His hands caught me.
Under my arms, firm, lifting me back upright with the efficient strength of a man who moved bodies for a living and could redirect mine without effort. I was on my feet before my knees had finished bending, my body brought back to vertical, his hands holding me steady with the particular grip of someone preventing a thing they also wanted.
"Not yet," he said. His voice was rough. The composure holding, but barely. Like plaster over a crack. "Later."
I whined.
The sound shocked me. It came from somewhere I didn't know I had—a place below pride, below strategy, below the twenty years of walls and silence and never asking for anything. A high, desperate, bratty sound that contained no dignity whatsoever and expressed, with total clarity, the specific anguish of a woman who had been told she could not put a man's cock in her mouth when every cell in her body was demanding it.
"That's notfair."
"Fair isn't in the contract."
"You're a bastard."
One eyebrow lifted. Slow. Deliberate. The corner of his mouth twitching with something that was not quite a smile and was definitely a warning.
"That's talking back."
The words landed. I felt them land—in my stomach, between my legs, in the place whereconsequenceshad taken up permanent residence and was paying rent.
Before I could process the shift, before my brain could catch up with the change in the air, he sat on the island stool and pulled me across his lap.
The motion was seamless. One hand on my hip, the other guiding my body over his thighs—face down, the silk dress riding up, the marble edge of the island in my peripheral vision, my hands finding the rungs of the stool for balance. His thigh was hard beneath my stomach. His left arm settled across my lower back—not pinning, grounding. The weight of it sayingyou're here. I have you. This is happening.
The spank cracked through the kitchen like a gunshot.
Open palm. Firm. Over the dress, the silk doing nothing to absorb the impact—if anything, the fabric transmitted the force more efficiently, the smooth surface conducting the sting into my skin with a precision that felt designed. The sound bounced off the marble and the tile and the high ceiling and came back multiplied, filling the room with the echo of his hand on my ass.
I gasped.
My hips moved. Involuntary. Pushing down against his thigh, grinding into the hard muscle, chasing the hardness I could feel beneath me—his cock, rigid under the suit trousers, pressed against my hip. The contact sent a wave through me so intense my vision blurred. I was soaking. The lace underwear he'd chosen was ruined—drenched, useless, the pretty scalloped edges doing nothing to contain the evidence of what he was doing to me.
He spanked me again.
Harder. The sting bloomed hot and bright and I pushed back into his hand—not away, into. Arching my spine, lifting my hips,asking for it with my body because my mouth was busy making sounds I'd never made before, small broken sounds that were half gasp and half moan and entirely without shame.
His hand left my ass.
It came around the front of my body, found my breast through the silk, and his fingers closed on my nipple. A sharp, precise twist—not gentle, exactly what I'd described, exactly what I'd asked for, the pinch sending a bolt of sensation straight from my breast to my core like a wire pulled taut. My back arched off his thigh. A sound tore out of me—loud, raw, the kind of sound that would have embarrassed me if I'd had any capacity left for embarrassment, which I didn't, because I was draped across Santo Caruso's lap with his hand on my breast and his cock against my hip and every synapse in my body firing in a direction I couldn't control.
He kissed me.
Hard. His mouth finding mine over my shoulder, his hand still on my breast, the angle awkward and perfect and devastating. His tongue met mine and I tasted him—coffee, need, the dark specific flavor of a man at the edge of his self-control—and then he pulled back.
“You’re so fucking sexy,” he whispered against my lips.
“Fuck me, Daddy,” I replied.
"No," he said. Against my mouth. The word vibrating through my lips into my teeth. "Not yet. Now, be good. Don't touch yourself. Daddy has business."
I was panting. Draped across his lap like something wrecked. My hair in my face. My dress askew. My body a live wire, every nerve screaming for more, for completion, for the specific relief that was so close I could taste it and so far I could cry.
"You won't know if I touch myself," I breathed.
He lifted me. Both hands on my waist, raising me off his lap, setting me on my feet with the careful precision of a man placingsomething valuable on a shelf. He straightened my dress. Smoothed the silk where it had ridden up. Adjusted the wrap at my waist with fingers that were steady and warm and absolutely merciless. Then he looked me in the eye.
"Daddy always knows."
