Chapter 19

Cal

"Wait!" Grace yelled. "Wait!"

I'd had enough, though. She tried to cover the seatbelt buckle with her hands, but I pulled them both away with my right hand and released the belt with my left. Then Grace tried to wrap her arms around the shoulder belt itself to keep me from pulling her out of the seat, and I had to put my left arm around her waist, then take one of her wrists in each of my hands and separate them while I started to haul her out of the car.

She was yelling the whole time, and writhing in my grasp, but even if I hadn't had all the information from the New Modesty Authority about how badly this girl needed discipline, I wouldn't have had the slightest doubt about my decision to put her over my knee right away. Grace had shown me, just in the ten minutes we'd spent in the truck together, not only what a lovely, sweet young woman she could be, but how thoroughly she could cover that up with her immaturity and her crying need for boundaries.

Crying. Well, she had certainly started to cry now.

"Please… Cal… don't… y-you can't…" I thought I could feel the conflict in her little body, as I held her with one arm around her back and the other across her waist. She had the shoulder belt in her hands now, over her head, as I held her three quarters of the way out of the truck.

"Let go of the seatbelt, Grace," I said, looking into her frightened, teary eyes. "Pretty much everyone in Grasskiln has spent the last twenty-four hours telling you that I can. I don't tolerate foul language from a young woman I'm courting, but it's your attitude I'm much more concerned with."

"I just… I just…" She stared at me, wild eyed. "I only said shit."

Her gorgeous green eyes told me everything. It seemed an odd moment, in a certain way, to realize I could absolutely fall in love with Grace Franklin, but I had to hand it to the New Modesty algorithm: those wet eyes held for me some magical mixture of defiance, worry, need, and—deep, deep down—submission.

"If it had just been the swear word," I said, hearing with satisfaction how calm and reasonable I sounded, after the intense flare of anger I had experienced only a few moments before, "I would have warned you, and let it go for the moment."

She had stopped struggling. She blinked at me, her brow creasing in a kind of puzzlement that I could tell meant she genuinely wanted to understand.

"It's the disrespect that earned you the lesson I'm going to teach you now."

"But…" she said—automatically, it seemed like, as if she felt like she couldn't really be in the wrong. I raised my eyebrows and waited, looking steadily into her eyes.

Yes, I'd felt my temper flare up when she'd said it. I guess I'm just a city girl who doesn't know shit like that. The word shit really hadn't played much of a role at all in my reaction. Grace's attitude had earned her the trip over my knee. I had only wanted to make conversation, and she had made a clearly conscious decision to take it the wrong way.

Sure, I hoped Grace would enjoy her first taste of a real grass-fed steak, and the thought of providing that for her had given me a real moment of happy expectation. Then she had pretty much, well, shat on that. I had let the anger die down, though, before I made the decision to discipline her, and now I could see in her face just how correct that decision was.

She had nothing to follow up her but with, it seemed.

"Let go of the seatbelt, Grace," I said. "I don't want you to hurt your hands, but you're going over my knee one way or another."

Grace

"No," I said weakly, but when Cal pulled me further, his eyes still locked on mine, my fingers just let go of the webbing of the belt, as if he had cast some sort of spell over me. Being in his arms, even if he had put them around me for such a humiliating, alarming reason, seemed to make it difficult to imagine doing anything but following his calm—but also terrifying—instructions.

You're going over my knee. My ears had heard the words, and my brain had processed them, but I seemed to feel them in my body, too, in the most distressing way. My stomach twisted and an electric current seemed to run over my skin as I felt Cal suddenly, shockingly lift me into the air and upend me like a sack of potatoes, over his shoulder.

"But… wait…" Words seemed to come out of my mouth without any meaning behind them except that I had absolutely no idea how I wanted to respond. I struggled a little bit as Cal, with his left arm wrapped securely around my upper thighs, opened the door from the garage into the house. I could see only his muscular legs in the faded denim of his jeans and the concrete floor of the garage, and then the two steps up into what I could tell from the tiled floor had to be his kitchen.

I'm going over his knee. I swallowed hard while the neat lines on the very clean kitchen floor went by below me. I thought I should probably feel unsafe, like I would fall off his shoulder or he would even hurt me by carelessly knocking me against a doorframe, but I didn't. The idea of Cal's knee had some sort of power—a kind of terrible fascination that I could feel not just in my mind but in every inch of my body. I felt my face pucker in dismay as I realized that part of me desperately wanted to know what it felt like, even though I knew whatever Cal would do when he got me there would definitely hurt.

