“Hands flat and push your bottom out. I’ll keep going until you keep it where I want it and those strokes won’t count.”
She couldn’t answer with words as he struck again and again, the weight behind each one seeming heavier, more determined. As the strikes continued to come, Rowan pivoted from foot to foot, rising on tiptoes after some, finding she had moved so close to the wall that her forearms pressed against it until Silas’ firm grip at her hip dragged her back into position. When the flesh of her bottom felt numb and raw, he moved on to her thighs and at that, she couldn’t help but call out with each stroke. Sweat covered her from head to toe and her nails dug into her own palms while she sobbed with each stroke, the punishment seeming to have no end.
“I would have given you twenty,” he said, out of breath himself as he swung between words. “But you’re right, forty is better. Forty will teach. With forty you’ll perhaps remember what your actions cost you, cost all of us. Bend deeper, hands lower. I want your legs spread wide and your ass pushed out for these last strokes.”
She somehow complied, the skin of her bottom and thighs throbbing, burning, stinging with heat. The last strokes he concentrated on the tops of her thighs. Each one called a cry from her lips as the leather bit into her tender flesh, but he didn’t once soften, didn’t once give in to her cries, and she did not want him to. She needed this and she needed for him to do it, to punish her like he was.
She only knew it was over when she heard the sound of the strap falling to the floor. Big hands wrapped around her hips, fingers digging into raw flesh and pulling her backward while the head of his thick cock invaded her pussy. There was nothing gentle in this fucking, nothing but punishment as he thrust hard and fast, the sounds coming from him base, like those of a wild animal. He stretched and fucked her and not once did he offer her pleasure. Instead he took and when he neared the end, he thrust once more, a deep, hard thrust that called a cry from him as his cock throbbed inside her, delivering his seed into her womb, their potency assured now as he held her hips tight to him, the pain of her burning bottom matched by the now raw walls of her pussy, and while he held her like this, limp and spent, he brought his one hand around and took her clit hard between thumb and forefinger and squeezed.
“Come,” he commanded as he had before. “Come on my cock, Rowan.”
Even with the pain, the heat of her punishment, she found herself moaning, lifting her hips into him, moving into his hand until an all-encompassing sensation erupted deep within her, making her lose sight and sound, forcing a cry from her lips, turning her into sensation, pure sensation, whole and complete until, finally, she was reduced to nothing and she gave herself over to him, to his powerful arms lifting her, hugging her to his chest, the sound of his heart pounding fast against her ear, and when he lay her down to sleep, she wrapped arms and legs around him as if afraid to be without, to no longer touch or hear or feel his heat, his breath, his strap, or his cock. She slept in this cocoon of safety, enveloped and possessed wholly by him.
Chapter Twelve
“Tell me about your son,” Rowan asked. They’d been lying in bed for almost an hour and he’d thought her asleep.
Silas turned to face her and they lay side by side looking at each other in the dim light cast by the moon.
“I never knew him, I’d thought him dead.”
At her confused look, he sat up and switched on the lamp beside the bed before climbing out and pulling on his pants. He opened one of the cabinets in the kitchen and found two glasses and a bottle. Rowan sat up but winced as she did. Her bottom hurt from her punishment and she eyed the strap he’d replaced on its hook by the door. Silas sat back down and poured two glasses of brown liquid.
“What is that?” she asked, smelling the potent stuff.
“A sort of whiskey. Alcohol. Here, take a sip.”
Rowan made a face but took the smallest sip and immediately pushed it away, coughing. “Are you meant to drink that?”
He smiled and swallowed the rest of the glass. “You’ll appreciate it someday.”
“I don’t think so.”
He poured another half glass and settled with his back against the headboard.
“When I met Ina, my wife, it was on a night she appeared almost out of nowhere in the village. There was another woman with her, an old woman, who was very ill and died within days of their arrival.” He paused, taking a breath. “Ina was a breeder. She had run away from the colony.”
“A breeder? How? It’s impossible to escape.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. But she had cut out her tracker sustaining a serious injury. The villagers were afraid of her and when the old woman died, took it as a bad omen. They wanted me to send her back, but I couldn’t do that, not even when the vote was taken that she should go for the sake of safety and peace within the village. But I knew what would happen to her if I sent her back.