The Cherished One (2 page)

Or, hell, all he needed to do was
look
like he was going to reach for that blasted hairbrush.  Or the paddle.  Or the tawse.  Or the cane.  Or the crop.  Sometimes she felt like the cat with the spray bottle of water they kept so that he wouldn’t claw the curtains!  But she couldn’t help it – his spankings hurt, even if he chose to use no implement at all but his formidable hand!

But there he was, looking practically illegally gorgeous in a pair of worn jeans that clung to all the right parts of him; he had a phenomenal butt that most men lacked any part of, she’d noticed, so that his jeans in the back didn’t just drop from the waistband to his legs, they molded to those wonderful curves, making her palms itch to grab and squeeze them as she did when she was beneath him in their bed.  He favored black T-shirts and jackets, and that was exactly what he was wearing.  Fawna didn’t give a damn.  He could have been wearing the proverbial potato sack, for all she cared.  She washed his clothes for him, and deliberately ran his all cotton t shirts through a hot wash and then the dryer on high heat, which shrank them, so that they strained nicely over all of those hard won chest and arm muscles.

Fawna was all for eye candy, and Dag was the very definition of the word.  She even forgave him for being a blonde.  She’d always thought that blondes weren’t her type, but here he was to prove her very, very wrong.

The Roma was a family run place that knew them well enough to bring her a menu and Dag a glass of good red wine, knowing he wasn’t going to be ordering anything.  He could eat – and would eat, if she wanted him to – but she’d banned that idea as soon as she found out that it caused him to have to void the food later.  She wasn’t about to be the cause of someone having to throw up; it just went against her grain to support bulimia, even for his kind, when she knew it did him absolutely no harm whatsoever.

He was being so secretive, so... mysterious that it was in the back of her mind that he might propose, although she knew that they had already decided that marriage really wasn’t for them.  And she was fine with that.  Besides the fact women supposedly were no longer pressured by human society to grow up and get married, their own particular social backgrounds forbid what would still be considered a mixed marriage, and one that could possibly end in her death.

Nothing like being dead to put a damper on a marriage, Fawna thought to herself as she watched the suburbs flow by outside the window of his Jag.

She’d had her usual – a baby antipasto salad with their just right oil and vinegar dressing, cheesy garlic bread, and a meaty braciola with homemade angel hair pasta on the side.

Dag loved watching her eat.  She wasn’t like a lot of the women he’d dated, in more ways than one.  She enjoyed eating, and didn’t hide that fact.  How she managed to stay so slim, he’d never know, but she did.  It had been a very long time since he’d enjoyed a meal, but he enjoyed eating vicariously through her.  She was a sensual woman, and her taste buds were definitely a part of that package.  Her moans when she was indulging that side of herself were nearly as rhapsodic as those when he was pressing her home to ecstasy within the confines of their bed.

She was just tucking into the tender layers of stuffed beef when she stopped and looked him straight in the eye.  “So why haven’t you taken me to task for last night?”

In some ways, she had grown to hate that half smile of his.  She knew she amused him on a lot of levels, and that fact annoyed her on a lot of her own levels.

He took a swallow of his wine, taking his time answering as always.  He would not be budged, and sometimes that drove her crazy.  “I shall, in my own time.”

Fawna sighed.  Of course.  His tone said she should have known better than to ask, and that she was probably going to regret having done so later.  But dinner – and his presence across from her – was enough of a distraction, for the moment.  Dear God, how had she managed to rate even a moment of his attention?  Despite the fact he was slightly paler than he probably should have been, he was drop dead gorgeous, and she still wondered at her luck that he’d deigned to be with her.

After all, she really wasn’t anything special.

“I should spank you right here and now for even thinking that,
petite
.”

