“On your toes,” he ordered, his voice stern. “I want that ass reaching for my punishment.”
Her emotions fought a pitched battle among themselves, but she obeyed, straining up another inch, even in the tipped heels. The next strike startled her, because it wasn’t his hand. It was the back of a brush, the carved oak hairbrush he’d taken from the dresser. The wood stung fiercely against her already tender buttock. As she internalized that shock, he did it to the other cheek, and then he set about alternating, side to side, hand to brush, never letting it get into a rhythm. Stinging heat became painful fire, but she kept lifting up to him, until she realized she had tears on her cheeks and sobs were catching in her throat. That emotional knot she’d resurrected loosened, unraveled. She was begging him now, but she wasn’t sure for what. It was just his name… No, it wasn’t…
“Master…please…”
She was too far gone for the shock of it to stop the words, but as she cried out in real pain at the last strike, he dropped the brush to the side. She let out a small shriek as his hands closed hard over the abused buttocks, and then she choked on her latest sob as his tongue thrust into her p-ssy, his mouth sealing over that and the perineum, then moving upward, teasing the rim of her anus, making her moan further. He was turning her over. Before she could blink or move to dash her tears away, he had her stretched out on her back, and he was lying full on top of her, his body insinuated between her legs. His arms were around her, pulling her in to his chest, but the open vulnerability of it, the fact she could only curl around him, her legs and body spread open to him, kept the tears coming.
He framed her face then, making her look at him. “Tell me one thing about you, Rachel. Something I don’t know.”
I think you may know everything. Because I feel like you’re standing right inside my soul. Because she was trembling, and because he’d laid her wide open, he’d made the one thing she could barely handle thinking about, let alone saying, come out of her lips. The thing she hadn’t been able to bring herself to voice in his office.
“My son died in Afghanistan. He was nineteen years old. I held him when he was born, and a roadside bomb blew away those perfect legs and arms, that beautiful face. He had my nose and my smile. His father’s eyes.”
Jon nodded. He stroked away the tears, traced her lips. She was going to shatter. “I need to move. Please.”
“You’ll lie like this, spread beneath me, and trust me to hold you together.”
But it was too late. That pain had already shattered her soul. What was once resilient had proven itself too fragile, and there was no putting a porcelain doll back together after it had been broken. Though she was glued together, there was no hiding the cracks. “I don’t know what this is for you, Jon, but I’m not strong enough. I thought I could do at least tonight, have this, but I made the wrong choice. Seems I’m always making the wrong choices. I’m too old to make one that’s this wrong.”
Propping himself on one elbow, he swept his thumb along her cheek bone, teasing the corner of her mouth, wet with the tears. “Close your eyes.”
When she hesitated, he sharpened his voice, repeated it, though there was something in the tone that made it reassuring, even with the note of reproof and command. She closed her eyes, her throat aching with those tears.
He held the pause a long moment, stroking her, letting her still, focus on what might be coming next. Occasionally a soft noise came from his throat as she hiccupped on a sob, but when she had settled down, he spoke again. “Most of us, even as we grow up, continue to look at the world through the subconscious of the age we were before we hit the reality and disappointments that we discover as adults. So, when you look at yourself in the mirror of your mind, you’re looking through the eyes of a certain age. How old are those eyes, Rachel?”
It made her even more uncomfortable, but as long as he had her spread-eagled and pinned like this she couldn’t be less than honest. “I guess…nineteen or twenty. Right before I had Kyle.”
With her eyes still closed, she leaned her cheek into the hand that was sliding down her cheek, curving around her chin. Jon’s voice was a rumble in her anxious mind.
“The therapist I had to see when I was twelve said that I had the outlook of a forty-year-old. I told him I was the reincarnation of Galileo, or possibly the ancient bard Taliesin. Never could decide. Maybe both. So see, under either interpretation, I’m far older than you.”
A weak smile tugged at her lips, despite herself. She opened her eyes then to see him trace that smile, caressing her dimple. His eyes were full of so many mesmerizing things. Compassion, desire, knowledge. A complete and utter absorption in her that unbalanced her reality, the way she’d always told herself life had to be. A lock of his dark hair had fallen over his brow, and when she reached up to stroke through it, his palm followed the line of her upper arm, then came down to cup her breast, weigh it thoughtfully.
“You have nice, heavy breasts. You looked to me like a woman who’s nursed a child, your breasts lower than a woman your age who hasn’t.” Before that observation could discomfit her, he bent his head, licked the nipple with casual pleasure, spoke against it. “I can see you nursing your baby with these beautiful, ripe breasts, swollen with milk, your nipples so large. You’d both be in my lap, and I’d watch him suck, equally fascinated and envious, hoping I might get a turn soon. Babies are little tyrants who trump even a Master’s demands.”
It startled a half-chuckle out of her, winning an answering glint from his gaze. Then he sobered. “Why are there no pictures of him, Rachel? There are no photographs in your home at all. Only paintings, most of them about tranquility, serenity.” His glance went to the picture on the wall, the governess yearning toward that clandestine kiss. “Except for this, a window into your soul. You’ve made this your refuge, because every time you go out, reality is pretty hard for you, isn’t it?”
“You know, I’m beginning to understand why dating a clueless male isn’t such a bad thing.”
“Too late,” he commented. “The pictures?”
She molded her hand behind his on her breast, liking the dusting of hair on the knuckles, the long, strong fingers. So different from hers, the times she’d tried, futilely, to pleasure herself in this bed, imagining her far-too-feminine hands as a man’s. Her throat was clogged with memories, but she found the answer for him. “I couldn’t handle the questions. The, ‘oh who is this handsome young man?’”
She looked left, toward the closet. “I keep the album tucked in between my sweaters. Most nights, I look at it before I go to bed.” She’d done it so often the slick page corners were permanently worn from her fingertips. “I keep it in there because when people see a photo album, they figure it’s okay to look, like it’s public property. I couldn’t bear someone visiting, picking it up on a whim and having to talk about it, answer questions…”
“You don’t have a lot of those either. Visitors.” As relentless as those blue eyes were, it was the press of his body on hers, the firmness of his groin against her p-ssy, everything that intimate connection could mean, that kept all of her soul spread open to him. She felt like nothing was hidden, yet in the dim light of her bedroom, she was also warm beneath him. Sheltered. The things she was in the privacy of this room, she could be with him. It was unsettling. She wasn’t sure she could deny him anything.