The kitchen floor ended. I got a glimpse of wood cabinets, the bottom of a refrigerator. Then the tile gave way to a wood floor, quickly followed by a red rug. A wild part of my brain couldn't help noting that Cal had decided to give me the chance to inspect his housekeeping skills very closely, and he had obviously vacuumed today, maybe in my honor. For some reason, the idea added a flash of heat to my already very warm face.

He cleaned his house for you, and you couldn't help disrespecting him, could you?

Everything had started to happen very quickly, like in a dream where the transitions make absolutely no sense. Suddenly Cal was turning, sitting, and shifting me from his shoulder downward until my upper body landed on a couch and my legs were draped over his startlingly muscular thigh.

I felt his left arm descend across my waist, holding me in place, and then I sensed the skirt of my dress rising. With a start I understood that Cal had begun to pull it up without further ceremony of any kind, and then time seemed to stop its breakneck pace and stand still as all the resistance that had fled when he had pulled me out of the truck returned.

"Wait!" I tried again, but the word had just as much effect as it had a few moments before: none at all. The physical side of my attempt to avoid the terrible humiliation of having my skirt raised and my horrid training panties exposed got just about as far as the verbal side. I had started to struggle much too late, and so I writhed under Cal's restraining left arm without his apparently even noticing. I felt his hand curl around my hip and pull me in a little closer to the rock-hard abs I could feel through his red-checked button-down shirt, but that could well have had more to do with getting me into exactly the posture he wanted. It definitely didn't stop the steadily progressing lifting of my skirt.

I reached back with my right arm, seeking out the hand on my dress, trying to push it away. That hand, huge and strong, found my wrist instead and bent it back behind me, so that Cal could capture it with his left hand, repositioning that arm a little to exert downward pressure. At least he'd had to let my skirt fall again, and that seemed like a tiny victory, but then I felt him pulling it up once more.

"Don't!" I yelled. "Just… just… don't!" I accompanied the cry with a desperate attempt to writhe away, but Cal bent my arm just a little further in an obvious warning. With a yelp of pain I went limp for a moment, at which Cal reached down and took hold of the hem of my skirt again.

I kicked out with my feet, instinctively, desperately trying to interfere with the process that way since my upper body could apparently do nothing. I found that Cal had placed his right leg over the backs of my calves so that I couldn't even move my feet far enough to make the slightest difference—except maybe that he repositioned that leg a little to make sure I couldn't get my feet free. He had the hem of my skirt to the middle of the backs of my thighs, and then he had it to my waist, and I knew he could see the thick white cotton of my awful new panties. A little sob burst from my chest.

"Jake told me you were in training panties," I heard his deep voice say from what felt like a million miles above me. "But he told me to take them down, too, if you needed it."

Another attempt to wriggle out of his strong grasp just earned me a further little bend of my arm. With a sob I understood just how good at controlling a woman's body Cal Perkins was. I could sense in the way he moved my wrist that he would never actually harm me; he intended to apply exactly the pressure he needed to apply to get me to obey him. He had decided that I needed this lesson, and he meant to deliver it.

I felt him tuck the hem of the skirt underneath my wrist. I thought he would take hold of the waistband of the panties, and I felt my forehead crease in expectation of the feeling of having them pulled down. Instead, I felt his enormous hand on my bottom, just holding my still sore cheeks through the fabric.

"I'm not going to take these down right away, though," he said.

"What?" I asked, startled. To my surprise and dismay, instead of spanking me Cal began rubbing my bottom gently. "Wh-what are you doing?"

"I know you're in training panties because you're learning about what you need, down here," he said quietly. His deep voice had dropped in volume to what seemed like a gentle rumble. "That includes punishment, and I heard you got a helping of that from Jake's family strap last night. In a moment, I'm going to take a look at what your bottom looks like after a thorough whipping. First, though, we're going to talk about your little pussy."

I couldn't help it. The combination of his gentle hand, just stroking the little cheeks, with his unexpected words sent a jolt of arousal through my system, radiating from my clit outward. It made my hips jerk hard over his thigh, pressing my bottom further into his hand, and it drew a tiny whimper from my lips.

"That's it," Cal said. "Good girl. There are a lot more kinds of discipline than just the strap or a spanking, darlin'. I hear you learned about that, too, last night."