He made his possession of her excruciatingly slow and talking to her as he did so. "There you go, my girl. Is that what you wanted?"
"Mmm, oh Trent, please, yes!"
She was so deliciously loud, he loved it! There was no doubt whatsoever when she was feeling good. She let him know it.
But as he began to press his fingers home within her, her own fell away, almost making the mistake of trying to stop him from having her.
"What are those naughty hands doing, Stevie? And where do they belong?"
Dear Gawd, that stern, no-nonsense tone was practically enough to obliterate what little control she had left.
The appendages in question hung there, guiltily for a long moment as he seated his fingers within her to the last knuckle and began plunging and rotating immediately, her own fingers twitching as if protesting the imposition of his will, then finding their way, somewhat reluctantly, back to their assigned task.
"I think I've been away far too long; you seem to have forgotten yourself entirely without your usual daily punishments. Even though you already have a good, hard spanking coming, I'm thinking that you might just need one right now to remind you exactly what I expect from you in the way of proper behavior, and almost interfering with what I choose to do with you is not proper behavior, is it, Stevie?"
She whined and moved her legs a bit, fake sobbing, but she knew she was caught. "Trent, no, I can't take two spankings, I can't!"
Before she knew it, though, he'd flipped her over and begun swatting her bottom with the paddle that he kept hanging off the headboard on his side of the bed. It wasn't a big paddle, more towards medium-sized, but she was so small that made it a large to her, covering every bit of her with each stroke.
As she had been taught, her hands went immediately above her head, reaching for the headboard, even if she couldn't quite touch it because of her position on the bed. He made sure she kept her legs shamefully far apart, so that each time the paddle connected with her flesh, she could feel the rush of air over privates that were desperately sensitive.
And they remained that way – perhaps becoming even more so – the entire time he wielded that wicked implement.
She could not leave, she could not try to manipulate her body to avoid a swat, but she could yell, and she did - very loudly.
And it was music to his ears, as were her promises of better behavior in the future, and her plaintive pleas for him to stop, which he didn't do until he heard her crying freely and hard.
As soon as he stopped, and the paddle was again hanging from its hook, he flipped her over. Ignoring her groans of protest that her bottom was too sore to touch the mattress, he moved her into the position she had been in before, on her back, legs well apart, tiny, delicate hands between those beautiful thighs of hers, holding herself open and rubbing a clit that had to be near to bursting.
"Do not cum until my fingers are inside you," he warned harshly, twisting them roughly into place while ignoring her caught breath and bitten lip, knowing he wasn't hurting her but rather just subjecting those very tender tissues to rougher treatment than she might have preferred.
When he was well and truly buried in her, he whispered softly, "Cum. I want to hear it. No holding back or I will thrash you thoroughly before I give you the punishment you've already been promised."
Her words weren't even whispers, they were the ghostly pleas of them. "Ahh...no...mmm...please, don't..."
"Did you hear me, my love? What did I just tell you to do?"
He saw her lick her lips and arch her back, her hips rising to greet the way his hand was thrusting powerfully into her. "C-Cum."
"And why haven't you done it? Do not disobey me in this, Stevie, or I will see to it that you regret it."
Her head began thrashing back and forth wildly, and he knew she was seconds away, "No no no no no no no...Trent! I – ahh, no, please..."
He knew one would never be enough for her, she was made for so much more, and so he drove her relentlessly, mercilessly to it, one right after the other. No let up, no respite, until he saw the unmistakable signs that she'd had enough about number twelve or so, and he crawled up the bed to take her into his arms.
She protested, as she did sometimes, trying to escape him, but she was so exhausted from what she'd gone through that her actions were uncoordinated and she was easily subdued.
"Come here to me, no, you have no choice. You will be where I want you to be, regardless of what you want."
She was fading rapidly, so he reached down to pull the covers up over them, cuddling her tenderly to him, resting her head on his shoulder and rocking her for a few short minutes, until he could feel that she had already fallen asleep.
Chapter 8
Stevie's little talk with Mildred had cured her of the need to look into Trent's background and motives any further, but it didn't do what she had hoped it might. It didn't settle her curiosity to know more about the man she had agreed to marry, it just managed to point out her own foibles.
The longer she stayed with him, the more distressed she became about what she had learned. Guilt was a horrible thing, gnawing at her, both about the details Mildred had provided and about her own actions in doing what she now considered to be snooping, so much so that, the week before she was supposed to go to Vegas with her friends for her bachelorette party, she had a bit of a breakdown.
Trent was aware there was something going on with her. She was getting into more trouble than she ever had before, seeming restless and unhappy and disturbed about something that he couldn't get her to confide in him about. It worried him to the point that he began to become more and more restrictive with her, because her behavior was becoming more and more erratic, and probably, if he was truthful with himself, because he feared losing her more now than he ever had at any other point in their relationship.
It wasn't until he got up one early Sunday morning to go that he noticed that she wasn't in their bed.
