“I’m sorry I slept with the windows open.” She was proud of her steady voice, even as her heart thudded hard against her breastbone and fresh sweat broke out under her arms and at the small of her back.
Please let him have forgotten, please, please let him have forgotten…
“What did I say I’d do if I caught you doing exactly that?”
He hadn’t forgotten.
Suddenly his hands on her body felt less like sensual preparation and more like a devious softening up for an interrogation. She didn’t need to look into his eyes to note the preternatural energy humming under his skin.
“Drew. No.”
“What did I say, Tess? Do you remember the conversation?” The words were liquid, so soft, which was a little scary. Despite the drawl, the sense of humor and the unflinching Southern honor, Drew was anything but soft.
She stayed stubbornly silent through ten pounding heartbeats, twenty, because if she kept quiet, his promise didn’t exist. Thirty more beats passed with her gaze focused resolutely on the place where her pulse pounded against the circle of his fingers. Finally, she surrendered.
“We’d been in bed all day and we’d soaked the sheets even though the AC was on. You said it was on its last legs. I said I didn’t care because I’d just sleep with the windows open. I’d done it before, and I’d do it again.” Unwilling to show fear, she dragged her gaze up to meet his. “And then you said…if I did…you’d spank me until I couldn’t sit for a week.”
With his back to the windows, stark shadows lay across the planes and angles of his face, concealing most of his expression. His eyes, however, were such a pale blue she could see emotion flickering through them, too fast for her to decipher. His bent head and wide shoulders offered her no protection from the moonlight, but she didn’t look away as her heart hammered in her chest and her stomach alternated between circus flip-flops and plummeting to the bottom of her abdomen. And yet at the same time her nipples swelled against the soft material of her tank top and a traitorous heat throbbed in her womb.
In a voice as thick and dark as the still air coalescing into moisture on her skin, he said, “Good thing you don’t have a desk job.”
Not funny.
She stepped back, twisting her head and arm to pull free, but came up short with her back to the wall. “Drew, you can’t possibly mean it. It’s…archaic! It’s crazy!”
He moved closer, boxing her in. “I meant it, Tess. You knew I meant it when I said it.”
Her jaw dropped. A minute ago he was a rational twenty-first century male whose mother had earned her law degree studying nights and weekends, and whose sisters juggled work and kids. That man had disappeared, leaving behind a Drew she recognized only at some level so primitive she hadn’t been aware it existed.
“You need this—”
She gasped, somewhere between astonished and outraged. “I do
not
!”
His gentle smile almost hid the intractable look in his eye. “Yes, you do, Tess.”
For the third time in thirty minutes shock ran, electric and searing, through her veins. Suddenly she was as motionless as he was, with no heartbeat, no breathing as she searched his eyes, pale blue and unreadable in the dim light. The hand that had rested lightly on her nape now cupped her cheek, while his thumb brushed her full lips. Then his roughened fingertips trailed along her neck, into the hollow where her collarbones met, then slid down her breastbone before detouring along the lower edge of her ribs and finally dropping to the swell of her hip. He wound his thumb in the string stretched taut there, pulled the thin strip away from her body and slid his fingers into the back of her panties to curve around her bottom.
“You’re trembling.”
“You’re scaring me. Again.” She might have sounded believable if her voice had quavered rather than snapped.
“I’m not scaring you. I’m making you mad,” he said, calling her bluff without a hint of remorse. “You know nothing bad’s gonna happen here. I, on the other hand, came up the street and saw the windows open and half the neighborhood’s Latin Kings drinking and hanging around in Mrs. Delgado’s driveway.”
An impromptu party she hadn’t heard over the music. She turned her head to the side, away from the look in his eyes. “I said I was sorry.”
“Apology accepted, Tess, but you still get the spanking.” His hand tightened on her hip, the pressure constant until she opened her eyes again. He looked back at her, his gaze part wry amusement, part serious intent. “Sometimes pain can feel really, really good.”
A dozen smart-mouthed comebacks trembled on the tip of her tongue, but in the end the agitation roiling inside her kept her from voicing a single one. She shoved at his shoulder and ducked under his arm, hurrying down the stairs and across the peeling linoleum to the kitchen sink. She opened the faucet as far as it would go. Cold water streamed into the scratched aluminum bowl. She scooped handfuls of water to her mouth, then splashed her face.
He’d lost his mind. That was the only explanation. He was completely insane if he thought she’d let him spank her. Yes, she’d left the windows open, but that was no reason for him to make good on a lazy promise made at the tail end of four hours of sex. Truth be told, they were nowhere near vanilla in bed, but let a Navy SEAL spank her, for God’s sake? He was certifiable!
Except he sounded sane, assured and totally in control.
