Chapter 12
“You are serious.” Cecilia gawped at him.
“How did you think I was not?” Cassian turned away from the door. “You broke a rule, and there will be consequences.”
Cecilia scrambled after him, her heart pumping. “But—but you cannot possibly think you can—can—demean me as if I were a child.”
Cassian spun on his feet so quickly that she crashed into him, and her nose slammed into the middle of his chest. Stunned, she did not move in the gap between the shock of running into him and reorienting herself. Cassian’s hands grabbed her arms.
“Ah, the intimacy,” he teased.
Face scalded, she pushed from him and glared, but her efforts fell flat. “You are not… corporally punishing me.”
Pulling away from her, he strode to the room. He held the door in.
Terror turned her blood to ice. “C-Cassian…”
“Come in,” he said.
“No,” she replied.
“Cecilia—”
“I am leaving now.”
As she turned, Cassian swept her up from the ground, and she gasped when she was thrown over his shoulder, and his arm turned into an iron bar over the back of her knees.
“Let me go, now!”
“No,” Cassian sounded almost bored as he walked them to the couch. “You are going to pay for your infraction, and you are not escaping it, no matter how you try to negotiate your way out of it. Besides—” he had her straddling his knees, “—I wager that we’ll both enjoy this.”
Her head was still spinning when she was rightened. “How do you figure?”
“I love to give spankings, and you need to be spanked,” he purred lasciviously. “Now, turn over on my knee for your punishment.”
“You cannot be—”
Cassian shifted her over his knee, and her cheek landed on a pillow. His arm landed on the back of her shins, and he rucked up her skirts. Her body fell still, as she expected everything from his large hand landing on her body—with her not knowing what to expect or prepare for.
What she certainly did not anticipate was his palms smoothing over the tender back of her legs.
Cassian was stroking his hands up and down her calves, simultaneously soothing her and making her nerves sing a concerto.
Thankfully, he kept her chemise over her as Cecilia knew she would expire if he did see her bare bottom.
“Your skin is so damn soft. Softer than the finest silk,” Cassian murmured.
“I… I thought—” She forced the words out, “—I thought you were spanking me.”
“I am, I am simply admiring my canvas first.”
Cecilia went still as his hand lifted up and cupped her bottom, the heat of his palm on her bare skin—him grasping what essentially was her bare skin through the fabric—made her want to melt through the floor. No one had been this intimate with her.
She tensed, expecting pain, and closed her eyes. Even though Cecilia anticipated it, the smack on her derrière was strong enough to make her gasp.
Her torso snapped up a moment before a large hand landed between her shoulder blades and pressed her back down. “Cass—”
“Unless the spanking gets too much for you, you will be quiet,” he commanded. “If it does get too much, tap me on my thigh three times like you do to yourself. The only sounds I desire to hear from your mouth are gasps of pleasure.”
He gripped her ankles and gently pulled her legs apart, and her quiver of excitement electrified the space between them. The second spank on the other cheek was not as jarring as the first, but it made her realize Cassian was not jesting.
Before she could respond, he set off a series of hard spanks, alternating between her cheeks, the sound of his hands vibrated throughout the room.
You can always stop him, she told herself.
But as much as she told herself she could… she couldn’t bring herself to move. Every strike of his hand vibrated through her derrière, then sent a shock of pleasure through the rest of her body.
She had never felt anything like this before. Sure, it was painful at times, but mixed in with the pain was the most exquisite, confusing pleasure she had ever experienced.
A moan left her lips.
Incredibly, Cecilia felt herself start to relax into it. All of her attention coalesced on the heat in her bottom, and her mind began to empty. Her body hummed with every hard smack, and more soft moans left her mouth.
Her breath was coming out in short pants, and her heart was racing so fast she thought she feared it would burst. She could feel wetness dampening her inner thighs and hoped—prayed—Cassian would not feel it.
His hand dropped on her bottom once more, stinging and hard, and it punched her breath out. As she let out a breath of relief, Cassian’s hand smoothed over her hot skin. She hoped he would leave her in peace and leave her without allowing himself to slip under her clothes.
She was not prepared to hear the pull of a cork and something drizzle on the flat of her lower back before running down between the cheeks of her bottom. Lavender oil. He ran his hands, slick with oil, through the sheer fabric over her derrière.
“What… what are you doing?”
