“I mean, you wouldn’t want to ask her about it. It would be far too humiliating for everyone involved. I suppose we must count it a total loss.”
“Not a total loss.” Her husband turned to pick up an oblong, charred piece of wood from his clothes chest. “The servants brought this to me a couple days ago. Do you recognize it? They fished it out of the kitchen fire.”
Minette stared at the paddle. Blast the kitchen servants. Why hadn’t they let the thing burn? “My goodness,” she said, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say that wasn’t incriminating.
“My goodness, indeed,” August replied drily. “Those are your initials, aren’t they? How did this paddle make its way from my study desk drawer to the kitchen fire?”
“I can’t imagine.” She bit briefly at her lip. “It must have been all the moving about.”
He stared at her steadily, in a way that made her feel shamed and excited at once. Then he turned away and opened a drawer. “Luckily, I have an excellent carpenter on staff, who was able to replicate the paddle despite the damage. In fact, I believed he’s improved it.” He withdrew a shiny new implement, turning it over in his hand so she could see the
W.A.R.
carved into one side. “He’s made it a bit larger, and thinner, to increase the sting and impart a stricter punishment. And he’s promised to make a few more, in case one...or two...should go missing. A man of his talents can provide me an endless supply. Isn’t that wonderful, darling?”
“I wouldn’t call it wonderful,” said Minette with a pout.
August smiled and tapped the paddle against his palm. She was glad he was feeling happier these days, but she felt anything but happy at this moment.
“I believe I shall keep one here in the bedroom,” he said, “for punishing my naughty wife when the situation calls for it. For instance, when she steals a paddle—which was a wedding gift—and throws it into the kitchen fire, and then pretends she didn’t do it.”
“It was a horrible wedding gift, you must agree.” Minette took a step back, and another. “I wish you would put that down, so we might get back to the embracing and kissing and...” She slid her hand down to the tuft of hair between her legs and caressed herself in what she hoped was a sufficiently seductive manner. “Don’t you want to touch me?” she asked. “Touch me here?”
“Indeed I do. After I paddle your naughty bottom.”
Minette stopped fondling herself and thought about the best way to escape him. Unfortunately, he was standing between her and the door.
“I only threw it in the fire because I considered that paddle a great detriment to our marital happiness,” she cried.
“I disagree with your assessment. On the contrary, I think it rather effective at keeping you in line. Come and bend over this chair if you please,” he said, indicating the one with his coat thrown over it. “Let’s make sure you understand that you mustn’t throw any more of my things into the fire.”
“I won’t. Oh, I most certainly won’t. I understand completely. I’m absolutely finished throwing paddles into fires, even if they belong there.” She searched her husband’s features for some hint of softening.
He only gazed at her, unmoved. “I will give you the usual warning: the longer you dally, the longer your punishment will go on.”
Blast. Well, she supposed it
had
been a wedding present, and she had snuck it out of August’s desk without permission. She ought to know by now not to meddle in his things, especially when he was one of those husbands who had no qualms about spanking his wife. She felt very remorseful as she crossed the room and bent over the upholstered chair. She hoped he wouldn’t make her cry, so she would drop tears all over his deep green coat.
“I’m terribly sorry I did it,” she said, resting her palms against the cushion beneath her.
“I know you are.” He rubbed a large, warm hand across her bottom. It felt rather pleasant, but then his caress was replaced by the hard wooden surface of the paddle. “Since I understand why you did it, there will only be ten strokes for your punishment. However, since I don’t wish you to do such a thing again, each stroke is going to be firmly applied.”
Minette closed her eyes.
Firmly applied?
He did everything firmly when it came to her bottom, spankings most of all.
“Ouch! Oh, no,” she cried as he landed the first stinging blow. “Oh, please, that hurts!”
A second awful stroke followed on the heels of the first. Thank goodness he’d placed a hand at her back to hold her down, or she’d have fallen right off the chair into a pleading heap. This new paddle was much more painful than the last one. So much for her and her schemes. She pledged, as she always did in this position, that she would never, ever behave poorly again.
“Oh.
Oww...
