Chapter One
‘There will be a new punishment tonight. Be a good girl, and make sure you’re ready when I get home. You have a hard night ahead of you.
Love, Troy’
Lacey let the note flutter to the floor in front of the fireplace. She leaned on the gray stone of the hearth for a moment, shaking her head. It was Friday.
Apparently, he was serious about Fridays.
She looked at her phone. 5:40 PM.
“Shit.” She hurried down the hallway, knowing she had ten minutes — fifteen minutes tops, if he was late.
But he was never late on Maintenance Night.
Her buttocks twitched. That it would be a long, agonizing night for them was certain.
She jumped in the shower, squealing as her shaking hands turned the hot water up too high. She scrubbed herself scrupulously, knowing there was no part of her body her husband didn’t regard as his. And there would be hell to pay if he found any part of her not squeaky clean.
She cursed the lunchtime jog she’d taken that day at the office. For once, she was keeping to her exercise routine, and it was starting to pay off. She thought she needed to lose ten pounds, even though Troy kept after her about needing to gain ten more pounds. It was just her luck that lithe, athletic Lacey would fall in love with and marry a man like Troy Stanton, who was more interested in the curves of a Christina Hendricks than he was the slenderness of a Jennifer Aniston.
Lacey was fairly certain she would end someone just to get the body of either one of those famous women. But the truth was, she was somewhere between those two extremes. Sure, she used to have the sleek lines of Aniston in college, but in the past couple of years, she’d gotten a little bigger. A more pronounced roundness perhaps, a larger butt for certain. Troy referred to it as her “filling out” for him — as if she was gaining weight on purpose. But oddly enough he loved it, loved her new body. She was ashamed of it, was disgusted with herself for it.
Not Troy.
“Dammit Lace,” she said, stumbling out of the shower. “Stop daydreaming!”
She looked down, frowning at the deep tan of the floor tiles. Water was everywhere. There wasn’t time to clean it up. She looked at the clock on the counter.
“Shit!”
Running into their bedroom, she attacked her dripping length of long black hair with a towel. She purposely averted her gaze from the shadowed corner of the room directly opposite their massive bed. She’d be there soon enough.
She zipped the skirt, struggling with the zipper at the top. The patterned, black skirt was breathlessly tight, just as he liked. The Dior stockings were the worst part, for she had to take her time with them. A tear or run would be disastrous. Her delicate hands shook as she rifled through her tops, looking for the one she knew he demanded for Maintenance Nights.
“There you are.” She snatched the ridiculously small tank from the drawer and dashed out to the living room.
The rumble of an engine grew loud outside.
He was home.
She hastily tucked the white tank top into her skirt as the garage door raised and lowered, the cutting out of the motor and the sudden silence snapping her to attention.
Her husband was built like a linebacker, but it was his unsettlingly intense gaze that first caught her eye back in college. He had the kind of rough-around-the-edges dark looks that would have any woman panting, yet for some reason he’d fixated on her.
Just the same way he fixated on her now as he walked through the door.
“Hi honey!” She perked up her smile, seeing him whistling. Whistling was usually a good sign.
He didn’t answer her though, and his gaze locked with hers.
Wrong. She was in trouble.
Maintenance Night meant she would be spanked; that was as sure as the sunrise. However, if he was unhappy with his wife for some other reason, he’d happily add on extra ‘tariffs’ as he liked to call them. Sometimes it would be some penance
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