Rod of Correction: Taken and Tamed (7 page)

At first he tried to calm her gently, whispering soft “shhhs” into her ear, but then he realized that she wasn’t hearing him – not in the least, and he switched to a less gentle approach.

 “Sunny, stop.”

It cut through the fog in her brain better than coddling her had.  Most of her body relaxed almost immediately, if not her mind, although her legs were still working restlessly, her arms reaching out for something neither of them could see.  He was interested to see that being less emotional and more forceful with her was what she had responded to.  That smacked of her having already accepted his dominance to a much greater level.  She’d discovered that he wasn’t playing, and – probably her flesh more so than her brain at this point – was beginning to recognize him as her dominant.

Rod simply held her that much closer, pulling the bedclothes up and around them once she’d calmed more.  “You did very well, Sunny.”

Why his saying that made her heart glow and expand almost painfully in her chest she didn’t want to consider any too closely.  She knew it was a genuine compliment; that he was absolutely serious, and she felt enormously proud of herself.  There was still lingering embarrassment and shame in the back of her mind. She doubted she’d ever really lose that, as much as she might try.

“Thank you, Sir.”  Her voice was hoarse and soft, exhausted and strained from all she had been through.  She’d never screamed so much in her life – well, perhaps at a football game in college, but that was a while ago.  She’d never screamed so much in bed with a man.  Ever - and she’d had some damned fine lovers over the years.  Anyone who wasn’t was kicked to the curb.

Rod smiled in the darkness, knowing she couldn’t see.  “You’re welcome.  Sleep now, Sunny.  And if you need to get out of bed, you need to wake me and ask permission first.”

Oh dear God, was she going to remember to do that?  When she had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night at her own house, she didn’t even really wake up, she didn’t think.  Then, this was an unfamiliar place – she’d have to be more awake.  Hopefully she’d remember.

Considering the condition her bottom was already in, she didn’t want to think what would happen if she didn’t.

Chapter V

When he awoke, Rod immediately turned over, his heart half in his throat, wondering if she had chickened out and left him in the night.  He wasn’t sure whether or not he’d put that past her, frankly, despite how far she’d come last night.  It was a very unusual situation for someone like Sunny to find herself in, and as much as he’d known she’d enjoyed last night, he wasn’t at all sure that she wouldn’t have decided in the middle of the night that this submission thing was for the birds and dusted.

She was still there, curled up on herself, a slight ring of mascara under her eyes that looked even darker against her pale skin.

He couldn’t help himself.  He turned onto his side to prop his head up on his hand and do something he’d never done with any other woman – watch her as she slept.  Even asleep, she looked exhausted.  He knew first hand just how hard she’d driven herself, and, as sexist as it sounded, he thought it must’ve been much harder to be an ambitious, overachieving female in this world than a man.  Rod knew that, even now, they had to work twice as hard to be considered just as good as a man.  The old boy network was alive and well, despite the rumors of its demise.

He bet it had been years – if not decades – since she’d taken a weekend completely off, and he instantly decided that this was going to be it.  No cell phones, no computers, no demands on her at all – well, except for what he knew would be the never ending list of his own, of course.

He’d never felt so explosively sexual with anyone else, and still managed to blush just thinking about his thoroughly mortifying first performance.  Hell, even the second time he took her was entirely too soon, and not according to his carefully laid plan, but he just couldn’t seem to get enough of her.

At that moment, of course, his own cell began to vibrate, and – just in case she was as light a sleeper as he was – he reached for it immediately and shut it off.  He didn’t care if the world was going to end.  He was going to keep whatever inevitable bad news his eager young assistant was calling about at bay – for the both of them – until Monday morning.

As a matter of fact, he actually hauled himself up, grabbed his phone and trotted downstairs – unabashedly naked – to the ornate box that had been locked, quite ceremoniously, last night, in which he kept his friends’ personal effects – which consisted of cell phones and keys – whenever they met at his house, because if he didn’t, their enjoyment of the evening would end up being continually interrupted.  That did not go over well with Rod.