” She wiggled her bottom after the third stroke, though she dared not reach back to rub it. She thought ruefully of her childhood spankings, which her brother had doled out on a regular, and deserved, basis. She’d thought marriage would mean the end of discipline, but she realized now that was not to be.
Because you’re a hopelessly naughty woman...
She bit her lip for the fourth stroke, then the fifth brought a loud cry to her lips.
“We’re halfway there,” August said, relaxing his hold on her back.
“My bottom’s on fire.” She reached to rub it but he made a quelling sound.
“Leave your hands where they are.”
“I’m trying,” she said. “But you’re hurting me very much. I wish you would touch me and stroke me instead.”
He moved behind her and nudged her legs wider with the paddle, then eased the smooth side of it between her legs. The sensation was scandalously arousing. “Stroke you like this, you mean?”
It felt so wonderful she couldn’t speak to respond. He turned the paddle the other way and slid the fine beveled edge just between her pussy’s folds. She feared that she bucked against the thing in a very lewd way. “You do like to be stroked,” he said in a low voice. “We’d better finish your punishment quickly, before you come off without permission.”
“Please, no more,” she begged. He’d awakened a heated, aching pulse in her center, and when he brought the paddle down on her arse—
whack!
—the need didn’t go away, only built in magnitude.
“It hurts. Oh, it hurts,” she said in her most pitiful voice, but he gave her the rest of the strokes, hard and stinging as ever. By the end, her parted legs trembled with the effort of holding still.
“There. Your punishment is over. For now.” His voice was soft, rough, virile as he smoothed a hand over her burning cheeks. He slid the paddle between her legs again, so she felt hot pain and blissful pleasure in equal measure. He tapped it against her pussy, then eased it back and forth. “Tell me, Minette. This has your initials on it, but who does this paddle belong to?”
“You, my lord.” She used the formal title of address because it felt right to do it. He was her lord in this, her unchallenged master when it came to marital discipline. She could feel increasing wetness where he pressed the paddle against her quim.
“It is
my
paddle, isn’t it? For punishing you when you need it. You are not allowed to touch it, do you understand? Unless I’ve instructed you to bring it to me, for your own correction.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“God forbid it should end up in any more fires.” She squirmed and gasped as he poked the tip of it right against her most sensitive place. “Have you learned your lesson, my dear?”
“Yes. Yes!”
“Don’t move. Stay just as you are.” He put the paddle down atop his wooden chest and began to disrobe. His clothes joined hers in a pile on the floor, then he returned to stand behind her, his stiff shaft jutting out. Her palms sweated against the seat cushion, but she didn’t dare move them, or straighten. She flinched as his hands closed on her sore backside and squeezed until she whimpered.
“Your bottom’s scarlet,” he said. He sounded more excited than concerned.
“Yes,” she whispered. “It’s throbbing terribly. I suppose it’s what I deserved.”
He responded to this admission with a few more stinging spanks delivered to each cheek. She pressed forward against the chair, making complaining sounds, but in truth, she felt more wanton than ever.
“How naughty you are, that I must spank you to make you behave,” he said. This time when he smacked her bottom, she rose up on her toes and made a sound that was not at all polite.
“I suppose it must be very frustrating to you,” she said, arching her hips against his.
He squeezed her shoulders and then reached beneath her to pinch her nipples. She cried out, trying to pull away, but he trapped her, clutching her against his chest. “Open your legs,” he commanded. “Give me your pussy, naughty girl, or I’ll spank you again.”
She obeyed as well as she could. Her wits had rather left her, gone fluttery at his lascivious words, delivered in a curt, stern tone. She didn’t like to be spanked, but she rather enjoyed the aftermath, when he handled her like this. When she was positioned to his liking, he thrust inside her, all the way to the hilt. His size still shocked her, but it was a good kind of shock that brought pleasure and made her squeeze around him with her sensitive walls. “
Ohhh...
” she sighed. “How perfect you feel inside me.”
He made a breathless sort of sound and withdrew, and plunged in again. She loved being taken like this, without couth, without civilized tenderness. She loved the heat of him against her back and the feel of his straining muscles as he covered her. She braced herself against the chair and moved with the rhythm of his thrusts. Every so often he delivered more smarting spanks to her bottom.
