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  She was practically hyperventilating and finally had to reach out and grab a hold of his shirt in order to keep from dissolving into a puddle on the floor in front of him. But she swore to herself that she'd hold his eyes until the darkness claimed her, even if it killed her to do so.

  "Very good, my sweet." The impulse was there to call her "my love," but he bit it ruthlessly back. "But I think we'll take this to your room. I want to watch you as I feel you explode and implode in my arms."

  Her shirt joined the panties and shorts he'd left on the floor before lifting her into his arms. He could have done that in many different ways. She knew he didn't consider her one hundred and ten pounds to be in any way taxing when he carried her. But he chose to wrap his weaker arm around her middle, using it to lift her as he reached down to guide a supple thigh around his own waist, forcing her to endure the relatively short journey from her kitchen to her bedroom while perched – naked and spread by dint of her position – over the prominence that was his throbbing package.

  He had thought of reaching down to free himself before hand, so that she would have been impaled on him for the trip, but he preferred not to anticipate things. So that when he finally guided his cock up into that excruciatingly tight passage of hers, she was well and truly desperate to receive him. Instead, Miranda got to feel her clit being rubbed up against the luckily worn, soft denim ridge beneath her with each step he took. There was no mistaking that hardness. It in no way yielded to her weight, but in fact swelled even further as if seeking the moist heat that was directly above it.

  Mace dwarfed her small bedroom as blatantly as he did its owner. Yet he managed not to look in the slightest out of place. He was the very epitome of masculinity surrounded by her choice of very feminine décor, which was heavy on pink roses with sea foam green accents, with lots of ruffles and frills.

  He was going to deposit her on her back on her bed, to grab her hips and drag her down to his mouth as he waited, kneeling, at the edge at the end. But he happened to catch sight of the two of them as they passed by what he knew, from listening to her talk about it, was a shabby chic Victorian style cheval floor mirror. The image knocked every bit of breath out of him. So, instead, he crossed to stand in front of it with her still in his arms, her slim legs barely able to lock around his waist. For a long moment, they each stared into the mirror; their breathing becoming even more ragged than it had been before.

  Eventually, Mace brought an end to their torturous, and what was worse, entirely unproductive, gawking at just how goddamned erotic they looked together like that and slowly lowered her to the ground, making sure that her pussy slid slowly down the curve of his bulge, feeling her shudder in his arms because of it. But he didn't let her get very far, keeping his hands on her hips as he turned her around so that her back was to his front, loving the sight of her much smaller body pressed back against his, held there by a splayed hand on her lower stomach and one that diagonally crossed her ribcage to take possession of a generous breast. Squeezing less than gently, then roughly twisting the painfully swollen nipple he found there, he pulled it away from her body as best he could. Her flesh was so firm and fully packed that it didn't go very far, but then, it didn't need to to achieve his end, either. It forced her up onto her tiptoes to try to relieve that painful ache with mixed results. Because as soon as she made herself as tall as she possibly could, he simply tugged that much harder, so that what little relief she was able to find was fleeting at best.

  Miranda felt surrounded by him, as if he enveloped her with his body, his typically wide power stance embracing the length of her with his legs, his feet paralleling hers, forcing her to stand just that much closer to him between them, her bottom rubbing against the blatant evidence of his desire for her.

  That torturous hand found its way to her other nipple and gave it exactly the same treatment with the same results, as he thoroughly enjoyed the way she squealed and keened, not that it had any effect at all on what he did to her. "Where should your hands be, little one?" he murmured from where his chin rested on the top of her head as he fondled her at will.

  She had such a hard time with that rule; he thought it was the one she'd probably broken the most often. There were several favorite positions he used with her with relative frequency, and this was one of them. She was expected to place her hands in whatever fashion he'd decided he liked best, based on what position they were in at the time. When he had her in front of her mirror, he liked for her to reach up and put her hands around his neck as best she could. Whatever kept her hands on him and kept her arms out of his way. But he also had to admit that he enjoyed the fact that keeping her hands there was a challenge for her, forcing her onto her tiptoes. And thus constantly reminding her of both her inherent vulnerability to him as well as the fact that she was expected to always do her best to obey him. This particular position had the added benefit of making her back arch, which set her breasts off in a fashion that he would never be able to resist, as if they were begging silently for the attentions he was only too willing to provide them.

  Chapter Three

  Her hands crept very slowly and reluctantly up towards his neck, so much so that his lips found her ear to say in a hushed tone, "If I were you, and my ass still stung as badly as I'd imagine yours does, I think I'd get that accomplished much more quickly, especially considering that you had to be reminded to do it in the first place." His words spurred her on as he'd thought they would, those small hands finding his shoulders, and then following them in towards his neck, immediately becoming a few inches taller within his arms as she stood on her tiptoes to accomplish her task.

