Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 80699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 403(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 403(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
At these calm words, delivered so evenly and with such easy conviction, my body rebelled against his. As I started to struggle, trying to pull my wrists out of his grasp, I thought of my impression from a moment before that a strange new part of my story had begun: what rose up inside me in response to Christian’s assurance he would punish me proved just how strange, and just how dark.
“No!” I yelled. “No… no way!”
I had started to shake my head violently, but I snuck a glance at Christian’s face. I absolutely needed to know how he would react. Part of my mind realized that my urgent interest in this arrogant billionaire’s response meant that my resistance didn’t mean what my independent streak wanted it to. That idea, however, had no chance of winning out in my head: I felt like I couldn’t live without knowing how Christian was taking my sudden rejection of his calling me a good girl.
Because I wasn’t a good girl. I had spent all my life so far—it felt like, anyway—pretending to obey the rules, but not actually complying with anyone’s notions of how I should act, in my heart. Sure, the most actual rebellion—the greatest degree of independence—I had ever mustered in my nineteen-plus years had been my unsuccessfully gaming the New Modesty system. But in my heart, as I heard those losers in Harristown knocking on my door and I had sat in the dark pretending not to be home, I had gloried in my sticking it to the Man, in the guise of the Midwestern men who thought they could make a dutiful wife out of me.
I had come to LA sure that I would learn from my failure with the New Modesty, and have the guile to outwit this new Selecta Arrangements program. I could still do it, too. I could get this rich dude’s money and ghost him. All I had to do was go over his knee for a spanking. I probably wouldn’t even have to spend my most precious asset, my virginity.
I had thought for a moment back there that I did want Christian to be my first—what’s not to like about losing it to the billionaire movie producer who made your favorite film? Not now, though: his clear determination to punish me like a naughty little girl had called up a part of me that had never emerged in this way before. I couldn’t obey him: I couldn’t belong to him that way, because…
My mind grasped at straws, trying desperately to understand my body’s reaction. In the meantime, that reaction went on. His hands held my wrists firmly up against the wall, but I kept trying to get my hands free, my struggle growing feebler by the second. I twisted my upper body, pushed with my backside to try to get traction and add leverage. Christian just stood there, pinning me in place.
“I didn’t want to have to do it this way, Leah,” he said, “but you’re going to have to learn obedience over my knee if you can’t learn it in a gentler way.”
CHAPTER 14
Leah
“Fucking forget it,” I grunted, still trying to extricate myself from his grasp. “Leave. Now.”
With a bizarre mingling of relief and disappointment, I remembered that Selecta’s surveillance would save me, if nothing else did. I knew there were security officers in the building who would remove Christian if I asked them to.
“I mean it,” I said, stopping my resistance and looking him in the face with as fierce an expression as I could put on. “I’ll call for security.”
“Go ahead,” he said, his smile tightening and his eyes narrowing. “They’re not going to interfere with a spanking.”
I froze. I swallowed hard and looked into his eyes. He had to be bluffing, or something.
“What?” I asked. My head shook with a rapid motion: half denial, half simple terror. “I mean… what? This is my apartment.”
Christian let me finish. The mere steadiness of his gaze spoke volumes. Yet once more, I had the terrible, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, that in accepting associate membership in Selecta Arrangements I had signed away some very fundamental right.
“You’re right that they’re watching every move we make—or, more accurately, the security algorithm is watching, and it will alert them if it sees a red flag that could lead to a violation of the SA terms of use. If I tried to have sex with you without your consent, for example, they would swarm up here in a matter of a few seconds.”
He delivered this news so calmly that I knew what he said next would be much less welcome.
“But disciplining an associate member is at the discretion of the member to whom she’s granted access to her apartment. That’s in the terms of use, too, and you signed it.”