"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."
Mona slipped the other strap of her gown off her shoulder and lowered the bodice. She gathered the fabric in her hands at her waist and pushed it all the way to her ankles. Naked but for the red high heeled shoes she wore, she stepped out of the dress and onto the floor.
"A blank canvas," Malcolm said as he walked a circuit around her naked body. "I'll enjoy painting you red and blue."