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  “But what? You’re actually going to defend driving that deathtrap on these winding roads? Has it not occurred to you that you could have been killed dozens of times over in that car? Or that you could have killed someone else?

  “No,” she answered quietly, suddenly feeling guilt at the honesty of his words. “I was going to say that I knew about all of those things, but I didn’t have the money to get them fixed.”

  Seeing that she was deadly serious, Sean couldn’t help himself but to kiss her gently on the lips, not allowing himself anything more than that or he knew he’d become distracted from his intent. “Listen, Tess” he said. “If cost was a problem you should have known you could come to me and I’d have worked something out with you. I’d have been happy to take care of it.”

  Those beautiful, pouty lips began to protrude even more. “No, I don’t want you to take care of it. I can take care of it myself. I don’t want to end up owing you money.”

  Sean levered them away from the wall, grabbing her hand and guiding her out of the store to his truck parked directly outside. After situating her in the passenger’s side and taking his place behind the wheel, he began to guide them towards what she thought was going to be dinner tonight. She should have known better.

  “I don’t know what your other lovers have been like,” he began, hating having to refer to anyone else in her past, especially since it seemed like a hurtful subject, “but I don’t keep score. I’ll not let you drive around in a car that I think is unsafe, regardless of how much money you do or do not have at any given moment.”

  “Well,” she huffed, “I’ll pay you back as soon as I can.”

  She was stiff as a board, looking embarrassed and wishing she were anywhere but here. Sean reached over and laced his fingers with hers. “I won’t take any money from you, honey.” His tone said that the topic wasn’t up for discussion. “But make no mistake, you’re going to pay in other ways for being so cavalier about your own safety.”

  That did not sound good to her. Not at all. Her rear was still stinging from the last time he’d decided she needed a lesson, and that was only two days ago. She had let loose with a string of epithets at another driver who was dawdling a bit in the fast lane - and she wasn’t even driving. Sean had let her know, unequivocally, that such outbursts were far from welcome.

  That was going to be a problem for her - a big problem. She had a potty mouth. A very uncouth potty mouth, and, for some reason, her usual laissez-faire attitude went out the window when she was riding, or worse than that, driving. She could foresee a future for herself that comprised many, many days of sitting very, very uncomfortably.

  Suddenly she realized that they were on a much-too-familiar route. They weren’t heading to dinner; they were headed towards home – either of theirs, since they only lived a couple of streets away from each other.

  “Hey, wait a minute! Aren’t we going out to dinner?” She hadn’t eaten since she’d sent Pam to grab her a big chef’s salad from the diner across the street, and that had been around noon.

  “After we take some time to address your misbehavior.”

  Tessa felt her expectations for the evening crumbling before her eyes. So not only did she have to sit on a bottom that was tingling in anticipation of what she knew was coming, but she also had to put up with her stomach grumbling loudly while they got there.

  This time they went to his house. She’d only been there twice since they’d started dating. He seemed to prefer her house for some reason, although she didn’t know why. His was a gorgeous, big, classical one-floor log home, with an open floor plan and a kitchen to die for. It was filled with what looked like brand-new stainless steel appliances that she’d drooled over every time she was there.

  He let her in first, following her closely and locking the door behind him as if he thought she might make a break for it - not that it hadn’t crossed her mind. But she figured she wouldn’t get very far, since he was pretty buff, she was hopelessly out of shape, and she didn’t want to embarrass herself any more than necessary tonight. Having him carry her back into the house, kicking and screaming – which she knew by now he wouldn’t hesitate to do - would definitely qualify as an embarrassment.

  She half-expected him to immediately begin to spank her, but as always, he seemed to enjoy proving her intuition dead wrong. Instead, he took her into his arms and hugged her tight, then kissed her deeply; she instantly melted.

  Then he pulled back just a bit and whispered into her ear, “Go bend over the couch in the living room.”

  Tessa’s head came up, nearly clipping him on the jaw as it did so, and she stared into those deep, soulful brown eyes of his, finding absolutely no trace of mercy. She had done wrong as far as he was concerned – which was all it took – and she was going to have to pay for it.

  She completely believed him when he said he would refuse to take any money for returning her automobile to a roadworthy state. She knew two things for certain, though: it would be a big chunk of change and she would pay every cent; he was going to take out the cost in strips of her hide.

  The couch she was to lie across was one of those camel-back types, with a tall hump in the middle that she instantly knew was going to lift her feet well above the floor and force her bottom out provocatively. There was no support for her arms, either, nothing for them to hold on to, nowhere for them to go except to be perpetually tempted to reach back and save her rear from the thrashing. She already knew that was definitely a no-no, having tried it once before. She’d ended up with both of her wrists clasped in one of his hands. The dominant showoff always found it easy to subdue her and award extra swats for having the audacity to try to ease her own suffering.