Yes, it was their house now, and their bedrooms, their place to play, and make love, and get spanked in this erotically charged manner.
I’ll not take any more of his things
, she promised herself silently.
I’ll be a perfect wife.
Or an almost perfect wife.
Or...a sometimes perfect but really mostly mischievous and irritating wife.
Oh well. She was sure she’d get many more spankings, but she would have August’s care and protection too, and his magnificent passion. It was everything she’d wished for her entire life.
She stilled her hips as the waves of pleasure crested within her. Behind her, August pounded against her sore, tender arse cheeks, as her pussy contracted in release around his rock hard shaft. Midway through her climax, he grasped her waist and pumped into her, filling her with his seed.
Perhaps they would make a baby this day. Perhaps they had already made a baby and she didn’t yet know. She only knew that she wouldn’t trade this gorgeous closeness for anything. His arms came around her and he pressed kisses against her cheek, her nape, her shoulder. “I love you,” he whispered.
“Even when I’m naughty?”
“Especially when you’re naughty,” he said, laughing softly. “I adore you, my beautiful, naughty Minette.”
*** *** ***
August made his way to Minette’s sitting room that night after dinner, with a tissue-wrapped bundle tucked beneath his arm. He knocked and pushed open the door, and located his wife at her writing desk. She looked up from her correspondence with a smile.
“August, you’ve come!”
She said the same thing every night, silly creature. Of course he’d come. If she ever locked him out, he’d break down the door to get to her. He looked forward with voracious longing to this private time with her, when he could bask in the warmth of her company. He lived for her smile, and her pleased adulation. She’d come to mean so much to him, in fact, that he’d developed a terror of losing her regard. Ridiculous, to fear such a thing when she’d adored him for years now, but the idea haunted him, unmanned him, disturbed his dreams.
“Good evening, darling. Are you at your letters?”
“Yes. Auntie Overbrook has written, and Josephine and Warren, and Aurelia, who says baby Felicity has dark hair just like her father, and that she doesn’t cry too much, and nurses like a monster. Those were her words exactly,
nurses like a monster
, and how they made me laugh. I’m so happy for them. Isn’t it delightful?”
“It is delightful.” Minette’s smile was contagious, like her ebullient moods.
She came from behind the desk as he walked to meet her. When she was close enough, he caught her in an embrace. Her sweet scent and closeness recalled that afternoon’s dalliance and their playful bath afterward. It was all he could do not to tackle her to the floor.
No. You must control yourself. For a few more moments at least.
“What have you there?” she asked as they parted. “Is it a present for me?”
“Yes.”
She clapped her hands as he led her to the settee before the fire. “How exciting. What is it for? The holidays have gone, and it’s not my birthday.”
“It’s for your un-birthday then. Do you remember the talented carpenter whom I referenced earlier today?”
He smiled as she fidgeted on the cushion. “Your devilish carpenter, you mean, who has made it difficult for me to sit?”
“The very same. I asked him to make this for you too, and I think it turned out very fine.”
He set the gift in her lap. She untied the bow and parted the wrappings, revealing an intricately carved and painted figure.
“My swan!” she exclaimed. “It’s exactly like the one I shattered.”
“Not exactly.” He took it from her and knocked it with his knuckles. “You see, it’s not breakable. It’s carved of hardwood and will last forever, if you keep it from harm’s way.”
“If I don’t fling it to the floor in a temper, you mean?” She tried to smile but her lips went wobbly. She bowed her head and ran her fingers over the swan’s etched feathers and gold-leaf paint. “This is so very lovely. It’s the grandest gift I’ve ever gotten.”
“Even better than the first swan?” he asked lightly.
“Yes, much better.” She cradled the figure in her hands and lifted it to her cheek. “It’s better because we’re better now, aren’t we?”
Oh, my darling. You don’t even know.
He gazed at her, this blonde, be-curled angel who had changed him so thoroughly. “I’ve never been happier in my life. I’m so happy that it frightens me.” He nudged the swan away and kissed her cheek, and then tasted her lips. “You’re my own special swan,” he said when he released her. “A little cantankerous at times, but still very pretty.”