Because of how strangely she had been acting, panic set in immediately. One of her newest rules was that she was not to get out of bed without his permission for any other reason other than if she needed to go, and she wasn't in the bathroom.
He began to search the house, but every bit of it was dark. He began to turn every light in the house on, hoping she was still there and hadn't fled somehow into the night alone.
While standing in the kitchen, he thought he heard a soft sound and followed it to the back of the adjacent family room. At first, he couldn't determine exactly where it was from until he hunched down and finally spotted her.
She was in a wretched little ball, weeping heartbreakingly beneath the piano.
Trent didn't hesitate one bit in joining her there, wanting desperately to pull her onto his lap but feeling characteristically unsure of himself, not wanting to drive her out of her little nest and away from him. But the relief he was feeling at having found her – there, in their house, as opposed to some place thousands of miles away from him – had him practically giddy at the same time.
"Hey, little darlin'. Whatcha doing under here?"
She didn't flee, as he worried she might, but did turn away from him.
He didn't reach for her, as much as he wanted to, her keening sobs were just about killing him. But he did begin to crowd her a bit, the physical manifestation of the rules he had been carefully hemming her in with. Although, some of that had backfired because on some levels, his tighter control of her had seemed to make her feel even safer.
It was a subject he had already ticked in his mind to revisit later, once he got to the heart of what was bothering her now.
Several people had already commented to him that he had become more verbal since he'd been with her, and he had come to recognize the truth in what they had said. She was a talker, and it had encouraged him to come out of his shell a bit and become somewhat less strictly no nonsense, in certain ways, friendlier, a bit more comfortable in social situations than he had ever been in his life.
&
nbsp; And that had all originated through her, and his dedication to making her happy in this life that they had created, however external its impetus was.
So he was at less of a loss than he would have been earlier on in their relationship to be confronted – under the piano in their family room at approximately three thirty in the morning when they both should have been fast asleep in their bed – with his obviously highly distressed bride-to-be.
Knowing she loved the sound of his voice, and that talking to her helped soothe her, that was what he did, not at all sure what he intended to say or even really convey to her, beyond the fact that he was here and that he was a safe place to be, even when she was upset like this.
"Go 'way, Trent," she sobbed, dragging the backs of her hands over her eyes.
Of course, he had no intention of obeying her command. It made him happy on one level, that she was actually talking to him, and sad on the other, that she didn't want him around her.
"Well, lovely, I'm sorry you feel that way, but I think I'm just going to hang out right here with you, just in case you think of something I can do for you, because, well, you know that I love you and the only thing that's important to me in this world is that you are happy."
That was the absolutely wrong tact, apparently, because it just set her to weeping louder.
His basic response was the same one most males had in this type of situation. Which was becoming anxious and just wanting her to stop crying, almost giving in to the temptation to simply start throwing suggestions of things she could do to feel better, although he tamped down those natural tendencies as best he could in favor of simply letting her know that he was there for her? "I'd love to help you with whatever it is that's bothering you, just so you know. No pressure, but I've got a big, warm lap and strong arms, and I'd love to hold you while you cry. I know that sometimes it's easy to feel overwhelmed, there are a lot of big things going on right now in our lives." He loved saying "our lives," but he didn't let himself rhapsodize over it now. "I know exams are coming up at work, and standardized testing after that, and the wedding and all of the stuff to do with that."
They'd finally decided on a date in mid-June, and that they would do a very small ceremony at her family home, as her father had suggested, and a little bit bigger reception party. But even having gone small, he was amazed to see the amount of work that she was having to put into it. Of course, he'd offered to take as many of the burdens off of her as she would allow, but he also knew that this was a day that she was supposed to be most in charge of, and he wanted her to have everything she'd ever wanted for their wedding.
But if that was at the heart of why she was so upset, he would put his foot down about it in a New York minute and they'd just go to the J.O.P. They'd still be just as married.
And, as long as, in the end, they were together, nothing else really mattered.
Although he didn't think that would be her opinion on the matter.
But talking about that didn't seem to inspire any more wretched sobbing in her than anything else he had said, so he kind of thought that was probably not it.
"Plus your hen night," he added, pausing slightly to see if Mo's insistence on a big to-do for that was getting her down, but apparently not.
"Your father seems to be doing pretty well with it all, doesn't he?"
It was really just an offhand remark, he hadn't figured it would be a trigger, but it ended up being the keystone, which caught him off guard a bit.
Outwardly, Elliott looked reasonably well, but then Trent kept closer track of him, out of a deep sense of love and respect, mixed with a certain amount of habit, which he liked to think was a pretty good approximation of how most children thought about their older parents. And he knew that the older man wasn't doing as well as he liked to project to his daughter, who, as she had already bravely confessed to him, tended to be a bit blind about other people in favor of herself.
Trent had told her at the time that he thought that was a wonderful bit of introspection, a self-discovery, frankly, that a lot of people never managed – or even tried to – arrive at.
