Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 94181 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94181 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
But the fear didn’t dampen the arousal. It fed it like gasoline on a fire, with a sudden, roaring intensification that made my thighs press together and my breath catch. My mind filled with images of exactly what Master Paul might do to a girl who couldn’t keep her fingers off her wanton cunt for a single night.
And then—somewhere in the chaos of my nervous system, somewhere in the narrow space between terror and need—a thought formed. It arrived with a clarity that surprised me, as if the part of my brain responsible for self-preservation had finally found a frequency the rest of me could hear.
“Master Paul,” I whispered. My voice came out small and shaky and half-strangled, but it came out. I was looking at his chest, at the open collar of his shirt where I could see the dark hair and the strong column of his throat, because I still couldn’t meet his eyes. “Could we… I mean… do you think maybe we could…”
I swallowed. My mouth had gone dry despite the rest of me being catastrophically wet.
“Could we talk about it as part of a scene?” I asked.
The words tumbled out in a rush, clumsy and breathless, and the moment they left my mouth I felt simultaneously horrified at my own audacity and flooded with a relief so profound it made my knees weak. Because what I’d just asked for seemed like a chance to explore the punishment within the framework of the narrative Melissa wanted to build. If I made my disobedience part of the story, maybe it would mean I could understand it better.
I was scared. I was so scared that my hands trembled against his chest where they’d come to rest during the hug. But I also wanted it with a ferocity that frightened me more than the fear itself. The wanting it… that had given me the courage to speak.
I forced myself to look up. To meet his eyes. It cost me everything I had, and the blush that accompanied the effort felt like it might actually set my hair on fire.
What I saw in Master Paul’s face made something open—bloom, even—in my chest.
I saw appreciation, rather than the clinical approval of a trainer whose subject had made a useful suggestion. It seemed like real appreciation, too. It seemed warm and deep and suffused with something that looked, from my vantage point of approximately five feet three inches, like respect.
The brown eyes of the man I couldn’t help calling my new master held mine. In them I could see the acknowledgment of what my offer had cost me, the recognition that I had just taken the raw material of my shame and my disobedience and offered it up as something we could use. Something we could build with.
His mouth curved: not quite a smile, but the ghost of one, the suggestion of warmth at the corners of his lips that transformed his stern face into something that made my heart stutter.
“That,” he said quietly, “is a very good idea, Anne.”
I could hear a warmth in his voice that differed from yesterday’s professional warmth. This seemed personal, as if he had just watched a girl take a step toward something difficult and who understood, with the particular empathy of someone who’d guided hundreds of girls through exactly this kind of threshold, what that step had required.
I felt my eyes sting. Not with the tears of humiliation or of feeling overwhelmed that had become so depressingly familiar over the past twenty-four hours, but with something else. It felt like gratitude. Master Paul hadn’t gotten angry. Or if he was angry… if the dominant part of him that had growled the word cunt while he fucked my mouth was furious at my disobedience… he had channeled that anger into something constructive. Something that would serve both the scene and whatever strange, terrifying education my body and mind were undergoing.
CHAPTER 20
Anne
“We’ll work it into a scene in the bedroom,” Master Paul said, his voice still pitched low, still for my ears only. “Before the shaving. A girl who disobeyed her suitor’s instructions needs to confess. Then baring her can be part of her training for the marriage bed. It might give the whole sequence an even better emotional arc that—”
“Paul. Anne.” Melissa’s voice cut across the studio, and I flinched, stepping back from Master Paul with the guilty reflexes of a girl caught in a forbidden embrace. Melissa strode toward us with her characteristic long-legged purpose, her tablet tucked under one arm and her coffee in the opposite hand. She had pulled her dark hair back severely. She had the focused energy I was beginning to recognize as her default state.
“Darlene’s ready on the bathroom set,” Melissa said, reaching us and glancing between Master Paul and me with eyes that missed nothing.