“Bend over the table,” he says, gesturing to the end free of breakfast clutter. When I don’t move to follow his command, he takes me by the elbow and leads me to where he wants me, and I feel him behind me as I splay my hands on the smooth surface. My breasts smash against the wood.

“Why are you doing this?”

“I have zero tolerance for tardiness.” His shoe nudges the inside of my foot. “Spread your legs.”

“What are you going to do to me?” I ask, voice shaking as I widen my stance.

“Not what I’d like to do.” His fingers graze the back of my thigh, and slowly he lifts the skirt, bearing my ass cheeks to the temperate spring air. “If you were mine to fuck, I’d take you right here on this table.” He pauses, and I sense the heat of his gaze on me, spreading gooseflesh down my back.

I shiver, though whether from the mild temperature or Liam’s words, I don’t know.

“If you were mine,” he says, pressing into my back as he brings his lips to my ear, “I’d get you worked up enough to beg, but I wouldn’t let you come.” He tucks the skirt around my waist, leaving my backside vulnerable to his every whim.

I swallow hard. “I won’t be late again.”

“When I say twenty minutes, I mean twenty minutes. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Since you’re still learning your boundaries, I won’t use my belt this time, but you’re getting a swat for every minute you were late.”

The idea of his hand on my ass turns my insides to molten desire. “A total of ten?”

“Eleven, Novalee.” His warm palm settles on my right cheek, fingers squeezing the flesh there. “But I wonder, my sweet girl, will my hand punish, or will it turn you on?”

I’m already turned on, but hell will ice over before I tell him that.

His palm lifts from my ass, and a second later, he lands a sound smack. I jump, unable to hold back a yelp because his hand hurts more than I thought it would. He lands another, and another, each one escalating in force. Gnawing on my lower lip, I fist my hands against the table, hoping to find the strength to get through the last half of the spanking.

His hand comes down again, and I can’t help but cry out. “You’re hurting me.”

“Yes. That is the idea behind a corporal punishment.”

“But it was only ten minutes!”

“It was eleven.”

Whack!

A pitiful whimper escapes my lips. I never knew a spanking could be so painful, could humiliate to this degree. My face burns, undoubtedly as red as my ass.

He issues the last strike—an especially harsh blow of his hand—and then he makes me sit on my hands at the table.