“Making sure you do not bruise,” Cassian replied as he kneaded the oil into her skin. “Your skin is like freshly spun silk—it would be a travesty to have it all mottled.”
Under his touch, she squirmed again, now desperate to get out of his tantalizing grasp. Cassian asked, “Is it that sensitive?”
“N-no, it’s…” How did she tell him she was aroused? “I—I—”
His hand slipped past the fabric and between her legs, a small mistake she was sure, but then his fingers spread over her inner thighs. “I don’t think that is the oil, sweetheart…”
“Cassian,” she breathed, attempting to stop him, “I need to go and—”
His hand slid lower between her thighs, and her breath hitched as his touch trailed down the crease of her bottom. His fingers dipped lower, and she gasped when they touched her most intimate place.
“You are not going anywhere.”
His voice was nearly a croon, and the satisfaction in his tone caused more heat to trickle from her. She did not know what to do with herself with the way he was stroking her quim as if she were her mother's prized Persian cat.
With how she was positioned, his fingers delved lower, finding a tender bud that pushed another moan from her throat. The sensation flooded her senses. He kept a steady onslaught on her sensitive bud, and Cecilia writhed under his touch.
“Have you ever touched yourself this way?” Cassian murmured.
Lost in the sensation, Cecilia allowed his question to go through one ear and out the other. His hard smack on her bottom jolted her into the present, and she gasped out, “No, I haven’t!”
“That’s a shame for you,” he rumbled. “But not for me. I am pleased as punch to initiate you into a world of sensory decadence.”
“And depravity,” she gasped when his fingers tore out a ragged cry from her.
“Oh, sweetheart…” he teased coolly, “You haven’t the faintest.”
The slick sound of her body as he rubbed her pearl and folds sounded obscene, and while Cecilia was concerned about how he had such mastery of her body—she was not sorry about it.
She felt a finger probe deeper, touching her where she’d never been touched before, and gasped when a long finger slid inside.
She squeezed her eyes tight as the wave of pleasure inside built and built.
The finger inside her was stationary while his thumb circled her bud with frenzy, and the demand of touch catapulted her into bliss.
Another finger slid inside her and pumped as she crested on ecstasy, his intimate caresses keeping her small bursts of pleasure sizzling through her veins.
When Cecilia finally returned from heaven to earth, she was utterly spent and as limp as a rag doll. She was hazily aware of when he set her clothing to rights and pulled her up against him.
His mouth fell to her ear. “That is the least of the depravity I can offer. Now, admit it, you are not as repulsed by me as you say you are.”
“I…” she breathed in, “…I will admit that.”
“Earlier, you were so tense, you could have put a bar of iron to shame,” Cassian remarked. “Mind telling me why?”
She wilted against his chest, “I… I got some disturbing news today from Rosie. Gabriel the Faultless is spreading more lies about me. He is… he is working the press into another Great Fire of London and scorching me with it.”
“You are not fighting fire, sweetheart. At most, what you are fighting is a pillar of smoke Whitmore has erected to take the bad attention off himself. You need to shoo the smoke away.”
Craning her head, Cecilia looked at him. “You are right.”
His lips curved at the corner, “I usually am.”
She hesitated, “In theory… what would you do to shoo that distraction away?”
He looked at Cecilia. “Where there is smoke, there is fire. Remove the fire.”
Tapping her pencil against her opposite hand, Cecilia paced her study while thinking, “How do I extinguish the fire? As a matter of fact, what is this fire?”
Passing by her wide set of windows, she paused at the sight of Cassian surrounded by five dogs, juggling five sticks he threw at paced times and lengths, that kept all the dogs in motion.
“He looks like such a giddy child out there,” she murmured to herself.
She watched him jog backward, almost tripping over one of the dogs; snatching a stick from the ground, he flung it, and the dogs went off like a bullet from a gun.
He clapped as the hounds barreled back to him, taking him down in a mount of wagging tails and lolling tongues.
She watched Cassian roll on the grass with his dogs, without a care in the world as to how stained his clothes would get. He was constantly laughing, constantly hopping around and playing, and the unmeasured delight she saw on his face made Cecilia wonder if she had ever known the man at all.
Turning back to the matter at hand, she tried to find the fire in this situation. Clearly, the fire here was the night when she had kissed Cassian by accident, and the smoke was the rumors Gabriel was spreading to distract everyone from the scandal of leaping to marry Ophelia.
But how did she douse the fire?