Page 123 of What Blooms in Barren Lands

“Well said.” Einar nodded, the warmth gone from his mouth perhaps, but not from his eyes. “But you’ve not been a good girl for me today, have you? Not taking care of yourself the way I asked you to.”

Feeling anything but remorse, I did my best to rearrange my features into a semblance of penitence.

“No, Sir. I have not.”

“No,” he agreed with me quietly. “And do bad girls get master’s cock?”

“No, Sir.”

“What do bad girls get instead?”

As if of their own volition, my eyes quickly darted to his face to help me gauge his intentions.

“Handprints? Sir?”

“I cannot fault your conclusions, babydoll.” Amusement laced his husky voice. “Lose the clothes and come lie across my lap,” he instructed me, patting his knee as if to demonstrate what was in store for me.

I did exactly as he commanded while maintaining the balance between obeying without appearing too eager to do so, the carefully crafted game of make-believe between us as easily perturbable as a sandcastle.

The rounded wall of rustling trees around us was like a cotton cocoon, absorbing the sound of his hand colliding with my flesh, regular and sharp like the snapping of a branch. The motions of his arm along its trajectory were deliberately slow, however, and their effects were distinctly more bark than bite. A caress rather than a chastisement.

“Aren’t you forgetting to count?” he reprimanded me.

I turned around to look at him. His broad torso towered behind me in the mellow light of the setting sun, and his right arm was raised, muscles bulging threateningly with the force to be unleashed unless held at bay. Yet despite the pedantically arched eyebrows, there was a smile to be discerned in the lines around his eyes. A warm, safe undertow beneath the imposing surface.

“Sorry. Fifteen,” I said, my voice strained.

When his palm connected with my skin for the sixteenth time, I could not help but let out a gasp.

“What the hell was that, babydoll? Are we having a good time down there?”

Pausing in his ministrations, he laid his hand flat on the swell of my hip, then traced its curve with his fingers, goosebumps erupting over my skin.

“Very. One of these days, you’ll make me come just from this.”

He chuckled.

“That sounds ... like an interesting challenge. Let’s try that soon, eh? But this right now is meant to be a punishment. You’re not supposed to be enjoying it quite so much.”

Despite the harsh note in his words, his touch conveyed nothing but affection.

“I can’t help it, Sir.”

“You can’t help it? Well, in that case, I’m going to help you, and you won’t like it one bit. Start over from zero.”

A vindictive smile spread on his face as he raised his arm higher than before, eyes sharp like shards of ice. I shifted, recoiling only very slightly, but his features softened almost imperceptibly into an attentive look telling me plainly that he had recognised my subtle gesture of polite refusal for what it was.

I’m not in the mood for too much pain today, I told him without having to say a single word; a plea to which he, infallible as always in interpreting my desires, replied:Then I’ll be gentle.

And he was, right until the final, much sharper blow, the only one that made my skin burn as I jerked with its shocking impact.

“Owww,” I cried complainingly, and then, hearing him breathe deeply with mounting impatience, I added quickly, “Twenty-five.”

He exhaled with an air of satisfaction and massaged my rear. I stretched and hummed with an intake of air. I looked to my right, at the sky expanding into infinity, brilliantly orange. Fluffy pink clouds rested suspended on the horizon, soft and precious like newborn lambs. And I thought about how all water in the world is connected and how those clouds may have been carrying in them the lakes of my native Bohemia, as well as the glacier lagoons of Iceland. And I felt intoxicated, drunk with an overwhelming feeling of safety such as I had never known, and could only ever feel when at his complete mercy.

I sighed deeply, shakily.

“You’re not crying, are you?”