Page 28 of Bought

I am in deep, deep trouble. My feet barely touch the floor as we enter the house, and when I try to pull back against Ethan’s grasp, they slide over the marble surface so he is dragging me like an ice skater. This could be fun, if it wasn’t so serious.

“Where’s the phone you used?” He snaps the demand down at me.

“Not telling.”

“Girl, I will beat it out of you.”

I know he will. And that fact simultaneously terrifies and excites me. I have needed this. I have needed the clash of wills. He left me alone. And maybe that was a greater sin than any other he has committed.

“So? I still won’t tell!”

He grabs my skirt up, bunches it in his hand and starts whacking my ass hard and fast with the other. My bottom becomes an instant inferno and I cannot help the shameful way I writhe and dance in his grasp. He keeps control of me by the back of the skirt, raising it high enough that everyone can see the state of my ass, especially when he yanks my fine panties up between my cheeks, exposing them to his palm and their eyes.

“It’s in the potted plant over there!”

He lets me go and strides over to a potted fern. “Here?”

“I put it in down the side and covered it.”

Before my eyes, Ethan starts digging into the soil, his fingers clawing at the dirt and discarding it on the marble floor. He won’t be the one cleaning it up, I’m sure. One of my hands reaches back to rub my ass. The other covers my mouth because I can’t believe I just got Ethan Keller to go digging in his own potted plant.

He excavates practically all the dirt before he realizes that the phone isn’t actually in there.

“You lied to me?” He rounds on me with a dirty-handed growl.

“You can’t beat anything out of me,” I snap back. I know more pain is coming now, but fuck it. This is going to hurt anyway. There was only ever so much he could do to me, and it was always going to be bad. At least this way, I get some amusement and brief reprieve.

“You’re going to tell me where that phone is,” he says, his brows lowering over his eyes until they are silver slits of pure aggression.

I’m terrified. My heart is slamming in my chest. My ass is aching. I am not making this easy on myself, but I don’t care because it’s more important to me not to make this easy on him. Ethan owns the world. The police. The FB fucking I, apparently. But he doesn’t own me.

“I’m really not.”

He crosses over to me again, stands in front of me. Ever the conscientious servant, Forsyth appears with a warm towelette for his hands. Ethan wipes them on the pristine cloth before tossing it to the side.

“This is not a joke, Casey. And it’s not a game.”

“It’s a phone,” I say with a smirk.

He’s wrong. It has been a game from the beginning. He’s just not used to losing, not even a little bit. This phone is the one thing I have some kind of leverage over, and I’m not going to tell him where it is just because he makes my ass hurt.

“Defiant little…” he growls under his breath. “You are going to pay for this, Casey.”

“I know,” I say. “That’s why I’m not telling you where it is. Because you’re going to hurt me anyway. So who cares. No matter what happens, this ends badly for me.”

“It can end a lot worse than you think,” he says, taking hold of me again. I steel myself for another barrage of hard slaps to my bottom, but that’s not what he has in mind now.

“Forsyth, bring me the restraints.”

We are in the grand room that leads directly off the foyer. There are more columns here, surrounding a sitting room with a vast array of furniture. Ethan marches me over to a long coffee table made of some dark wood, picks me up and lays me face down over it, holding me in place with the flat of his hand in the small of my back.

“Let me up, you fucking asshole!”

He doesn’t let me up. Forsyth brings him the restraints, thick, heavy leather that encircles my ankles and wrists, linked with chains that are similarly attached to the legs of the table. Ethan takes his time securing me, making sure that I’m not going anywhere. By the time he’s done, I am secured on the table like some kind of sacrifice.

He pushes the skirt all the way up over my back, and then he peels my underwear down from the crevice of my ass where it was stuck, to my knees. My legs are slightly parted, the shackles pulling them open a little, the panties trying to pull them closed again. That tension is the least of my problems.

An angry Ethan is an unpredictable beast. I don’t know how harshly he will punish me, but I know he will go out of his way to make sure I don’t enjoy this. Unfortunately for him, I am enjoying this on one level at least. Finally, he seems to have lost a sliver of control. I got to see his eyes flash with temper. I got to see him as a man, possibly fallible. I have cracked his facade and I will not let him forget it.

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