Chapter 22

Cal

I sent Grace to the washroom to freshen up, and went to get the steaks from the fridge. The rock-hard state of my cock, slightly uncomfortably confined by my jeans, distracted me enough that I nearly forgot to light the grill.

By the time Grace emerged, though, looking fresh as a daisy and just as naturally gorgeous, I had the potato salad out and the burners had gotten nearly hot enough to put the right sear on the grass-fed sirloins. My erection had calmed down a little as I salted the meat, but the shy expression on Grace's pretty face brought it back to life with a fierce leap, so full of arousal that I had to clear my throat and look away.

It definitely didn't all have to do with her beauty, of course. Pretty girls couldn't get me going the way this one did just with their faces or their bodies—even girls who, like Grace with her red hair and green eyes, fell into the category I thought of as my type. Pretty girls who rode my lewdly caressing hand the way Grace had done, flowing with their private lubrication and crying out with untold, shameless pleasure… well, they were another story. Especially when they blushed that way, meeting my eyes afterward.

No, she didn't belong to me. Not yet. But I knew from the look in her eyes that Grace Franklin understood how soon she would belong to me, if things unfolded as they should. More—and this was the part that had made my cock jump painfully along my thigh—her expression told me that she had started to understand a good deal about what it would entail; what starting to belong to me as her accepted suitor and possible future husband meant.

How I would continue on with resolution, leading her along the path I had already begun to show her, when I had disciplined her sexually over my knee. How her training as a submissive young woman, ready and willing to obey her suitor's most lascivious demands, had only just started.

"Should I…" she started to say, when she had joined me in the kitchen, and then her blush came back, rosy in her porcelain cheeks.

I saw in her eyes why she had stopped. I nodded.

"Yes," I told her. "Keep calling me sir. You'll need to get used to that with me as well as with your foster daddy."

Her eyes went wide—I thought I could see surprise at my having guessed her thoughts so effortlessly, along with maybe a note of alarm at how matter-of-factly I had addressed the issue. I knew Grace would thrive as she got used to her submission to a man, but I could see in her expression how conflicted it still made her. She'd only been here in Grasskiln for a day, of course—but I had no doubt that the best way to help her find her feet lay in ensuring she received the message unambiguously. Grace would obey, and learn her place, or she would keep going over my knee or the arm of Jake's easy chair until she did.

Grace

I felt my brow crease, and I took a deep breath through my nose.

"Sir," I said, and then I twisted my mouth to the side because of the shiver it had sent through my whole body just to say it to Cal. I tried to continue on as if nothing had happened, but I had the uncomfortable feeling that he could read not just my thoughts but also the tiniest details of my body language. "Should I set the table?"

Somehow calling him sir here in the kitchen, with both of us just… well, standing there looking at each other, felt very different from doing it when he had had me over his knee, holding me down so that he could teach me my mortifying, humiliating, overwhelming lesson. It seemed more real, and therefore more embarrassing and more troubling.

"Sure, darlin'," he said easily. "Thanks for asking. Flatware is in that drawer and napkins are in the holder on the table."

He pointed, but instead of shifting my eyes in the direction of the drawer I couldn't seem to stop looking at his handsome face. When he turned his attention back to me, he looked puzzled for a moment, and then he smiled, lifting the left side of his mouth in evident amusement.

"A picture would last longer," he said.

Again, I could easily have imagined him mocking me that way, and I suppose it was still a gentle kind of teasing, but I could tell he meant to share the joke rather than make it at my expense. Then I felt a new flash of heat in my cheeks as I realized that he had meant to bring about precisely the same kind of shared moment in the car when he had asked about beef being expensive in the city. And I had decided to be… well, a brat.

A handful.

Now, though, after my ‘lesson,' part of me resisted the idea with the greatest possible indignation, but I couldn't keep the thought back: Cal had disciplined me, even if he had done so with embarrassment and pleasure—too much pleasure. He had corrected my misbehavior, and here in the aftermath I could see how intent my suitor was on making his courtship pleasant and agreeable, despite the circumstances.

The circumstances. Yet another little surge of blood came to my face. The need to train me properly, because I'm a handful.

My suitor had started to train me, and I had started to submit to his authority. I had offered to set the table. I had called him sir.

I felt tears well up at the corners of my eyes, and I turned immediately to the drawer and pulled it out, a little more roughly than I meant to. I had no idea why I had started to cry, really. Just… everything, maybe.

