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“And the fact that you call anything I do that you don’t like a tantrum,” she continued, her chin rising up as she refused to let herself look away from him, “is certainly a big problem, as well. It’s wildly condescending, for a start.”
“Here is what will happen,” he said in a perfectly calm, conversational tone, as if there was no tension in the air, no beating, throbbing, white-hot thing wrapping tighter and tighter around them both. “I told you I was going to spank you. You had the option to dance for me, instead, but you chose to run away, as usual. Leaving me to clean up yet another one of your messes. Also as usual.” He smiled faintly. “Did you think I had forgotten these infractions?”
“Is this boarding school all over again?” she demanded, still going for the bluster even as that hot, slippery, yearning thing made her worry she might turn into a puddle on the bed. “Will I get detention for smoking that cigarette? Will I have to write lines? Scrub the floors?”
“I have something significantly more corporeal in mind.”
“You say you want obedience but you didn’t like it much when I actually got on my knees, did you?” she snapped at him, telling herself that fire in her was fear, not desire. Because she didn’t want to be fascinated by this. She wanted to be afraid. “And I’m not calling you sir, by the way, no matter how many shades of crazy you show me.”
A careless shrug. “You made your body fair game in this little struggle of ours. Why shouldn’t I do the same? I think we’ll do this my way and see what you call me when I’m done. You might be surprised.”
“If you spank me,” she told him, low and fervent, “I really will let that current sweep me off to Libya. I mean it, Nicodemus.”
“Note to self,” Nicodemus said mildly, sounding completely unimpressed with her threat. “Tie wife to the bed.”
He moved then, putting his knee on the mattress as if he meant to crawl toward her. And everything seemed to slide sideways in a dizzy sort of shift. The world went red. Mattie thought something blew up inside her—knocking out reason. Knocking out everything save that grinding, expanding, whole-bodied desire for anything and everything he might give her.
She panicked.
Mattie dove for the side of the bed, already envisioning her escape. Into the bathroom, where she could lock the door and, if all else failed, crawl out on the roof and try—
But he simply reached out and caught her with one large hand around her hip, yanking her back into the center of the bed.
“Be still,” he told her.
So instead, Mattie fought.
She flailed and she kicked, she bucked and she twisted, and she was lost for what seemed like a very long time in the haze of it. But then the fever seemed to lift, and Mattie had to face the unpleasant realization that, as ever with this man, she’d only made it all that much worse.
Because he hadn’t fought back. He’d simply pinned her to the bed with his superior strength. And waited.
She was out of breath. Nicodemus was impassive.
He was stretched out above her in absolutely the worst position she could imagine. His chest pressed against hers, flattening her breasts in a way that made her simultaneously hot and very, very worried. His hips were flush against hers, his legs on the inside of hers, and he made no attempt at all to hide the fact that he was hard. Ready. Aroused.
He was so strong. So perfectly formed. Beautiful even when he held her down, his fingers threaded with hers, her arms up and over her head and flat against the mattress.
“You’re only making this worse for yourself,” he told her.
And she was sick, she decided, because she didn’t want to fight him any longer. She wanted to melt into him. She wanted to shift so that his hardness pressed more directly against the core of her. She wanted to lift her mouth and press it against his. She wanted—and she knew that it was more destructive by far than anything he could do to her.
“Nicodemus.” But she was whispering, and even she could hear the longing in her voice. And the fact she didn’t demand that he release her.
“You claim you won’t surrender to me by choice,” he said, in that firm, relentless way that made a rush of heat wash over her, turning her restless and liquid and yearning beneath him. “And yet it has been obvious to me for some time that surrender is what you need above all things. Think about it. You, completely out of control. No manipulations. No schemes. No plotting. Just your bare bottom and my hand. Imagine what we can learn from an interaction so elemental?”
It took her long moments to realize that she was shaking, over and over, as if something had gone loose inside her and could no longer be contained. As if he was already doing the things he’d painted so vividly. As if she was already that far gone. That lost. As if she could truly surrender the way he wanted her to do. The way she wished she could do. She shook, hard and deep.
