Harmony recalled the barrage of caricatures in the papers. They’d been embarrassing enough, but the thought of her father seeing them…
“What does he do to you?” he asked. “Does he beat you? Make rough with you? If he does, I’ll take you away from him this very moment. Duke or no, I’ll not allow a daughter of mine to be abused.”
“It’s not at all like that.” She was blushing to her ears from this mortifying conversation. “He doesn’t beat me. He doesn’t do anything outside the law. It is…oh, how to explain? He likes a…a disciplined sort of lifestyle. I’ve agreed that this is good for me too. It keeps me focused and thoughtful. After all, I’m a duchess now.” She’d exhausted the extent of her capabilities to explain the matter. “Please trust me. All is well. If it wasn’t, I’d send Redcliff or one of the other servants to tell you right away.”
He didn’t look convinced. “You know, I never laid a finger on your mother. I never hit her—or you—even though it was within my rights to do it.”
“I know. You were a gentle father.”
“I loved your mother just as she was. There are other ways to enforce discipline, such as kindness and loving guidance. These are skills every husband should have.”
“He does have those skills.” Harmony twisted her hands in her lap, then looked back up at him. “Papa, I knew when I wed him what our marriage would be like. I agreed to it. In some way, I wish for order and propriety too. It comforts me to know that he will gather me in when I go too far. And I always go too far, you must admit. I was allowed to run…perhaps…a bit too wild in my formative years.”
Her father bit at his lip. She didn’t mean to chastise his parenting skills. His voice was gruff when he spoke. “I wronged you, poppet. I abandoned you after your mother passed. You see, it was so difficult when you got older, because…well…you recalled her so much to me. You have her same beauty, her same energy and charm.” His eyes misted over, and Harmony’s throat tightened with emotion. Her father composed himself and took her hand. “I miss your mother so, even to this day. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better father to you these last years. If I can do anything to contribute to your happiness, I will. Stephen too. That scapegrace has been tamed something awful by his Meredith. You wouldn’t recognize him. There’s a baby on the way, he’s just written.”
Harmony clasped her hands. “Truly? How wonderful. I’m to be an auntie. But, father.” She lowered her voice. “What is afoot with you and the dowager? How did you arrive here together?”
Her father puffed up with a pride she hadn’t seen in evidence in a while. “Why, I’ll tell you how. We rode here together. A gem of a woman, the dowager Courtland, when I can steal a moment without that Mrs. Lyndon by her side.”
Harmony had to laugh at that picture. Her father and the dowager, evading Mrs. Lyndon like two young people dogged by a chaperone. “You are not… Surely you are not courting the dowager?”
Her father waved a hand. “I am too old to court anybody, and she’s too high above me anyway. We talk and write letters. Perhaps one day I’ll marry her or perhaps I won’t. Depends what she wants, if you know what I’m saying. She’s the type to rule the roost. These Courtlands,” he said, with another wave of his hand. “What are we to do?”
“I don’t know, papa. I really don’t know.” Harmony’s head was reeling. The dowager and her father?
“Harry?” The dowager’s voice shrilled from the doorway. She poked her head into the room with a beleaguered expression. “My son would like to have a word with you in the library. Something about discussing the honor of your intentions.”
“What?” Her father rose from his chair.
“He believes we should not have ridden all this way without a chaperone!”
“That young upstart.” Her father crossed the room and offered the dowager his arm with a lazy bow. “I’ll tell you this, Ermie. I shall set him straight if he thinks to trap me into marrying the likes of you.”
The Dowager Courtland giggled—giggled!—as her father turned and winked at her. Then the two of them put their heads together and sailed out the door.
“Oh my goodness,” Harmony said, burying her face in her hands. “Oh my goodness, it is too much.”
Chapter Twenty: The Ball
Two Months Later
They decided—together—on a weekly system of accounting for her transgressions. Not that he didn’t occasionally spank her in a rush of exuberance, or lay on some heat before he made love to her. Harmony loved those spankings tossed over his knee in the bedroom. But for purposes of discipline, both of them found a weekly session suited them very well.
These sessions did not occur in her bedroom, or his, or in the study, but in his very stark and male dressing room, where things like belts and straps naturally abounded, and where he discreetly stored other tools such as riding crops, paddles, and various sizes of birch rods. The canes were left in the study. “A possibility,” her husband warned, “for the very worst misbehavior.”
Harmony tried not to think about that, but she did wait with a queer and excited feeling for Sunday evenings to arrive. She would sit at dinner with Court, barely noticing any other family members or guests, thinking only of what she had done that week in the way of naughty acts. She would stare at her husband’s hands and his stern and handsome face and wonder how he would choose to punish her. Sometimes he would catch her eye and she would shiver in guilty anticipation.
“You enjoy this far too much,” he teased one Sunday. After that, he had introduced the use of ginger figs into their punishment sessions. He’d procure lengths of the root from the kitchen gardens and carve them into slender phallic shapes with a flange at one end. He would carefully feather the edges of the ginger while she watched with wide eyes, and then…
Being spanked or whipped with ginger burning in her bottom was so very different than being spanked without it. When she admitted to Court that it made her feel much more punished, he made it a regular feature of her weekly disciplinary regimen.
