I turn off the shower, wrap a towel around my body.
“I really don’t need anything, Miles!” I call out. “Just take the night off, okay?”
When there is no response, I open the bathroom door, and push it straight into a man who is not Miles.
There is nothing old or British or refined about this man. He is a barbarian in a suit.
He has long hair that curls roughly at the ends, tattoos that creep out under the sleeves of his shirt. A thick pelt of chest hair reveals itself at the opening of his shirt. It’s undone one button too many to be casual. Uncivilized, just like the rest of him.
“Hello, Chloe.” He greets me in a tone that borders on the casual.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m here to do something that should have been done a very long time ago.” His voice is like gravel being tipped onto hard asphalt. A rough, earthy sound that makes me reverberate inside.
“What… What?”
My voice goes up in pitch as he crosses the room and takes hold of me. His hands are huge. When they curl around my upper arm, his fingers touch. He makes me feel instantly tiny, and terrifyingly vulnerable.
“Miles! Call the police!”
“Miles isn’t coming.”
He takes a seat in my grandmother’s antique chair. Nobody sits in it because it’s overstuffed and doesn’t have any armrests. As it turns out, that suits my attacker just fine. He pulls me over his lap and the towel falls from my body, leaving me completely bare.
I have no idea what he is doing. I expect an assault of some kind. Something deviant and sexual, something brutal and frightening. I am half right. His palm lands on my bottom, his hand splayed flat to spank me.
The shock of being slapped makes me squeal, but he doesn’t seem to care how much noise I make. Doesn’t he realize that there is security here? Where the hell are they? How did he get past them? As my mind desperately fires questions, he keeps spanking me, his big palm making contact with my shower-wet skin.
“Why are you doing this?”
“You need this, Chloe,” he says, that voice rumbling through me.
“I definitely don’t!”
“You don’t know what you need, little girl. You don’t know what situation you’re in. You don’t know anything. Now be quiet and take your spanking.”
“Who the hell are you?”
He stops. Thank god, he stops. “You’ll call me Master.”
“Oh, for god’s sake, no, I won—ow!”
The spanking starts again. Harder and faster this time. I scream and kick. I try to pull out of his grasp, but he’s not letting me go.
“You’re crazy! And you’re going to go to jail for this! You’re going to… owwwwie…” I squeal even louder as his palm strikes harder and lower. He’s spanking my upper thighs, and the sensation is reaching a peak I can’t contain.
“Master,” he growls. “That’s what you’ll call me.”
“Master,” I gasp. I’d call him anything just to have this stop. I’m not accustomed to pain. I’m even less accustomed to punishment, and that’s what this feels like, even if I don’t know what I’ve done to earn it.
“Good girl,” he says, giving me one more slap before drawing me up from his lap, not by my hands, but by my hair.
His eyes are brown. The kind of brown you can fall into. When I look into them, I sense a deep emptiness. There is an abyss inside this man.
“Who are you?” I whisper the question.
“I’m the man who is taking you, Chloe.”
“Taking me where?”
His hand slides over my seared cheeks and pushes between my thighs. His long fingers find the slick lips of my sex. I’m wet. I don’t know why. I’m sore and embarrassed and scared. My body is in panic mode. Maybe that involves some instinctive response of arousal.
“Anywhere and any way I want.”
His voice makes me tremble. There’s something completely certain, totally possessive about it. He touches me as though he owns me, as if I am a thing for him to use. His fingers make the point further by sliding up and down my bare slit, smearing the traitorous juices along the folds of my sex.
I look into those eyes, search them for some hint of his identity. I don’t know him. I’m certain I have never met him. Can I be so sure, though? I meet thousands of people every year. Have I seen him before in a less predatory mode? Has he somehow blended into a crowd of fundraising rich-listers at some point? I know he has money. I can feel it in the way he carries himself. This is a man with power. This is a man who doesn’t believe the rules apply to him—because they don’t.
“You’re hurting me.”
“No, I’m not,” he says, the tip of his finger finding the entrance of my sex. I feel it drift in a slow circle around that delicate place and then pull away to give me another sharp slap, reigniting the pain in my bottom.