She’d enjoyed it all.
As Malcolm had given her no instructions for what to wear for their Sunday night assignation, she wore her favorite fall dress of crushed red velvet—ankle length, skin tight, backless. She pinned her apple-red hair up in a chignon and let tendrils fall down her neck. If that wouldn’t please a man such as Malcolm, nothing would.
Midnight came at last.
Mona went to the gallery, and spent a moment petting sweet, sleepy Tou-Tou in his bed before heading for the back room. She didn’t want to seem afraid, so she opened the door without hesitation.
Malcolm was waiting.
He stood in the center of the back room, his back to her. He’d dressed like the man in the portrait. Hunting attire. White breeches, a green velvet jacket, and brown leather riding boots that clung to his thighs like a second skin. He was magnificent, resplendent, utterly desirable. His hair looked a shade longer and a shade lighter, and it was curled on his head in the consummate Regency style.
In his right hand he held a long wooden riding crop with a leather tip.
Mona ignored the crop. She cared nothing about it. She walked to Malcolm, almost ran, and he took her into his arms and kissed her passionately. His mouth was warm and tasted of spiced wine and cigars. She couldn’t stop kissing him.
"Beautiful girl,” he murmured against her lips. She wanted to tear off his fine white linen cravat and lick the hollow of his throat. She would have kissed it and bitten it. She would have drunk wine out of it. She hadn’t given that hollow a second thought until it was covered and hidden from her view.
"I want you already,” she said as she grasped the back of his coat and pressed her breasts to his chest. He kissed the tops of her breasts, swelling out of her dress. He ran his fingertips over those soft swells and she shivered and sighed. Her nipples needed sucking and her clitoris needed licking and her pussy needed his cock. She was pleased they would be all alone tonight, their first time all alone together in months. She had things she must ask him, but she knew she couldn’t until he’d spent his lust on her. It would be hours, she knew, if the pattern held.
She could wait.
Malcolm had looped the leather cord of the riding crop over his right wrist, and she felt the tip of it tickling her backside as he kissed her mouth. He lightly scored her back with his fingertips, caressing her skin along her spine, cupping her bottom before tickling his way up to the nape of her neck again. He kissed her earlobe, kissed her collarbone. As he kissed her neck, he pulled the strap of her dress down her shoulder to bare her left breast. He held it in his hand, squeezed it as he kissed her mouth. He cupped it in his palm and looked down, smiling at it like a prized possession.
"So lovely,” he said. "So young and ripe.” He teased the tender red tip with his thumb, tracing the edge of the aureole. Her nipple hardened quickly. It was a red marble under the pad of his thumb. He toyed with it to make her moan. "Tell me what you feel, Mona. Tell me what I do to your body.”
"I feel desire.”
"Tell me much more than that. How does your nipple feel?”
"Hard. It feels as hard to me as it does to you,” she said breathlessly. "A woman can feel when her nipples are this hard.”
"As a man can when his cock is hard.”
"Yes, I’m sure it’s something like that. When you touch my nipple when it’s soft, I feel pleasure. But when you touch it when it’s this hard, the pleasure is magnified. Ten or twenty times. It’s hard to stand, hard to breathe. I ache, Malcolm.”
"Where do you ache, Mona? Tell me everywhere you ache.” He whispered the order and kissed the top of her breast. His soft hair tickled the bare flesh of her chest. She would die if he made her wait for him to take her.
"My breasts ache,” she said. "They need to be licked and sucked hard. And I ache inside for your cock.”
"In your cunt.”
"In my cunt,” she said. He inhaled sharply as if it aroused him to hear her say the word. "It’s not just the cunt. The ache is everywhere. In my stomach. In my thighs. Everywhere you touch me. I ache everywhere, Malcolm.”
"Here?” he asked, and flicked his tongue across her nipple.
"Yes.” The word came out in a gasp.
"Here?” He slid his hand into the long slit of her dress at the top of her thigh. He cupped her between her legs, cupped her cunt, and slipped a finger into her wet hole. She contracted around it involuntarily. Malcolm flinched and she knew he’d felt it.
"Yes…” she hissed.
"Here?” He kissed her chest over her heart. "Do you ache for me here?”
"Malcolm…you told me not to love you. Don’t make me love you.”
"But do you miss me when I’m gone?” he asked.
"The things you do to me…I’d never dare dream them, much less do them. And yet, when I’m with you, there is no game I wouldn’t play, nothing of my body would I keep from you. You leave me and I go mad with waiting. You leave me and you are my every waking thought and my every sleeping dream. And if I knew when you were returning to me, I would count the minutes until I saw you again.” She paused. "No, that’s a lie.”
"What’s the truth, Mona?” His voice was so soft and tender it hurt her.
"I would count the seconds.”
They breathed together, looking into each other’s eyes. His mouth closed over hers again and they were locked into a kiss that would seemingly never end.
Then it did.
Malcolm panted. He released her breast and wrapped that arm around her back again, pulling her roughly against him.
"What you feel for me is what I want you to feel tonight,” he said. "But you might hate me after.”
"I could never hate you.”
"Don’t say things like that,” he warned. "Men like me take statements such as that as a challenge.”
"Will you beat me very brutally tonight?”
"I will.”
"Will I like it?”
"If you let yourself.”
"I’ll try,” she said, scared but willing. Anything for Malcolm. Especially tonight. She’d never met a man who conformed so closely to her ideal. She felt the smooth leather of his riding boot against her bare calf. She rubbed her leg against it like a cat rubbing its cheek against a chair leg it wanted to mark. She ran her hands down the velvet of his broad back, cupped his firm backside and held it while he kissed her. Of their own accord her hips pushed into his again and again. Her sex was already open for him, wet and slick, hollowed out and waiting. If he put his cock into her right now, she’d come before he’d even bottomed out inside her on the first stroke.
But he didn’t take her.
"Listen to me, Mona.” He put his hands on her neck, lightly cupping it, his thumbs pressing into the hollow of her throat to force her to pay attention to his words. She dropped her hands to her sides and met his dark flinty eyes again. "You’ll be mine tonight in a way you’ve never been mine before. It’s one thing to allow a man to pleasure you. It’s quite another to allow him to hurt you. You’ll know real powerlessness tonight, real fear, true pain. And I will drink it like wine.”
"You like my pain?”
"I love your submission to pain. It’s human nature to race toward pleasure and flee from pain. That you would fight your own nature to please me by suffering my crop arouses me more than anything you’ve done for me before.”
"I want to please you.” She placed her hands on his trim waist, feeling the heavy brocade cloth of his vest and the heat of his body under her hands. "After all, that’s what you’re paying me for.”
"Oh…you will be beaten for that.” He eyes narrowed and she saw he meant it.
"Good,” she said. "If I’m going to be beaten, I want to have earned it.”
"You earned it when you crossed the threshold. You earned it when you sold your body to me.” He stepped back from her, putting breathing room between them. She already felt cool without the heat of his body against hers. "Show me my property. Show me what I got for my money.”