“Did it not suit you?” I ask with a grin. “Was it not everything you expected?”
“Well, not really. I expected it to hurt. Or at least sting. But that—” She stops when she realizes I’m chuckling at her. “What’s so funny?” she growls at me.
“You. And your silly rebelliousness at my requests. If you want a proper smacking, Grace, then follow directions.” She squirms under my hold, like she wants to get up, but I place one hand over her neck and the other over the small of her back. “Hold still. You will stay like this until we come to terms.” Her body relaxes and I smile. “Good, girl.”
“I want you to call me Grace. And I’ll call you Mr. Asher, can we come to terms with that?”
“If you do not submit, I’ll get up, walk away, and never turn back. Your choice. The terms are clear, Grace,” I say her name with a little bit of contempt to hammer my point home. “You. Submit. To me. Not the other way around.”
I can almost feel her rolling her eyes and then she says, “Yes, Master,” and I chuckle. “Don’t laugh at me,” she says, growling again.
I smack her hard this time and she yelps, her body twisting to get away from it before she can stop her reaction. “I’ll do whatever the hell I please and you will shut your filthy mouth about it, do you understand?”
“Yes, Master,” comes out a lot easier this time.
“OK.” I put her underwear back in place and turn her over until she sits up. “Kneel right there,” I say as I open my legs and point to the space between them. She scrambles a little until she’s in front of me. We are eye to eye since she’s propped up on her knees. “Should I allow you to look me in the eye? Or should I forbid eye contact?”
I watch her watch me as she tries to put the pieces together. Grace is a true submissive, she just doesn’t know it yet, so I am patient as she works through things.
“Whatever pleases you, Master,” she says quietly after a few seconds.
“You please me, Grace,” I say back. “You please me.” She smiles and quite possibly even blushes. I’d give anything for it to be daytime so I could see that blush. “So you get to choose. Which do you prefer?”
“I prefer to look into your eyes, Mr. Asher.”
“You’re bad,” I say, smiling.
“You called me Grace and that means I can call you by your name. So I choose Mr. Asher.”
“Who made that rule?”
“We did,” she says back smartly. “Together.”
“We’ve known each other one day, there’s not enough time for traditions, Grace.”
“Maybe not. But”—she smiles with mischief and I find myself eager to hear her reasoning—“we’ve set a precedent. So same thing. You call me Grace when you want to explain things to me, so I can call you Mr. Asher after you call me Grace.”
I shake my head at her. “Fine, girl. We wouldn’t want to break past precedent, so we now have a tradition. Now, what do you want to do next? Go back to your bungalow and sleep?”
“What’s my other choice, Master?”
Jesus Christ. That right there makes me want to fuck her. “You’re a good girl, so if you’d like to stay here on the beach with me, you may.”
“OK, I choose to stay here on the beach. What will we do here?” She waggles her eyebrows at me and the grin on my face has got to be huge. Who knew she could be so sweetly manipulative? “You’re the master, so you get to decide.”
“I always get to decide, Grace. I don’t need you to tell me that.” She bites her lip to stop her smile. “Tell me about your life. Where do you work and what do you do?”
And then her mouth opens and words and sentences spill out. Paragraphs and paragraphs of details tumble out of her tender pink lips. I listen with an eager ear as she describes her new job, her old job, her loft in the city, her car, her fascination with cats—she doesn’t have any because her building doesn’t allow pets—and then, after she’s all talked out, her pause is longer than it should be and I find her almost asleep.
“I guess I don’t have to play the get-to-know-me game then. You’re too tired.”
“I’m not tired, I just put myself to sleep with my boring life. So, no,” she whispers. “I want to hear, I’m not asleep. My eyes are just heavy. Tell me. Tell me something about you.”
“What do you want to know? The plot in the Invisible Man 2 movie? My upcoming appearances? How much money I made this year? What kind of car do I drive? Choose.”