  Dear God, seeing her like that made his mouth go dry and his dick spasm violently where it poked insistently against the small of her back, finding no real harbor there. She was everything he wanted in a woman and more, despite the fact that – or maybe, more accurately, because of the fact that – she challenged him so often. She would never be an easy woman. But he was more than up to storming any battlements she might erect against him – against his possession of her, against becoming more intimate with him, against establishing something more than – what had she called it? A "kinky fuck buddy" relationship. He wanted, and intended to have, much more than that from her. Since she hadn't ordered him out of her house when he'd thrown caution to the wind and invaded it as he had, he was going to shamelessly press any advantage he could to get what he wanted from her.

  Those firm breasts jutted towards palms that quite literally itched to be filled with their sensuous weight. The mauve nipples still standing at the attention he'd brought them to moments ago, called to him. He watched in the mirror as his hands slowly drifted towards them, long, strong fingers capturing the base of each and squeezing firmly. His ears were keenly attuned to every possible reaction she might have to his actions, from a gut-wrenching groan to the softest sigh; and this time it was the latter, as if she might be trying to withhold or tamp down on her responses to him. He couldn't be sure that that was what she was trying to do, but he kept that thought in his head. His index fingers closed around her nipples, each at the same time, while the rest of his hand and strong, firm fingers continued to squeeze her flesh rhythmically, his motions rolling out of his hands from pinky all the way through to those tightly pinched nipples in a motion that was almost as if he was milking her, knowing that it was something she enjoyed enormously – or had in the past.

  Her responses this time, however, were quite subdued, and he began to think his suspicions were right. She was deliberately tamping down her usually loud and enthusiastic responses to everything he did to her. Mace wondered what might inspire her to do such a thing. Not that he was going to allow her to continue to do it, but he always wanted to know what she was thinking. She was unlike almost every other woman he'd ever known in that she didn't much like to spend time talking about her feelings – or his – for which he was ever grateful, except when it was something he thought he should know about.

  In t
rying to establish a new level of intimacy in their relationship, though, he knew that they needed to talk to each other, even about the things that they would each much rather avoid. "Miss Miranda," he breathed huskily.

  Damn, he was going to start talking to her at a time like this? How could he possibly expect her to converse when he was handling her breasts so possessively, so enticingly? It was all she could do to try to tone herself down. She wanted to writhe and moan and arch herself even more obscenely, offering herself up to him, to get him to handle her even more roughly than he already was. But now that she was faced with the starkly sexual sight of them together like this in her mirror, she realized abruptly that she wasn’t at all sure what the rules were anymore, considering that he seemed like he wanted to change the game and up the ante, as it were.

  "Are you holding out on me?" he asked sternly. One hand left its breast behind to cup the curve of her throat. And that paw was so big that his fingers extended almost to her chin as he lifted it back, thumb resting at the underside of her jaw, just in front of her ear, requiring that she arch her neck at least as much as her back was already.

  There was absolutely no implied threat there that he would ever choke her. Neither of them was into that. But he had – as usual – noticed that she liked him to make her very vulnerable. This was one quick and easy way to remind her just who was in charge without having to punish her. Not that he would shy away from that, either. In fact, he was thinking that a second disciplinary session might well be in her very near future, depending on how she answered his question.

  How had he noticed that in such a record time? No other man she'd ever been with would have probably noticed at all that she wasn't quite as vocal as she usually was when he made love to her, but Mace caught on in two seconds flat.

  He could feel her swallow very hard behind his hand. "Be very careful how you answer me, Miranda Kiley. You really would not want me to catch you in a lie, believe me. That would make all of your other punishments to date feel like I was trying to stroke you to orgasm."

  She whimpered at his words. "I-I w-wasn't t-trying to. I just… didn't know… you know…"

  He brushed the flat of his tongue from her collarbone up to her ear lobe, leaving that moist trail at once white-hot and yet she shivered at his action as if from a chill. "What, sweetie? Tell me. You can say anything. I won't be mad." Mace met her eyes in the mirror, seeing a lot of doubt there that he'd never seen before. She looked... tentative, almost to the point of being scared, which was exactly the opposite of what he was trying to do for her, for both of them.

  His hand left her throat, coming to rest between her breasts as he watched her avidly, doing his best to try to understand where she was coming from that had made her feel so uncharacteristically cautious with him.

  But she reached down and pulled his hand back to exactly where it had been. "No, please. I like how that makes me feel. I love how you make me feel – always." His ears caught the unusual places she'd used inflections in that sentence. "Even when I don't think I can take another swat, but I can see that your arm is drawn back and I'm going to get one anyway. I just—" She stopped for a second, then continued, "I wasn't sure if you wanted something different from me now. Since we're making this into a more serious deal."

  Mace kept his hand where she'd put it, perhaps tightening it a bit, but then, that was his call, not hers. His free hand began at the collarbone to which he was placing a somewhat less than gentle bite and followed her curves down, hugging them lovingly, until his hand ended up between her hips, spanning them from the tip of his little finger to the tip of his thumb. "Spread your legs for me, baby," he crooned against her neck as he bit it gently.

