by Maren Smith
"I'm not going to call you that," she said shortly. Grabbing her plate, she stood up, but that was as close to leaving as he allowed. When he snapped his fingers, her feet stopped moving so abruptly she might as well have put down roots.
Without a word, Dominick pointed at her vacated seat, then sipped his morning coffee and waited until, reluctantly, she complied.
"Have I upset you somehow?" he asked, calmly and quietly once her bottom resumed its ginger contact with the seat.
Maddy flushed all over again. She folded her hands tight in her lap, determined not to fidget so he wouldn't see how nervous he made her. She wished she knew what to tell him. That she hadn't liked waking up half naked beside a very public walkway by the CEO of the resort she was here to do a job for. It still wasn't his fault… Well, okay, catching her by the arm last night had been, but everything that happened after that she had no one to blame for but herself. At any time she could have used her safeword, but she hadn't. It had been her choice, her libido that she'd given free rein to, and ultimately her decision to simply lie there with her eyes closed when she could have crawled her boneless self back to her room where she could have passed out in private.
She puffed out several frustrated huffs before, eventually, she grumbled, "No."
"Are you sure?" he inquired, still calm, still quiet. "Because you seem a little irate."
She puffed again, her irritation spilling out beyond her ability to contain. And because she didn't have any good reason for feeling this way, she was forced to adopt one. In the end, she wished she'd tried harder to keep her mouth shut, because what came spilling out of it was almost worse than admitting the truth. "I have road rash."
"Impossible. We haven't yet fucked on a road."
"I have beach rash then!" she hissed, lowering her voice to an angry whisper, painfully aware of every other person in the dining hall. What faint conversations she could hear were none of them loud enough to cover this one.
Sipping his coffee, Dominick smiled ever so faintly. "Do you need help digging out the sand?" He showed her his hand. "I promise to only use my fingers." He waggled them once, then slowly and deliberately closed them all together. His thumb tucked against his palm as he narrowed his hand and, with a twist of his wrist, mimed a faint upward thrust. He held her gaze a moment longer before letting his hand drop again. "Would you like to tell me what's really going on?"
Legs shaking, Maddy stood up again.
Again, Dominick stopped her with a snap of his fingers. Her feet obeyed despite her brain. She wanted so badly to leave and yet she couldn't make them move until, with even greater authority than before, he pointed at her chair. Something in the way he held her gaze said that this was the last time he'd make that request without consequence. Her bottom tingled, apprehension prickling through all the layers of her skin. The longer she stood there, the more that sensation intensified until, trembling all over, Maddy returned to her chair.
"Look at me," he said, no trace of smile anywhere about him now.
She tried, but it was so very hard to hold his stare. Not doing as he ordered was harder still, however. The end result became obedience delivered through snatching glances that returned to him only to dart away, again and again while her hands picked at one another in her lap.
"Do I need to stand you up?" he asked, one finger tapping out a warning along the edge of his cup.
That wasn't what he was really asking, though. What he was really saying, was: Did she want him to flex his authority and make her not just stand but turn around and bend over, presenting her bottom so he could lay into it with one or two or however many disciplinary swats he thought appropriate to get her out of the snit she was working herself up to throwing?
Did she want that? Mortification burned her, and all that dreadful tingling that had been playing across the surface of her bottom suddenly relocated, shooting straight down to that shadowy point between her tightly clenched legs. It made her feel scared. It made her feel reckless.
It made her feel like last night all over again.
"Stand up, sit down," she grumbled, the words—like her rapid, near panicky breaths—just rising up and falling out of her even though she knew she ought to keep her mouth shut. She couldn't, though. She'd long since reached the point of being no longer able to. "Make up your mind, why don't you? All this up and down is getting boring."
"Have it your way." Dominick abandoned his coffee cup and tossed his napkin on the table beside his plate. "Up."
