Page 132 of Powerhouse: Boxed Set
“Two.”
Crack. Crack.Crack.
“Three. Four. Five.”
A wail rose in my chest and leaked through my mouth on the next slapping impact. The pain was mounting into something utterly pervasive, it invaded my nostrils, plugged my ears, embedded itself in my throat until I was all hurt, one single aching atom of pain.
Six, seven, eight, nine, in such quick succession I didn’t notice I was crying or when it had started until I noticed droplets falling into the clear pond through blurry eyes.
The tenth stroke was when it happened.
It.
Some strange alchemy in the chemistry of my body that turned each lash of that cruelly biting bamboo cane into something that reached as deep as my bones and went warm.
Liquid.
My muscles slowly unclenched, hot and aching, yearning instead of protecting. Unconsciously, I arched my back even deeper under the press of Tiernan’s hand, the cool air tickling the underside of my blazing ass, sparking a contrast so delicious it made me clench my teeth with something other than pain.
Eleven.
Twelve.
A moan rumbled through me like an earthquake, sundering me in half so that everything dark and hidden under the crust of my careful veneer went tumbling into the half light of the solarium for Tiernan to sift through and decipher.
“Thirteen.” His voice like smoke now, sinuous and sinful.
Not angry anymore, so much as…aroused?”
I rocked back into the next stroke, toes curling in my Prada loafers, breath chugging through my chest like steam from a train.
“Still,” he reminded me, but there was a thread of satisfaction in his tone at my eagerness. “Be still, little thing, or I might hurt you.”
Because he knew the truth, that he wasn’t hurting me, not really, not anymore. Each blow fell just as sharply as before, but my body translated it into bone-rattling pleasure. I could feel the swollen ache of it between my thighs, the stickiness of my underwear clinging to my sex.
Fourteen and fifteen fell, but Tiernan paused before sixteen because I bucked again. I was losing sense of myself in the pain/pleasure vortex. My thoughts had no time to form before my body was singing with sensation again. When he paused, a little, almost noiseless whine fell from my lips and shamed me.
But not enough to stop.
“Hush,” Tiernan ordered, pressing his entire body into my right side, the hand on my back sliding to my left hip so that I was locked against the hard, hot length of him. “Be still and take what I give you.”
A shiver rippled through me like one of my tears splashing into the pond.
Crack.
“Sixteen.”
Moan.
Crack.
“Seventeen,” said between clenched teeth like he was the one in pain, his whole body tensed against me.
Moan.
Crack.
“Eighteen.”