Expecting him hard on her heels, she shut off the water and turned, but the stairs were empty, the creaky floorboards above her silent. Would he forget about it? He looked haggard with exhaustion, dark smudges under his eyes visible even in the dim light of her room. Maybe if she gave him enough time he’d fall asleep and they could laugh this off in the morning. Or maybe he’d storm down the stairs, drag her to the sofa and blister her butt. Moments passed, then stretched into a minute without sound or movement.
Fine. He could sit up there until he roasted.
Her mind replayed his words…
put yourself in my place…not as badly as you scared me…half the neighborhood’s Latin Kings drinking and hanging around in Mrs. Delgado’s driveway…not as badly as you scared me…
Well, that was an accomplishment to put on her résumé. She’d managed to scare a SEAL, an individual trained to handle any circumstance at any time with whatever meager tools and resources he had at hand. She’d scared him.
But she’d known when she wedged opened the windows with a small shim that she wasn’t just dealing with her poverty line life. She was defying the only rule he’d felt strongly enough to voice. Despite his current incarnation as a dominant alpha male, Drew was laid-back, relaxed, beyond tolerant of her unusual hours, jobs, hair color and friends. Besides the windows, he simply let her be. Of course, a highly trained professional special operative in the United States Navy should have more on his mind than fussing over her rainbow hair and shabby wardrobe.
Okay, she got it. This had to be about his job, which called for extended, unbroken focus, and if he was worried about her, he might falter at a very deadly task. Given the life-or-death scenarios he faced, the last thing she wanted to do was distract him. She’d let him down, wronged him by disobeying a very specific request. If he felt that strongly about this, then fine. He wouldn’t hurt her. She knew that.
Best to get it over with.
She turned and climbed the stairs with far more reluctance than she’d shown on her way down. Drew sat on the bed in her room, his eyes closed, his back to the wall, one leg stretched out in front of him, the other pulled up. His arm rested on his bent knee, the hand dangling forward while the other hand lay on his thigh. A wide swath of moonlight illuminated his face and body, and she saw the tendons of his hands running under skin dusted with fine, white-blond hair. Three knuckles were bruised, nothing unusual.
His hands had fascinated her from their first meeting—on a brilliantly sunny, San Diego, late winter day after a storm, when the surf pounded the beach in waves the length and height of tractor-trailers and the sand was damp from rain. Drawn to the crash of the surf and the clouds scudding across the sky, she’d spent the entire day sculpting an enormous, whimsical castle complete with thick walls, a moat, drawbridges, and turrets with gargoyles, perched atop a mound of sand carved into unassailable cliffs. Late in the afternoon several surfers who’d survived despite their death wish stopped to examine her work.
Drew was one of them. A couple inches under six feet, he was so leanly muscled that in his unzipped wet suit she could see veins, tendons, ligaments running under his skin. It was his hands she’d watched, however, as he and his friends circled the castle, sizing up the fanciful structure before identifying weak points and strategizing an attack. Nicks, scabs and scars covered his long, tapering fingers and the backs of his hands, while his palms and fingertips bore calluses from physical use. His hands skimmed over the packed sand, almost but not quite touching the painstakingly molded shapes as he argued with a buddy about climbing techniques. Muscles roped around his wrists and forearms, and his biceps, triceps, deltoid, trapezius and abdominal muscles flexed and released under his skin.
Any San Diego-raised girl knew navy when she saw it. Marriage-minded girls could pick out officers blocks away. After three years of bartending near the base, Tess correctly guessed rank with nine out of ten guys, and knew the SEALs from the wannabes. Drew was the real deal, and guys like him, with their pick of the beach bunnies, normally didn’t give her the time of day. But he’d looked at her, then at the castle, then back at her again.
“You did this?”
She surveyed seven hours of work that would wash away with the next rain, and shrugged. “Yes.”
“Nobody helped you?”
“No.”
He took in her rolled up jeans with the muddy knees, her bare, dirty feet with bright purple toenails matching the purple streaks in her blonde-for-now hair, windblown from two braids, her shapeless hoodie sweater. His eyes showed a frank interest her petite, semi-Goth self rarely attracted.
“Impressive.”
After a murmured conversation he transferred his board to a buddy. She stood silently next to him and watched his friends load up their trucks and leave.
She smiled at him, ready to play the game that would put him in his place at arm’s length. “How are you going to get back to the base?”
He squinted into the setting sun, then at the nearly empty parking lot, then finally at her. A quirky grin crossed his face. “I was hoping if I bought you dinner you’d give me a ride.”
“I’d think about it, except I don’t have a car.”
This time she spoke without a hint of emotion, as if his unexpected invitation hadn’t sent a secret thrill through her. In return she expected disbelief, irritation, even a bit of blame for being so pathetic as to ride the bus. Instead, he threw back his head and laughed at himself, at her, at life, it didn’t matter, because she was done. With his self-deprecating sense of humor and deft, confident hands, he’d won this round.
