me home or spank me. I’m not scrubbing your floors.”
“Careful, Tinsley.” I fought every instinct that demanded I reach out and grab her by the throat. “You have no idea what you’re asking.”
Dragging her over my lap and welting her upturned ass didn’t begin to address what she deserved. Or what the sickness inside me craved.
As if reading my thoughts, she gulped, and the blood drained from her face.
“When you finish the floors in here, you’ll do the next room over and the one across from it, as well.”
A muscle leaped in her jaw. “I—”
“Think through what you’re about to say. There are six classrooms on this floor. There’s also a church and gymnasium with expansive wood flooring.”
“If I’m playing janitor all day, when will I learn?”
“Don’t worry about that, princess. I’ll read to you while you work.”
She groaned miserably. A sound that left me feeling deliciously winded as she marched off to the supply closet.
This tiny elven minx was going to be the death of me.
CHAPTER 13
MAGNUS
Scrubbing floors set the foundation for Tinsley’s daily lessons at Sion Academy.
Over the next four weeks, she spent more time learning while on her hands and knees than sitting at a desk. As she crawled along with a soapy sponge, I walked beside her, delivering lectures on physics, comparative government and politics, Latin literature, and Catholicism.
She hadn’t lied about her memory. When she heard something, she could recall it later, almost verbatim. Every test she aced proved she was absorbing my lessons.
The one thing she failed to learn, however, was obedience.
She’d had a few tardies and curfew violations, but the bulk of her misconduct began and ended with her mouth.
She was a vulgar, loquacious wiseass, too smart for her own good, and lived every moment as if her only mission was to annoy me. No one had ever dared to talk to me the way she did, and no punishment seemed harsh enough to deter her.
After four weeks of social isolation, withheld meals, psychological humiliation, and manual labor, I knew what she needed.
Physical suffering.
Bodily pain.
She needed my belt across her ass, over and over and over.
In the years I’d taught here, I’d only used a strap and cane on three occasions. Those had been extreme cases, where the students were so wild and unmanageable that a physical beating hadn’t even fazed them. It hadn’t affected me, either. I had no physical interest in the girls, and in the end, all three were expelled.
Expulsion was what Tinsley wanted. Therefore, it was the one thing I wouldn’t give her.
That left scrubbing floors.
Or corporal punishment.
Slapping.
Spanking.
Flogging.
Choking.
I couldn’t. I shouldn’t, for ten thousand reasons all amounting to one.
I want it.
I wanted to put my hands on her so badly, and if I did, if I physically punished her, it would be irrefutably, uncontrollably, gloriously sexual for me.
I’d only touched her one time. Four weeks ago, I’d let my thumb brush her lip. That single, featherlight touch had unfurled a surge of twisted, desperate cravings from the darkest corner of my mind. Since then, I’d kept my hands to myself and forced my black thoughts into nonexistence.
But if I touched her again, if I introduced her to my favorite pastime, it was all over.
As it was, watching her crawl across the floor on her knees teased the hell out of my sadistic nature. The flagrant sexual symbolism in the act wasn’t lost on her, either. She called me out on it every time, asserting that no student should kneel for her teacher because it was perverted and sexist and played into the fantasies of predators.
It was a wasted argument. If she kept her disrespectful mouth shut, she wouldn’t be on her knees. Period. The choice was hers.
I checked my watch and paced through the classroom, grinding my teeth.
She was late again.
Closing my eyes, I prayed the Hail Mary to calm my temper. As I finished and began the prayer again, the sound of sprinting footfalls broke out in the hall.
Shoes squeaked against wood as Tinsley tore around the corner and burst into my classroom in a fit of wheezing, spluttering breaths.
“I’m here!” She bent at the waist, a hand in the air and the other on her knee, choking. “Good thing I’m fast.”
“You’re late,” I snarled, torn between kicking her out and giving her something substantial to choke on.
“Oh, come on.” She glanced at the clock on the wall. “Only two minutes late. Are you seriously going to be a vagina about it?”
“A vagina?”
“The fleshy pink canoe between a