Chapter 6 #2
She raised the axe high, putting her back and arms into the mighty blow she intended and which she would have delivered if only she hadn’t heard Brock suddenly shout, “Stop!”
She jumped, almost throwing the axe. Startled, she snapped around to find Brock charging at her from the front of the cabin. The look on his face was nothing but concern right up until she dropped the axe. Then, just like the evening sky, it darkened.
“What are you doing?” he demanded, sending every nerve in her body to quivering all over again.
“I’m doing it myself!” she snapped back, defensively.
She hadn’t meant to snap or to sound as outraged as she did, but nor had she expected for him to show up either.
Yelling. Scaring her with the determination of his steps and that look he wore.
The one that said she was in trouble when she wasn’t.
Was she?
She clutched at her fingers, backing up a few steps as he passed the log to scoop the axe up into his broad hand. He stopped directly in front of her, his face darkening even more.
“I said I would help you.”
It sounded more like a threat than a reassurance.
“But I can do it!” she insisted. “I can take care of myself.”
“You damn near took your leg off with this thing!”
“Oh, it’s not that sharp,” she scoffed, almost rolling her eyes at his exaggeration, but that was the wrong thing to do and she knew it the moment her gaze came to rest on him again.
One minute they were staring each other down in front of her impromptu chopping block, and in the next, he’d dropped the axe and grabbed her arm instead.
He made the whole world turn, and not in a romantic, his-arms-came-around-her, bending-her-over-backwards-as-if-they-were-about-to-kiss sort of way.
No. The world turned all right, but because he’d just tucked her under his left arm, bending her over his left hip, while the flat of his big hand began a hard, fast, and furious tattoo all over the seat of her jeans.
The first blow shocked her. The second stole her breath in a shout that was equal parts pain and disbelief. He’d just taken his threat out of the realm of ‘could be let’s pretend’ and made it real with every smack after whack of his iron-hard palm.
It was beyond belief.
It also hurt like hell.
She shouted, her belated startlement finally finding voice, but not before he’d peppered every part of her bottom in stinging hurt.
Every smack of his hand cracked across cold skin until hurt became a kindly descriptive compared to the painful fire he was building under her skin.
Her ability to hold still vanished. She kicked her feet, throwing back a hand to block any more swats from falling, but he only turned his attention to the backs of her thighs instead.
She howled, her tender thighs absorbing the pain and sting of every hard smack, until she kicked first one foot and then the other up in defense of her thighs.
No matter which foot she used, he deftly switched to her opposite thigh, and then went right back to her bottom until her hand blocked him again.
“Put your feet down,” he ordered. “Move your hand.”
“No!”
Grabbing her wrist, he tucked it into his left palm while his arm caught her in a tighter grip. Hupping her all the way up off the ground, he sat down on the stump and threw her over his lap like only so much cumbersome baggage.
“Stop!” she wailed, but Brock was already taking off his belt.
She heard the clink of his buckle, the slither of leather being yanked from around his lean waist, and although she couldn’t hear it, she knew he’d just doubled it over in his hand when she felt the shift of his body as he raised it high.
As painful as his hand had been, the belt was worse.
Much worse. The thickness of her jeans was no defense against the snapping fury with which he punished her bottom.
His arm was tireless, and his aim unerring.
It hurt. It hurt so much and went on for so long, she lost control of everything, including the wailing sobs that wracked her shoulders as she bawled for him to stop. Just please stop.
“I’m sorry!” really were the magic words, because he didn’t stop until she was crying them, over and over again while the pain burned through her butt, hot as a bonfire.
She wasn’t sure when he stopped spanking her.
All she knew was one minute the denim muted whacks of his belt were all she could hear and the burning of her wounded flesh all she could feel, and in the next it was over.
He didn’t let her up. He held her sprawled over his lap, with her hand firmly clenched in his and the toes of her shoes helplessly digging runnels in the wet grass behind her, and her hot tears cooling as they fell from her cheeks to the frosty ground below.
She gasped and hiccuped, and only when her sobs had dwindled to little more than breathy hitches did she come all the way back to herself enough to realize he was rubbing her bottom.
“Are you done?” he asked, his tone firm but his hand gentle as he soothed away the intensifying burn. It didn’t seem to care if the spanking was over; it just kept scalding her, hotter and hotter until no amount of rubbing could ever have put it out.
She nodded, desperately hoping he would let her up.
He did, slowly relaxing his grip on her wrist until she was able to pull free.
Pushing against his thigh, she tried to stand, but he allowed her up only far enough to pull her down again, this time to sit upon the strong thighs he’d just punished her over.
