Sinful by Carolyn Faulkner Page A

them? And would her father approve? In the end, she had known that the choice was out of her hands, anyway, and now that it was her turn to choose, Lita didn’t know that she trusted herself – yet – to make the right decision.
    To say nothing of the fact that it would be trading one form of submission for another. Brandt had made it clear over the past few months that they had been intimate that he expected to be where the buck stopped with them. He hadn’t espoused religious reasons for it, but rather admitted that that was just what he preferred in a relationship.
    And he certainly did believe in spanking his woman, as she had quickly found out. That extravagant weekend of her birthday was only the beginning. She couldn’t even begin to count the number of times she’d been over his knee, over the tailgate of his truck, bent over the end of the bed or simply spanked while she was standing there, trying to do the dishes or folding the laundry. He chastised her physically whenever he felt she needed it, and that was apparently quite a bit.
    She wasn’t as much concerned with the physical punishment – although she supposed she should be, but it was something she was accustomed to – although the fact that it was him spanking her sure put a different twist on it. Her concern was more that – having fought so hard to gain her freedom and independence from a male dominated society – if she said “yes” to him, he was going to expect her to submit to him.
    She knew that that was where the comparisons stopped between the two. Brandt was an incredible cheerleader in regards to anything she wanted to do to better herself, or even just enjoyed doing, and he didn’t try to tell her that her only purpose in life was to bear children and keep a nice home for her husband, who was the breadwinner. He encouraged her in her studies – even set aside a time every night – whether they were together or not – when they both did nothing but study or work on papers or whatever they needed to do for their various classes, and he was nothing if not over the top proud of her when she brought home two A’s last semester. Heck, he’d even been proud of her when she’d gotten a C in a math class, because he knew how hard math was for her, and that she’d worked her butt off to do that well.
    Had she sown enough wild oats? How much was enough time to make up for decades of oppression? If she turned him down, would she be throwing away the best thing that would ever come along for her?
    In some ways, the society she’d been brought up in was a lot easier to live in. There weren’t so many hard decisions to make. If your father wasn’t making them for you, as a daughter, then the husband he’d handpicked was.
    But this decision – whatever it was and however it turned out – would be on her entirely, and she didn’t want to screw it up.
    And, with all her heart, she didn’t want to lose Brandt.
    It was dark, and she couldn’t see his face as he said, “I take it you haven’t thought about it at all, or that you have and you’re trying to figure out a way to let me down easy.” His tone was carefully neutral, as if he was trying to let her know that there would be no recriminations regardless of what she decided.
    “No. No, that’s not it,” she sighed, trying to sit up, but he wouldn’t release her from his side. “I just—”
    “Tell me this, are you happy with me when we’re together?”
    “Oh yes, I am!” she replied unreservedly.
    “Even though you get spanked?”
    He could feel her reluctance and realized that wasn’t really a fair question, but he was interested in her answer. “Yes.”
    “ Because you get spanked?” he asked, giving voice to something he’d wondered whether she realized about herself.
    “No! Definitely not.”
    “So you’d be just as happy if I, as your boyfriend, as your male authority, let you run around willy-nilly, staying up until all hours, never studying, eating badly,