Dangerous Temptation (Dark Dream Duet #1)(42)

“I am the master of this house. I am the master of you,” he reminded me cruelly, the hand without the bamboo reaching up to grab me by the hair and tug it back painfully so I was forced to look up into his snarling face. “I warned you what would happen if you broke my rules, Bianca. I was kind and patient with you. I let things slide. Your sharp tongue, your reluctance to give me your locket, your unwillingness to follow even the simplest of orders. She’s grieving, I thought to myself. It’s an adjustment.” He paused, and for one small second, I wondered if I had been rude to him, if I didn’t owe him some politeness and regard for taking Brando and me no matter the reasons why he’d done it. “But no more. You will learn that I am not a man who takes disobedience lightly.”

He stepped back so abruptly, I lost my balance and staggered. Instead of helping me, he watched with a small sneer that glowed in the dark, teeth white and sharp as two rows of polished knives.

“Go to the pond,” he ordered softly, yet the words seemed to echo in the solarium, whispered back at me by the leaves and trees.

I hesitated, my heart thumping and swollen in my throat so hard I thought I might choke. He only had to tap that bamboo switch against his palm to spur me forward.

When I reached the marble lip, he demanded, “Bend over and brace yourself.”

My hands trembled as I placed them on the cold stone, fingers curling over the edge to brace for what I knew would come.

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.