by Maren Smith
“I know what it means,” he growled.
“—Wax on, whack off!”
“Either find an off-switch for your mouth or I will,” Vance snapped. “I am trying to be nice here, Ettie. We survived yesterday because of you. Today, it’s my turn.”
“Don’t treat me like I’m helpless.”
He sighed. “I’m not.”
Shaking his head, he all but rolled his eyes, and the sudden ricochet of anger that shot up through her when she saw that, vaulted her onto her feet. “Yes, you are! And I’m not helpless.”
“I never said you were. I don’t think ‘helpless’ can be found anywhere in your personal vocabulary. Combative, yeah. Mouthy, hell yeah.”
“You forgot ‘bitch’,” Ettie snarled, and then backed up a step when he suddenly took one towards her. She caught herself before she retreated any further than that, but by then the damage was done. Now he wouldn’t just think she was useless, he’d also seen she was a coward.
“I actually wasn’t going to say that,” he told her, his tone serious and the smile he had been courting mere moments ago nowhere now in sight. “I might say ‘switch’ though. As in, you might want to watch what you say next, or I might just go outside and cut one. We are in the woods, sweetheart. We are surrounded by them.”
Was it his ‘sweetheart’ that made her knees weaken so badly they knocked together, or was it his threat? Her flesh up the backs of her thighs and all across her bottom crawled. But her chin hiked, and her mouth refused to stay closed. “We’re surrounded by pines and evergreens, and I happen to know for a fact they make for rotten switches. Try again, buster, ‘cause you’re not scaring me.”
A glimmer of amusement trickled back into his eyes, and the corners of his mouth quirked. “Did you notice the birch and walnut trees down by the creek? I’m pretty sure if I looked hard enough I might even find a willow. So go ahead. Keep talking. See how far you can push me before I put you across my knee and teach you how to dance.”
“You and what army?” Pure heat burned up through her face and down into her stomach. Though the words pouring out of her carried an angry tone, anger wasn’t what she was feeling. She’d never heard someone refer to the writhing effects of spanking as dancing before. Having felt his hand once already, she could well imagine just how easily he could bring her to a point of doing just that while pinned across his lap. It was an awful trick of the isolation and the cabin, and him, that in that moment she found herself wanting to experience it.
And damn him if he didn’t seem to know it.
Tipping his head, Vance took another step toward her, closing the distance by inches. “Do you really think I need an army to stripe your backside, Ettie?”
She was shaking, but not because she was mad and certainly not because she was afraid. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. For the first time in her life, she didn’t know what to say.
Which seemed to say everything he needed to hear. Turning on his heel, he walked out the door, shutting it softly behind him.
Ettie stood in the middle of that small cabin for almost a full minute, unable to explain just why she felt so…bereft. Sinking down on the nearest chair, she clasped her hands tight and tried to stop shaking. What was wrong with her? She didn’t want Vance to spank her. How could anyone want that? The man was…
A gigolo? Well, yes, but he was handsome too. And charming. And damn near devastating to every sensible fiber of her being. No wonder so many women in Corbin’s Bend kept his number on speed dial. She’d only been trapped with him for one day and already she was, what? Baiting him? She was, wasn’t she? Four years, seven months and fourteen—but no, she was actually back to one day now, and still all she felt was this deeply instilled neediness to be taken in hand. Apparently, anybody’s hand would do.
Vance’s heavy footsteps tromped down the length of the porch, coming back to the door. He opened it, two long switches already trimmed down to the bark leading the way.
She looked at them and then at him, that twisting—was it excitement and how could it possibly be that—tightening in the pit of her stomach until it hurt just to breathe.
“Up,” he said, closing the door behind him.
Ettie didn’t move. Not because she was being defiant, but because her legs wouldn’t obey her. A creeping wave of heat rippled up through her, washing over her face. An even more treacherous wave of longing followed it, filling her up in other places too devastating to think about. “Those are going to suck for kindling,” she finally said, feeling numb. “They’re too green. They won’t burn.”
