by Maren Smith
“Tell me if this hurts,” he said, covering her knee with one hand and gently encouraging her leg to bend. He brought her thigh all the way back to his chest. He extended her shin, first to a ninety degree angle from her thigh and then all the way up. “Stretch your toes to the ceiling,” he directed. “Now, stretch them back towards you.”
No match for the proximity of that butt or the seductive power of his hands, she obeyed. He kept shifting his grip on her, his touch moving up and down her leg with each slight shift in position she made—feeling her shin, her knee, the front of her thigh before sliding down the sensitive inner slope to firmly grasp her by the back. He wasn’t feeling her up, she told herself. He was feeling the movement and tension in her knee, feeling how everything connected to the pins, feeling his way along the extensive scar tissue to see for himself what worked and what didn’t.
If she closed her eyes though, she could almost make believe he was feeling her up. It had been a long time since anyone had touched her like this. No one had wanted to. She hadn’t let anyone get close enough to want to, not since Sebastian.
She didn’t want to think about him.
Cadence liked the way this felt though, even if it was entirely professional on his part, even if it wasn’t real.
“You want to talk about it?” Marcus asked, laying that leg down and picking up her left.
“About what?” she started to say, but halfway up into the first position with her shin at ninety-degrees from her thigh, breath-robbing pain shot out from her knee and chewed straight through the muscle of her leg. Back arching, she sucked for air, but didn’t scream. Both hands reflexively grabbed, one fist seizing at the short carpet fibers and the other catching all the loose fabric it could at the back of his shirt.
“Breathe,” he said. “Just breathe.” His hands instantly gentled. He cupped her knee, waiting until the pain had subsided before guiding her back into slow movement. He tested her range of motion. “This must be the bad one.”
“That’s the good one, actually,” she said, once she could speak without panting.
“You were favoring your right yesterday, working this one extra hard, then?”
“Another lecture, Dr. Devon?” She winced, back arching all over again when he tried to extend her leg straight up and another shot of pain made it impossible for her to hold still. “Ow! Stop, stop, stop!” But he had stopped and was already easing her leg back to a less excruciating position. “I’m sorry,” she panted, mortified to have let the broad extent of her weakness show. It was then that she noticed she wasn’t just clinging to his shirt with both hands now, she’d ripped it completely out of his waistband and was now holding onto the back of his belt as if her life depended on it.
“You’re going to take it easy on this leg today.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, forcing herself to let go of his pants. “I’ll get used to it and I’ll be just fine.”
“You’ll be finer faster if you don’t push yourself so hard that you can’t move.”
“I know my limits.”
“Apparently not.”
His butt wasn’t exactly losing attractiveness points, but as her irritation began to balloon, she felt less and less inclined to notice. “You’re my employer, not my father, my husband or my collared master.”
He chuckled. “Somebody’s been reading her Welcome to Corbin’s Bend packet.” Standing, he turned to face her. Amusement danced with a hint of sternness as he bent, taking each of her hands in one of his. “Ready to stand?”
“I don’t need your help,” she snipped, but she did and she knew it. Her legs were pulsing now, both of them throbbing with the same degree of wounded heat her bottom had suffered the night before. She’d never get off the floor without some kind of help. Just the thought of his watching while she crawled as far as the entertainment center and dragged herself up high enough to get her feet under her was beyond humiliating. “Let go. I can do this on my own.”
Marcus didn’t dignify that with a response. His grip on her hands tightened. “On three. Ready? One…two…”
She tried to brace herself for it, but she drowned his three behind the involuntary shout that followed the agony of having to take her own weight on her knees once more.
“I’ve got you,” he said, his arms around her waist, helping to support her until the pain inevitably receded and she could stand on her own. “You’re on sit-down duty today.”
“Don’t baby me.” At any other second of the day, she’d have battled her way back out of his arms, swallowed the pain and walked away. But right now, his arms around her felt so warm and strong, and his chest felt so hard under her open palms, and she just didn’t have the strength.
