Old Enough To Know Better (14 page)

Son of a bitch!  He was really going to do this!  Clint had always threatened her with something like this, but he’d never actually done it.  Finn was taking things to a new level – a new, uncomfortable level.

But when she tried to stand up to turn around and talk to him about it, she found his hand on her back, preventing her from doing so.  “Finn, I’m scared!”  Cat didn’t realize that what she’d said would have such an immediate reaction from him, but she filed that away for future reference.

She was instantly gathered in his strong arms, coat and all, shielded against him, and away from any potentially prying eyes.  “Honey, I would never put you in any danger at all, under any circumstance, for any reason.  If I think it’s safe, it’s safe.  I’ve waited too long to have you to risk so much as an eyelash of yours, ever.”  He kissed her lips so softly she wasn’t even sure she’d been kissed.  “I know you’d like to get out of your spanking, and especially since it’s going to be conducted in the great outdoors, but I really do feel that we’re perfectly safe here, and, if some hearty soul such as ourselves should decide to come down here, we’ll see them coming and be able to compensate long before they get here.”

He’d already carefully rearranged her over the car again before he’d ended his speech.  “Now, you can keep a lookout as well as I can, if you want.  And if someone interrupts us, whether you’ve gotten one swat or a hundred –”

“A hundred?” she squeaked indignantly.

“– then we’ll stop, and that’ll be that.”

“All right,” Cat said, however grudgingly, realizing he hadn’t asked for her acquiescence on the matter.  He’d simply deemed it to be fact and plowed on.

Until now, she’d retained her jeans and panties, but she lost them just before he began, or she would have protested much more vehemently, but the spanking began immediately after her jeans hit the pebbles, and the lecture began in the same instant.  She wasn’t sure which she disliked more.

“I know you’re new to obeying me, Catherine, but I expect you to do so, the first day a rule is in effect as well as the last.”

Was he spanking her harder than he had, or did it just seem louder – and worse – because they were in such an open area, where the sound reverberated across the water?  She tried to keep her eyes concentrated on the road in, but it was hard when you were being compelled to dance, ankles bound by your jeans and undies, on the crunchy gravel.

She knew he wasn’t hitting her as hard as he could – far from it.  If he really wanted to damage her, he could do so without trying very hard, as Clint could have.  But he certainly made what he did do sting and burn and ache enough that she never wanted it to happen again, most especially in this setting.

So much so that her right hand began creeping backwards to try to block some of the wickedly accurate, crisp swats. 

“Keep your hands out in front of you, Catherine Angelique, or I’ll have to take my belt off,” he warned without missing a beat.

Without thinking she fairly shrieked, “Noooo!” then looked around as if she expected a hoard of Islanders to come to her rescue as she obediently put her hands out in front of her, where he considered they belonged.

But none did, damnit.  So much for those hopes.

And it wasn’t just the pain of the spanking itself, it was the entirety of the action – the rules, the consequences, the lecture, the looks, the fact that someone bothered with any of them, and followed them through to their conclusion, however unhappy for her.

She needed this.  Every bit of it, and Finn seemed to understand that, at least as well as Clint had, and he wasn’t letting her get away with anything, which was exactly as she needed it to be.  So few men understood that concept, really understood it and took it to heart.

Damn it.

How had she ended up with two of them in her life?

“No, ow – Finn!”  He’d painted her entire backside with a primer of I’m sorry pink, and now he was adding another coat, just for good measure, and blast it all, that hurt!

But he kept right on spanking, and no one was riding to her rescue.  He gave her a very thorough spanking that had her bawling outright near the end, and he spanked her a while beyond that so that she would remember it the next time she thought about disobeying him.

But when it was done, it was done, and he took her, bare bottom into his arms, shielding her again as he had before from any potentially prying eyes, and rocked her tight against him, leaning up against the car and letting her stretch against him, unable to keep his hands from wandering down to the butt he’d just blistered.

“Ow, stop that!” she tried to swat him away, but he ignored her.

“Sorry, ma’am, but I’m a Backside Boy.”

