by Thianna D
“No rush,” she muttered bitterly, and yet, once he was gone all she felt was abandoned. Hating the very feel of it, Cadence promptly let go of the belt. She glared at it, tears brimming in both eyes, slipping past her lashes to roll down her cheeks when she, unable even to bear its being on the same bed with her, slapped it off onto the floor.
For some reason, that didn’t make her feel better either. She actually felt worse, but she still left it there, lying wherever it fell while she buried her face in her folded arms and silently fought her misery back until she could contain it again.
Think about it, he’d said. Think about what? About the fact that he could beat her whenever the mood struck him? Except that wasn’t really what was happening. It’s not like the rules hadn’t been spelled out for her right from the very beginning. Why did she keep pushing at him? It was almost as if she were deliberately trying to provoke him into spanking her, as if this feeling—this hot and achy bottom—were the salve by which she could smother all the myriad of pains she didn’t want to have to face. How crazy was that? To almost prefer a spanking over just building that proverbial bridge and getting the hell over it already!
She should pick up his belt. He’d told her to hold it and here she was, disobeying simply for the spite of it.
He ought to spank her again for that alone. More than five though. Ten, at least. Maybe twenty, like he’d threatened.
Twenty with his belt would probably kill her.
She sniffled, feeling just guilty enough and awful enough to briefly consider leaving the belt exactly where it was. Her sense of self-preservation quickly reassumed control over the insanity, though, and Cadence slid around to lean over the side of the mattress. She’d given the belt a better slap than she’d realized. It was completely out of reach. Her only hope of reclaiming it without Marcus ever being the wiser would be if she got out of bed long enough to get it and then get back in again.
She didn’t want to do that.
Lying down flat on the mattress again, Cadence buried her face within the sheltering folds of her arms and waited for Marcus’s inevitable return. It seemed to take forever, with every passing minute bleeding out a depressing eternity, right up until she heard the carpeted tromp of masculine footsteps coming down the hall toward her bedroom door. Then, more than anything, she wished she had more time to put off that fast-approaching moment when he would discover that she’d deliberately done the exact opposite of what he’d asked.
She closed her eyes, pressing her forehead into the backs of her wrists, wishing she could just disappear as the footsteps crossed her threshold and then stopped. He sighed. Until then, she hadn’t known something as simple as a wordless breath could sound so…so disappointed. He could have cut her with razors. It would have been less painful.
“I couldn’t reach it,” she said, lifting her head off her arms only far enough so that he might hear her. “Please, can I have a second chance?”
Crossing from the door to her bed, Marcus bent to pick up his discarded belt. “Hold out your hands.”
She still had that moment of apprehension when she lay her hands on the mattress before her, turning her palms up like a naughty schoolchild of old about to receive a well-deserved slap. But just like before, he draped the length of his folded belt across both her hands as if it were a sacred offering.
“Think about it,” he said again, and that was all. Just before he left, she thought she felt the softest touch of his hand, smoothing down the back of her hair. But she didn’t look up and she couldn’t be sure.
He was gone a long time, even longer it seemed than before, leaving her to lie where she was, her panties still in a roll across the tops of her thighs, her nightshirt still bunched up in the small of her back, her bare bottom still on full display but no longer stinging or aching or even burning any more. She held his belt exactly as he’d given it to her, stared at it, wondering all the while what she ought to be thinking about. Maybe this was something submissive women knew instinctively and which she, as anything but a submissive woman, just didn’t have it in her to understand.
That was almost as depressing as his sigh had been. It brought her right to the brink of tears.
Maybe she was supposed to be thinking about what she’d done wrong. But what was so wrong with wanting to be responsible, independent, and physically able to take care of herself? Why should she have to want to be taken care of? Why should she have to want to be a burden? She was supposed to be taking care of his children, instead they’d spent the day taking care of her. She was supposed to be the one washing the supper dishes, instead Marcus was out there scooping thick froths of soap bubbles out of the dishwasher and off the kitchen floor. And yes, her knees were bad right now because she’d pushed herself too far, and yes, it hurt to bend them or put any kind of weight on them, but life was pain, wasn’t it?
“Be glad you’re still alive,” her doctor had said while she had lain in the hospital, sobbing because she was already at the maximum level of morphine and it still hurt so damn much.
“Get mad at it,” her physical therapist had challenged that first day when she had first dragged herself up out of her wheelchair, back when their goal had been just to get her walking again and hers had been to dance.
But that hadn’t happened.
“It’ll get easier,” Mama Venia had told her.
That hadn’t happened either. The challenges were different now, but that didn’t make them easier.
Maybe she was supposed to be thinking about how she could be more obedient in future. Was she supposed to accept the shit-hand fate had dealt her, shrug her shoulders, say ‘oh well’ and just get over it? How did someone just get over having everything they’d ever wanted ripped away from them? How did they just get over suddenly needing help every minute of every day because they couldn’t even walk without spontaneously falling over their own uncooperative feet?
How could anyone expect her to want to use a cane fifty years before she was ever supposed to have to? How could Marcus expect her to advertise to every single person she passed how weak and useless she now was, when she never had been before?
