Love Spanks 2014: You know you need this

Love Spanks 2014 is here! You’ve tasted us, and now you get to sample free stories from top F/F authors. Please visit Governing Ana for the prize list, sign-up sheet, and free books. You can win from a prize pool valued at over $1,000, including a Kindle Fire or Nook HD, just for commenting!

Many authors will also offer a contest on their individual blogs. Your comment on their blogs automatically enters you in both the main contest and the individual contests!

What’s the catch? Absolutely nothing! We love writing for you and want to thank you for your readership. Perhaps someone might get a spanking or two for reading such naughty blogs, but that’s a reward rather than a catch, right?

1. Visit each blog between Friday, February 7 and Sunday, February 9 to read the posted stories and excerpts.
2. Leave a comment answering the story question on each blog. You will receive one entry per blog for the grand prize drawing. You will also be automatically entered in that author’s individual contest, if she has one.
3. If you have visited all of the blogs, visit Ana’s blog to sign up for FIVE bonus entries to the grand prize.
4. Deadline is midnight EST (UTC -5) on February 9!!
5. If you successfully completed a previous challenge (Spank or Treat 2013, Spankee Doodle 2013, Love Spanks 2013, or Spank or Treat 2012), you may add “VIP” to your comments. You will earn THREE bonus entries toward the grand prize. (Yes, we will be doing this again. Yes, if you successfully complete the Love Spanks 2014 challenge you can become a VIP for our next activity!)
6. If you are a F/F author or thinking of becoming one, please add “FF” to your comments. That way, your name will be entered in the special F/F author prize drawings.
7. If you are Love Spanks 2014 Ambassador, please add “Amb” to your comments to receive your extra prize drawing.
8. Visit any of the participating blogs on Friday, February 14 to find out the lucky winners. Will it be you?

Like these events? Want to support your friendly F/F authors? Become a Love Spanks Ambassador! In exchange for promoting this event, you will receive one extra prize entry, AND you are still eligible to participate and win prizes! To find out the details, send an email to tarafinneganromance@gmail.com, with the subject line “Love Spanks Ambassador.”

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*****

Hi! I am so proud to be part of this wonderful event, and I hope you’re having a great time reading so much F/F fiction :) My contribution is an extract from my WIP spanking romance, Meeting Venus. Emily is a talented artist, but she doubts herself and doesn’t make the most of her ability. Her lover Charlotte introduces her to spanking as an erotic pleasure and as a motivating tool. In this chapter Emily is at a party hosted by Charlotte, having promised (but failed) to enter an art contest.

*****

Charlotte was her usual dazzling self, gliding round the room with effortless grace, lighting the place up and lightening the hearts of everyone she spoke to. But I knew that things would be different once the party was over and she had me to herself.

Sure enough, as soon as the last guest was gone the atmosphere changed, as if a winter chill had swept through the room.

“So,” she said, her voice cool, “suppose you tell me exactly why you skipped that contest? I thought we had discussed that it was a great opportunity. I was under the impression that you were all set.”

I looked down at my feet, suddenly feeling childish, and resentful for being made to feel that way. I didn’t want to be having this conversation. I wanted to be wrapped in Charlotte’s arms, thrilling at her closeness. I wanted to bathe in her smile, that beautiful starburst that lit my senses. I wanted her to be proud of me. Anything but this. “I’ve been too busy...” I muttered into my chest.

“You’ve had plenty of time and opportunity. Try again.”

“I...”

A long, defeated sigh.

“It’s too hard. I’m... just not as good as you think I am.”

Charlotte strode towards me. As she approached I fiddled with a wine glass on the little table next to me, running my index finger to and fro on its rim, wishing foolishly that a guest would return and take her attention off me.

“That’s just another excuse, and one I’m getting sick of,” she said, taking my wrist and lifting my hand from the glass. “I’ll tell you what the problem is, Emily. You are lazy. You want reward without the effort. You are a lazy girl, just as surely as a girl who skips her chores around the house, and you use a lack of confidence as a cover.”

Stung by Charlotte’s slight, my eyes flashed up to meet hers. “It’s not like that!” I snapped. “I just... I can’t do it.”

