Page 36 of Red Flag Bull

I stare at him. “No. Why are you angry?”

“I’m always angry. Legs.” The command is sharp, and I spread myself for inspection.

For a while, he simply gazes at my creamed pussy with admiration in his eyes, and by the time he starts wiping his semen from my inner thighs, my face is ready to burst into flames.

He doesn’t look up from his gentle cleansing of my sensitive flesh. He’s careful, and he’s not invasive with his ministrations, giving me only a superficial spruce-up. “Are you on birth control?”

The heat in my cheeks burns with more intensity. He regrets fucking me bare, and I don’t blame him. “I’ll take care of it,” I assure him.

“What does that mean?” he asks, looking up from his work. “Plan B from the pharmacy? That’s where you were going?”

I open my mouth to speak, but he continues his interrogation, his tone getting louder with each question. “Where in your cycle are you right now? Are you fertile? You can’t risk staying in my bed a second longer in case a child starts to grow inside you? Is it the worst imaginable thing? You said you only wanted my babies, but now the thought repulses to you? Is that it?”

My eyes prickle with the arrival of hot tears, and I look away. “No.”

Jason takes my chin in his hand and guides me to face him. “Why are you crying?”

“I’m not.”

He lifts one eyebrow and waits.

“I don’t want you to hate me,” I whisper.

“Why would I hate you?” he asks. “Because you fuck with my head and make me feel crazy? Because you said you’d be mine, and then left me? You turn up twenty years later, needing me like never before, and no matter how badly I want to say no, I can’t fucking leave you to suffer? You think that’s because I hate you?”

He looks down at me with such pain in his eyes, my insides squirm with discomfort. I did this to him.

A therapist once said that, until I learn to love myself, I’ll hurt anyone who gets close to me. The more I push them away, the harder it is for them to stay, but I’ll go on testing them, only convinced of their love if they’re willing to suffer me at my most awful.

I never needed to test Jason, in order to feel his love, and I never wanted to hurt him, but I have. In some ways, I wish he hadn’t started caring about me to begin with, but then, I’d have given up long ago.

His love is the kind that lasts, but I don’t deserve it, and as good as it feels to have him in my corner, I don’t want to cause him more harm. I’ve let him down on so many levels, and I’m only going to keep hurting him, if he continues to care about me.

I can’t pull my chin from his firm grip, so I close my eyes, to escape the intensity of his confronting stare. “I don’t want you to hate me, but I don’t want you to love me, either.”

He doesn’t say anything for so long, I open my eyes again.

His eyebrow twitches, but it’s the only slip in his façade, as he maintains an otherwise level expression. “What do you want from me?”

I swallow hard. “Mercy.”

“For what?” he demands to know. “What did you do, Amanda? Where have you been, for twenty fucking years?”

“Nineteen.” I’m back to Amanda now?

“Are you being intentionally avoidant and oppositional?” he asks in a warning tone. “Is this you, begging for more punishment? Because I want a straight answer, and I will get it. By any means necessary.”

Getting my ass spanked some more sounds less painful than confessing. I turn my face. “Do whatever you want with me.”

His frown deepens, and he tenses his jaw while he wipes at my thigh with the cloth that’s turned cold. “I will.”

* * *

He doesn’t punish me.

At least, not in the conventional sense.

There’s no dragging me down to his dungeon and forcing the truth from my lips. Instead, he brings me a glass of water and some pain relief for my swollen pussy and throbbing ass. It both confuses and unsettles me. Which is a lot less fun than an intensive paddling, if I’m honest.

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