The corners of his mouth twitched. “Oh sweetie. I promise, you’re about to find out just how fierce the burn can be. Last chance, stand up.”
Her stomach was a roller coaster of knotting loops. “What do you mean, last chance?”
“You know what I mean.” He took two slow steps toward her. In a room this small, two steps was all he needed to bring them to within arm’s reach of one another. “You can either stand on your own or I can come over there and get you, and instead of the six licks you’ll get ten.”
Her whole chest constricted. Something must have shown on her face because his mouth twitched again, his smile becoming that much more pronounced.
“What’s it going to be, Ettie? You or me, six or ten?”
She didn’t want this. Except, she really did. She tried to tell herself it was the spanking alone—after all, it had been such a very long time for her; God, she was so tired of counting—and not him making her nerves fire and her pulse race. But that just wasn’t true. It was very much Vance doing this to her. Everything about him was perfect, from his stance to his words, to his tone and his oh so dominant, authoritative attitude. She didn’t want it to be, but it was. How many years had she spent being angry at this man, and how could all her reasons for that just disappear in the span of one day. Try as she might, she couldn’t make herself remember a single one of them.
He took another step, coming right up to the edge of her chair.
On shaky legs, Ettie stood up.
Vance smiled, neither smug nor victorious. In fact, it seemed damn near gentle. “Good girl.” Something inside her melted just a bit. “Now our choices change. Turn around and face the table.”
Ettie glanced at it over her shoulder, then back at him. The last thing she wanted to do was turn her back on Vance. “Why?”
“You know why. Shall I add three more for defiance?”
She had the most incredible urge to say ‘Yes, please.’ She locked her lips to keep it back and faced the table.
“You’re doing very well.”
She locked her lips before she said something stupid, like, ‘Thank you.’ “Get bent,” she said instead, pulling that worn, familiar coat of rebelliousness in tight around her.
He moved around to her left side and every nerve inside her prickled in awareness of him. “I think that’s my next line, sweetie, but in the wake of such a spirited reply, I think we ought to boost your impending count from six to nine.”
Her first thought: Nine wasn’t so bad. She could do nine. A rush of liquid wanting trickled down along the lips of her sex, tickling her. Her breasts felt heavy and swollen. Her nipples ached.
“Would you like to take your pants down, or do you want me to do it?”
All the air in her lungs abandoned her. “What?”
She couldn’t take her pants down. If she did, he’d see the telltale wetness soaking into the crotch.
“Don’t be shy, Ettie,” he said, letting both switches caress upon the backs of her thighs. “We just spent the night twined together in nothing but a rug and our skin. Pants, take them down.” He tapped the seat of her bottom with the tips of those switches. “Panties, too. All the way down. You can keep your modesty by facing the table and hoping I’m blind.”
Ettie couldn’t move. Once upon a time, a long, long time before she came to Corbin’s Bend, back when her only intimate knowledge of spankings consisted of what r
are scenes she’d discovered in old-time romance novels and erotic pictures (back when the internet was new and it took fifteen minutes to download every one)—back when she was new to the world of domestic discipline and she was in her first year of college, Ettie had a roommate. Her roommate had a boyfriend. And that boyfriend had been a spanker.
Standing in the gloom of an isolated cabin lit only by firelight, funny how Ettie would think of him now. She thought about the shock of that night when she’d come home to find her girlfriend sprawled across her boyfriend’s lap, a hairbrush dancing a crisp cadence all over her rosy bottom. It had been a shock on everyone’s side. They’d been embarrassed. She’d been horribly embarrassed, and over the next week, as their relationship eased back into something less strained, Ettie finally worked up the nerve to confess her attraction to the possibility of being spanked herself.