Get mad, her therapist had said, and that’s exactly what Cadence did. She was always mad these days. Even when she sometimes didn’t think that she was, sooner or later she could feel it, bubbling up just under the surface of her right alongside the never-ending flow of these stupid, useless tears. Surely this wasn’t what Marcus wanted her to think about? Surely there had to be something more, something meaningful that she was missing that a truly submissive woman might instinctively just know.
Try though she did, Cadence couldn’t figure out what that something must be. All she did know was that she was tired, so unbelievably tired, of getting mad.
Outside, the sun was going down. Upstairs, a bath was being run. Someone was laughing. Someone was fighting. Someone, Buddy from the sounds of it, cried until another set of footsteps climbed the stairs and the low tones of their father gradually tamed the chaos. Children were tucked in, bedtime stories were read, hugs and kisses were distributed, and lights switched off. Then heavy footsteps came slowly down the stairs, weaving their way back through the house to her room.
He came in, closing the door softly behind him. He took a decorative, cushioned chair away from the wall and set it down beside her bed. Sitting, he rested his elbows on his knees, folded his hands together and said, “Do you want to tell me what you’ve been thinking?”
She had absolutely no idea what to tell him. She looked at his belt, her fingers feeling along the looped edge. “Three months,” she whispered.
He cocked his head. “What was that?”
“Three months. That’s what they gave him. He took away my life and they sentenced him to three months, which he got to serve one weekend at a time. During the week, he went to work like normal, they gave him a brand new partner and he got to dance. It’s everything I ever wanted and he stole it from me, but he still got to dance. It’s not
fair.”
Marcus exhaled, a heavy sound that culminated in an equally heavy touch as his hand came to rest on her shoulder.
“I’m really very tired,” she said, feeling every bit as broken as she sounded.
Taking his belt from her limp hands, he lay it on the bedside table. He started to roll her panties back up into their proper place, but stopped when she said, “Can you leave them down? I don’t want to be forgiven just yet.”
She closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see the way he was looking at her, but in the end, he left her panties in a roll around her thighs so she could be ‘punished’ just a little while longer.
“Do you need to use the bathroom?” When she shook her head, Marcus came around the bed, took off his shoes and lay down just behind her. He tried to put his arm around her waist. “Come here.”
“I don’t want you to hold me.”
“Too bad.” He pulled her to him anyway. She stubbornly remained on her stomach, but all she could feel all down the length of her left side was the heat of him stretched out beside her. His hand roved her back, caressing the curve of her spine. His breath brushed her forehead, stirring through her hair. “Do you regret it?” he asked. “Coming to Corbin’s Bend?”
A sane person probably would have. Oddly enough, she didn’t, at least not right now. “Do you regret hiring me?”
“If all we’re going to do is answer each other’s questions with more questions, then let me ask you this: You do know no one expects you to be strong all the time, right?”
That could not have stung worse had he slapped her face. “I haven’t been strong one time yet.”
“Don’t,” he said, his caressing hand shifting all the way down her back until it was there, resting flat with warning on the fullest swell of her left buttock. “Don’t.”
“You wanted to hear what I thought,” she countered, feeling sick even as she laughed. “If you don’t want the truth, just tell me what you want to hear and I’ll be happy to lie!”
“Don’t!” One minute his hand was a warning presence on her bottom and in the next, he had jerked up onto his elbow. Catching her chin, he forced her head up and around until their eyes clashed and held, despite her minute rebellion to pull away. “Don’t,” he said again, brushing her hair back from her face. When she began to cry, he groaned as if he could feel the pain of her defeat every bit as keenly as she was. “Don’t,” he whispered, and then he kissed her.
He tasted like coffee, warm and heady, and in his soft lips she found only the sweetest tenderness. At least at first. He tried to stop after one. She could feel it in the slight trembling of his mouth, when he drew back his head just far enough to take a breath. She also felt it, that internal snap as desire and self-control abruptly parted ways. He kissed her again, only this time there was a fierceness underlying the tenderness, a hunger she could taste every bit as clearly as the coffee.
She didn’t want to think about the last time someone had kissed her like this, but the need to experience it once more, to be purely physically wanted, consumed her right along with the passionate devouring of his kisses.
Afraid to trust it, she unfurled slowly, reaching for him, her fingertips drifting up his chest to grip his shoulder, pulling him down to her even as she turned over, minute shifts of submission that helped to tuck her underneath him until she was lying full on her back.
He released her chin and his hand began to wander, only now instead of caressing that slow path up and down her spine, he was wandering her front, pulling up the hem of her night shirt until he could strip it entirely away. He laid her bare to his touch and his hands remained never more than a hairsbreadth from her skin, sweeping down the gentle slope of her neck, tracing the line of her collar bones and the hollow in between them. He explored her with care, finding the hills and valleys of her breasts, the tightening peaks standing stiffly for the attention of his fingers first and then his mouth as it followed the course his hands had set. He knew her ribs, caressed and kissed his way down the trembling plane of her belly, her navel and hips.