She knew he’d read her mind, but spoken those words out loud in response in a voice he hadn’t bothered to tone down in the least.  Dag wasn’t the slightest concerned with modern conventions about not correcting one’s woman.  To him, that was the most natural thing in the world to do.  But Fawna frowned and sat forward uneasily in her chair, looking around them as if he’d shouted his intentions from a bullhorn.  She could feel the blush creeping up to her hairline, knowing that, an hour or so from now, the color of her bottom was more than going to match that of her face.  “Stop that.”

He managed to look both slightly embarrassed and yet completely unashamed at the same time, much unhappier at having been caught delving into her mind – which he’d grudgingly promised her he would only do in emergency situations - than at having noticed that she was running herself down, which he flatly refused to permit.  To her, he looked much more like a little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar than a dangerously lethal man known to kill first and ask questions later.  Of course, she knew she was the only person alive who was privileged to know the other, less lethal side of him.

And he was the only person alive to know all sides of her.  Not even her mother – with whom she was extremely close – or her close group of female friends knew her quite as well as Dag did, and she was glad and proud of that fact.

As always, she stopped eating when there was more than enough for lunch and dinner tomorrow; The Roma’s portions were notoriously enormous, and she was the only one who was going to be noshing on them, which was quite all right with her.  It meant she wasn’t going to have to cook for another couple of days.

He had been watching her delicate precision as she made her way through the meal, as if he was going to devour her himself.  Seeing she was done, he threw several large bills onto the table, literally growling, “Let’s go,” as his hand clamped down on her wrist and she fell into place behind him.  Well, no proposal in the restaurant.  She’d been dead wrong about that.

They’d been together long enough, though, that he automatically shortened his stride so that she could easily keep up with him without danger of breaking an ankle on the stiletto heels she preferred.  Although he adored what they did for those gorgeous stems of hers, he’d told her long ago she didn’t have to wear them for him.  Fawna had shot back that she didn’t give a damn whether or not he liked them – she wore them because she loved how they looked, too hell with him.  She hadn’t said that she also liked that they gave her a six inch height advantage that she desperately needed with him.  He towered over her, and she hated that.  If she could, she’d wear them all the time.  One of the things he’d learned during their time together was one of the worst punishments he could give her that wasn’t in the least physical was to ban her from wearing anything but flats.  She detested having to look up at him all the time, and once, in the middle of an argument during which, of course, she had become much more heated than he, she had actually gone and gotten a chair to stand on, so that she could look down on him for a change.

It hadn’t had quite the effect she’d hoped for – making him dissolve into laughter and effectively end the argument just when she’d been lining up all her arguments – so she hadn’t tried to again.  Instead, she made him sit down, where at least their height difference was a little less exaggerated.

Despite their hurried departure, he made an impromptu stop at a florist and bought her a dozen of her favorite lavender roses, furthering her thoughts that she might be proposed to this evening, perhaps after she was spanked.  Fawna wrinkled her nose.  That wouldn’t be right.  If he spanked her, he wouldn’t make love to her, by his own damned rule.  If he proposed, she damned well wanted him to claim her right afterwards.  She’d have to see what she could do about getting him to change his mind, if what she thought was going to happen happened.

And, if it didn’t, she was fine, too.  They’d been together for a while, and she knew the impediments to what she was thinking as well as he did. But he was acting strangely tonight, and, considering what had happened last night between himself, her big brother Dain, and Maximilian, who was at least as dangerous and powerful a vampire as Dag was, if not more so, she supposed it could be nearly anything.

He and Max had been enemies for centuries, all over a woman.

But what she’d thought was going to happen once they got home, didn’t.  At least, not the more pleasant thought.  Instead, once he’d very carefully put everything in its place, and she had grown complacent and was updating her Facebook page with tales of their wonderful meal and pictures of her gorgeous flowers, she found herself being led into their bedroom by the unforgiving circle of his thumb linked with his third finger, encircled, as it was, around her slender wrist.

