never seen before. She looked... tentative, almost to the point of being scared, which was exactly the opposite of what he was trying to do for her, for both of them.
His hand left her throat, coming to rest between her breasts as he watched her avidly, doing his best to try to understand where she was coming from that had made her feel so uncharacteristically cautious with him.
But she reached down and pulled his hand back to exactly where it had been. "No, please. I like how that makes me feel. I love how you make me feel – always." His ears caught the unusual places she'd used inflections in that sentence. "Even when I don't think I can take another swat, but I can see that your arm is drawn back and I'm going to get one anyway. I just—" She stopped for a second, then continued, "I wasn't sure if you wanted something different from me now. Since we're making this into a more serious deal."
Mace kept his hand where she'd put it, perhaps tightening it a bit, but then, that was his call, not hers. His free hand began at the collarbone to which he was placing a somewhat less than gentle bite and followed her curves down, hugging them lovingly, until his hand ended up between her hips, spanning them from the tip of his little finger to the tip of his thumb. "Spread your legs for me, baby," he crooned against her neck as he bit it gently.
Intellectually, she didn't want to obey him. Her battle was always with her stubborn intellect, which occasionally reared its ugly, militant feminist head and suggested terrible things to her – like that she didn't have to do anything he told her, that he didn't own her. But the thing was that the rest of her desperately wanted to belong to him, to be his in each and every way he might come up with, even those she might not like the idea of. She longed to surrender herself to him completely, to know that she could trust him enough to do just that and that he would keep her safe.
She suspected as much of him, based on how he had treated her so far, but they had never taken that last, serious, committed step – although it seemed they were bound to now, at his behest.
Mace knew she was struggling within herself, but he wasn't going to be very patient with her just because he knew how her mind worked. However, just before he was going to turn her around and spank her again – this time in front of the mirror, which he thought would be amazingly hot, she began with her right leg, moving it dramatically away from its twin, doing the same with her left leg, so that she could feel her inner lips separating because of just how widely her feet were spread apart. She lost height against him, her hands falling to clutch at his shoulders, as he required, needing him as balance so that she didn't fall forward, which served to press that very intimate area against his hand as if she was seeking him.
Who was she kidding? She always sought his touch there. She could be dead a week and her hips would still arch into his touch.
Then, as their eyes met and he easily held her head still so that she couldn't look away, he forced her to watch him take possession of the most intimate part of her as if he owned it himself, with every confidence that it was his absolute right to be there, to slide his fingers down between her legs, settling over her mound and pulling those eagerly exploring, slightly curving fingers back just a bit to tighten his grip on her. "This is mine. You are mine. And I want – I will have – everything from you. I will hear every cry that bubbles up in this pretty throat of yours, see every tear you shed – whether it's from my mouth loving your clit or my fingers swatting it. You no longer have the right to censor yourself, Randa. If you're too loud – which I can never envision happening – or I get sick of hearing your pleas – which I also cannot imagine happening – then I'll tell you that you must keep silent. But it is not your place, my woman, to make that kind of