While she stood beside him and tried not to gawk at his hands or the gorgeous, anatomy-textbook planes of his torso, he pulled a cell phone out of his backpack and sent a quick text message. Then he introduced himself, helped her rinse her tools and pack them in the canvas tote that held the trash from her picnic lunch. Almost right away a black truck and a red sports car pulled into the nearly empty parking lot. Silent and efficient, a bulky bald guy got out of the truck, tossed a set of keys to Drew and slidt into the passenger seat of the sports car. With a spray of gravel and mud the red vehicle zoomed back onto the highway.
He palmed the keys and looked at her. “Mexican? Thai? Italian? Your choice.”
Game over.
“Well?”
The brusque question called her back from the windy day by the ocean to the stifling confines of her bedroom, and the black-clad man waiting silently on her bed.
She spoke in an even, measured tone of voice intended to hide the exasperation simmering inside her. “I get it. You asked me not to do something. I did it, anyway. That was disrespectful. If we’re going to be together I can’t be a burden while you’re…working. In the future I’ll do whatever it takes to stay as safe as possible. And if you need to…spank me…to work this out, I’m ready.”
There. An admission of guilt plus the proper recognition for his demanding career. That ought to do it.
After another snort of disbelief, he opened his eyes and turned his he, fixing her with an uncompromising look. “You think I’m doing this for me? Wrong, Tess. Your apology was sincere. I trust you won’t do this again. The spanking is for you.”
Exasperation exploded into slitty-eyed irritation. “I cannot believe you think I need—”
His lifted hand cut off her words, then he turned his wrist and beckoned her forward. “You said you were ready. Come here.”
The temper that got her screamed at, or worse, in every foster home she’d lived in surged red-hot in her throat, but she drew breath, closed her eyes and let it out as she counted to ten. He had a point. She didn’t
get
his point, but dominating or hurting her wasn’t the issue. She knew that. “Fine, fine. Let’s just get this over with,” she muttered under her breath as she stepped through the doorway and stalked toward the bed.
A hint of a smile danced around the corners of his mouth before the beckoning hand switched to the closed fist meaning
halt
. “Take off your top.”
The heat in his eyes and his intractable tone flipped a switch in her brain. All the confused protests tumbling around in her rational mind sputtered in a crackle of static, then shut off, but her body reacted automatically. She tugged the wet, clinging fabric over her head and let the shirt drop to the floor as she bent forward.
While she’d intended nothing more than using her hair to hide the aroused flush flooding her cheekbones, a hitch in Drew’s even breathing as he beckoned to her again told her he wasn’t immune to her downcast eyes and nearly naked body. Her hair fell dark against the upper swells of her breasts, and her white panties stood out even against her pale skin. As politically incorrect as it was, she couldn’t blame her thudding heart and watery knees on nerves alone. The stark reality was she was all but naked as she crawled up onto the bed to accept his punishment for her disobedience, and her female, animal body seemed to be operating on an entirely different frequency from her rational brain. Sheer erotic arousal pumped through her veins.
Drew lifted his hands out of the way so she could lie facedown across his lap in a strange, awkward and more than a little embarrassing alignment of their bodies.
“Move forward,” he said, his voice soft yet firm.
In response to his command she shimmied forward, centering her bottom directly over his thighs. His discarded black watchman’s cap lay a few inches away. She gathered it to her and rested her face on her folded forearms as images of how this looked flashed against the movie screen of her mind. Mostly naked, over his lap, her bottom perfectly situated for swats.
“Pull down your panties.”
Red, telling heat bloomed in her cheeks at the thought of reaching back and baring her bottom for him. The pendulum of her emotions swung wildly between a rather disturbing excitement and sheer vexation. She clenched her teeth to bite back a furious response, then turned her face away from him and reached back to hook her thumbs in the elastic edge of the string bikini briefs. With a little squirming and some help from him, she got her panties down, lifting just enough to let him tug the soaked panel from between her legs. She expected him to slide them down and off, but he left the white fabric at midthigh.
He stroked his palm over the curve of first one cheek, then the other, the touch soft, gentle, so seductive she let out her breath in a trembling rush, and with the exhalation, melted into his powerful thighs. A lush blend of arousal, embarrassment and nerves made her wiggle her hips in a figure-eight on his lap. When she made contact with his erection, hard and ready against his fly, his hand tightened briefly on her ass.
“Let’s try again. Why did you leave the windows open?”
Fuck counting to ten. For that matter, fuck
him
! Hot, aroused, sweating, confused and emotionally reeling, she sucked in air and pushed up onto her hands and knees. “Damn it, Drew!” she all but shouted as she turned to look at him. “You know why!”
The muscles in his arm flexed as the hand at the small of her back forced her flat, then
crack!
A resounding smack landed on the left side of her bottom. Tess jumped and yelped as fire spread from the point of impact.