He didn’t even comment on them, let alone allow them to distract him.
Instead, he spanked away until they felt tight and uncomfortable and prickly.
Once I started ouching and twitching under his hand, he stopped and pulled them down.
‘Stay right there,’ he said firmly. ‘Don’t move a muscle.’
I heard him walk through to the kitchen and scrabble in the drawers. How strange. What could he have in mind?
When he came back, he laid something flat and cool and made, I supposed, of wood against my warmed cheeks.
‘This might be painful,’ he warned me. ‘But you’re getting ten good hard ones. No excuses.’
He was right about the pain. There was some kind of fundamental antagonism between skin and wood. I kicked and gasped and earned two extras, but I managed to hold myself down for the full complement, working through the deep-seated soreness and heat, taking my medicine.
He lectured me throughout and, while I couldn’t have said I was listening very closely at the time, when I thought about it afterwards, I recalled every single word. It seemed that words plus spanks gave a much more lasting effect than words alone. This was a shaming realisation, but one I had to accept if I was going to make a success of the project.
Once he’d put down the wooden thing – a spatula, I noticed – I expected him to send me to the stupid corner, or the computer to write the stupid journal entry, but he didn’t. Instead, he let his hand linger on my bottom, stroking it, then one of his fingers drifted in between the cheeks, making me shiver.
I heard his breathing quicken. His hand slid down inside my thighs. I could almost feel his indecision, almost feel the unruly twitch of his pulse.
Finally, he said, ‘Ah, fuck it,’ in a rough-edged voice and I heard his trousers fall, with a clink of belt buckle, down to his ankles.
I felt a charge of victorious lust right between my legs. He had beaten me and now I had beaten him. His grip on my hips made me snarl with triumph and when he pushed into me, quickly and without finesse, I hissed.
Whoever wrote that book had better self-control than Dan.
Whoever wrote that book was able to look at his woman’s rosy-red upturned arse without the blood rushing to a certain part of his patriarchal anatomy. Or so he said. Personally, I think he was lying.
Dan definitely didn’t share his imperviousness. He thrust away, hard and fast, grunting with the effort of it. His pelvis slapped up against my too-warm cheeks, heating them even more, and he put a hand on the scruff of my neck and held me down until he heard the muffled, garbled beginnings of my orgasm.
That was all he needed to start pumping even faster, until he collapsed with all his weight on top of me so that the sofa arm pressed uncomfortably into my stomach.
‘Oh, God,’ he panted, his damp cheek sticking to mine. ‘Oh, God, Pip. I don’t think I’m up to this.’
‘Hey,’ I wheezed, barely able to get the breath out of my severely compressed lungs.
He took the hint, heaved himself off me and landed with a thud on the sofa. He grabbed my hands and drew me on to his lap – not over it, this time. The deep-seated tenderness from the spatula-spanking made me gasp a little, but I liked the feel of it, right inside me, a living aide-mémoire.
He wrapped his arms tightly around me and buried his face in my shoulder for a few moments. When he withdrew it, he looked sheepish.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘It really hurt,’ I said, ‘but that was what I needed. Don’t be sorry.’
‘No, not that,’ he said with a little snuffle of a laugh. ‘I’d have given you twice as many strokes if you’d given me a hint of defiance. No, I mean … afterwards.’
‘Oh, you shouldn’t be sorry about that. I’m certainly not.’
His lips twisted in a quick smile but his eyes were troubled.
‘I feel like I’ve fucked up. No, don’t make some silly joke, I’m serious. You want this and I want to help you. If I turn it into a kinky sex game because I can’t control my, uh, urges, then …’
‘Oh, don’t be so hard on yourself, love.’
‘Well, that’s it. It’s you I’m supposed to be hard on.’
‘But it gives you a hard-on.’