“Tell me if it hurts,” he said, peeling her panties down her legs and off her feet, discarding them on the floor.
She’d sooner swallow her own tongue. She simply parted her legs, urging him to settle all the faster between them before helping him strip out of his shirt. That too was tossed carelessly aside, and then she was his again. His mouth locked with hers. His skin was a furnace against her and his hand, cupping her sex directly now, feeling for heat and slick readiness, parted her most intimate folds as he sought and found the treasured nub hidden there.
Her breath caught when he stroked, and then he was moving down, and for the first time in a long lifetime of bitterness and hurt, Cadence forgot to think about anything beyond his mouth, his tongue, and his hands. She forgot how it felt to be broken and remembered instead the sensual sting of a man’s wanting. She remembered what it was like to dance, if only in the sheets of this bed. To follow his lead as he brought her right to the shivering edge of completion, only to restrain her from the fall, to back her from it, then bring her close again and again, until the desperation had her arching and crying out, writhing to pull him right into her skin with her.
And then he was. That first slow, grinding thrust as he sank himself all the way up inside her filled and stretched her in all the best ways. His burning hips aligned with her own as his mouth once more claimed hers. When he began to move, her whole body moved with him.
He was so careful of his weight, even when she urged him not to be.
He was so thorough, leaving no part of her untasted, unkissed, uncaressed.
And when she finally came, every inch of her locking down in wave after wave after devastating wave, it was his arms that caught her when she fell apart. It was his breath that she breathed, his heat that she burned in, his kisses that consumed her. His hands that softly, one caress at a time, pieced her back together once more.
“Tell me if I hurt you,” he whispered, his teasing lips scaling back the intensity only to rebuild it. Gently, tenderly, he rose over her, filled her, and made her dance with him again.
Chapter 19
Dad.”
Marcus snapped his eyes open, for one half second in time, completely lost. The room was dark, lit only by the living room light down the hall, which was just enough for him to realize not only was he not in his own bed, but the slumbering armful of hot femininity sleeping curled up beside him was not Stacy.
“Dad.” Buddy poked his back and Marcus rolled over far enough to see his son, at the same time, pulling the sheet up high enough to cover any naked bits of Cadence that might otherwise be glimpsed.
“What is it?” he whispered.
“Carla’s on the phone. She sounds funny. I think she’s crying.”
Marcus got out of bed, checking his watch and grabbing for his clothes, half falling over and half herding Buddy back out of the room so he could close the door without waking Cadence. Where the hell was the phone and why hadn’t he heard it ringing? Yanking on his pants, he rubbed his eyes and checked his watch again. This time, he got his eyes to focus enough to read the time. Two a.m. That put a little steam in his step. No doctor ever got a good, ‘hey, let’s just chat’ phone call at two in the morning.
Picking up the kitchen cordless, Marcus tucked it between his shoulder and his ear and dropped onto a stool at the bar to wrestle his socks and shoes on. “Carla? What’s happened?”
“I fell off my porch,” came the immediate sobbing reply. “I’ve been lying here for almost an hour, screaming my head off, but no one can hear me. I don’t think my leg’s broken, but I can’t get up.” Carla was sniffling, warbling, and she did sound odd, Buddy had been right about that. But there was something in her voice that caught Marcus’s attention. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was, but there would be time enough for him to figure it out once he got there.
“Front porch or back?” he asked, getting his last shoe on
and tied.
“Back.” Carla sniffled again, beginning to calm down now. “I feel really shtupid.”
That not only caught his attention, it stopped him where he was. Sitting up straighter, he picked the phone up off his shoulder and held it in his hand. “Have you been drinking?”
Another sniffle. “One or two…teeny, tiny little…wine bottles…I don’t know.”
Marcus caught himself before he sighed. He did, however, roll his eyes since the only one there to see it was Buddy, propped up against the kitchen table with his head resting sideways on his folded arms. “I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”
“Marcus?”
The smallness of her slightly slurring voice prevented him from hanging up. “What?”
“Why don’t you want me? Why doesn’t anybody want me?”
Biting back a groan, Marcus rubbed his face and drew a deep breath. Striving for patience when all he really wanted right then was to hang up the phone and send Buddy back upstairs so he could, in turn, crawl back into bed with Cadence, Marcus sighed again. “I’ll be there in ten,” he repeated and hung up.
“Did Cadence have a nightmare?” Buddy piped up the instant he put the phone back in the charger.
“No, why?” Marcus stood up, pulling his shirt on while he went in search of his wallet and keys.
“Sometimes you let me sleep with you when I have nightmares.”
Marcus glanced at his youngest, but he wasn’t ready to have this conversation. “I have to go to work, Buddy. It’s nowhere near time to get up, so get on back to bed.”
Buddy didn’t move. “Do you like Cadence?”
He really wasn’t ready for this conversation either. “Sure I do.” He deliberately kept his tone light and distracted. “Don’t you?”
“Sure I do,” Buddy echoed, copying his father in both word and tone. “I like her just fine. I even like her with my pants on.”
Marcus pointed down the hall. “Bed.”