  “No interfering with your punishment,” he had said in that no-nonsense way of his that seemed amplified any time she found herself being chastised by him.

  With a resigned sigh, she laid her tummy over the back of the sofa, finding it surprisingly easy to balance there. She had been right about her feet. They were dangling uselessly above the floor. Tess was literally left hanging, and entirely at Sean’s mercy.

  He approached her from behind this time, reaching for the waistband of her jersey knit skirt and pulling it down and off with embarrassing speed, as if she’d somehow known this morning that she would end up in this position, and had dressed for the ease of her disciplinarian.

  Oh, she dressed for him all right – much better than she had since she’d moved up here, hauling out the feminine accoutrements that she had eschewed after moving up here. In expectation of their date - and because she never knew if any date night might turn into The Night - she’d decked herself out in make-up, a nice outfit and even a cute bra and garter set with matching stockings. The garter belt now framed her panty-clad bottom. Sean thought it made the most tempting target, not just for a hard spanking but for other things...

  “Very cute panties,” he commented, his hand resting on her bottom, boldly claiming the topic in question.

  “Thank you.”

  “I like that you wear matching bra and panties.” He paused. “Does your bra match these panties? I bet it does.” Sean didn’t know why exactly he was asking her that question, considering that he was being driven out of his mind at just the sight of that scrap of lace covering her behind. He didn’t really need to torture himself any more than he already was, but the question was out there now, and he wanted to know the answer.

  “Yes.”

  Tessa heard his heavy sigh, felt his fingers slipping boldly beneath the lacy edges of her panties to curve around the very flesh he was shortly going to be punishing, as if testing their mettle before delivering her sentence.

  “You have a gorgeous behind,” he breathed, leaning down to press his lips to that slightly indented spot where her spine ended and her bottom began, making her shiver in the process.

  “Thank you.” That was another thing he was teaching her the hard way: that when someone complimented her, if she couldn’t think of a
nything positive to say, that she was to simply say “thanks.” Protesting or trying to deflect the compliment in any way would get her into trouble. He had already warned her that as she continued to repeat the same error, the quality and length of her punishments would grow correspondingly. She already knew better than to test him on that. He wasn’t the type to lie. Whatever he said he was going to do, he damned well did it, damn it.

  In some ways, she wished he was more like a few of her earlier boyfriends – much more wishy-washy and apt to not stick to his guns. No such luck with Sean. She had been waiting, always torn between hoping that he wouldn’t do that which she wanted him to do and hoping that he would not do it. She never felt prepared for what was coming, not even at that very moment when he hooked his fingers into her panties and pulled them down to rest just above her knees. Tessa had never felt so vulnerable or exposed as she was now, spread out over the couch.

  She hadn’t been nude with him before. Not that she didn’t want to, but because he wouldn’t allow it. When he said they were going to take it slow, she hadn’t quite realized just how slow. They saw each other every day, ate dinner together nearly every night, snuggled and kissed and watched their favorite television programs on her small couch or listened to music and talked, but they had yet to make love, or go much further than some relatively light petting.

  Tessa supposed she should be thankful that he wasn’t all “wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am” about it, notching his bedpost and moving on to someone else, but the longer he made them wait, the more agitated she became. She was snapping at Pam and at her customers, and all of it was because she couldn’t keep her mind off of him and what it would be like when they finally made love. At this point, if he so much as breathed in the direction of her privates, she was going to go off like a rocket.

  Being spanked definitely took the edge off of her raging desires - at least for as long as she was being actively spanked. When it was over, however, she found herself exponentially hornier than she had been before. Not only was her bottom aflame and sore and tender, but somehow being spanked always seemed to ignite the fire raging between her legs, although he was scrupulously careful never to spank those more delicate regions.

  Sometimes he held her for a while before spanking her, but this didn’t seem to be one of those times. Tessa wasn’t sure which was worse – getting right to the spanking, or making her wait a bit as they kissed and cuddled.

  As soon as his hand made its first contact with her cringing flesh, she knew: they were equally bad, even worse than simply not being spanked at all, no matter how much she’d thought she’d wanted it all those years.

  The unvarnished truth was that it friggin’ hurt, from beginning to end. Although he always made sure that she was well secured, this position was worse than any he’d put her in, because she literally couldn’t squirm away, couldn’t kick her legs up far enough to knock his descending palm from its trajectory, couldn’t lean off his lap. None of her tricks were going to work when she was draped like a housecoat over the couch; all she could do was lie there and take it, and that was truly a horrible thing to realize. She was face-down, bum-up and her completely bare bottom the perfect target - immobile, and unfortunately, all too-inviting.

