Chapter Six

CHAPTER SIX

Bianca

He didn’t say a word.

Nor did he let me say one in my defense.

When I opened my mouth, he silenced me with one of his massive, tattooed hands over my thigh, squeezing so hard I knew for sure this time it would leave a bruise.

Lion Court was dark and quiet when we pulled up, even though it was only seven-thirty and Brando should still be awake. I didn’t question it though as I followed Tiernan into the silent, cave-like entrance hall, then through to the small glass solarium on the left side of the house. The air was moist and close, the scent green and earthy from the sub-tropical plants crowding the interior.

“What are we doing in here?” I found the gall to say, even though the words were a whisper.

Tiernan didn’t answer as he moved through the fat leaves and overgrown bushes to the back of the glass room where a small pond was encased in green marble, gurgling quietly from a fountain sculpted to look like a nymph caught in the arms of Zeus. It was hard to tell if she was struggling to get free or writhing with passion in the bare-chested god’s arms and the sight sent a pang of disturbing energy through me to my core.

A sharp crack pulled my attention back to Tiernan who stood by the pond near a thicket of bamboo. He’d selected a thin, strong branch and broken it in half. I watched with my heart beating in my throat as he tested the pliancy of the limb, then whistled it through the air a few times, his strokes strong and sure.

My knees went soft.

When he turned to me, I couldn’t read his expression in the murky dark of the moon spilling through the glass and iron ceiling.

“What did I say about obedience, Bianca?” His words were darker than the shadows as he stalked toward me, bamboo stalk in his right fist.

I tried to speak, but there was no air in my chest to power the words. My inhale was shaky, but I clenched my fists at my side and tipped my chin into the air. “Something arcane and misogynistic?”

He paused a few steps away from me as if to study me. A moment later, the bamboo reared back and landed on his bare palm with a brutal smack that made me flinch.

“No, I do not think so. Let’s try again, shall we? What did I say about obedience?”

“That you demanded it as repayment for taking Brando and me into your home,” I said obdurately.

Tiernan took one large step forward until a shaft of moonlight fell directly over his face, a diagonal streak of silver that caught his scar and made it blaze white. There was anger in the set of his jaw, in the taut line of his mouth, but also something dark and lurking in that pale gaze, something that took some kind of perverse joy in my fear.

A shiver rolled through me like a fog bank.

“I am the master of this house. I am the master of you,” he reminded me cruelly, the hand without the bamboo reaching up to grab me by the hair and tug it back painfully so I was forced to look up into his snarling face. “I warned you what would happen if you broke my rules, Bianca. I was kind and patient with you. I let things slide. Your sharp tongue, your reluctance to give me your locket, your unwillingness to follow even the simplest of orders. She’s grieving, I thought to myself. It’s an adjustment.” He paused, and for one small second, I wondered if I had been rude to him, if I didn’t owe him some politeness and regard for taking Brando and me no matter the reasons why he’d done it. “But no more. You will learn that I am not a man who takes disobedience lightly.”

He stepped back so abruptly, I lost my balance and staggered. Instead of helping me, he watched with a small sneer that glowed in the dark, teeth white and sharp as two rows of polished knives.

“Go to the pond,” he ordered softly, yet the words seemed to echo in the solarium, whispered back at me by the leaves and trees.

I hesitated, my heart thumping and swollen in my throat so hard I thought I might choke. He only had to tap that bamboo switch against his palm to spur me forward.

When I reached the marble lip, he demanded, “Bend over and brace yourself.”

My hands trembled as I placed them on the cold stone, fingers curling over the edge to brace for what I knew would come.

Tiernan moved behind me, studying my raised bottom precariously close to being exposed by the short hem of my kilt. I gasped, jumping, when he kicked my feet wider apart. For one moment, I wondered if he would flip up the skirt, reveal the full, thin expanse of my cotton briefs.

A shiver, this one nothing to do with fear, snaked through me like a serpent through grass.

Instead, a heavy palm fell to the small of my back and pressed firmly.

“Have you ever been spanked before, little thing? The ache of it will remind you for long after I stop that you are mine, and as such, you obey me in all things. I texted you five times without response. You were, in fact with a boy, and you got some inane design permanently inked on your wrist without asking permission. Intending to use my money to do so. I think that deserves twenty lashes, don’t you?”

I didn’t respond, but he laughed darkly into my silence, the thumb on my back edging just under the hem of my skirt, onto the slightly sweaty skin above my bottom.

“You might cry,” he murmured as an afterthought, as if he didn’t really care. “But you will not break position until the twentieth blow has landed. Is that understood?”

“Yes,” I snapped, my right leg bouncing with jitters that Tiernan quickly quelled with a harder press of his hand into my back.

The blow landed before I could brace, when I was still expecting him to reprimand me for my tone. A whistle of air, then a muffled crack as the thin limb met my kilt-covered behind. The fabric was pretty thick, but nothing could mute the sharp pain that cut into my buttocks like a liquid rope of fire.

I cried out, fingers tensing around the lip of the pond so hard a nail cracked.

“One,” Tiernan bit out.

I sucked in a deep lungful of air, hoping somehow that the oxygen in my lungs would douse the flames on my ass.

No such luck.

Crack.

“Two.”

Crack. Crack. Crack.

“Three. Four. Five.”

A wail rose in my chest and leaked through my mouth on the next slapping impact. The pain was mounting into something utterly pervasive, it invaded my nostrils, plugged my ears, embedded itself in my throat until I was all hurt, one single aching atom of pain.

Six, seven, eight, nine, in such quick succession I didn’t notice I was crying or when it had started until I noticed droplets falling into the clear pond through blurry eyes.