They’d been meeting once a month for much longer than Sunny had been attending the otherwise casual card games, and there had only once ever been such an occasion, and the caller had been more than justified in doing so.  Most of them looked forward to those rare, uninterrupted hours, and that it no doubt the longest period that any of them ever went without being connected to work – first, with most of them – and then home, of course.

He found her iPhone easily – the case wasn’t some girlie pink and purple thing – it was a black phone in a black, rubbery case that looked like it would allow it to survive World War Three.  He had the same exact phone and case himself, only his was red.  Even before he picked it up, it was vibrating almost angrily.

Her keys were also not what one would expect; he’d noticed them as carefully as he did her when she’d put them in.  Truth be told, he noticed everything about her, but tried to concentrate on smaller details others might miss.  It was a trait that had served him well in life.  There was a kubotan attached to it, which he was actually quite glad to see, a small flashlight, a small knockoff version of a Swiss Army knife, all held on a big, pink carabiner.

There was his girl!  Practical, prepared and pink.  That would be considered hot in any man’s book, as far as he was concerned.

He left the box right there, where it lived, then crossed the room to his study, where he located a dust covered stack of K-Tel CDs in one of the eight or so bookcases that lined the room and moved the entire stack, revealing a small safe, into which he placed her keys and still vibrating phone, as well as his own that was doing the same, closing the door on them both without so much as a second thought.

Straightening, he glanced at the grandfather clock in the corner – one of the few relics he still owned of his childhood.  It was only about seven thirty. They had gotten to bed late, and she had more than earned the chance to sleep in, which he felt certain was something she didn’t do very often, either.

Doing his best to keep himself from diving into work as he flipped open his brand new Apple MacBook Pro, Rod instead x’d out of all of his work stuff – and even his personal email - and did a little surfing, a little online shopping – finally buying himself an antique gun he’d been coveting for a while – and skyped with a friend from Asia that he hadn’t spoken to for a while when he noticed he was online, but the chat rapidly descended into work talk, so he excused himself in order not to get caught in that trap.

Instead, realizing he’d lost almost two more hours of his life to the Internet, he headed for his huge gourmet kitchen and began to prepare breakfast for them.

Minutes later, everything was perking along nicely – the bacon his chef always had precooked and ready for him to just heat up in the microwave was almost done, along with a seasonal fresh fruit salad.  Her cup of coffee – strong and dark like he knew she liked it – was waiting to be brewed in the Keurig; he’d already scarfed most of his first cup of the day down and would probably have to make another before they ate.  Scrambled eggs – liberally adulterated with cheese but nothing more because he wasn’t sure of her exact tastes - were on the back burner to keep warm, and his one weakness, his one true indulgence that he allowed himself every Sunday was warming in the oven – giant, big as your head cinnamon rolls.  He had his chef trained to make two of them – and two only – on Fridays before he left his boss to his own devices for the weekend.  He’d learned just how Rod liked them, with lots of sugary cinnamon and tons of cream cheese frosting sitting in a bowl on the counter, waiting to melt into the tops once he took them out.

He was being extremely generous with her, considering he was giving her one of his precious rolls.  He hoped she realized just how special that meant she was to him.  He’d dated women for months who had gone wanting when it came to that particular vice of his.

Just when he was congratulating himself on being so benevolent, a whirlwind that was being swallowed up by one of his button down shirts darted past him, right to the treasure chest in which she had voluntarily placed her phone and her keys last night, upon arriving.

But, of course, when she flipped the lid up, there was nothing there.  “Where is it?  Where’d it go?  It was right here last night . . .”

By the time he got there to tell her where they were, she was already on her hands and knees on the floor, peering beneath the beautiful antique mahogany buffet and peering here and there, muttering invectives at the cell phone gods for not having kept better track of it for her.