That had been the beginning. All she had felt was excitement when her roommate’s boyfriend took her by the hand, led her to the second-hand sofa in the living room, and brought her lie facedown across his lap. He’d bared her bottom. She’d loved that part—the blushing shame of it, the age-old sense of tradition when he’d pulled her underwear down to her knees. Back then, she’d barely considered the view she’d been presenting to that young man whose name she couldn’t begin to remember. Started with an R, maybe. She’d been so preoccupied with how it had felt first to have her bottom stroked, then squeezed, and finally smacked, that she hadn’t given modesty a second thought.
For some reason, the idea of presenting that same view to Vance Foster right here and now petrified her.
“Pants down, Ettie.” Another slow step and now Vance was directly behind her. “If you do it yourself, it’s nine strokes. If I do it for you, it’ll be sixteen.”
“You’re doing it wrong. In my stories, the count always goes up in lots of six.” It was the stupidest thing she could have said, but she couldn’t help it. It was just what came pouring out of her mouth.
“I know,” Vance said, mildly amused. “I don’t want to be predictable. You’re still running your mouth and I can tell by your face that you’re hoping I’ll give up and walk away. I also know if I did that, I’ll probably destroy any future chance I might right now have of kissing you until your toes curl up tight like little pink buttons. Sweetie, I find myself wanting very, very badly to kiss you until you’re all button-toed. It’s going to be the next best thing to kissing you breathless, but then you couldn’t run your mouth and since that seems to be your only way of asking me to spank you, I’m not sure I want to take that away.”
She jumped when his hand settled on her hip, her heart stumbling inside her chest, a sensation so unexpectedly painful that she couldn’t quite breathe around it. She offered no resistance when he hooked his finger in the empty belt loop of her jeans, tugging just hard enough to coax her to turn to him. She couldn’t meet his eyes.
“I’m going to switch your bottom now, Ettie, and it’s going to be bare while I do it. So, who’s going to do the honors, you or me? Nine or sixteen?”
She looked at his mouth, but only because he’d mentioned kissing, damn it. Now the idea was stuck in her head, the tantalizing image of his lips nibbling at hers until her back began to arch and her hands reached up to cup his shoulders, pulling him closer.
His fingers left her belt loop. They wandered around her waist and down to cup her bottom, his bare palm burning right through her pants on the right cheek, those two switches caressing on the left. His touch branded her, her whole body melting into his hands until her legs wobbled and her breath caught. He squeezed her bottom again and then his hands wandered back to her belly. The next thing she felt was the loosening of her button fly, before her zipper clicked down the teeth of its track and her pants sagged.
“Sixteen it is,” he said, seducing her with his smile. The heat of his fingertips slipped in between her underwear and her skin. In stark contrast, the coolness of the switches glided over the curve of her hip to her thigh as he pushed both denim and cotton down to her shins. “Warm up?”
She quavered, breathless all over again. “Yes, please.”
“Please, no less.” His breath caressed the slope of her shoulder as he turned her back to face the table again. His hand came to rest on the back of her neck, applying gentle pressure until she bent, lowering herself until her stomach was flat upon the age-polished surface of the sturdy table. “Good girl, Ettie. Good girl.”
Every inch of her shivered, and it didn’t have a thing to do with the temperature of the room.
It wasn’t a wide table. The top of her head came nearly to the far edge. When he temporarily lay the switches down beside her, suddenly needing something to hold onto, she gripped onto that edge with both hands. It wasn’t over the knee, but there was still intimacy in the way he rested his hand upon the small of her back, encouraging compliance while his other caressed the full swells of first one buttock and then the other.
Her fingers tightened. Her nerves were firing, rapid and hot bolts of ever-building excitement. Her stomach was one giant quivering knot. No longer twisting now, but tight and tense as she waited for that first hard swat. Incredulously, the only thought she could cling to, much as her hands clung to the table’s edge, was: Please, don’t let it be too soft.