She found herself standing in front of him as he sat on the end of their bed. Calling it their bed was somewhat of a misnomer, though.  It was her bed.  He occupied it with her, held her while she slumbered, but he usually slept alone... elsewhere.  She’d seen where his coffin was, although it had taken him nearly five years to trust her with that information.  Five years during which she did her best not to feel insulted that it had taken him so long, because it was a blink of an eye, as far as he was concerned, and she could understand his reticence at revealing that kind of information, especially considering her family background.

Dag took both of her hands in his, in a way he hadn’t before, kissing each of them.  “I thought – I thought I was going to lose you last night, you know.”  He caught her eyes just before they darted away and he watched that gorgeous pink stain her first set of cheeks.

She heard – and felt – the unfamiliar hesitation in his voice, and in his heart, reaching out to tilt his chin up, forcing him, when no being in existence could have, to look up at her with his eyes blood red with unshed tears.

Shocked down to the soles of her feet, she wasn’t given the time to consider what she’d seen.  Instead, he had the sheath of a dress in an uncharacteristic heap on the floor, and her bottom arched over his lap in record time, the barely there scraps of lace she called panties serving as decoration atop of the expensive pile of dress material.

Chapter Two

Fawna had thought he’d been taking things a little too well, considering, and she was right.  He’d just been holding it in until now, when she was going to have to pay the piper, or, more accurately, the Viking, and what he demanded in recompense was strips off her bottom, preferably collected by his own palm, or a weapon of his own making, of which she had many more than she cared to admit.

In fact, their master bedroom suite had what was supposed to be a dressing room just off it that was the size of a small bedroom.  She was allowed approximately half of it for her clothes and shoes, but the other half contained various implements and accoutrement, so that every time she went to get dressed, or even just grab a pair of socks, she was reminded that many of the choices in her life weren’t really her own.

Usually, her punishments were accompanied by lectures.  Long, involved ones.  For a man who had been a formidable Viking warrior in his time, a society that she – apparently – had been woefully misinformed into thinking hadn’t been much in the way of talkers – he certainly did like to deliver a searing scolding, at least when she was on the receiving end. 

And she was perpetually on the receiving end of something from him, and it wasn’t always pleasant, and she definitely knew it wasn’t promising to be so this time, especially once his hand crashed down onto her vulnerable butt.

Their apartment was well soundproofed.  It needed to be, because Fawna had already proven at that point to be quite vocal when she was being disciplined prior to their moving in, and Dag wasn’t about to stop the discipline that he felt she really benefited from.  That was one of the things that they had investigated quite thoroughly – much to the real estate agent’s, and Fawna’s, discomfort – before they’d gotten into it.

But she was still a delicate flower, his love – with a hell of a set of lungs.  She hadn’t known much in the way of pain or discomfort in her life, and he was glad for her.  But it had made the spankings he delivered just that much harder for her to take.  Dag had brought discipline and order into a very few, very select other women’s lives in his not inconsiderable time, but Fawna was the smallest of them, and the most sensitive overall, probably due to her family background.  She was the least prepared to handle what he dished out. She had done her best to deal with what he’d expected her to take, but he’d made the decision himself, without informing her, to scale back just a little, and he’d never regretted his decision in the least.  She responded just as well to a little less physical discipline than he might deliver to a taller, more muscular woman, and he didn’t see the shadow of fear in her eyes that made his heart and his testicles shrivel when he’d seen it in hers that one time he’d reached for the paddle.

Not that she wasn’t very thoroughly punished.  She was.  But he wasn’t the type of man to decide that one size fit all, and that was that.  He had long since realized that adjustments needed to be made in almost everything, and something as intimate and personal as discipline could hardly be different.

He loved spanking her with his hand.  Just his big palm cracking loudly down onto that generously rounded butt of hers.  For a naturally small, almost ethereal woman such as Fawna, she was most wondrously blessed with a gorgeous backside that he found he could barely keep his hands off even when he didn’t have her tipped over his lap.

And when he did, Heaven help her, for his palm literally itched to set it ablaze, to bring it to that sunset hue that had her alternately kicking and squirming, moaning and crying, sometimes – and this was definitely one of those times – begging him to stop.