I broke off, suddenly realizing that I’d inadvertently revealed too much, and there was no hope that Silas had missed my slip, because he was now pacing steadily toward me, a dark cast to his face.

“What did you say?” he asked, his long legs covering the distance between us. I felt like a gazelle slowly being circled by a lion.

He thought he could intimidate me? Fuck him. “You heard what I said,” I said defiantly.

Something between a growl and a hiss rumbled up from his chest.

“Say your safe word, Molly,” he said, coming closer. “Tell me to stop.”

God, that face, with that chiseled jaw and those carved cheekbones and the firm, masculine lips that were currently pressed together in determination.

“What are you going to do?” I dared. “Fuck me until I say yes to marrying you? There’s not a chance in hell, especially after you and Mercy—”

“Say. Your. Safe. Word.” His voice was almost menacing, almost mean, and Lord help me, I felt my response to that dampening my thighs.

“No,” I said haughtily. “I won’t.”

He was on me then, his arms like steel bars around my back, pressing me close to him. I was forced to lift my face to see his; he glowered down at me, his eyes like the heart of a flame, hot and blue and deadly. The last time he’d looked at me like this, like he wanted to eat me alive, had been last year…

“Say it,” he demanded. “Make me stop.”

Was it stubbornness or lust that made me dig in my heels? I wasn’t sure. But I could feel his erection grinding into my corseted stomach, feel the possessive way his hands roamed across my back, until he dug his fingers into my hair and forced my head back even farther. My pulse pounded everywhere—my exposed throat, my wrists, my empty, wet cunt.

It pounded for him.

“I’m not saying it,” I said. “You can’t make me.”

“Oh, is that the game?” he growled. “I have to make you?”

He bent his head down and nipped at my throat, and my whole body sang. Sang with righteous fury and pent-up resentment, maybe, but it sang nonetheless, singing for him and him alone. The nip turned fierce—a real bite—and I hissed, raising my hands to shove him away even as my center clenched with want.

He caught my hands before I could push him, and then his mouth was on mine, searing and marking and angry. Why he was angry with me, I didn’t know, except that maybe we were always destined to be angry with one another. And then his mouth parted my own with insistent, needy force and his tongue slid against mine, licking and fluttering and plundering my mouth.

My knees seemed unable to hold my weight, and without breaking our kiss, he reached down and hooked his arm behind my legs and I was swept up into his arms. He carried me to a nearby bench and sat down, and for a moment, I felt the twin tugs of desire and disappointment. The kiss was deep and urgent and I never wanted it to end…but I couldn’t have this with Silas. This greenery and blue sky and this pleasant bench in the cooling shade—this was what lovers did and we were not lovers. We were…something else, maybe. But not that.

Then he pulled away and in the space of an instant, I caught his blue eyes, as dark and inscrutable as the midnight sky. And then I was summarily flipped over onto my stomach on his lap, my forearms braced on the bench and my feet hanging off the other end.

“Silas,” I protested, struggling, and he pressed a firm hand on the small of my back as the other worked to lift up my skirts. I realized what he was doing a second too late; his palm cracked against my ass with a noise that rang through the maze.

“No!” I shrieked. “Let me go!”

His hand on my back held me tightly in place. “You know what you have to say, Molly. Say it. Say it, and I’ll stop.”

I froze. Saying it was admitting defeat, and I hated defeat. I liked to win—I loved to win, and if Silas thought he could spank the safe word out of me, he was dead wrong. Besides, there was the way that my ass felt after the slap—warm and glowing—and the way my breathing sped up as he shifted under me and the way that my nipples tightened as his fingertips ran lightly over my thighs.

But.

But.

I wasn’t used to being spanked. Hell, I wasn’t used to being dominated at all, had never let a man run my body this way, not since Mr. Cunningham had bought my virginity from me for five hundred thousand pounds when I was fourteen.

You’d never let a man since Cunningham…until Silas last year.

“Aren’t you going to say your word?” he crooned in my ear. “Are you really going to let a man you hate lay you over his lap and spank you?”

I told myself that the shudder my body gave at his words was a shudder of anger and not a shudder of lust. I looked over my shoulder at him. “It doesn’t matter how hard you spank me, Silas. You won’t win.”

Smack.

I cried out as his hand landed on my bare flesh.

Smack.

Smack.

Smack.

Three blows in quick succession, and I was so unused to pain, so unused to being held down. My whole body was squirming now, my face rubbing against my wrists as I fought for the air that had been driven out of my lungs by the pain.

His hand returned to my ass, not to strike, but to rub and caress and soothe. Stupidly, I found myself sighing into his touch, even raising my hips and trying to buck into his hand.

“Greedy girl,” he murmured, his fingers dancing past the small crevice that led to my cunt. I whimpered, bucking my hips again. The hand on my back pressed harder and he laughed a low laugh. “Greed becomes you, Mary Margaret.”

And then he trailed his hand down to my knee, where he nudged it to the edge of his lap, spreading my thighs and exposing my pussy.

I gasped.

Warm summer air blew over the wet, swollen flesh, teasing and gentle, and I somehow felt more wanton than I’d ever felt. How? In a closed garden with no other people around, with a man who’d seen my cunt a hundred times before? How, when I’d been naked before scores of people, in packed ballrooms and in heated, languorous orgies? How did Silas make me feel with a few spanks and a summer breeze like I was the naughtiest—and also the sexiest—woman to ever walk this earth?

Silas groaned above me. “Fuck, you’re so wet, Molly. Please. Say your safe word. If you don’t—”

Smack.

I moaned. The pain flamed along my skin for half a second—half an unbearable second—and then dissipated, leaving to resettle deep in my core. I moaned louder as a finger teased about my wet folds.

“It starts with a c, doesn’t it, Mary?” he asked quietly. “The word?”

The finger moved lower, glancing across my clit, and I inhaled sharply. And then it went back up and, without warning, pressed hard against the pucker there. Resistance and discomfort and the memory of those times before—when he’d fucked my ass so hard that I couldn’t breathe, when I’d climaxed so long and so hard that I forgot my own name—it was muscle memory that drove my hips up against that thumb and nothing more.

It slid partway inside, and he murmured, “Did you miss this, Mary Margaret?”

“Don’t call me that,” I ground out, his pressing thumb short-circuiting my thoughts.

“Why not? It’s your real name, is it not?”

“Because not even my family used my real name. No one calls me that!”

Smack.

“I call you what I feel like calling you, are we clear on that?” he asked sternly. “You are mine to call what I want.”

“No. I’m. Not,” I managed.

“Maybe not. So use your safe word to prove it,” he goaded. “Use it and I’ll stop spanking you. I’ll even take my thumb out of your ass.”

My hips were now wriggling of their own accord, my ass begging for more punishment, my pussy begging for more pleasure. My nipples pressed hard and tight against my corset.