Hannah blushed and stood there speechless until Daniel rescued them both from the awkward moment.
“Is that your brother there?” he asked, peering toward the gate beyond.
“Yes, it is.” She turned to look his way.
“Come to protect your reputation?”
“Yes, sir. My mother thought it proper.”
“It sounds as though you have a sensible mother. Why don’t you both come inside for some coffee, the air is getting bitter cold out here.”
The romance between Hannah and Daniel bloomed from that day on.
The only thing that survived the battle that brought them together was that Hannah would again… and again and again… be thusly punished, when in Daniel’s opinion, the high-spirited young woman needed to be brought around. She was a strong-willed woman, who occasionally had to be reminded of her place. To start, her punishments were carried out in the same swift manner as that first animated spanking in town. Even during that one there lingered afterwards an undercurrent of something more going on with them both. Sexual sparks flew. Although it was not until they were married that the two dared to act on the erotic urges that rose in them with such passionate fervor during the process of punishment.
The day the two realized that there was something blatantly sexual in the punishment scenes, they were both astounded. But once exposed, it didn’t take long before they accepted the obvious truth.
They were in the barn. Newlyweds. Their first fight as a husband and wife.
All day, Hannah had worked to save a dying foal. She was a novice with farm animals, but she’d been through the successful birth of two colts and was determined to see this animal live, even though it was unlikely he would survive. She became angry with herself for waiting too long to act during the mare’s difficult labor. She was angry with Daniel for not being there to help her. And she was angry with God for turning His back on her when she needed Him most.
Distraught and tearful, she spewed a string of invectives at her new husband the moment he walked in the barn door. Although she was happy he’d finally returned, she lashed out with one sharp word after another, until the exasperated husband finally blared:
“Enough, woman!”
“But don’t you see what happened here!” she objected crossly.
“I see these things all the time; they can’t be helped.”
“It could have been helped if you’d been here,” she turned away from him in a violent move, and he grabbed her by the arm and hauled her back.
“Enough, Hannah!” He tried to remain calm, but it was getting harder by the minute.
“If you expect me to put on a happy face, and greet you with smiles and kisses, well… then… you’re a bloody ass!”
His anger flared.
“You want to take that back?” he challenged her.
“No, I don’t!” she cried, while she tried to wrench away.
Daniel saw no recourse but to thrash her bare behind. Maybe it would knock some sense of propriety and decorum back into her.
He summarily stripped the skirt from around her waist and pushed her over a waist-high rail. Moments later, a leather strap conveniently hanging by the barn door began to crisscross her bared bottom, raising a fiery heat and leaving angry welts etched in the white flesh. Strangely, Hannah accepted the punishment with far less fight that Daniel expected given her tempestuous mood. Perhaps she knew she needed it.
It was a hard punishment—and an important statement in their young marriage. If he taught her nothing else that day, he’d remind her that despite her forceful personality, her wit and her intelligence, he would maintain a solid reign over his young wife. He loved her spirit, but not when it turned ugly, as it had this day.
If that was all that happened in the barn that would have been enough, but so much more occurred that shocked them both.
About halfway through the punishment, a strange surge of feeling flooded Hannah’s body with a brilliance that felt more like pleasure than pain. She moaned while her body writhed erotically against the wooden bar. The blows became more like a sexual communion between the two as the heat between them rose. Desire and longing flowed freely in their midst.
Hannah’s lusty performance stirred Daniel’s manhood into an urgent pulsing erection. He could see the wetness between his wife’s legs as if she were taunting him to take her. The strap struck her reddened bottom and the moan that rose in response was filled with the sumptuous sound of desire. He struck her ass again and she writhed almost whorishly. Her taut legs held her spread bottom high; her vulva below seemed to swell, the pink fleshy portal expand, while her fragrant juices dribbled down her inner thigh. He let the fierceness of their shared arousal mount.
In time, he dropped the strap and moved toward her with his hand plunging between her legs, his free arm drawing her upright, and his mouth kissing the back of her neck, her shoulder, and her ears. His tongue lapped the sweat from her sweet-tasting skin.
Daniel speared her from behind with grunting thrusts claiming the territory of her body as his acquisition. He whispered things she would not recall a day later. But she smiled inwardly to know that this show of emotion was as much a show of love as authority.
When he wanted more of her, he pulled out and carried her into a stall where he laid her down on a freshly laid bed of straw. Her poor thrashed behind was further pained as the prickly mattress scratched her flesh, but by then, both were far too gone to care. She fervently wanted him inside her, and drew him in with a wet sex and her grasping arms.
“Oh, husband, take me hard!” she practically screamed.
He thrust into her crevice, banging the head of his molten member deep within her, until she screamed with a wild erotic wail. With his organ still planted deep inside her squeezing cunny, he sat up against her groin and clutched her breasts, kneading them like bread dough, his fingers digging deeply into the soft skin, and torturing the nipples as he pinched the flesh between his fingers.
Hannah didn’t object; she wanted the pain. He then slapped the tender flesh hard, moving back and forth from one side to the other until both breasts were nearly as red as her scarlet bottom.
