, right now, meant firm, painful correction.
As if to add to the impression that I had both found my mind and lost it, in the same moment, the knowledge that I was safe with Cal made me more resistant, more rebellious, more of a handful. I didn’t move my hands.
“Wait!” I said. “I’m… I’m going!”
I tried, stupidly, to move forward toward the couch, as if to demonstrate that I hadn’t actually disobeyed him, and I had meant to stand there and wait the way he had told me to.
“Get those hands away from your butt,” Cal said, right into my ear. The words seemed cooler, the tone less heart-jumpingly scary, but they still seemed to rumble through my body, and they still carried a clear threat of rapidly escalating consequences for my defiance. “This is extra. You need to learn to obey me when I discipline you.”
It only occurred to me then that the way he had delivered these instructions clearly referred not just to this punishment but to the ones he presumably intended to give me in the indefinite future.
When he disciplines me. Tonight and… and always.
The conflict raged higher inside me than it ever had. The observing part of me, off somewhere on the horizon, seemed suddenly to have gained the ability to see far into the future, and when she, the Grace who watched me, showed me myself and Cal standing together at the altar, I let out a sob. I clenched my fists, and then I moved my hands. To my mortification, I even tried to bend over a little bit, pushing against the restraint of his strong left arm around my chest.
I would never, ever have imagined I would respond that way, or even could respond that way. I put my hands on the front of my thighs, atop the lap of my modest green dress. I could feel the thick cotton of the awful, embarrassing training panties underneath, and I tried to take foolish comfort from the thought that Cal apparently didn’t mean to bare my bottom before he spanked me.
Yet, said the version of me who could apparently look on with blushing, but very hot, excitement at the Grace about to feel her suitor’s—her future husband’s?—firm hand correcting her for her misbehavior. You know he said he was going to spank your bare ass… and then make you take everything off for your paddling.
I closed my eyes tightly, and I bit my lip. I heard a tiny whine of fear and helpless need escape my nose. Cal’s arm tightened its grip, and I felt him shift his weight a little. Then he started to spank me, very hard and very fast.
I cried out in surprise at how much it hurt despite the padding of the panties and the dress. Reflexively I tried to move my hands back behind me again, but Cal had moved his arm down and increased the force of his grip, so that I found I couldn’t move my hands far enough. The realization that I had absolutely no choice but to receive the punishment he intended to bestow on me brought a wrenching sob out of my chest. Even with the noise I made, though, I could hear Cal’s arm traveling through the air, so far and fast that it sounded like Jake’s strap.
I started to writhe desperately against the metal-bar-solid restraint of what felt like solid muscle just under my breasts. I kicked out instinctively, and lost my balance, and still Cal kept spanking me, putting his right leg across the backs of my knees so that he could keep my backside where he wanted it.
Then, just as abruptly as it had started, the spanking stopped.
“Go to the couch,” Cal growled in my ear. “Hands on your head.”
CHAPTER 28
Cal
This time, Grace obeyed without hesitation. When I had set her on her feet, her hands went straight to her head and she stepped toward the couch. She cast a look at me back over her shoulder but the expression on her face bore no resemblance to the one she had worn when she had stopped halfway across the living room floor. I had seen a gleam of defiance, then—defiance for its own sake, or, really, for the sake of getting her butt spanked even sooner.