"Hey, Grace," Cal said, and I felt his hands on my shoulders, squeezing very gently and soothingly. I tensed for a moment and I thought I would remain that way, unable to show him any of what had started to unfold inside of me, and then I surprised myself: I relaxed.

Then, to my embarrassment as much as my relief, I relaxed into him. Collapsed might have been a better way to describe it. I took a little step backwards and I pressed myself against his muscular body, suddenly just needing—desperately needing—to feel the firmness, the masculinity there. No, I wasn't even thinking about his cock at that moment—but I blushed anew a moment later, when I did. I knew I couldn't feel it, like that, with it imprisoned in his faded jeans, but to my embarrassment I wanted to so badly it made me bite my lip.

"You okay?" he asked.

I let out a little sob. The question should have sounded ridiculous to me. I knew—the independent, restless part of me knew, anyway—it made no sense at all for the man who had put me over his knee and fondled me without my permission as some sort of ‘discipline' to ask me that.

What made much, much less sense was for me to choke out, "Yeah," and mean it, as I felt his fingers release the remaining tension in my shoulders. I pressed myself more urgently back against him. I realized to my dismay that I had even made a little rubbing kind of movement with my backside, against the strength of his thighs.

I heard him chuckle, the sound coming from above my head and reminding me how much taller Cal was than me. Even that brought a jolt of need down between my thighs. He had just made me come so many times that I hadn't felt certain I would walk right, when he had sent me to the bathroom, and something about his touch and his voice had made me horny all over again.

I wanted him. I felt my eyes widen as I realized it. I wanted him so badly… the way Shelly had wanted Jake, last night.

I pressed with my bottom again. With heat in my face, I even tried to move my ass higher, and I got up on my tiptoes, suddenly desperate to feel his hardness—his real hardness. His hard-on.

Cal stepped back, though. I let out a little whine of protest, but then he started to turn me around, and then he had his right hand on my face, cupping my chin, and his left hand on the back of my head, holding me gently but also firmly, tilting my head a little back and a little to the side. My lips parted and my eyes went wide at the approach of his gorgeous, bearded face, and then he started to kiss me, so differently from the way any of my ‘boyfriends' had kissed me that it felt like a completely different act.

He didn't thrust his tongue into my mouth, but he still dominated me with it, and with his lips, telling me simply and wordlessly that he would take his pleasure that way, and wouldn't accept any objection or refusal. His tongue touched mine softly, and a shiver went through my whole body, then straight to my clit, and I found my arms going around him hungrily so that I could press myself against him, cling to him.

Not breaking the kiss, he moved his right hand to the small of my back and held me that way, until I whimpered up into his mouth. That little noise seemed to raise the heat between us another notch, and the hand on my back slid down to the place I wanted it most—or maybe second most—and he took my ass in his hand again, this time most possessively of all, it felt like, through my modest dress and my horrid training panties at least.

I thought I could feel it, maybe. I sensed a bulge against my belly, and it brought the flames to my cheeks and down inside my panties, too. I whimpered again, and Cal kissed me harder, pulled me closer.

Then, suddenly, he had broken the kiss, and the hand on my butt had moved to my waist, the one on my head going around my shoulder.

"Not tonight," he said, his voice just as strict as it had sounded when he had had me over his knee. "I want you to be sure."

My eyes went wide, and I felt the tears that had vanished when he put his hands on my shoulders return. I let out a little sob against his shoulder.

"I am sure," I told him. How could he reject me? How could he resist me? Hadn't he made it completely clear that he wanted to… to claim me, to make me belong to him?

"That's great," he said. "Let's say I want you to be sure tomorrow, too."

I knew he meant to take care of me properly. I knew he wanted to fuck me. At the same time, though, did I really know it? It stung. I started to pull away from him, to wriggle out of his arms so that I could just set the fucking table. The tears kept pricking at the corners of my eyes.

Cal didn't let me go.

"Hey," he said, moving his left hand to the back of my head again so that he could kiss me.

I shook my head, evading the kiss. "I'm fine," I told him. "Let's eat. I'm hungry."

"No," he said. "Kiss me."

My eyes widened. I hadn't expected that reaction at all. I looked up into his blue eyes at this very close range, and I found my mouth had started to water at the idea of more of his dominant kissing. My lips parted, and he kissed me again—not as long, but just as forcefully. I melted into him helplessly, the same way I had, as if I couldn't keep myself from confirming just how badly I needed to submit.

When he broke the kiss, he looked straight into my eyes, his gaze scorching.

"I don't want you to think it's not going to happen," he told me. "It's definitely going to happen. When I decide you're ready."