  Chapter Five

  As he spanked, Sean scolded Tess and she wished she had a pair of headphones or ear plugs. She’d rather just be spanked. Being lectured while her bare ass was being seared was adding insult to injury. It made her feel like a chastised little girl, which she was quite sure was his intent. And this time, he didn’t go easy on the guilt, either.

  “I am very unhappy with you, Tess,” he said, bringing his hand down in a rapid arc to impact with first one bottom cheek and then the other. Her cries would have moved Sean had he not been so fascinated by how her plump globes flattened and then sprang back to blossom with the imprint of his large hand. “You should know better than to let your car get to that point – especially the tires - and your boyfriend is a mechanic, for Christ’s sake!”

  She opened her mouth to defend herself, then closed it again, deciding that it might go better for her if she just kept her mouth shut. Nothing she was going to say at this point – or probably any other – was going to stop him from spanking her.

  He continued to swat her vigorously as he spoke, and Tess began to long for the improbable protection of her tiny panties. At least it would be something between her blazing bottom and his leathery palm. “I can’t imagine why you would be so careless. Your inspection sticker was almost a year out of date! Your registration sticker lapsed six months ago. What if you were stopped by a cop?”

  Should she tell him that she’d already been there, done that? Hell no, she answered herself quietly within her own mind. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her and besides, how could she stop crying long enough to tell her that the nice officer had given her two weeks to get whatever needed to be done to her car and get it inspected. He’d even gone the extra mile and said that if she did it within that timeframe, and brought him proof of it, he would tear up the ticket.

  That was over three months ago, of course. She had been pouring every cent back into the shop, and didn’t plan to spare any money towards fixing up the car until she absolutely had to - that would be when turned the key and it refused to start. Then she would put money into her jalopy, and not a second before.

  Now, though, as her poor butt became redder and redder from his tender ministrations, she knew that those days were gone. Even if she ended up owing him a partnership in her shop, she was going to do whatever she needed to avoid ending up back here.

  Those vows were wholeheartedly reinforced when he took a step back and to the side of her, and she heard the tinkling of a belt buckle being loosened. Her heart skipped a beat.

  He was going to take his belt to her backside! She was already sobbing and crying and begging just from his hand – how was she ever going to survive being flailed by that well-worn strip of leather?

  Sean wasn’t of a mind to give her time to dwell on that question. There was an unmistakable sound as the belt slid through its loops. In one motion, he doubled it and brought it down across the backs of her thighs, a place to which he had heretofore paid little attention.

  Tessa couldn’t help it. She reared up, threw her head back and let loose a long, loud scream that she was sure his neighbors could hear, even though his closest was three miles away. It was the only time Sean had wavered during one of her punishments, wondering if, perhaps, he was being too hard on her. Then he remembered that she had repeatedly passed him every morning on those bald tires, doing at least seventy-five in a fifty mile-an-hour zone. Resolutely, he striped her again with the leather, this time diagonally across her bottom, so that any subsequent strokes would criss-cross.

  He made sure that there were plenty more; his belt again and again sliced through the air, striping her bottom and thighs. Slowly, her mind began to travel; she had come to a place beyond the point of beyond-control, then beyond that - touching down at a place of complete submission. Tessa was helpless to stop him and didn’t even want to. Through the agony of the stinging blows of the belt she felt Sean’s love and caring. He was doing what he was doing to keep her safe and in spite of the discomfort Tessa was lifting her bottom up to meet the blows now, screaming for forgiveness with each one but not even trying to fight.

  When Sean realized this, he literally threw the belt away, not caring whether it marred his babied hardwood floors. Reaching down, he pulled her into his arms, tucking her head against his neck as he walked down the hall into his bedroom to lay her with infinite gentleness down onto his big bed. He refused to let go of her as he twisted back to grab a box of Kleenex off the nightstand, not even offering it to her but taking several out himself and dabbing her face, then holding one up to her nose so that she could blow. When her face was clean and she had begun to recover, he stretched his legs out and pulled her on top of him, figuring she wouldn’t want to be sitting or even leaning on tha
t backside for quite some time.

  “We have put this matter to rest,” he said gently. “I won’t say another word to you about this unless I see that you’re not taking care of your car again. Regardless of where we go together – whether we’re together forever or you decide you hate my guts tomorrow – you are always to come to me with any mechanical problems. I will take care of it. That’s something I always can and will do for you, because I always want to know that you’re safe.”

  “What if I can’t afford to pay you?”

  Tess could see that his jaw was already flexing, but asked anyway. It was a very pertinent question, as far as she was concerned. “Then we’ll get you on a convenient payment plan and you’ll pay me what you can, when you can, just like I said. And no more than that, understand?”

  “Yes, Sir.” The words just fell out of her mouth, and she didn’t like that at all. He was looking entirely too self-satisfied about it, but then he’d been a military officer. He was used to people addressing him that way. Although she had no interest in following in their footsteps, it just seemed somehow right in this situation.