Rod wasn’t being much help because he found himself mesmerized by the sight that greeted his eyes.  She was facing away from him in much the same position into which he had put her last night on his bed, straining to look under the furniture, his big shirt obscuring the majority of her more exciting bits, but still he didn’t think he’d ever seen one of his shirts ever look so good on anyone, including himself.

For a long while, he stood there, slack jawed and dry mouthed until, finally, he reached down without thinking and took a hold of her, at the very private root of her, making her jerk her head up at the sudden – not to mention extremely intimate – contact with a resounding
thunk
.

“Oh, dear, Sunny, I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to make you do that.”  He immediately abandoned his more interesting post in favor of practically hauling her out from under the furniture. 

“Don’t – no, God damn it!  Stop it!  I have to find my cell!” she protested very loudly and very petulantly as she actively fought him.  “I’m expecting a call from -”  absolutely no one that mattered as much as getting him to cease and desist.  She realized, as soon as his hand made contact with her rump that she should immediately reconsider her words, her tone and her actions.  He’d draped her unceremoniously over the back of the big overstuffed couch, holding her there with ridiculous ease by the mere placement of his hand on her back.

He’d only planted a few swats before he patted her behind, saying, “I would suggest you not move – even a millimeter – before I get back.”

As much as she wanted to get up and continue to search for her things – and she really, really, did – Sunny somehow managed to do as she was told.  She craned her head around a bit to see what he was up to, but that the extent to which she had moved.  She had a feeling that his little foray into his study wasn’t going to mean anything pleasant for her, and she knew she didn’t want to make things worse.

When he returned, it was with something in his right hand that she couldn’t see well because of the angle.

But she could certainly feel it!  Something long and thin – a ruler, maybe? – assailed her backside with a vengeance, the sting of which didn’t lessen with time, not one iota - in fact, just the opposite.

He swatted her so many times – and so hard – that it actually broke.  That stopped him as he spent several minutes very carefully inspecting her rear to make sure that she hadn’t gotten any splinters.  If she hadn’t been crying so hard,  -  blubbering for the first time since she was a child, Sunny would have jumped for joy at the implement’s timely demise.

She would have been celebrating prematurely, because, apparently, he had brought a whole fistful of the blasted things with him, and he proceeded to destroy each one of them in the course of teaching her this painful lesson.

When he finally stopped, Rod was panting from his efforts, and it looked like someone had massacred a handful of rulers as they lay broken and scattered where he’d flung each one before reaching for the next.

She was still over the couch, where he’d put her, as she damned well better be, panting much harder than he was and hiccoughing sobs.  He hoped that helped her come to the realization that he would not tolerate being spoken to by her like that.  It seemed as if they were back at square one, as if she’d forgotten everything she’d learned last night, not that he was going to let her continue to do so.

Sunny didn’t think that anything had ever hurt so badly in her life.  She wasn’t a mother, so she didn’t have that kind of comparison, and she had never had surgery and was, luckily, very healthy. She’d sprained her ankle here and there, gotten tennis elbow when she’d discovered, then inevitably overindulged in the sport, but it was nothing like this.

Perhaps it was the combination of the several kinds of embarrassment that had heightened the sensations she felt every time one of those rulers landed.  A lot of them – especially near the end – smacked down right over territory that had already been covered multiple times.  There was always going to be a baseline of mortification at being spanked like a child.  There was no way around it.  But now she was also embarrassed because she’d awoken and not even considered the events of the last evening, but rather reacted absolutely frantically because she’d gotten a look at his bedside clock and realized she’d slept so long, and she knew she was expecting several important calls this morning that she absolutely
could not
miss.

She’d forgotten her new position, even though it was so soon after having confessed to him that she didn’t want to be released from their arrangement, too.

So she waited  – arms not long enough that she could support herself on the couch cushions beneath her and legs not nearly long enough to make it to the floor, dangling there as her bottom throbbed and stung terribly, and awaiting his pleasure.