“You can do it, Emily. You just need to discipline yourself to do it. Creative people still have to work hard like anyone else. If you were a writer you would have to draft things. Even Shakespeare’s stuff wouldn’t have come out perfect first time, would it?”

I gave a little shrug. “It might have.”

“No,” she said. “It wouldn’t have. And you shouldn’t expect your art to be perfect first time either. Is that what they taught you at art school? That you didn’t have to try? That inspiration would just hit like a bolt of lightning and move the brush around for you?”

“No...” I answered sullenly, sounding the part of a child for good measure. I had a very strong urge to kick my toe on the floor. Or at least kick off the strap heels I had worn all evening. Get out of that dress, take off my makeup. I didn’t feel like being glamorous. I lowered my gaze and spoke to Charlotte’s chest. “They taught us... that you have to struggle with a piece. That you have to work on it, through good and bad, until it’s resolved.”

Charlotte, I had learned, had a way of saying a great deal with a nod. She gave one of those nods, then strolled over to the sofa.

“I think you had better fetch me the hairbrush and get over my knee.”

My stomach did a swan dive to somewhere near my feet. The hairbrush… I had only been given it once before but that had been plenty enough to make me dread its return. That I didn’t want to fetch it – that everything inside of me demanded I didn’t – seemed, in the glare of Charlotte’s anger, as irrelevant as the temperature on Saturn. And so I brought it to her and clambered mutely into position across her lap. Before I had settled, and without a word, she yanked my dress up round my waist with a disarming roughness. Oh, this was too real and too awful. The feeling I had as a ten-year-old when I put a ball through the kitchen window and was bawled out by my parents as the stupidest girl in the world? I would have rather lived that moment a hundred times over than feel this.

“On the bare from the start this time,” and she slipped her thumbs under the waistband of my knickers and eased them down to my thighs. “This is going to be a very direct and, I imagine, a very unenjoyable reminder that the decisions we make have consequences.”

“Please...” I whined, knowing that it was too late to avert the inevitable but unable to help myself from trying. I didn’t want a spanking. Not one like this. I wanted to climb into bed and bury myself under the covers; to hide from everything and just be left alone.

The back of the hairbrush was smoothed over my bottom cheeks, its coldness like a threat. I closed my eyes in anticipation and clutched a cushion tightly to myself, wishing to the pit of my aching stomach that I had just worked on that stupid painting, entered that stupid contest.

Time, I learned in the first few seconds of the spanking, had dimmed the memory of my last taste of the hairbrush. The reality of the experience – the scorching, all-consuming physicality of it – was brought emphatically back to me as Charlotte pounded the brush against my bottom with a quickness and intensity that spoke of controlled fury. I gasped, my eyes thrown wide open in shock; I yelped, I bucked; and all the resentment and frustration that had built up inside came bursting out in screamed, half-insensible oaths.

“You’ve earned this, Emily,” she coolly scolded, her cut-glass accent impeccable even as she breathed heavy with effort. “And you’re damned well going to be sorry when I’m done giving it to you. You might not care about your career, but I do.”

Somehow Charlotte’s composure made it all worse. I wished she would shout at me, call me a naughty girl, lose her temper. But no matter how angrily she snapped the hairbrush down her voice remained infuriatingly measured, and the litany of chastisements she reeled off made me feel all the more ridiculous as I kicked and bawled like a child.

And then for the longest time there was nothing but the awful, repetitive clap of the hairbrush, the pain that coursed through me, the hot tears that ran down my face. And, most powerfully of all, the most bitter, heartfelt regret. Charlotte, I knew deep down, was right to be punishing me. She believed in me, even when I didn’t believe in myself. She wanted me to become what I was capable of becoming. And now she was giving of herself, just as she always did: she was giving me something I needed, as an act of love.

Afterward, when I lay cradled in her arms, I cried still, but these tears were different to the violent ones that came during the spanking. I wanted to speak, to express how I felt, but I didn’t trust myself to use the right words. As if she could read my mind, Charlotte stroked my hair and whispered sweet little things about her beautiful girl.

*****

Thanks for reading! I really hope you enjoyed it, and I’d love to hear what you think. If you’d like to answer a question, I have one: would you go to get the hairbrush, like Emily did, even though you really didn’t want a spanking?