Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 73013 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 365(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73013 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 365(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
“What?” I asked. “They have million-dollar jobs for landscapers?”
Rick’s eyes narrowed. His hand tightened its grip around mine—not painfully, but very firmly—and he leaned close to speak right into my ear. My lips parted and my eyes went wide even before my husband’s words reached me, simply at the dominance of the gesture.
“Your attitude is becoming a problem, Dee, but it’s a problem I’m going to solve, even if I have to use the strap on your bare butt until you can’t sit down—not even in a first class airplane seat.”
My heart had started to pound in my chest, and my breath came in little pants between my parted lips. Rick kept his mouth close to my ear, and tightened his grasp of my hand a little.
“Do you understand, babe?” he asked. “Give me a yes, sir if you understand.”
I felt my forehead crease into a deep vee as my tummy seemed to flip all the way over. Worse—much worse—further down my body responded in that dismaying way I had, to my mortification, started to expect. I tried to keep from squirming as I became suddenly aware that not all the soreness from Rick’s firm right hand had vanished from my backside.
I didn’t have a choice, did I? I couldn’t very well jump out the plane window, or even try to escape in the Chicago airport: I had seen enough of this ‘program’ to know they would bring me back to my suddenly strange husband. And who knew what awaited us in Rocky Falls? The memory of the strap hanging on the wall in the private room, of Rick’s order to put the pillows on the bed and lie over them rose into my mind. I closed my mouth and chewed on the inside of my cheek as I tried to sort out fear from what I couldn’t deny represented a very different kind of arousal.
No. I don’t have any choice.
“Yes, sir,” I breathed, my face blazing as hot as a furnace. “I…”
I realized that I didn’t have to say it, but something in me demanded—treasonously, to all my ideas of independence within my marriage—that I demonstrate this further submission.
“I understand.”
I did understand that my husband intended… intended…
My brain searched for a phrase and found one that made my blush even worse.
My husband intends to keep me in line.
To keep me in line, whatever the fuck that meant. Yes, I understood that.
I absolutely did not understand the way I had responded, body and soul, to that terrifying, confusing, wantonly arousing prospect, or how I would ever be able to work out, or cope with—let alone accept—it.
“Good girl,” Rick said, loosening his grip and leaning back into his own seat again.
I closed my eyes and swallowed hard. He hadn’t actually just said that, had he? He hadn’t actually called me a good girl.
No—that wasn’t even the problem. The problem, again, lay in the way I had reacted. All of me: body, heart, soul, mind. I had liked it. No. I had loved it.
Rick, his hand holding mine loosely now, either hadn’t noticed my distress or chose not to mention it. He continued with the explanation he had started a few moments before.
“No,” he said, his voice as easy as if I hadn’t challenged him and he hadn’t threatened to whip me, “no million-dollar landscaping jobs. But they’ve already accepted me—contingent on us moving—into an executive training program, and they want to fast-track me based on my management experience.”
My eyes and mouth opened wide for a completely different reason, and a flush of pleasure replaced the embarrassed blush of a moment before. In that moment, I knew I must love my husband more than I had ever loved anyone, because the joy I felt at this stunning news didn’t have to do with what it meant for me anywhere near as much as I just felt elated for him.
“Oh, Ricky,” I said. “Oh, that’s wonderful.”
In the back of my mind, a little voice said, “This is the man who thinks he can behave like some ancient patriarchal neanderthal version of a husband to you. Are you really going to celebrate his success? The success that’s taking you to a place where apparently all the men think that way?”
I silenced that voice and leaned over to kiss my gorgeous, successful husband. I refused to think the next thought, the one that had darted into my brain—the retort to the little voice.
Shouldn’t I celebrate him because he knows how to keep his bratty, too-modest bride in line?
CHAPTER 12
Mandy
At the baggage claim, a limo driver had a sign with Mr. and Mrs. Williams on it. I couldn’t push away the thought: I could get used to this. I knew Rick had a lot more intelligence and ambition than he had ever had the chance to show. I had never even let myself dream of what our lives might be like if someone really gave him the shot it seemed like Selecta might give him in Rocky Falls, through the New Modesty subsidies.