  Intellectually, she didn't want to obey him. Her battle was always with her stubborn intellect, which occasionally reared its ugly, militant feminist head and suggested terrible things to her – like that she didn't have to do anything he told her, that he didn't own her. But the thing was that the rest of her desperately wanted to belong to him, to be his in each and every way he might come up with, even those she might not like the idea of. She longed to surrender herself to him completely, to know that she could trust him enough to do just that and that he would keep her safe.

  She suspected as much of him, based on how he had treated her so far, but they had never taken that last, serious, committed step – although it seemed they were bound to now, at his behest.

  Mace knew she was struggling within herself, but he wasn't going to be very patient with her just because he knew how her mind worked. However, just before he was going to turn her around and spank her again – this time in front of the mirror, which he thought would be amazingly hot, she began with her right leg, moving it dramatically away from its twin, doing the same with her left leg, so that she could feel her inner lips separating because of just how widely her feet were spread apart. She lost height against him, her hands falling to clutch at his shoulders, as he required, needing him as balance so that she didn't fall forward, which served to press that very intimate area against his hand as if she was seeking him.

  Who was she kidding? She always sought his touch there. She could be dead a week and her hips would still arch into his touch.

  Then, as their eyes met and he easily held her head still so that she couldn't look away, he forced her to watch him take possession of the most intimate part of her as if he owned it himself, with every confidence that it was his absolute right to be there, to slide his fingers down between her legs, settling over her mound and pulling those eagerly exploring, slightly curving fingers back just a bit to tighten his grip on her. "This is mine. You are mine. And I want – I will have – everything from you. I will hear every cry that bubbles up in this pretty throat of yours, see every tear you shed – whether it's from my mouth loving your clit or my fingers swatting it. You no longer have the right to censor yourself, Randa. If you're too loud – which I can never envision happening – or I get sick of hearing your pleas – which I also cannot imagine happening – then I'll tell you that you must keep silent. But it is not your place, my woman, to make that kind of decision." He felt her body contract under his hand at his use of that particular acquisitive phrase and smiled evilly. "You must be as you are, as I make you, unfettered by social convention, as I will take you in public places occasionally. Unfettered by embarrassment, because I will punish you in public, also." He felt her whole body shudder at that and knew he was going to have to make that come true more quickly than some of the other things he had in mind for them. "You know that I will always take care of you."

  That idea – not the spankings or the potential public embarrassment – but the thought that he might make her dependent on him – was what had her writhing and twisting. Trying to dislodge his hand without removing her own from his shoulders and having no success at it. Fighting him not because of what he had stated he wanted to do to her, but because of what he wanted to give her.

  It didn't surprise him at all that this was the point at which she decided to fight him the hardest, but he wasn't going to back down this time. He would have her submission to him even in that which she would consider to be the biggest challenge to her ability to submit to him. He would have her submission especially in that, no matter how hard she fought him on it. And he vowed to himself that he would set about curbing her so strictly that the only thing she would say when he offered her a million dollars was, "Yes, Sir."

  Right here, right now, though, he intended to stifle her little rebellion and continued speaking about this subject – because he knew it bothered her – as he moved them to her bed. Sliding the hand that had been around her throat to the back of her neck instead, he used that hold to guide her onto all fours on her bed. Pressing her face down into her fluffy comforter, he placed a hand on her hip to tug her beautiful bottom up, into the air in a manner that afforded him a bird's eye view of the way the parts of her that he craved the most – her most secret, hidden parts – were on obscene display to him.
"You're going to quit your job and come to live with me." She tried to rear up, to break his hold on the back of her neck, but she couldn’t do it. Not that she stopped trying. He wondered frankly if she would ever stop rebelling. "I'll redecorate the room above the barn to be your studio. You can paint there. I'll buy you anything and everything you need to work on your painting."

  "NO!" she yelled, slamming a hand down on the mattress for emphasis.

  In answer, his hand came down on her behind with a thousand times more gusto. "And I will make it yes, Randa. I'm going to make sure you eat more and better than you do now—"

  "NEVER!" she screamed, and again when that palm landed across her backside another time.

  Mace continued to spank her as he spoke. He ignored her outbursts as he added extravagantly to the list of what he was going to do for her – to her she didn't seem to worry much about or object to at all. For her was completely unacceptable. At least, until now. He wasn't going to allow her to continue to hold him at bay as she had in the past. He was going to storm every one of the strange barriers she erected to their true intimacy. He would have all of her, or die trying.

  Her bottom was almost a cardinal red, and yet she continued to try to escape him, although her efforts were much less enthusiastic than they had been and she had left off screaming her rebellion at him in favor of cries of an entirely different impetus.

  Instinctively, he left off spanking her in favor of reaching down with one hand to hook his fingers over her collarbone. Then he unzipped his jeans and moved aside his underwear enough so that his raging hard on could spring to freedom, bringing its swollen head – that was already well moistened with pre-cum – to butt up against her entrance, which he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt was going to be sopping wet. And she didn't disappoint. She never ever had in that department. Once he was nestled there, his free hand mirrored its mate's position, using that hold on her to keep her from being able to move away from him much at all as he thrust his hips forward and invaded her completely in one tremendous stroke.