“You won’t defy me, Hannah!” he began to rattle off a string of demands.
“No, sir!” She would agree with everything he said.
“What I say is law around this farm,” he slapped her breasts and squeezed them more.
“Yes, sir!”
“You will submit to me. Is that understood, wife?”
“I will submit, sir. Oh, take me hard as you desire.” She was delirious with love and need and longing, and her quaking body began to orgasm in spasms far more deep and rich and biting than any she’d experienced in their young marriage. Her insides grabbed him hard and shook loose his own orgasm. Soon, he fell to her chest and held her tightly to him for as long as the spasms continued to wrack both their bodies with pleasure.
“You do such things to me, Daniel Crowe,” Hannah sighed as she lay panting beside her husband. “I think you must be the devil to make me so ravenous.”
“Is that a complaint?” he asked.
“Sir, I don’t know. I know only that when you were whipping me, which I know I deserved, it hurt terribly… and then, so strange it seemed… the hurt went away... I wanted more. I wanted that pain. My body became like a fiery furnace. I could not stop the madness.” She turned his way to seek his face. “Is that sane, or have you driven me mad?”
“Perhaps, Hannah,” he looked down on her with soulful eyes, “we’ve stumbled on the truth that drives our souls. How do I know? But should we judge it bad? We are married. We love each other. What could be wrong in expressing that love in the way that pleases us both?”
“You were pleased?”
“Is there any doubt?”
She smirked playfully. “I was too far gone to tell.”
“When you’re aroused, then I’m aroused. And if being beaten makes you frantic for me, then beating you turns me f
rantic as well. I daresay, I can punish you when you deserve it, and I hope it hurts. But we might accept that there is more going on when we clash that way.” His eyes then narrowed. “Just keep in mind, I would not take kindly to your misbehaving just to get the benefit of such ardent love making.”
“Oh?” She coyly answered, while a faint blush rose on her cheeks.
“If I think you are baiting me for such a scene, you’ll be surprised to find my devilishly nasty side has more than a good strapping to keep you in line.”
“Oh, Daniel, my thoughts are so twisted now, I don’t know what to think,” she said.
“Don’t fret. We have a lifetime to figure this out.”
Pain and punishment were not always part of making love. But making love took on an added charge when the two combined with such force. There were times when Daniel had to separate punishment from pleasure, when he felt it necessary to punish his wife in ways that would not arouse her—such as the day he tethered her naked in the yard. The humiliation seemed to quell the worst of the testy beast inside her, and gave him an accompanying satisfaction.
It was, then, particularly ironic that the same measures Hannah’s husband used to tame, love and her stun her into good behavior were the same ones that Jarrett Cain and his crude associates used for their depraved enjoyment.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Hannah kept the lanterns burning by the window. Daniel was away, looking for the wayward Jolie. She’d not been herself in the week following the terrible incident with Jarrett Cain and his boys. Although Jolie swore she wouldn’t tell Daniel about that day, Hannah didn’t trust her sister’s word. And now, even worse, Jolie was missing. She was nowhere to be found since mid-morning when she left to visit her friend Maggie. Was it possible that Cain’s wrath had struck again? Hannah prayed that by some miracle this was not the case, although the possibility was the first thought in her head when it was clear that Jolie never arrived at Maggie’s house that day.
Daniel had little choice but to go after the girl, but he was hardly happy about the situation when Hannah announced that she was missing.
“I vow that she’ll see the blunt end of a paddle!” he warned.
“I don’t dispute the need. But I do want her home safe.”
His eyes narrowed, fixed and grim, he set off in search of the girl while Hannah was left to wait.
A sudden knock on the door woke Hannah from a troubled nap. Her eyes jerked open and a chill ran up her spine. Who could that possibly be?
She tiptoed to the door and cracked it open just a bit, seeing one of Beau’s good friends on the other side. She didn’t know the boy well, but the fellow seemed like a nice enough chap; not like the tougher boys who wildly ran about the county playing havoc on the farmers.
“Sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Crowe, but I bring news to you from Beau,” the young man said, sounding worried.
“What is it?” She opened the door a little wider.
“He’s had a fall. . .coming here to talk to you, but he didn’t make it.”
“My God, where is he? Anything broken?”
“I don’t know, missus. I tried to check him, but he’s complained so that I couldn’t. He’s hurt bad, ma’am. If you could… well, you know, come along…”
The flustered woman gazed nervously about the house. If only Daniel had been there; he would have gone himself. But what could she do? Her heart beat with a furious thunder, while the boy himself fidgeted nervously waiting for her to respond.
Fearing that Beau was in mortal danger, she suddenly grabbed her coat and, pulling it on, climbed up in the saddle behind the stranger and rode out into the night with him. It was just a mile or two beyond the farm, when she spotted through a blanket of darkness, the shapes of several men.
“Where’s Beau?” she asked suspiciously as they slowed down and trotted into their midst. On seeing the group of men before her she sensed that she’d been tricked. If she’d ridden her own horse, she would have turned away right then. But she’d stupidly, foolishly ridden behind the young hooligan on his horse, and there was no way to successfully flee.