“You are so unbelievably stubborn.” Was it a trick of the pain or was that admiration she heard in his suddenly husky tone?
Cadence raised her face, looking up into his. What she saw there stole her breath all over again. Marcus the doctor, her boss, was looking at her as if he wanted her. And that wanting was so naked and raw, it sparked a whole new wave of throbbing heat to sweep through her, one that had absolutely nothing at all to do with the pain in her legs. Her nipples tingled, feeling every slight brush of his chest bumping into hers as they each breathed. When his gaze shifted from her eyes to her lips, she forgot how to resist, argue, or even think. Was he going to kiss her? Was she going to say no?
She ought to. She barely knew the man in every way that counted, and in those ways that didn’t…well, she still had to work with him and that alone made accepting his kiss such a bad, bad—
He bent, bringing his mouth closer to hers.
—bad idea.
She tried to tell him no, even as she could feel her own chin lifting as if to meet him halfway. His breath smelled just like coffee, forever realigning in her mind exactly what her idea of heaven could be. The heat of his hand gliding up her spine to comb open-fingered through her long hair, seared into her nape when he cupped hers as hot as hot could be.
“Dad and Cadence sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G!” Buddy sang out from the kitchen doorway, stopping everything. Marcus and Cadence didn’t exactly spring apart, but when she pushed away to put a respectable distance back between them, he didn’t exactly stop her either.
Laughing, Buddy skipped on into the kitchen, leaving his oldest brother, Michael, standing frozen and stiff, no readable expression whatsoever on his face as he looked from his father to her and back again.
Marcus cleared his throat and took a step back on his own. “Stay off your feet as much as possible today. When you go shopping, use the scootabout. My boys can fetch and carry for you.”
He left without giving her a chance to argue, edging past his son on his way out of the room. Down the hall, his office door shut and it was so quiet in the formal living room that she could even hear the click as he engaged the lock.
Michael stared at her, still without the slightest expression. He didn’t seem angry. He sure wasn’t happy. She honestly couldn’t tell what he was.
In the kitchen, Buddy crawled up onto one of the counter stools, grinning as he asked, “Can we have pancakes? If you don’t know how to make them, I can help. I used to help Libby all the time. We need eggs and flour and milk and cinnamon and blueberries and butter and…”
Seriously doubting they had even half those ingredients, Cadence limped into the kitchen to pull Buddy off the counter before he dumped an entire cabinet full of glass mixing bowls on top of his own head. When she passed the hallway leading back to the front of the house, she couldn’t help but seek out the closed office door. Her nipples were still tingling. Her breasts felt heavy, swollen…needy. The twin pulses of pain in her legs were nothing compared to the heated pulse that had come alive between her thighs and now lay feeding wanton impulses all the way up into her womb.
Michael moved then, positioning himself between her and his father’s door. His closed expression had grown hard. Cadence flinched from it, dropping her gaze to the
floor. Unsure what to do, she went into the kitchen, she painted on a smile for Buddy’s sake, and she made pancakes for breakfast with the last two eggs in the house, milk and vanilla coffee creamer. They didn’t have blueberries.
What the hell was she doing here? Everywhere she moved, she could feel Michael’s accusing stare burning into her back. This was not a good situation, but for the life of her she had no idea how it had gone from being professional, to seductive, and now even to this! Worse, she had no idea how to change it back.
CHAPTER TEN
Marcus leaned against his office door, eyes closed, body throbbing. This was not good. What was he thinking? The one woman in all of Corbin’s Bend that he should not, absolutely not, have a relationship with and what was he doing? She hadn’t been here two days and already he’d almost kissed her. God, he could still feel her in his arms, her body so soft and warm, her eyes so full of stubbornness and fire, and that mouth of hers. God, that mouth.