It wasn’t. When it came, the crack of his hand met the swell of her bottom with a gunshot-like pop that filled the tiny cabin the same way the shock of sensation filled her. Not too hard, not too soft. It was perfect. As was the swat that followed, and the one after that, on and on, alternating from bottom to top and cheek to cheek. It had been so, so long. Something was wrong with her. She didn’t know what it was, but the sting of tears filled her eyes long before the sting of any real discomfort overwhelmed her flesh.
She buried her face between her hands, pressing her forehead to the wood, and breathed in through her mouth in an effort to control the raggedness of the unexpected sobs rising up into the back of her throat. She didn’t mean to cry. He wasn’t spanking her anywhere near hard enough for that kind of reaction. His hand kept coming down though, peppering brisk pops of sound and bursts of warming sting all over her bottom, building the force even as he built the tempo. Try though she did to hide it, the change in her breathing must have signaled when her dam of restraint shattered and Ettie broke down.
She completely fell apart, but Vance didn’t stop. He simply shifted position, tucking her lower half up against his side, wrapping his steadying arm around her hips to prevent her from getting up or twisting away, which she only tried to do one time before her need to submit became absolute. She held herself still for him after that, letting his hand temper her flesh time and again while the sting beneath his steadily intensifying swats built into a burn.
Her hands gripped the table so fiercely that her knuckles turned white and the edge bit into the soft fleshy pads of her fingers and thumb. She refused to kick, but as his tempo changed and the raining swats turned hard and strong, her toes dug into the unyielding floor, fighting the need to curl, to drum, scramble and scrape. She buried her face between her arms, gritting her teeth to keep from keening, but nothing she did could stop her shoulders from shaking.
He stopped so suddenly, his big hands paused to rub the fire he’d built under her skin. He gripped, squeezing first one cheek and then the other. She refused to look, not wanting to see it when he stroked her shoulders, rubbed her back, and then picked up both switches together.
“Breathe,” he told her.
She couldn’t without gasping, and she didn’t want him to know how badly she was falling apart.
“Breathe,” he said again, letting the cool lengths of each verge caress soft lines across the heat of her burning backside. “It’s okay, honey. Do you want to count them?”
She shook her head. She didn’t think she could.
“Let me rephrase that. I want you to count them.”
Ettie shook her head again.
“I need to hear your voic
e, or we’re all done here. Do you want to stop?”
“One!” she snapped. It came out heavily laced with bitter defiance, and he snapped back with both switches at once. Having never been switched before, Ettie didn’t know how hard he actually struck, but the kiss of those tips held a sting unlike anything she’d ever felt. She gasped, her back arching. Her hips tried to tuck even as she came dancing up onto the tips of her toes, and still she snapped out just as harshly, “Two!”
She thought she heard him tsk, but the next flick of those switches answered just as promptly and the force of it matched her tone.
“Three!” She grit her teeth.
By four, she lost the fight for frozen submission to the smallest of kicks. Her hips began to writhe. By seven, she couldn’t hold still at all. And by ten, two-thirds of the way through her allotted count, she wasn’t calling each successive number anywhere near as swiftly or as defiantly as before.
She panted her way through to twelve, broke down sobbing at thirteen, and it was a wonder he could understand what she was saying at all when she wailed out the count for the final three strokes. She tried to get up off the table then, but a touch of his hand between her shoulders stayed her. He rubbed her back, stroked her hair and her face, but he didn’t touch her bottom again.
She wished he would. More than anything, she wanted to be touched. Not just a caress on her throbbing, welt-lined bottom, but something more intimate. She wanted to be wanton, and to be desired in that wantonness. She wanted to feel his fingers touch just once between her trembling thighs, to dip into the wetness overflowing her there, but he didn’t. All he did was let her cry, until her tears had exhausted themselves and her. Only when she finally fell quiet did he lift his hand from her shoulders and help her up.
She still had her pants around her ankles when he turned her around, folded her into his arms, and held her.
“You’re beautiful,” he said.