Cat groaned.  He was a Backside Boy in more ways than one.  He’d been born and raised on the backside of the Island, which automatically made him a Backside Boy, but he also had an affinity for roasting women’s rears, which was another, deeper, some would say more twisted, reason for that particular moniker.

She shivered, and he noticed it immediately, and helped her pull her clothes back on, careful around her sore butt, then helped her into the car where he cranked up the heat and got them under way, eying her closely and adjusting the temperature to how he saw her acting until they were back at her house, where he bundled her into bed with him and made love to her, almost painfully slowly, until she broke down in his arms and begged him to stop.

“I feel the same way, honey. I do,” he confessed gruffly in the darkness.

She let him go that Monday morning, knowing that he was going to be telling his mother about them some time shortly, and expecting an angry call anytime from Jane, telling her to kiss off – and much, much worse.  Cat figured she’d be excommunicated from all of their organizations and clubs – not that she was quite that much of a social butterfly, but still – and she’d become a social pariah.  Jane’s family had been on the Island a lot longer than hers had.  She could do that, if she wanted to.  She had the power.

When it came, it wasn’t as bad as she thought it was going to be.  It was awkward, yes, but not nearly as horrid as she’d conjured in her mind.  Still, when she saw Jane’s number on the caller ID, she had more than half a mind to ignore it, but she decided to be good and pick it up anyway.

No “hello”, no “how’re you doing”, just, “So am I persona non grata?” she asked, fearing the answer like someone who was asking a doctor whether or not they have a terminal disease.

There was a few seconds of silence on the other end that had her heart lodge painfully in her throat, but then, “No, you’re not.  He’s . . . he’s the happiest I’ve ever seen him, and he told me he’d been waiting for you his entire life.  How can I deny him that, even if thinking of it gives me the creeps.”

“I promise never to make you think of it.”  Cat was trying, unsuccessfully, to fight back the tears.

There was a knock at the door that she’d all but decided to ignore, but then it became an insistent pounding and she knew who it was.

“I think your son is here.”

“Yeah, he told me he was going to come be with you, that he knew it was going to be hard for you to talk to me because you didn’t want to hurt me.”

“Of course I didn’t want to hurt you.”  Cat took an ineffectual swipe at the tears that were rolling down her cheeks as she made her way blindly to the foyer to let him in.  “How did you ever raise a kid like that, anyway?”  The half insult was taken right in stride.

“Dumb luck.  Pure, dumb luck.”  Cat heard Jane clear her throat and knew she was crying, too.

“Thanks, Jane.  I love you.”

“I love you too, but if you hurt him, I’ll kill you dead.”

“Understood.”

The phone went dead just about the time she finally got the door open and she fell into Finn’s waiting arms.  He kissed her on the top of the head and carried her up the stairs as she sobbed. 

“She loves the both of us very much, and she just wants us to be happy.”  And have babies, he added in his head, but he’d told her that was probably not going to happen.  Jane knew that as soon as he’d told her that the woman he’d been dating was Catherine.  She knew that Cat didn’t want kids, so she’d have to borrow grandchildren from her friends, which could have its advantages, Finn had pointed out, since she could return them when they grew annoying and their real grandparents couldn’t.

Although Jane accepted the fact that Cat was dating Finn, not everyone in their social circle was quite that accepting, as Cat found out a month or so later at the next Girls’ Night, which was being hosted at Carol’s magnificent mansion in Otter Cove.  Cat arrived early, as she always did when Carol was hostessing, because, despite the fact that she had all the money in the world, Carol never bothered to have these little shindigs of theirs catered, nor did she deign to get her own hands dirty, or even stop by the store for a couple of bags of chips, heaven forbid.  So Cat cooked everything for her and brought it over.  Everyone thought that Carol was taking advantage of Cat, including Cat herself, but she liked to cook and it was no bother to her so she’d never said or done anything about it.

Finn had been ready to give Carol a piece of his mind when she was up till all hours baking, but Cat had told him to shut up, that the menu was entirely her choice and that Carol left things entirely up to her, and since she didn’t care, there was no reason for anyone to get up in arms about it.

