“Ain’t gonna make me count for you, sir?”

Smack!

“If you can keep count, I’m not doing my job right.”

The first few strikes are easy. Warm-ups to gauge how much Mal can really handle. He knows he can take a lot, but he wants to push him to his limit.

Under Rowan’s hand, Mal’s skin is warm and heating up by the minute.

“Mmm!” Mal cries out at the first truly hard spank even as his cock twitches against Rowan’s thigh.

It’s hot as fuck, and Rowan rewards him with more hits, one after another. Nowhere on Mal’s backside is safe from his hands—blows raining down on his asscheeks and the crease of his thighs and directly over the plug keeping him open for Rowan’s cock later.

With each, Mal groans. Low, high, whining, gasping, growling—the reaction is different every time Rowan’s palm connects with Mal’s skin. And Rowan commits them all to memory, knowing he’s going to jerk off to them for weeks on end.

That and the power he feels having this gorgeous man in his lap, rutting against him.

“Tell me why you wanted this, Mal,” Rowan says between two sharp spanks.

“I… fuck… I deserve it,” Mal breathes back.

“Why?”

“’Cause I…. Oh! Fuck, more….”

“Why, Mal? Tell me.”

He wants to hear Mal call himself a brat or spoiled or hell, even a needy bottom bitch, but he’s not expecting a sincere confession.

“I sl-slipped. Did something we didn’t… I shouldn’t—”

It’s nearly incoherent. A stuttered mess of half sentences, but… I kissed you and I shouldn’t have is what Rowan hears. And then I slept with someone else is what he doesn’t.

This is dangerous—letting Mal ramble like this. He’d said last week he didn’t want to talk about the real world during their scenes. Didn’t want to use them to work through his personal problems. Which, fine, whatever. Rowan can respect that. Even if it takes everything in him to stop his babbling, he knows that getting Mal actually incoherent is dangerous for both of them, for more reasons than Rowan’s pride and curiosity.

“Hey, come back to me,” Rowan says gently, cupping Mal’s cheek and guiding his eyes to meet his own. “You don’t deserve it for that. Never for that. Give me a color.”

“Green….”

“Good. You need a minute?” he asks anyway.

Mal shakes his head, and with the gesture apparently shakes off whatever vulnerability he’d been about to blurt out.

But Rowan smooths his hands over his red ass anyway, so gently that he barely feels the fine, light-colored downy hairs tickling his palms.

Only when Mal pushes his ass up into his touch and grinds his hard cock into his thigh does Rowan raise his hand again. He gradually ramps back up from one to eleven, each spank harder than the last, dialing it down only when Mal’s gasps signal more pain than pleasure.