I’ve been working on another new book — this one more BDSM romance than straight-up spanking, although there is spanking in it. In fact, here is the first spanking scene in the book, which doesn’t occur until Chapter 13:

He had her undress to her bra and panties, and she did, and she noticed—standing there in the lamplight in the plain dark set she’d chosen with absurd care that afternoon—that the thin barrier of them was doing nothing practical at all. She’d slept with this man. He’d had her with nothing on. The scrap of fabric covered nothing he hadn’t seen, protected nothing real. It was, she understood, entirely a thing in her own head, a last token of being clothed, a half-inch of not-quite-fully-exposed that her nervous system apparently needed even though her reason knew better. He let her keep it without comment, because of course he did—he read the need and honored it the way he honored everything, no questions.

And then he sat on the edge of the bed and drew her, gently, unhurried, across his lap.

The position undid something in her before a single thing had happened—the simple fact of being arranged, of being put where he wanted her, her body settling over his thighs, the vulnerability of it, the being-handled. Her face heated. And the thought arrived with a strange clarity, the cool clinical voice she could never fully switch off, narrating even now: forty-three years old, and no one has ever done this to me. Not once. Not as a child, not as an adult, not in play, not in anger. In my entire life, no one has ever spanked me, for any reason at all. This is the first time. She braced, automatically, for the shame she was sure would come—the what kind of woman, what am I doing, a grown professional draped over a man’s knee in her underwear—

—and the shame came, and then, almost instantly, it was sublimated into something else entirely, dissolved by the one fact that reorganized all of it: she was not doing this because she’d been made to, or caught, or punished. She was doing it on purpose, by her own sovereign choice, with the intent of handing control to someone she trusted. And that intent transmuted the whole thing. The position that should have been humiliating became, instead, the physical shape of the surrender she’d been walking toward for months. She wasn’t being put in her place. She was giving her place, deliberately, into careful hands. The shame had nothing to hold onto. It guttered out for lack of fuel.

“Color?” he asked, one hand warm and still at the small of her back.

“Green,” she said, and was surprised to find it was completely true.

The POV character is 43 years old, and here are some images I asked Gemini to come up with based on descriptions of her:

Of course, they aren’t perfect, but they should give you a general physical idea of the person we’re dealing with here.

This book has by far the fewest spanking scenes per capita of any book I’ve written, except for Other Options which isn’t a spanking story in the first place. They’re also the least explicit spanking scenes I’ve written, although they are detailed. I think I had a different mindset when I was writing this book, which is what led to it being more romance than kink.

It still needs some heavy editing, and it’ll be a while before it’s anywhere close to ready for publication, but I’m still rather happy with how it turned out.

(By the way, the tag for this book will be “Chiropractor Lauri”.)