The tenth stroke was when it happened.

It.

Some strange alchemy in the chemistry of my body that turned each lash of that cruelly biting bamboo cane into something that reached as deep as my bones and went warm.

Liquid.

My muscles slowly unclenched, hot and aching, yearning instead of protecting. Unconsciously, I arched my back even deeper under the press of Tiernan’s hand, the cool air tickling the underside of my blazing ass, sparking a contrast so delicious it made me clench my teeth with something other than pain.

Eleven.

Twelve.

A moan rumbled through me like an earthquake, sundering me in half so that everything dark and hidden under the crust of my careful veneer went tumbling into the half light of the solarium for Tiernan to sift through and decipher.

“Thirteen.” His voice like smoke now, sinuous and sinful.

Not angry anymore, so much as…aroused?”

I rocked back into the next stroke, toes curling in my Prada loafers, breath chugging through my chest like steam from a train.

“Still,” he reminded me, but there was a thread of satisfaction in his tone at my eagerness. “Be still, little thing, or I might hurt you.”

Because he knew the truth, that he wasn’t hurting me, not really, not anymore. Each blow fell just as sharply as before, but my body translated it into bone-rattling pleasure. I could feel the swollen ache of it between my thighs, the stickiness of my underwear clinging to my sex.

Fourteen and fifteen fell, but Tiernan paused before sixteen because I bucked again. I was losing sense of myself in the pain/pleasure vortex. My thoughts had no time to form before my body was singing with sensation again. When he paused, a little, almost noiseless whine fell from my lips and shamed me.

But not enough to stop.

“Hush,” Tiernan ordered, pressing his entire body into my right side, the hand on my back sliding to my left hip so that I was locked against the hard, hot length of him. “Be still and take what I give you.”

A shiver rippled through me like one of my tears splashing into the pond.

Crack.

“Sixteen.”

Moan.

Crack.

“Seventeen,” said between clenched teeth like he was the one in pain, his whole body tensed against me.

Moan.

Crack.

“Eighteen.”

A moan so long, it didn’t end until after the nineteenth strike.

I was crying hard, sobbing really, my face as wet as that untouched place between my thighs. There were formless words on my tongue I mindlessly tried to articulate without success, almost babbling as he reared back and gave me that final, punishing strike.

Electric heat sizzled through me, sparking in my pussy. It was almost enough. So close. Yet not enough.

Tiernan held me hard against him as I moaned and cried and tried to gyrate against the air for any kind of friction to send me over the edge.

It took me a few long minutes to settle under his calming hands, one stroking at my hip, the other over the hair streaming down my back. Only the sound of his harsh breath and my hiccoughing, diminishing cries filled the echoing solarium.

I stared unseeing at the mosaic tiles at the bottom beneath the water as I tried to dredge my mind up from the depths of my body’s firing synapses. With a start, I came back to myself, mind clearing, thoughts as clear as those tiny tiles lining the pond.

“Oh my God,” I whispered, head dropping between my shoulders, hair curtaining my face.

My shame.

I’d almost orgasmed from Tiernan spanking me.

With a freaking bamboo switch like some kinky, shameless whore.

Like someone without pride.

Like someone without the last name of Belcante, without the proud, noble Constantine blood.

The shame coursing through me like cold water through my steaming veins misted my eyes and made me want to cry for different reasons.

Tiernan seemed to sense the change in me and silently stepped away to give me space.

I stood instantly, then winced as the pain in my backside flared brilliantly, giving way to a duller ache in the muscles I’d held clenched for too long. I couldn’t look at Tiernan. Everything in me repelled from him, because he had done this to me.

It had been in me to give, I’d known this for years, this acute ache for something rough and wrong.

But he’d been the one to beat it out of me.

And I was freaking terrified that now this deviant thing in me had seen the light, I wouldn’t be able to put it to rest again.

Especially not around him.

“You’re a monster,” I croaked, because he was and in that moment I hated him with everything in me, more than I ever had before.

He let me turn on my heels and walk away stiffly through the cover of foliage leading to the door.

It was only when I was deep in his caged jungle that his voice, rough as gravel, called blandly out to me.

“You keep breaking my rules, little thing, and I’ll just keep coming up with inventive punishments.”

As far as threats went, it was the best he’d ever issued.

*     *     *

Later that evening,after I’d showered away some of the shame, read an Iron Man comic to Brando with Ezra carefully signing along because Brando wanted to learn American Sign Language, and finished my homework, there was a knock on my door.

When I opened it, Walcott stood there holding a tray with a pot of tea and a little covered basket.

“What’s this?” I asked in a voice that was threadbare from moaning and crying earlier.

Walcott’s face was mottled with severe scar tissue, but I wasn’t sure if I’d ever seen kinder eyes. He smiled slightly at me as he passed me the tray, then reached out to squeeze my wrist before he turned back down the hall.

When I set the tray on my bed and carefully sat my burning bum on the cool silk sheets, I discovered what was on the tray.

Peppermint tea, a banana, a new bottle of aloe vera and anti-bacterial ointment, a roll of gauze and an ice pack.

Use the anti-bac ointment and wrap the tattoo. The aloe and ice are for your behind. I hope you think of me every time it aches.

—TM

I flopped back against the pillows and stared at the canopy above me, fighting to understand the beast of a man who had beaten me, aroused me, then sent me some kind of fucked-up care package to mend me in the aftermath of his fury.

Much like the chaotic mix of painful pleasure he had eked out of me, Tiernan was becoming a dangerous temptation I was less and less certain I could avoid.