It was a wonder his cock hadn’t burst through his zipper. The tightness, the constraint…it was all he could feel right now. That and the phantom sensation of Cadence, lying on her back on the floor underneath him…
He’d almost kissed the scars on her legs. Hit by a car, she had said, and Marcus could well believe it. The damage had been extensive. He could see it, had felt it when he’d run his hands over the pins still holding her fragile bones and knees together. It must have hurt like hell, and still did obviously, and yet…all that beautiful, prideful, aggravating stubbornness…
In the kitchen down the hall, he heard the faint rattle of a pan on the stove. She was cooking breakfast. He’d bet anything she was standing at the stove while the cane he’d given her lay neglected in the living room where he’d put it down. His cock throbbed, amplified by that soft devilish voice inside him that was even now pointing out her deliberate defiance of his instructions to keep that cane with her. What other excuse did he need to go back out there, take her firmly by the arm as he drew her into the privacy of his office and put her across his knee? His palm itched, knowing from last night exactly how it would feel to spank her. His mouth watered, the ache of his unsated desire kicking up another notch as he imagined the inevitable scissoring of her legs as her bottom reddened under rapid-fire swats.
He’d bare her bottom, which pretty much went without saying. Disciplinary spankings should always be delivered on the bare. He’d pin her legs down too, he didn’t want her to hurt herself through kicking and there would definitely be a lot of that. Squawking, fussing, perhaps crying too.
Perhaps not. Cadence was made up of nine parts stubbornness and one part pride. She’d broken down for him last night, but the minute she’d shoved back off his lap and slapped those traitorous tears off her face he’d known it would take more than four silly swats and another stint in the corner before that happened again.
And he wanted that to happen again. He wanted to hold her during that moment of complete and utter vulnerability, when she was at her most fragile and lost. He wanted to feel the heat of her punished bottom burning into his lap and the damp of her tears soaking into his shirt. He wanted to smell her, that heady scent that was all female, naked and moist the way she had been last night when he’d seated her naughty bottom on that stool and put her nose against the wall, or covered by just the barest slip of virginal white panties, like she had been this morning, with her skirt bunched up around her hips while he’d worked her legs and tried with everything he had to keep his mind on the task at hand rather than on how unbelievably good it was going to feel to strip those panties off her, hook her scarred knees up over his shoulders, bury his face in the core of all that seductive, female wetness and simply devour her until her entire body was writhing and bucking and convulsing all around him.
This was so wrong.
Shoving away from the door, Marcus grabbed a bottle of hand lotion off his desk and took it into his private bathroom. His own hand was cold, cold comfort compared with the heat he knew he’d find in Cadence, but he did it anyway. He tried to summon some other fantasy, but when he imagined himself spanking, it was her arching her bottom back in submission of his hard hand. When he kissed, he imagined it was her breathy sigh he was breathing in as he moved to cover her, holding her good leg pinned to his hip while he thrust long, slow and deep. Maybe. At first. But with a woman like Cadence, filled to overflowing with all that beautiful stubbornness and pride, at some point she was going to push the right buttons. At some point, she was going to earn something harder, rougher.
At some point, he was going to have to roll her onto her stomach, drag her hips to the edge of the bed to save her knees from kneeling, fist her hair and pull back her head to free all those guttural, moaning cries as he took her roughly from behind, punishing her with his cock. Pussy first, then ass and that’s when Marcus lost it, the rapid beat of his hand as he imagined fucking her, the tightening of his balls that precipitated that punch of orgasmic release. His whole body shuddered with the force of it, the way he knew he’d shudder as he drove himself into her, furiously embedding himself as deep into her tight heat as he could make himself go while he came.
The jutting spasms drained him and eventually ceased.
Panting, eyes closed, Marcus leaned against the bathroom wall and tried to catch his breath.
