felt when he’d left flooded in to fill the vacancy.
“You wouldn’t tell me,” she said. “It wasn’t fair. You had just asked me…you had just demanded that I tell you things that were so private, and you wouldn’t even tell me your name . How could I trust you?”
He was silent.
“You deserved it,” she said hotly.
At the snap of her words Jake’s head tilted back, as though he’d been struck, and a flicker of human emotion lit up his face. Catie was afraid to move, to speak, to breathe, for fear of what that emotion would be. She herself was torn between righteous indignation at the fact that he really did deserve it, and guilt because, well, that’s not the only reason she’d done it. And then Jake stepped forward, and she saw him more clearly. She saw that he was lit up with…
Lust?
“You play games, Catie,” he said, closing the door behind him. “You play games to provoke. I do not know why, as of yet. But let’s find out what kind of response you crave.”
What I crave…
His tone sent shivering sparks shooting through her body until her skin tingled all over. She already knew what it meant.
“You must be disciplined,” he said, and pulled the table across the floor with a harsh screech, back to the center of the room. Catie stared at it, wide-eyed. Disciplined. The word itself sent her blood rushing to her core. She was feeling lightheaded again, her pulse throbbing in every sensitive part of her, her hearing dulled.
“Disciplined?” she asked. Her throat was dry.
“I won’t call it punishment yet,” Jake said. “That remains to be determined. But you promised your obedience, Catie. Now obey. Bend over and lay your forearms flat on the table.”
This. This . This was the energy she remembered from Lola’s office, when he’d dragged her up by her hair…
She walked over to the table in a kind of trance. The anticipation was better than any drug she’d ever tried back in her wild teenage years. Every nerve felt alive and primed and happy, ready to sing out in a chorus of sensation. Even pain.
She bent over and put her forearms flat on the table. She felt hot between her legs, and that familiar peace came over her as all thought disappeared from her mind, leaving only her desire behind. She wanted him. She wanted his domination. She needed relief—from lying, from the interview. From doing things she knew to be wrong. From everything.
“Yes, sir,” she whispered.
His fingers danced up the backs of her naked legs, and she sighed. He grabbed the hem of her skirt and yanked it over her buttocks, so rapidly she thought she heard the fabric rip. That small sound gave her chills.
Her underwear was still lying ruined on the floor somewhere. He’d be able to see how wet she was for him all over again. She listened hard for the sound of a zipper, wanted to hear the sound of his zipper, was aching to feel him inside her again, but instead—
“Oh, I’m not going to fuck you,” he said behind her. “You don’t deserve to be fucked again yet.”
And then she felt his first blow.
It was his hand, just his open palm, expertly placed at the juncture where her buttocks curved into her legs so that it stung in rippling waves that shook her flesh and made her ache for more. Her breasts swung forward and her sore nipples brushed the table through her shirt, and she gasped.
He spanked her again and again, until she could feel the wetness spill down her inner thighs, until she thought she would come just from the impact. She moaned, and started to arch toward him, and she thought, for just a moment, she thought he might…
He grunted and put his hand between her legs, as if just to remind her she was still under his control. She did not move, held still at the precipice. Her body needed to come.
“No,” he said. His voice was hoarse, and she thought she heard it tremble. “This is your punishment, Catie. If you want to be trained by me—if you want to be trained at