10. Lemon
TEN
LEMON
The warm sun heats my skin the moment we step outside, a soft breeze ruffling the skirt of my dress and reminding me that I’m not wearing any panties.
I’m used to being braless in this dress.
The open back makes it impossible to wear even the most innovatively designed straps, but having no bra and no panties is a brand-new experience for me.
The sense of exposure I feel is both disquieting and kind of…invigorating at the same time. I don’t like feeling exposed, but I’m still enjoying the strange feeling of being naked, because Atticus asked me to be.
He asked me to try this, and I said I would, assuming I’d hate it and could tell him how awful it’d been. But after only a few steps outside of his home, I’m already a little turned on by the naughty nature of being in public without any panties.
Is this why women do it? I’d always assumed the only reason a woman would choose not to wear panties was because she physically couldn’t wear them beneath a particular outfit or because every pair she owned was dirty.
I’d honestly never considered that a woman would choose to go out with nothing beneath her clothes because it made her feel… sexy.
When we reach his car, he opens the door for me, then lifts me inside, grabbing a handful of my bare and slightly sore ass as he places me on the passenger seat.
“Can you still feel my handprint on your ass?” he asks with a quiet smirk.
I try really hard not to blush, but heat infuses my cheeks before I can stop it. “Atticus.”
“Imagine how it’d feel if I spanked you properly. Your skin would be pink and warm for hours. You’d feel my possession every time you moved.”
I really, really should not like that thought, but I do. What the hell is this man doing to me? Why, since bumping into him, do I feel like I’m becoming a completely different person? I feel bolder, braver, and yet somehow so much more inexperienced than I did before.
Maybe it’s because Atticus isn’t like the other men I’ve been with. He’s intense and controlled and consuming. Since the first time his scorching palm landed on my back, I’ve done things I’ve never dreamed of doing before.
I’ve knelt at his feet. I’ve been naked in his living room. I’ve let him do…things to my butt. And now I’m pantyless with his handprints on my ass cheeks, thinking about how much I’d like him to enact the filthy picture he painted for me this morning.
Sucking in an affirming breath, I try to banish the vision from my mind, but instead, I feel almost sucked into it, like the thoughts are stronger than my resolve to ignore them.
The fantasy plays out like a movie in my mind.
From the outside looking in, I watch him hold my hand and guide me to lie over his lap, my head and chest hanging over one leg, while my legs dangle over the other, my ass positioned in his lap, an offering at his mercy.
In my mind, I watch him pick up the wooden hairbrush and rub it lovingly over my skin, then I swear I feel the deep-seated thud of pain as he lifts it and brings it down heavily on my butt.
I can practically taste the imagined surge of lust that ricochets through me as the wood collides with my skin.
His palm on my ass this morning was a sharp sting that bloomed into a heat. I thought I’d hate it. I thought I’d recoil from the pain…but I didn’t. Instead, those two light spanks and the burn of heat that followed them lit a fire inside of me I’ve never felt before.
Am I a freak? Who wants to be spanked? What type of person gets turned on by the idea of being hurt just so they can feel the residual heat for hours afterward?
Before this morning, definitely not me. But now…
Now, I think I want it. I think I’d like it—no, I think I’d love it—and that’s almost as scary as the idea that the only person I’d want to touch me that way is him.
What on earth have I gotten myself into?
From the very first moment we met, I knew that he was more intense than most men I’ve dated in the past. But the necklace he fastened around my neck and the way both he and his brother are acting like I’m one of the family now is insane.
In the past, I’d consider having a sleepover with a man before I’ve known him a month as already moving too fast in comparison with any encounter I’ve had before.
But somehow, I think I’ve agreed to stay with Atticus all weekend, and right now my clothes are hanging beside his in the closet, like they belong there.
Last night when Felix talked about me moving in, it didn’t feel like he was teasing me.
In fact, he talked like me living with them was the next obvious step.
He behaved like me giving up my own place so I could move in and live with a man I barely know was a foregone conclusion, not a ridiculous notion.
“We’re here,” Atticus says, pulling me from my busy mind and back to the present.
“Sorry, I’m a little distracted,” I admit.