Taking Cadence was a fantasy, but not one he could afford to let come true. He could want her, need her like this if he had to, but there was just no way that he could act on it. Not now. Maybe not ever. Not when she was in Corbin’s Bend only because she had no place else to go. Not when she was working for him only because he’d offered a place for her to live. She was not interested in pursuing a domestic discipline lifestyle, and he knew himself well enough to know, he could not live any kind of life without it. That need was just too much a part of him, where as she had only agreed to accept it when the alternative meant returning to a life too hard to survive.
He was attracted to Cadence. He wanted her like he hadn’t wanted another woman in a very long time. But to act on that desire was nothing less than an unforgiveable misuse of his authority over her, and that, Marcus would not do.
So, he’d spank her if she needed it, because that was the way of things here in Corbin’s Bend and Cadence had agreed to that. But he would not kiss her, no matter the provocation. And he would not make love to her, not lovingly or punishingly or any other degree of ‘ly’ in between.
From now on, he was going to keep his hands off of Cadence.
Even if it killed him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Michael, please stay with the group!” Cadence called. Daniel stood quietly by both her and Marcus’s car while she helped Buddy get out of the childproof safety locks on his booster seat. The doctor’s oldest son, however, was already halfway across the grocery store parking lot.
“Mind if I get out of the road, or do you want me to get hit by a car too?” he shot back, stepping off to one side just as a car drove slowly between them. It only obscured her sight for a second, but that second was just long enough so that when Cadence finally got Buddy out of the car and looked again, Michael was gone.
“Dad said you had to use the cane,” Buddy protested, but when she slammed the car door, she did so with the cane still lying in the very back where she’d tossed it.
Catching both Buddy’s and Daniel’s hand, Cadence limped as fast as she dared toward the store. Michael hadn’t gone far. He was standing inside, looking at the bubblegum machine when she led the other two boys into the store. Aggravated as she was, she did her best not to sound like she was scolding. “Michael, I need you to stay by me, please.”
He continued to look at the gum, pretty much ignoring her while she fetched a shopping cart from the rack by the door.
This was a nightmare she had no idea how to deal with.
“All hands on the cart,” she said, feigning a cheerfulness she certainly didn’t feel.
Both Daniel and Buddy complied, but Michael turned an
d walked right past her and on into the store without so much as a glance.
That was harder for her to ignore. She went after him, pushing the cart as fast as she dared and wincing with every hurried limp she had to take. She really had overworked her legs yesterday; today, she was paying for it. It wasn’t even noon yet and already the gravel in her knees had turned to boulders.
“Michael.” She caught up with him enough to grab his shoulder. “Hey,” she tried to soften her tone, but her irritation was growing in direct proportion with the pain of having to chase after him. “Look, you’re forcing me into a bad guy position where I have to choose between putting up with your crap or telling your father.”
“Go ahead,” he promptly countered. “Tell him whatever you want and I’ll tell him how you left the cane in the car and didn’t use the scootabout like he told you. Why should I listen to him if you’re not going to?”
“Are you blackmailing me?” Cadence asked, so surprised that for a moment she couldn’t even be angry about it.
His gray eyes narrowing, Michael stuck his face into hers. “No, I’m tattling. What do you care anyway? It’s not like you’re going to stay.”
It wasn’t until he turned to walk away that her temper abruptly reasserted itself. She grabbed more than his shoulder this time. Hooking her hands under his arms, she jerked him up off his feet. Ten years old going on pain-in-the-ass was still small enough for her to heave up into the basket of the cart.
His feet hit the bottom with a clatter and then he hit his butt, but he didn’t stay down. He vaulted to his feet and probably would have jumped right back out of the cart had she not grabbed the front of his shirt.
“You can’t treat me like a baby!” he shouted.
“Sit your butt back down or this shopping trip is over and we’ll go home right now,” Cadence said flatly. She didn’t raise her voice, but when he stuck his angry face back into hers, it was a near thing. “You want to tattle to your father about me, you go right ahead. But I guarantee when I tell him about this, it will not be me he talks to first.”