She had cried quite a bit at the time, feeling guilty about how she had treated people, mainly her father, and he had held and soothed her through it, and his greatest wish at the moment was to do the same thing for her.
He'd maneuvered himself as close to her as he could get without landing in her lap. She was crying too hard to really notice what he was doing, so he simply spread his freakishly long arms and legs wide and put them carefully around her, squeezing gently, rhythmically. And with the underlying motive of wanting to get her both into his arms where she belonged and onto his lap, and he managed, somehow, he wasn't quite sure how – but he was smart enough not to question his good fortune – to do both of those things with a minimum of disturbance to her.
And then, he just held her tightly, demanding nothing, but offering nothing more than pure, physical comfort.
When her sobs finally began to die down, she tried to lean herself away from him, but he wouldn't allow it.
"No, baby girl. I've said it to you before, and I'll keep saying it: I love you, and now that I have you, I'll never let you go."
Instead of soothing her, as he had intended that it would, she went absolutely rigid as a board.
"Don't say that."
Trent swallowed hard at her disconsolate tone, and even though he was terrified to do so, he said quietly, "I will always say that to you, because it's the truth."
"No, you can't. I'm not – it's not – we can't…"
The weeping that followed was so deep, so heart wrenching that he very nearly followed her down that path.
But he knew they didn't need the both of them sobbing, so, instead, he forced himself to rock her a bit, saying quietly, "There is nothing we can't face together, Stevie. Your father…"
"This isn't just about my father, Trent." Her voice was very nearly unrecognizable, it was so low and tortured. She hung her head, still keeping herself as far away from him as he would allow.
Stevie knew that the time for confession was now. What she'd done, what she'd found out about what he'd done, all of it was eating away at her, and she wasn't at all sure that marrying him was what she should be doing, and he at least deserved to know that.
He deserved so much more than that, but not from her.
From someone much, much better than her.
"I did something I'm ashamed of." She laughed but it wasn't tortured, not amused. "I've done so much that I'm ashamed of now..."
He desperately wanted to drag the details out of her, but he managed to hold his morbid curiosity back, somehow, and simply rubbed her back and held her, allowing her to tell him what this was all about in her own time.
And she did, after drawing several shaky breaths.
"You're probably going to throw me out, but I-I investigated you."
Trent could not have been more surprised to hear that. He wasn't worried in the least – he'd pretty much told her the worst about his life – minus the unnecessarily gory details of life with his mother and then in foster care. She knew the truth about his mother, and that was his deepest shame, for some reason, even though it wasn't something he'd done.
Frankly, he couldn't imagine that she'd discovered anything that wasn't pretty boring about him, even if she'd looked into every one of what she had occasionally referred to as his harem. He hadn't done anything particularly scandalous, especially by today's standards, with any of them, and, in most – not all, but most – cases, they'd parted as friends.
"You did?" he said, for lack of anything more erudite or salient entering his head at that moment.
"Yes, I did."
She was hanging her head and he was wracking his brain. What could he have done that would have made her feel so ashamed? He couldn't come up with a thing, the kinkiest things he'd ever done in his life were with her. She was really the only woman in his life who had inspired the sexually dominant side of him. Not that he had
n't tried it out a bit here and there, and somehow finding a way to get her not to hate him, to manage to get her to see him as something other than the father-stealing rival she'd painted him as was, once he'd achieved success in the business world, the biggest goal in his life.
After a bit of a pause, he murmured, "Well, if you've found out something juicy about me, please spill, because the suspense is killing me. What did you dig up about me that's making you feel so horrible?"
Stevie sighed. "What I discovered was that you weren't at all the obnoxious bastard I'd always thought of you as."
He craned his neck back, looking dumbfounded. "The horror! I am such a cad! How could I possibly do that to you!"
She shrank away from him, curling herself into the smallest possible ball within the confines of his arms, and he could feel her removing herself from him, emotionally and physically.
He really had to stop trying to be funny. It always seemed to have the opposite effect from what he intended.
"Stevie, please talk to me. Obviously, I'm missing something here."
But she had shut down, hugging her own self as best she could, as far away from him as if she was on another planet.
And Trent's patience, the small supply of which he possessed being more readily available to her than any other person he'd ever known, was running dangerously low.
He had used the cane on her for the first time last night and, as he tightened his arm around her, he let his hand slide under her to clench a bottom cheek on which he could still feel the obvious ridges of its cruel kiss.
She jumped and whimpered low in her throat.
"I think I deserve an explanation, baby love, and I intend to have one, even if I have to extract it from you in a manner I would prefer not to."
To his great relief, she slowly began to lean the entire ball of her being towards – rather than away – from him, sobbing, "I don't know why you'd care to bother, Trent. I'm just not worth it."
He gathered her to him, saying fiercely, "That's just earned you a session with my belt tonight, honey. You know I won't stand for you putting yourself down in any way."
Never Say Never Page 9
