go!”
His hand on my back held me tightly in place. “You know what you have to say, Molly. Say it. Say it, and I’ll stop.”
I froze. Saying it was admitting defeat, and I hated defeat. I liked to win—I loved to win, and if Silas thought he could spank the safe word out of me, he was dead wrong. Besides, there was the way that my ass felt after the slap—warm and glowing—and the way my breathing sped up as he shifted under me and the way that my nipples tightened as his fingertips ran lightly over my thighs.
But.
But.
I wasn’t used to being spanked. Hell, I wasn’t used to being dominated at all, had never let a man run my body this way, not since Mr. Cunningham had bought my virginity from me for five hundred thousand pounds when I was fourteen.
You’d never let a man since Cunningham…until Silas last year.
“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