"Yes…” she hissed.
"Here?” He kissed her chest over her heart. "Do you ache for me here?”
"Malcolm…you told me not to love you. Don’t make me love you.”
"But do you miss me when I’m gone?” he asked.
"The things you do to me…I’d never dare dream them, much less do them. And yet, when I’m with you, there is no game I wouldn’t play, nothing of my body would I keep from you. You leave me and I go mad with waiting. You leave me and you are my every waking thought and my every sleeping dream. And if I knew when you were returning to me, I would count the minutes until I saw you again.” She paused. "No, that’s a lie.”
"What’s the truth, Mona?” His voice was so soft and tender it hurt her.
"I would count the seconds.”
They breathed together, looking into each other’s eyes. His mouth closed over hers again and they were locked into a kiss that would seemingly never end.
Then it did.
Malcolm panted. He released her breast and wrapped that arm around her back again, pulling her roughly against him.
"What you feel for me is what I want you to feel tonight,” he said. "But you might hate me after.”
"I could never hate you.”
"Don’t say things like that,” he warned. "Men like me take statements such as that as a challenge.”
"Will you beat me very brutally tonight?”
"I will.”
"Will I like it?”
"If you let yourself.”
"I’ll try,” she said, scared but willing. Anything for Malcolm. Especially tonight. She’d never met a man who conformed so closely to her ideal. She felt the smooth leather of his riding boot against her bare calf. She rubbed her leg against it like a cat rubbing its cheek against a chair leg it wanted to mark. She ran her hands down the velvet of his broad back, cupped his firm backside and held it while he kissed her. Of their own accord her hips pushed into his again and again. Her sex was already open for him, wet and slick, hollowed out and waiting. If he put his cock into her right now, she’d come before he’d even bottomed out inside her on the first stroke.
But he didn’t take her.
"Listen to me, Mona.” He put his hands on her neck, lightly cupping it, his thumbs pressing into the hollow of her throat to force her to pay attention to his words. She dropped her hands to her sides and met his dark flinty eyes again. "You’ll be mine tonight in a way you’ve never been mine before. It’s one thing to allow a man to pleasure you. It’s quite another to allow him to hurt you. You’ll know real powerlessness tonight, real fear, true pain. And I will drink it like wine.”
"You like my pain?”
"I love your submission to pain. It’s human nature to race toward pleasure and flee from pain. That you would fight your own nature to please me by suffering my crop arouses me more than anything you’ve done for me before.”
"I want to please you.” She placed her hands on his trim waist, feeling the heavy brocade cloth of his vest and the heat of his body under her hands. "After all, that’s what you’re paying me for.”
"Oh…you will be beaten for that.” He eyes narrowed and she saw he meant it.
"Good,” she said. "If I’m going to be beaten, I want to have earned it.”
"You earned it when you crossed the threshold. You earned it when you sold your body to me.” He stepped back from her, putting breathing room between them. She already felt cool without the heat of his body against hers. "Show me my property. Show me what I got for my money.”
Mona slipped the other strap of her gown off her shoulder and lowered the bodice. She gathered the fabric in her hands at her waist and pushed it all the way to her ankles. Naked but for the red high heeled shoes she wore, she stepped out of the dress and onto the floor.
"A blank canvas,” Malcolm said as he walked a circuit around her naked body. "I’ll enjoy painting you red and blue.”
She quaked in her shoes with fear and arousal. She’d never been with a man as beautiful as Malcolm and she would have walked barefoot across a pit of red coals to please him tonight…but he was right. Reason called to her, telling her to run from the pain.
She ignored its voice. It sounded too much like her own. She’d far rather listen to Malcolm’s.
"Put your arms behind your head,” he said. "Clasp your fingers and keep your elbows open. Like a butterfly’s wings.”
She did as she was told. The move made her arch her back, thrust her breasts forward. Malcolm stood before her, inspecting her.
"Legs wider,” he said. He touched the floor with the tip of the riding crop in two places—here and there, showing her where to place her feet. She moved her feet wider apart, a foot and a half, and stood quivering in place.
"Very nice.” Malcolm raised the crop and tapped her left nipple with it. Then her right. He caressed the underside of each breast with the triangle of leather on the crop’s end. He ran the shaft of the crop down the sides of her body from each elbow to each ankle and back up again. It tickled and made her shiver. She would have given anything to feel Malcolm’s body against her right now. She craved it and with every passing second she craved it more. No doubt this was the intention.
He stepped close again. It was torture to be so close without touching. He brought the crop up between them and pressed the flat side of the tip to his lips. Then he pressed the opposite side to her lips.
"Think of it as a kiss,” he said when the leather lay against her mouth. "That’s all it is. Just a kiss from me to you.”
"Most kisses don’t leave welts,” she said. "I prefer French kissing.”
"Well, I’m English. This is English kissing.”
Then stepping back again, he brought the crop’s leather tip between her legs and lightly tapped her sex. He turned it on its side and used the edge of the tip to pry her apart along the seam of her vulva. She felt the stiff leather corner against the entrance of her body.
"It stings more if it’s wet,” he said with his devil’s grin and for a split second she wondered…what if Malcolm was the devil? With a riding crop in her cunt, she could almost believe it.
So what if he was? She wanted him all the same.
He dipped the riding crop’s tip into her sex again, wetting it with her own fluids.
"Insult to injury,” she said.
He held his arms wide, smiled, and bowed. "The name of the game, my darling.”
She nodded her acquiescence.
"Here are the rules,” he said. "You survive my crop, you earn my cock. A hundred strikes of this.” He lifted the crop into the air. "For a hundred strokes of this.” He pointed casually at his crotch and she could see the outline of his erection through the pale breeches. The trousers adhered so tightly to his body she could even see one long vein running from the base along to the shaft to the tip. She knew that vein. She’d licked it with her own tongue.
A hundred strokes of his cock? She’d come after the first ten, if not on the very first.