Snorting, Maddy threw a strawberry at him. It bounced off his chest and rolled away somewhere. She sat there; he did not. Shoving his chair back, Dominick stood up. Her irritation died when she noticed how he was looking at her now. Everything about him seemed dark all of a sudden, not just his eyes. Even his mouth was tense and frowning. All too late, she heard the warning bells tolling in her head. "I-I'm sorry about the strawberry," she allowed, though she didn't feel particularly sorry.
"Too little, too late. Up." Arms at his sides, the finger of one hand flicked repeatedly at its opposing thumb; it was her only clue to what he was truly feeling under the dark of that tight-lipped mask he wore. "I'm not going to tell you again, Maddy mine. Obey me, right now, or you and I are going to take this to the next level. How badly do you want to go there? You have three seconds to decide."
When he unhooked his bullwhip from his hip and set it on the table, the bottom fell right out of Maddy's stomach.
"I'm not going to use that," he promised. She was almost reassured until she noticed he was also unbuckling his belt. He tugged it free of his pants with a single serpentine hiss of leather on cloth. Doubling the wide length in half, he palmed the buckle and all of Maddy's earlier irritation vanished. It was now entirely replaced by panic.
Soft and unapologetic, he answered her unspoken question. "Yes. This one, I am going to use."
"Not here," she whispered, her face burning, her heart beating hard in her chest and the whoosh of her pulse and the sounds of so many people laughing, talking, not paying the slightest bit of attention to them as they dined, numerous steel forks scraping lightly on ceramic dishes tickling at her ears.
"With me, you'll take the consequences when and where you misbehave."
"I didn't—"
"One."
"But I didn't!" she protested, her voice rising. In her rush to explain, she forgot she was supposed to care about those sitting close enough being able to overhear. "I wasn't! I-I-I—"
"Two," he said, unyielding.
"I'm allowed to say what I feel!" she cried, blinking hard because in that moment she really almost did cry. She could feel the tightness in her chest and the watery burn stinging at her throat and her eyes.
"Yes, you are," Dominick agreed. "In fact, I was trying to get you to say what you were feeling, but instead you decided you'd rather be short, sulky and sassy—three S's that will automatically land you a fourth, and that's 'spanked', every single time you use them with me. Strawberry? Now, that's a whole new kind of S." He paused, letting her digest that before continuing, "I'm about to say 'three', little girl, and when I do, all of this goes to the next level. I don't want to do that and I'm pretty sure, if you think about it, you don't either."
Maddy fought back frustrated tears. She didn't want to be at this level now.
"You have two choices," he said. "You can either sit right where you're at and push your luck, see what happens, or you can stand up and take the licks you've got coming."
Stubbornly biting at her trembling lip, Maddy found a third option. "Or I could call red."
He met her challenge with nothing more than a nod. He didn't bother to tell her there would be consequences for that. Even she knew there would be.
Maddy stared at the belt in his hand, at that loop of leather that she knew was going to lay into her if she stood up and which she did not want to feel. But more so, she didn't want to feel how much worse it would be if she didn't stand up. And she really, really didn't want to call r
ed, although in the back of her mind, she knew that was the only thing she could say to guarantee she never had to feel the bite of Dominick's belt. This whole thing had started because she'd wanted him to go away. If she said 'red', he might actually do that.
She felt sick to her stomach, but when she saw Dominick open his mouth for that final 'three', she stood up.
They stared at one another: the dice cast, the options on all sides removed. When he reached for her, she couldn't quite bring herself to pull away.
"Please not here," Maddy whispered, knowing it was useless even as she begged.
Taking hold of her arm, Dominick pulled her out from the table to stand behind her chair. "Face the wall. If you can't see them, they can't see you."
That was little-kid logic and so blatantly untrue. Yet when he turned her to face that shadowy back wall, not to mention the empty seat of her chair, not seeing all the people who were about to get a front row seat to her punishment did kind of help.
Kind of.
"Three with your shorts down," Dominick said, moving to stand at her left side. "Five if you keep them up, but I'll let you make that choice."