“Beau ain’t here,” she heard the familiar sound of Eldon Tremaine speaking to her from the darkness and a miserable chill made her entire body quake in fear.
Somehow in the seconds that followed, she was removed from the horse and set on her feet. A low campfire lapped the night, casting an evil look about the landscape of the woods.
“I thought since I was so close, Mrs. Crowe, that I’d enjoy my evening better taking my pleasure with a willing woman.” Though she didn’t see him immediately, Jarrett Cain’s voice was clearly recognizable.
“You blackguard filth!” She stepped further into the smoky light and saw the figure of the ominous man looming in the shadows. His surly grin made her stomach wrench.
“Haven’t heard a thing from your delinquent brother, have you? Well, it’s time I was getting another payment.”
“Payment?”
“You know what I’m after.”
“You dare come to me at a moment like this and… and…” she stammered but couldn’t complete the sentence. Her brain would not cooperate; her frantic emotions had seen to that.
“A little pleasure is all I’ll be wanting tonight. We’ll save the really hard stuff for when I have you at my ranch.”
“You can’t mean that!”
“Oh, but Mrs. Crowe, I believe I made myself clear the other day. You’ll give up the sweetness of your lovely body until Beau Noble finally gives himself up to me.”
He moved a step forward and pulled her into him; then the two disappeared into the woods a few feet from the others who waited in agitated silence. The man’s large body was warm and smelled of wood smoke—hardly as unpleasant as Hannah would have expected. In response to his firm and commanding hands, an unwanted heat rose up inside her that she dare not transmit to him.
But seeing the pleased look in his eyes, perhaps he felt her reply regardless of her attempts to squelch the feeling.
“Don’t worry, ma’am, this won’t take long.” His lips formed a lecherous smile. “You know, I imagine that before we’re through, I’ll have you eating out of the palm of my hand. I’ll have you squirming in your drawers for the hardness of my body and the crude pleasure you’ll get from me.”
“Never!” she spit out.
His hand was already underneath her skirt, as he forcefully pressed her body against the scratchy trunk of a gnarled oak tree. With his probing fingers moving adroitly inside her bottom cleft, a powerful wave of sensation engulfed her loins. She gasped when a sudden spasm of fiery sensation shot through her lower belly.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you liked this, Mrs. Crowe.”
“Don’t fool yourself!” she barked back.
“But I feel you warming, ma’am.” His hand was in the wet fissure deep between her legs, gathering the betraying juices and swathing higher where his erection planned to go. She jerked as his fingers thrust inside the tight hole and her mouth opened in a silent scream. The strangeness of the night and this strange place did terrible things to her body and brain. This couldn’t be happening! And yet, it was.
“I don’t care what you say, little lady,” the big man purred in her ear, “you have a liking for whorish lovemaking. And since that’s so, I’ll make good use of what I have here.”
The more he swathed that back portal, the more it seemed to respond and open to the offensive touch. She was mindful the entire time of keeping her movements, her moans, any sign of pleasure to a minimum. She thought of home, her Daniel. She forced images of the farm to appear in her head. After a time, she felt the man close in with his body pressed against her backside and the nakedness of his groin against the nakedness of her bared flesh. And then his rigid cock pressed against the tight opening. She gasped again, afraid that a sharp and frightening pain would follow. Cain persisted despite her mewling cry of anguish, and with a little more force, his erection slipped through the
opening into the channel that he and his accomplices had used before. The back entrance was still sore from their previous encounter, but curiously welcoming of the fullness that caused every nerve in her body to brighten excitedly. She held in the telling whimpers, forcing her mind again and again to Daniel and away from the hateful enemy who plunged himself for pleasure inside her private spaces.
Cain was true to his word. He buggered her with several hard swift moves, while his hand wrapped her hair in a tight fist and his mouth kissed a trail of slobbery kisses down her neck. When he at last climaxed, his hips ground into her, knocking her torso hard against the tree trunk—she’d be surprised if the vigorous battering didn’t split her.
Hannah remained silent as a church mouse throughout the ordeal—her arousal determinedly subdued. But she wasn’t afraid. She had no illusions that this was actually paying off her brother’s debt. She didn’t even know what he owed the man. But now, because Jarrett had taken a fancy to her, she’d become a convenient place for him to vent his loathsome spite and contemptuous disregard for women. She’d be his whipping girl if she didn’t find a way to stop him. Tell Daniel, and her husband would kill the man. Could she afford to risk that?
After several final grunts, the man mauled her ass and breasts as if he owned her flesh.
The shame, the terrible shame! She inwardly rebuked herself, while even then, her body acted as engaged in the event as it might some similar intimacy with Daniel. Her shame redoubled with every sexually heated breath she took.
As Jarrett pulled from her body and left her clinging to the tree, she vowed that she must keep this terrible secret. With all the power she had, Hannah squelched her indecent physical response. She must keep this wickedness her secret.
“I’ll take you within a half mile of the farm,” Cain announced as he re-buttoned his trousers. “What you tell Daniel Crowe is up to you.”
The Humiliation of Hannah Page 7