“Given how pink your cheeks have gone, I’d love to know exactly what you’re thinking,” Atticus teases, climbing out of the car and coming to open my door.
Lifting me out of my seat with his hands on my ass, he smirks at me as he closes the car door and captures my hand, leading me across the parking lot to a restaurant I’ve heard lots about but never eaten in.
“Have you been here before?” he asks.
I shake my head.
“We ate here the last time we were in town visiting Tori. The food is good.”
Nodding, I follow after him. “I haven’t had the chance to try it, but I have heard that it’s great.”
When we get inside, the hostess offers us a table either inside the restaurant or out on the terrace.
“Terrace, please,” Atticus says.
Nodding, she grabs two menus, then leads us through large, open French doors and out onto a whimsical terrace with honeysuckle hanging from the pergola that covers the whole space.
“Can I get you anything to drink?” she asks.
“Coffee, black for me. Lemon?” Atticus asks.
“Can I get an iced hazelnut latte, please?”
“Of course. I’ll grab them for you and be back to take your food order,” the server says, hurrying back inside and out of view.
The terrace is mostly empty with just a handful of tables full of what look like tourists sitting and eating, their attention solely focused on themselves and not us.
Shuffling his seat closer to mine, Atticus drapes an arm around my shoulders, his fingers toying with my hair while we sit reading our menus in comfortable silence.
“Tell me more about you and your roommate?” he asks after a moment.
“Before I moved to Rockhead Point, I lived in Bozeman and worked in a fantasy-themed coffee shop. Avery was one of my regulars. She used to come in before and after her college classes, and after a while we became friends.”
“So she didn’t act like she did last night back then?”
A sour laugh slips from my lips. “No, she didn’t.
She always seemed a bit tightly wound, but she was in her last year at college, and I thought she was just a typical stressed student.
She wasn’t the only student like that that I served.
Most of our clientele were exhausted college kids who were either partying too hard or staying up late to study and desperate for caffeine to help them make it through their day. ”
“How good of friends were you before you moved in together?”
Sighing, I shrug. “Looking back, I guess we weren’t ever really friends. I served her coffee and asked her about her day. I sympathized with her when she got a B on a paper and not an A. I listened when she excitedly told me she’d been offered the internship in Rockhead Point.”
“Did she celebrate or sympathize with you?” he asks astutely.
Sighing again, I shake my head. “I thought she did. I thought we were friends, but when I think about it, I don’t know if she ever did or if I just assumed she had.
It wasn’t until the day we moved into the apartment that she realized the dresses I wore to work were mine and not costumes I had to wear as a uniform to fit in with the fantasy theme at the coffee shop. ”
“Has she been acting as crazy as she did last night the whole time you’ve lived together?” he questions.
“Not the whole time. Well, not that crazy the whole time.”
His stern, intimidatingly attractive face softens. “Princess, I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with that.”
“It’s my own fault really. I should never have agreed to move in with someone I hardly knew.”
“You thought you were friends,” he says sympathetically.
I nod, feeling stupid. “Yeah, I did.”
The server arrives with our drinks, and I’m relieved.
It already feels like Atticus sees me too clearly, and I’m not sure I want him to see much more, at least not today.
The Avery situation is already raw, and admitting to him that I’m aware it’s my own fault that I’m in this situation only makes it worse.
“Are you ready to order?” the server asks.
“What do you want to eat, Princess?” Atticus asks me.
“I’ll have the waffles and berries, please.”
Turning to the server, he offers her a cool smile. “The waffles and berries for my princess, and I’ll take a Denver omelet, please.”
“Okay, can I get you anything else?”
“No, thanks,” Atticus says, turning all of his attention back to me and dismissing the server in a cold, but not exactly rude, way.
Nodding, she turns and strides away. The moment she’s gone, warm palms cup my face and turn me to look up at him. “How do you feel?” he asks.
Opening my mouth, I start to speak, then stop myself.
I’m not entirely sure how to answer him.
My instinctive response would be to tell him I’m fine, but am I?
My body is sore from all the sex and orgasms during the night, but I’m also needy and turned on.
I feel eager for more, but my mind is a strange mix of both confused and settled.
“I don’t know how I feel,” I admit honestly.