Finn had, of course, taken exception at being told to shut up, especially by his woman.  He didn’t like that at all; saying it sounded very disrespectful to his ears, and his were the ears she needed to worry about.

So, while she was literally elbow deep in flour, making a knock off of Auntie Anne’s pretzels that she’d bake off at Carol’s tomorrow, Finn came into the kitchen, picked up a flattish wooden spoon from one of the decorative utensil jugs she had scattered around the counters, and gave her bottom five very hard smacks with it, and she could do very little about it without scattering flour from hell to breakfast all over her otherwise very clean kitchen.

And Cat knew that he knew she wasn’t about to do that.  Blast!  Sometimes being a neatnik was such a pain – quite literally, this time, damnit!

“Do you know why you’re getting swatted, Catherine Angelique?” he asked, giving her another hard round of five.

“Ow ow ow!  ‘Cause I told you to shut up,” she said, knowing it hadn’t been a good idea at the time, but she hadn’t really been concentrating on him, and she was frankly sick of everyone hounding her about what she did for Carol.  She wasn’t as much of an idiot as everyone seemed to think she was.  If she hadn’t wanted to cook for Carol, she would have told her to kiss off and make her own damned food.  Cooking an extra night every month gave her something enjoyable to do.  She wished everyone would just back off about it, and Finn just happened to catch the brunt of it.

Unfortunately, he was the one person in her world who could also wield a wicked wooden spoon against her bottom when she mouthed off about it, and that was exactly what he was proceeding to do.

Chapter Ten

All of the yelping and yeowling she was doing was a side effect of him smacking her with that God awful implement – and she could never say how much she hated the idea of her beloved kitchen being again sullied by containing literally dozens of potential implements, especially when it had been safe for the past five years – over her jeans, in implacable sets of five or so, while chastising her about being more respectful and watching her tone of voice.

But then he took them down, along with her panties.

As much as she wanted to protest the move, loudly, as she ran for any kind of cover she could, Cat had to admit that he was right.  If he had told her to shut up in the same way she had said it to him, she would have been very upset.  It was horrible to realize, in the middle of a spanking, how much you truly deserved it.

When he finally let her up, she could see the pattern the distinct droplets her own tears had made in the flour on the countertop, before he turned her around and hugged her.  He was at least as big a believer in forgiveness afterwards as Clint was, which meant that she was always hugged and cuddled and completely forgiven afterwards, and that was not just lip service.  Unless she repeated it, she never heard about a transgression again.  It was done and over with.

But she stopped him before he got to that point, saying quietly through her own tears, “I’m very sorry that I said what I said.  Sometimes stuff comes out of my mouth in a way I don’t really intend, but that’s no excuse.  I didn’t mean to be disrespectful of you.  Thank you for correcting me.”

Finn’s face was, at first, wholly amazed, then it melted into adoration.  “Aw, baby, that’s okay.  I just wanted you to be aware of what you’d said and how you’d said it.  All is forgiven.”  He kissed her on the top of her head, but didn’t – literally couldn’t – stop there.

Disciplining her was an incredible aphrodisiac to him.  Not just the actual act, though, but simply being responsible for her discipline and care.  Watching out for her, even in the smallest of ways, making sure she was safe, protecting her, loving her – all of it kept him rock hard, twenty-four seven.  Sometimes he worried that he’d overwhelm her with his attention and love, but she seemed to be reacting in the opposite manner.  She was eating much better than she had, more nutritiously and more often, and she’d gained some weight.  Not quite enough for his taste, but some, and he would make sure that she made steady gains in that area.

She just seemed to be happier than she had been when he met her. That could definitely be ego talking, but he’d asked his mother, who had grimaced at first, not really wanting to talk about that subject with him, but then, a few days later, she had come to him and told him that yes, Cat was definitely acting much happier than she had since she’d lost her husband.

It was one of the nicest compliments he’d ever received.  It was better than making his first million, by a long shot.