"Up," Maddy said, not liking him at all just then. The only reason he would want her pants down would be so he could look at her naked butt while he whipped it. When this was over, she couldn't wait to tell him he wasn't ever going to see her naked butt again! Just thinking about it made her bottom lip quiver.
"Bend over. Hands flat on the seat and legs straight. I want you to hold that position until I give you permission to rise."
What were her reasons again for not wanting him to go away? Maddy stared at the seat, unable to remember a single one. Her eyes burned, making her nose run and the chair disappear behind a rippling watery haze. She bent and laid her hands flat on the seat, locking her stare on the dark swirl of a wood knot in the grain between her thumbs.
His hand, the one not holding the belt, settled on the small of her back, right above the waistband of her shorts. "Breathe."
She tried to, but there was a block inside her and it wouldn't let the air come in. Fortunately, she didn't have to worry about that block for long; the first swiping bite of his belt knocked it up into the back of her throat. She caught a quick gasp before it resettled inside her, cutting everything off again. She didn't make another sound. Not when the next three swipes overlapped the first, searing pain so vibrantly across the same damn spot that she couldn't just feel it, she could hear it. Her ears rang, the white-hot hurt like a high-pitched whine. Or maybe that was her; it was hard to tell.
The fourth snapped in low, bisecting the lower swells of both buttocks and spreading its excruciating fire to places she'd have no choice but to touch if she tried to sit down later on. The last bite of his belt cut lower still, lashing the backs of her upper thighs where the bottom hem of her shorts failed to cover her. That one made her dance up onto her tiptoes, knees bending, hips bobbing and waggling, feet stamping because while leaving position might be forbidden, holding still was impossible.
Sucking air, unable to see anything for the tears gathering on her lashes, on the brink of falling if only she broke just a little bit more, Maddy forced herself to still. Her legs shook, but she stiffened her will and her knees, and brought her bottom cringingly back into position. She stared at the knot between her hands, chin wobbling, blinded by a veritable wall of the tears that she absolutely refused to cry. Not here, not because of this. Nobody was going to count that coup on her. Not Dominick, not Tessa. Nobody.
No further strokes of his belt fell. From first to last, it was over in less time than it took her to stand in the first place. In the deafening silence that followed, broken only by the tense ringing that filled her ears and the raggedness of her hiccupy breaths and the sniffles from fighting a suddenly runny nose, from somewhere in the dining room beyond her sight, Tessa giggled. "Had I known there would be two floor shows this morning, I'd have brought my camera."
Something deep inside Maddy broke then. Her bottom and thighs burned, so agonizingly hot, and yet it wasn't her bottom that she was feeling. It was the rock, the one growing up cold, fast and heavy right in the middle of her chest. She couldn't breathe past it, or swallow past it. She couldn't force back her tears far enough because it blocked the way, getting bigger and heavier with every second that she had to stand bent over that chair.
Dominick's hand left the small of her back, abandoning her now to bear the weight of that rock alone. She choked on one shuddery gasp after another until he said, "All right, you may rise."
Maddy snapped up off that chair like a stringed marionette.
Bringing her chair back to the table, Dominick directed her to it. "Sit down."
Chin held high, fists so tightly clenched that she could feel the bite of her nails digging into her soft palms, Maddy snapped around on her heel and fled. Her pace never once rose above a stiff-legged march but it was fleeing nonetheless, straight through the middle of the dining hall with Tessa laughing at her, some smiling, but everybody staring. The second she reached the exit, she shoved through the heavy spring-loaded door and the last ounce of pride and self-restraint that had enabled her to get that far snapped.
She ran, her legs feeling rubbery and weak, as fast as she could down the hall, out of that common building and across the employee compound. Being on an island restricted where she could go. Instinct took her back to her apartment. She hit the door, fumbling with her key and slapping away all the furious tears she refused to yield to until the lock at last turned and, with a click, she slammed her way inside.
