The realization hit me like a second paddle—not painful but shocking, disorienting, a blow to some internal structure. My boss, this immaculate, controlled, pearl-wearing woman who organized her desk in geometric lines and never had a hair out of place, was getting turned on by paddling me. By holding me down and making me cry and watching my bare bottom turn—Icould feel it, and in my mind’s eye I could see it much too vividly—scarlet under the white plastic of Selecta’s official disciplinary implement.
And the worst part? The truly worst part, the part that I thought I would lie awake thinking about for nights and weeks and possibly years to come, was what that realization did to me.
The warmth between my legs, which the pain had briefly overwhelmed but never extinguished, roared back to life with a ferocity that made me gasp. It wasn’t the slow, creeping heat from the conference room. It wasn’t the reluctant warmth I’d felt watching Karen on the screen. This was a flood—sudden, drenching, undeniable—and I felt my inner thighs grow slick with it as my swollen, aching pussy clenched. The paddle cracked down again and I cried out, but the cry had something in it now that hadn’t been there before, a thread of something that sounded—God help me—like my own need.
Penelope heard it. I know she heard it, because her breath hitched, and the next stroke was harder than any that had come before, and the one after that was harder still, and I was sobbing and shaking and dripping onto the polished wood of her desk in ways I could never, ever take back.
The paddling stopped.
The near-silence that followed went on for a long time. It seemed to fill her office like water filling a tank. I could hear my own breathing, ragged and wet. I could hear Penelope’s, still quickened, still rough at the edges. My bottom blazed with a heat so intense it felt like it had its own pulse, a second heartbeat throbbing in counterpoint to the one hammering in my chest.
I started to push myself up. My arms shook as I pressed my palms against the desk, lifting my tear-streaked face from the wood, trying to begin the slow, agonizing process of reclaiming some semblance of composure.
Penelope’s hand pushed me back down.
Not roughly, let alone violently, but with a firmness that felt irresistible; a steady, deliberate pressure on the center of my back that flattened me against the desk again before I’d risen more than a few inches. I made a sound of protest, something between a gasp and a sob, and then her hand slid lower, off my back entirely, and I felt her fingers—cool, brusque, terrifyingly sure—trace a path down over the burning skin of my bottom, down past the crease where my thighs began, and then inward.
She touched me,there.
Her fingertips found the slick, swollen folds of my pussy with the accuracy of someone who knew exactly where they were going, and the sound that came out of me was nothing I had ever made before in my life. It was a moan—low and shuddering and utterly helpless—and it came from a place so deep inside me that I hadn’t known it existed until that moment.
CHAPTER 6
Anne
“Please,” I whispered. “Please don’t. Please stop.”
Even as I said it, though, my hips pushed back against her hand. My body moved without my permission, seeking her fingers the way a plant turns toward light—involuntarily, instinctively, with a need that made a mockery of the words coming out of my mouth.
Penelope didn’t stop.
Her fingers moved in slow, deliberate circles over my clitoris, spreading the wetness that was—I could feel it—everywhere, coating her fingers, coating my thighs, evidence of an arousal so total and so shameful that I pressed my face into my arms and sobbed. But the sobs kept breaking apart into moans, because what she was doing felt—it felt?—
It felt like nothing Kevin had ever done. Nothing Kevin had ever come close to doing. Kevin’s careful, anxious fingers had touched me like I was made of porcelain, and I’d felt… nothingmuch. A vague, pleasant friction that never built to anything, that always seemed to be happening at a slight distance from wherever the actual sensation lived. I’d thought that was what sex felt like. I’d thought that was all there was.
This was not that.
This hand knew exactly what it was doing. Penelope’s fingers moved with care—deliberately, unhurriedly, effectively. She found the spot that Kevin had never found, or had found and immediately lost, and she stayed there, circling it with a pressure that was firm enough to make my toes curl and light enough to make me desperate for more.
Her other hand remained on my back, holding me in place, and the combination of the restraint and the pleasure, the burning skin of my paddled bottom and the exquisite, unbearable sensation between my legs, created something I had no framework for. Something that built inside me like a wave, like a wall of water, like something titanic and inevitable that was going to crash over me and leave nothing standing.
My mind whirled. The spinning felt almost literal. The office, the desk, the contract, the meeting, the lingerie, the white lace panties with their oval opening—all of it seemed to dissolve into a warm, pulsing haze, and the only things that existed were her hand and my body and the impossible pleasure that was climbing, climbing, climbing toward something I had never reached before. Not with Kevin. Not alone in my apartment with my own tentative, guilt-ridden fingers. Never.
“Please,” I said again, but the word had changed. It wasn’t a plea for her to stop. It had become something else entirely, and we both knew it.
My breathing turned to shallow, desperate pants. My fingers gripped the far edge of the desk until my knuckles went white. The wave was right there—right there—I could feel the crest of it, could feel my body tightening around a pleasure so intense it bordered on pain, and I was going to—I was about to?—
Penelope’s hand stopped.
She pulled her fingers away from me in one clean motion, and the loss of contact was so sudden, so brutal, that I actually screamed. A short, strangled, disbelieving scream that turned into a sob, then turned into a frantic, writhing attempt to push my hips back toward her hand, to find the friction again, to get back to the edge she’d just shoved me away from.
“Anne.” Her voice was steady. Controlled. If I hadn’t heard her breathing change during the paddling, I might have believed she was entirely unaffected. “Look at me.”
I turned my head. My face was a wreck—I could feel it. Tears, snot, blotchy redness, mascara I’d forgotten I was wearing smeared across my cheeks. I looked at her through swollen eyes and saw her standing behind me, her fingers glistening in the lamplight, her gray eyes fixed on mine with an intensity that pinned me more effectively than her hand on my back ever had.
“Tell me you want the modeling job,” she said.
“I—” A sob broke the word in half. “I?—”