She swiped at her eyes, staring in shock down at her hands where she gripped them tight in her lap.
“Look at me,” he said. He seemed awfully calm for a man who had just spanked her, and hard.
Sniffling, she obeyed. Just looking at him made the tears start up again. “B-but I c-can d-do it m-myself!” she sobbed, covering her face with both hand so he couldn’t see how ugly she was when she cried. She was so embarrassed. What grown person cried over something as insignificant as a spanking?
Except it had hurt so much. There’d been nothing insignificant about what he’d just done, and she didn’t understand.
“Look at me,” he said again.
Embarrassed, she did.
“Did you see how close you were to hitting yourself in the leg with the head of the axe?” he asked.
She shook her head, although she was smart enough not to mention how closely she’d come to it a moment before he’d come charging around the side of the cabin with violence on his mind.
“What if you’d hit yourself?”
She felt the single drum of his fingers on the side of her hip when she said, “It’s not very sharp. I checked.”
His jaw ticced. “Get up.”
Afraid she might get spanked again, Stace reluctantly obeyed.
Pulling and twisting at her fingers, she stood in front of him, backing up when he pointed for her to, and watched as he picked up the axe.
Putting his spare hand on her shoulder, he nudged her well back before shouldering the axe and facing the log.
She might not know the first thing about chopping wood, but it obvious from the way he ponied up to her chopping block that he did.
He checked where she was one last time, and then swung so hard and so fast that it split her log directly in half in one stroke.
He then held the axe up for her to see. “You still think this won’t cut? ”
She wrung her fingers, her ass burning furiously. “No, Sir.”
“Do you have any doubt in your mind right now that had you hit your leg with the point, you’d would now be lying on the ground with your leg half off and less than two minutes until you bled out?”
She raised her eyes, watching him uncertainly. “Actually, as strong as the body’s determination is to live no matter what...”
He held up a staying finger. “It is so very important to your future sitting abilities that you not finish that train of thought.”
“Yes, Sir.”
He pointed behind her and she backed all the way up until her shoulders bumped the curved wall of the log cabin.
Sniffling, she watched as he used the blade of the axe to pick up one half of the log he’d split in two.
He chopped it, not like he had the first cut, but into thin, precise kindling strips.
After doing the same to the other half, he told her, “Take it into the house and meet me on the other side. Turn on all the lights and open the curtains too. We’re going to need it once the sun goes down. ”
She winced. “Um...”
In the process of gathering the kindling off the ground, Brock stopped. He was frowning even before he met her gaze. “Please don’t tell me the power company never showed up.”
“I could, but I’d be lying.” Her wince became a cringe when he sighed and then stood up.
“Okay,” he said mildly. “Plan B.”
She blinked. “What’s that?”
“I’ll take this to the wood-bin. You grab the baby and an overnight bag.
You’re sleeping at my house until this one is habitable.
Water, gas, electricity, heat, and at least as much furniture as a kid fresh out of college.
” He held up a finger, stopping her before she could do more than open her mouth.
“If the next words out of your mouth are ‘I can do it’ instead of ‘Yes, Sir’, you aren’t just going over my knee again.
Little girl, I’ll bare your butt first and you won’t sit all weekend. Is that what you want?”
Stace stared at him, her mouth still open, her tummy a mess of tangled wires that had just pulled so tight that all she could feel was the quivering of each reverberating knot.
The time to believably protest came and went.
Her hands ducked behind her, covering her still hot and throbbing bottom, finding spots of tenderness where the belt had left welt lines.
No one in their sane mind could possibly ever want another spanking.
Not like the one he’d just given her. So why was that stern look of his making her insides flutter, and why did the low throb pulse in her flesh seem to be moving, traveling deeper in between her legs until each maddening throb echoed in her own needy clit.
Her nipples pulsed too, stiffening into tight peaks that rubbed against the inside of her shirt like the calloused pad of a man’s thumb. Circling and stroking, caressing the jutting tips of her breasts until, for just a moment, it was like she really could feel his hand under her shirt.
She shivered, then shivered again as that look on his face changed. She’d been silent too long, and now he had realized why.
Way, way too late, Stace managed a strained huff of a laugh. “No, of course not. Who’d want that?”
Her face burned every bit as hot as her backside. Turning sharply, she walked away, heading for the front porch. Hell, heading anywhere so long as it got her out of his line of sight.
Only when she’d climbed the steps and reached for the doorknob did she suddenly realize she’d walked away from him with her hands holding her butt the whole way.