Chapter 20 - Callum #2
She paused mid-step. Backlit by the headlights, with rain running in rivulets over her delicate French features—her defined cheekbones, pouty pillow-soft mouth, the gentle slope of her nose. My war goddess caught between mercy and obliteration, blazing with rage and heartbreak.
Her voice, when it came, was low and shaky.
“Never,” she said. “That would mean you’re beneath me.
And you’re not. You’re mine.” My knees nearly gave out.
The wind whipped her hair again, flinging it across her face.
She glared at me through the strands like she saw every version of me—the broken boy, the reckless driver, the man clawing for redemption—and didn’t look away.
It fucking destroyed me.
“I don’t want easy either, Aurélie. I want us. All of it. The fights, the hard parts, the push and pull, the fucking wildfire of it. Because you are the only person who has ever made me feel like a man worth becoming.”
Silence settled. She stood still for a beat, mist swirling in the beams behind her, and I held my breath. Waiting. Praying.
Then she lunged.
Her arms snaked around my neck, and her mouth crashed into mine with a violence that felt sacred. I caught her waist and lifted her off the ground, just to feel her closer, tighter, like I could fuse her to me and never let her go. Her tongue was unforgiving. Her lips tasted like rain and lipgloss.
It was a kiss built from fury and grief and every emotion we’d buried between races and fights and foreplay. A kiss that said, I love you for all that you are, I hate you for driving me crazy, you’re not allowed to leave me.
The whole world blurred out of existence.
It was just her—my orbit, my ruin, my religion. Magnetic and merciless and mine, the pull I could never resist. And me—falling right back into her gravity.
Lightning cracked above us, a jagged white scream across the dark sky, and we broke apart. Barely. Her arms braced on my shoulders, breath hot against my mouth, and I hel her off the ground by the waist
Aurélie looked at me like she wanted to tear me apart. I wanted her to. Wanted her nails in my skin. Her spit in my mouth. Her voice in my ear saying don’t you dare let go.
The rain kept coming; steadier now and cold against my skin, but blistering everywhere else.
She stared at me, eyes narrowed, chest heaving, and I could see the battle behind her lashes. There was calculation in her hesitation.
“Et maintenant?” she asked. What now? “You still want to marry me after all this? Because I don’t do halfway, Callum.”
My vision tunneled. My sanity snapped. God, I’d never wanted anything more.
“I want all of it,” I confessed. “The rage, the ruin, the ring on your finger. I want to tattoo vows into your skin until you forget your own name and only remember mine. I want you,” I lowered her slowly, guiding her feet back to the gravel, and backed us toward the car, “if marriage means I get to fight for you like this, fuck you like this, worship you even when everything is burning down around us? Then sign me the fuck up, baby.”
She blinked at me, chest rising and falling fast, like she felt the quake of it too.
“D’accord. It’s all or nothing.”
Her words were a line in the sand. One she dared me to cross. We both shivered, but she stayed pliant in my arms, as if she was daring me to do something reckless. Almost like she wanted me to.
I knew what she wanted. She wanted to take the reins, flip the script, and turn every inch of pain and betrayal we’d just dredged up into something she could control—me.
She wanted to tame the beast with her own hands, to make me answer to her.
Because that was how Aurélie loved: not softly, not passively.
By owning it, claiming it, and mastering it.
And fuck, I needed her to.
“You want control?” I growled, low and feral, squeezing her waist. “You can have it.”
I shoved her back against the hood of the car with a thud. She gasped, her palm landing flat on the metal hood behind her, her back arching, the swell of her tits fucking pornographic in this goddamn dress. And to think this was the safest option.
“But if you’re gonna take it,” I continued, crowding her, towering over her, “then take it. Stop teasing. Stop threatening. Own it, baby.”
Her eyes flared, molten with shock, arousal, and fury. “You think I don’t?” she hissed. “You think I don’t own every fucking inch of you?”
“Prove it,” I snapped. “Because right now, I see a brat who’s running her mouth instead of doing something with it.”
She slapped me. Hard. The sound was louder than the thunder rumbling in the distance.
My head snapped sideways. My cheek stung, but fuck me—I was harder than I’d ever been in my life.
Every nerve ending alive, my love for her snarling in my chest like I was both a sadist and a masochist. I felt the sting of my lip splitting, the quick bloom of heat followed by the unmistakable metallic taste of blood.
I turned back to her. Breathing hard. Drenched.