Sucking in air, Maddy paced a tight back and forth circle from the front foyer to the living room and back again. She was shaking, her knees wobbling. Her hands refused to steady, and it wasn't only the run that had done this to her. One shuddery sob was all she allowed to escape as she bent, grabbing the backs of her legs first and then her ass. It hurt. It really, really hurt. He'd only spanked her five times; how could he only hit five times and have it hurt this much?
Snapping back up again, Maddy scrubbed what few tears had escaped from her cheeks. The rock in her chest was suffocating her. She hit her own breastbone, pressing hard between her breasts because she didn't know how to get it out of her. Then she heard it, the soft click of a key sliding into the front door lock and turning—first to lock (because she had forgotten to do that) and then unlocking again—before the door swung inward.
"Thank you," Dominick said, handing the master key back to Emil.
"Not a problem," the resort's CEO replied, already walking away.
Maddy's pacing route got instantly smaller, becoming no more than a single step of agitation in any available direction. She couldn't take her eyes off him, but he ignored her 'if looks could kill' and came inside anyway. If it weren't for the rock burning through her chest—it was so huge and cold—she could have ordered him to get out. But what was the point? She couldn't make him leave; nothing could make him leave until he wanted to, and judging by how he crossed the entryway, stalking her across the living room while she paced helplessly in tighter and tighter circles, he wasn't about to want to anytime soon. She shook her head, but Dominick didn't stop coming until he was standing within an easy arm's reach directly in front of her.
"You forgot something," he said, his tone soft and calm, his expression damn near unreadable.
Her breathing filled the silence in that living room. It seemed very loud. Loud and angry. Her bottom blazed, hot and sore and so very tender beneath the hems of her shorts. Where his swipes had repeatedly overlapped, the faintest brush of stiff fabric against the throbbing edges of her flesh hurt like hell.
When she neither spoke nor moved, Dominick beckoned her to him. "Come here."
The rock growing up inside her cracked. Her shoulders jerked when it did so.
"Why?" she tried to ask, but there was no sound beyond a shuddery hitch of indrawn breath.
"Aftercare," he replied, and beckoned again.
Another
crack split the rock and, for the first time since it had started, she could almost breathe again. Her shoulders began to shake, jerky hitches that wracked her one after the next, in earnest now. She tried, but there was no more blinking back the tears. She shook her head, but her face crumpled on her anyway. She covered her mouth so he wouldn't see her lips peeling back from her tightly clenched teeth, or hear the high keening whine that sounded more like an animal than a person. She didn't want to go to him, but when he held out his hand, hers found its way into it. He pulled and she went, becoming instantly enveloped in the strength of his comforting arms.
The second her forehead touched his chest, the rock shattered and she felt every icy sliver of it cutting her to ribbons before it was gone. She bawled. She didn't mean to, or want to, but she did. And by the time it was over, she couldn't even bring herself to hate him for it. It was really, really hard to hate someone who held her the way Dominick was doing, chest to chest, heart to heart, so tight in his arms that she lost the ability to tell where he stopped and she began.
Eventually the storm petered away, leaving her hiccupping and headachy and struggling to catch her breath.
"That really hurt," she sniffled into his shirt.
"Yes," he agreed, gently caressing her hair. "Oddly, it did."
It was not an apology, nor did he offer one. Not ready to be let go, Maddy burrowed closer and held no grudges.
CHAPTER NINE
"Welcome to the Glory Ho," Emil announced to a round of startled laughter. He was leading a procession of twenty-seven people—which included the bureaucrat and his entourage, everyone Maddy had flown with to La Isla del Paraíso, along with an entire second plane load of lawyers, accountants, and insurance agents. Tessa and her boyfriend were there, as was Dominick, who seemed content to linger to the back of the group with several pirate-clad Dominants, every one of whom appeared (at least whenever Maddy glanced back at them) to be deep in discussion over a packet of papers.