“Again,” I rasped, lifting my fingers to my mouth. They came away red.
The sight nearly fucking undid me. The pain, the blood, her… it was all too much, too hot, too honest. I felt the cut pulse with heat and I wanted her tongue on it again. I wanted her to mark me everywhere. Fuck, I was in love with a woman who could kill me and I’d beg her to do it slow.
“If it helps, hit me again,” I muttered, almost to myself as something deep in me—dark, depraved, hers—liked it. I didn’t want her to go easy on me. I wanted to bleed and beg and crawl. For her. Only ever her.
She blinked. One, two, three seconds passed, her expression unreadable.
But she didn’t slap me again. Instead, she grabbed my face, fingers digging into my jaw, and dragged my lips into her mouth.
She kissed me like she was claiming the blood she drew, tongue swiping the cut on my lip, devouring my groan like it was her fucking right.
Then I grabbed both her thighs, spread them over the edge of the hood, and stepped between them with lethal intent.
“Oh, baby,” I whispered, smiling. “You’re gonna regret that slap.”
Her pupils dilated, but she didn’t back down. “I’m not afraid of you,” she said.
“You fucking should be,” I breathed, lowering my head until my mouth was at her ear, hot and shivering. “Because I’m not playing games tonight. You want to keep pushing, keep testing me? Fine. But there are consequences.”
I let my palm slide up her thigh, fingers curling around the sensitive dip just above her knee.
“Take my privileges away. Take your power. But just remember, mon amour,” I nipped at her bottom lip, “if you’re going to treat me like I’m not your Dom—don’t expect to come like I am.”
She gasped—sharp, ragged.
I could feel the tension snap inside her. That twist in her core when the words hit her spine. Her hands flexed on the hood behind her.
“Because this?” I whispered, hand rising to her throat, thumb pressing beneath her jaw just enough to tip her head back. “Is earned. And I will earn it. But don’t think for one fucking second that I’ll let you forget who you belong to.”
Rain lashed around us. We shivered against each other from both the cold and the unbearable, volcanic heat simmering between us.
“Maybe that’s not the control I want…” she said, her hips lifting just slightly into mine.
“You already own my body. You always have.” Her fingers slid up my ribs, curling around the open collar of my shirt.
“But I want the part of you that you keep locked away. The part you think no one gets to touch. I want that. I want your surrender.”
I huffed a laugh that sounded more like a groan. “You want the part of me no one gets?” My fingers dragged down her spine and pressed my forehead to hers. “You already have it, baby. That part of me isn’t locked away anymore. It’s crawling to you.”
She blinked up at me, smudged mascara and all. That devastating, defiant look melted into something softer and desperate.
“Don’t make me beg for what’s already mine, Cal. I don’t just want the man who takes control. I want the one who’s terrified I’ll leave if he lets go. Je veux him. The you-you.”
I chuckled, brushing my lips against hers. “You want me to surrender?”
“Yup.” She popped the P, then bit my lower lip. “Right here. Right now.”
Something in me cracked. All the way through. And still, I fucking smiled.
“I spent years believing no one would ever want the worst parts of me, and here you are, asking for all of them. The parts that panic when you pull away and the parts that crave your mercy even when I know I don’t deserve it,” I admitted.
“I don’t know how to love you without falling to my knees first. I only know how to love you too hard. ”
Her lips curled into a slow, satisfied smile. “That’s my good boy.”
The words detonated inside me.
Heat surged through every inch of me, molten and possessive and loud. I felt the shift in my spine, in the way I gripped her thighs tighter, rougher, as if she might float away if I didn’t.
“I’m giving you one chance,” I rasped, voice like gravel, “to give me a safeword, baby. Do you understand?”
She exhaled like I’d ripped the breath from her lungs, her whole body sagging into my grip, obedient and molten and mine. Her voice was a whisper. “Yes, Sir.”
I didn’t hesitate. Not with her body open like that, not with her voice trembling yes, not when everything in me was begging for this release, this ritual, between us.
I yanked her to her feet, spun her around in one swift motion, and pressed her chest to the hood with a hand flat between her shoulder blades.
“Stay,” I growled.
Her feet planted wider apart—subtle resistance, a brat’s defiance. I could practically hear her smirk.
“Are you foregoing a safeword?” I asked.
She didn’t answer, but her back arched sensually, and her hands slid up the hood, as if to brace herself.
So I fucking spanked her.