This Sunday he had moved their session to an earlier time since the Courtland ball was to take place that night. Harmony headed toward her husband’s rooms just before the appointed hour in a pretty flocked dress and stockings, with her hair drawn up in a fetching style. At these weekly sessions, she took care to present herself in her very best light, and to accept gracefully his efforts to discipline her. In truth, these sessions kept her dearly connected to him. Even if they hurt like the devil most of the time…
The closer she came to his chambers, the harder her heart beat with excitement and alarm. She was already fit to fall apart over the ball and her role as hostess. Perhaps this time with Court would help her calm down and refocus her wits. It seemed the sessions always ended with her feeling clear-headed and relieved of stress.
That’s because he makes love to you so thoroughly afterward... Would he do so today, with the ball to prepare for? She hoped so, but it would be his choice, not hers. The last thing she could do after a spanking was make demands on her husband. But if he wanted her, even now in broad daylight, she would gladly submit to his whims.
Her fantasies along these lines became so ribald that by the time she arrived at his door and knocked upon it, she was blushing hot. He admitted her with an all-too-knowing smirk. “Improper thoughts?” he asked. “What a naughty wife you are. If not for these sessions, I believe you would be completely lost to the civilized world.”
She dropped an apologetic curtsy. “I am guilty as charged.”
“We had better begin then.” He removed his coat and draped it across the back of a chair, then his waistcoat, carelessly flicking open the buttons. He turned up the frilled cuffs of his shirt, exposing the muscled grace of his forearms. Harmony’s heart accelerated and her mouth went completely dry.
“You will remove your gown, please.”
“Yes, sir.”
She struggled out of it with her husband’s help until she stood only in a short chemise and stockings. H
“Shall we talk about this week?”
She watched his fingers work. “Yes, sir.”
“We have been very busy with preparations for the ball, so some of your harried and disrespectful behavior toward my mother might be excused. For instance, when you made fun of the turban she specially commissioned for this evening’s revelries.”
She felt a snort of laughter rising in her throat.
“Harmony,” he chided.
The laughter burst out, bold and disrespectful. “It’s only that there were so…many…birds…upon it.”
He pursed his lips, focusing staunchly on the ginger. “You are not helping your cause.”
She clamped her mouth shut, knowing he, too, was trying not to laugh.
“Then there was the matter of my mother’s favorite bonbons mysteriously disappearing.”
“I only ate three of them,” she protested. “My papa ate the rest.”
“Ah, but I cannot punish your father, only you. I trust they were delicious enough to be worth a sound switching.”
Harmony’s galloping heart turned over. He hadn’t yet punished her with a switch! Her eyes went to the table where he normally laid out the implement of his choosing and there she saw it, slender and newly peeled by the looks of it. “Oh,” she said softly.
“Oh,” he repeated, mimicking her. “I believe you will find it very instructive. Quiet in application too, with the house so crowded today. I cannot be lenient only because of the circumstances.”
“No, sir.” She curtsied again, bowing her head with true remorse for all the mischievous and mannerless things she’d done over the course of the week.
“Lastly,” he said, beginning to shape the ginger’s flange, “there is the little matter of your dress for the ball.”
“What matter?” Harmony asked innocently.
He flicked a bit of peel onto the tray. “I believe it to be scandalously alluring. You cannot think I would have nothing to say on the matter.”
“The dowager approved it, sir.” His eyes fixed on her, and she wished she had used a more submissive tone.
“The dowager lives to torment me,” he said. “And sometimes I believe you do too. I shall spend the entire evening trying to discipline my gaze from the display of your glorious bosom.”
“I meant to please you.”
“Oh, you please me.” He stepped closer, his fingertips teasing at her waist. The scent of ginger wafted between them. “You shall also please every other man there and cause me to burn with jealous ire.”
“Jealous ire?” she repeated weakly. “That sounds like a very impassioned thing.”
His fingers spread on her back, his features tightening into a strict mask. “Turn around, wife. It is time to pay the price for your shenanigans.”
She turned as he bade her and he gathered the back of her chemise, handing her the ruffled edges to hold out of the way.
“Bend forward slightly.”
Harmony bit the inside of her cheek as he parted her and seated the shaft of ginger into her bottom. She straightened and fidgeted, agitated by the invasive feeling of it. She always, always clenched around it when it first slid in her. It was a helpless reflex invariably answered by an aching burn. She made a moan of complaint which her husband ignored.
He walked her to a chest of drawers near the wall, conveniently waist high, the top kept free of any clutter or decoration. “Over,” he said when she stiffened. “Bend over and present your bottom for the punishment you’ve earned.”
She obeyed, clutching the hem of her chemise in now-sweating palms. This was the moment that addled her the most, the moment when she stood positioned and waiting while he crossed to the bureau to fetch whatever he planned to spank her with. She stared down at the top of the chest, her bottom already feeling punished as the ginger released its sting within her sensitive nether passage. She heard his measured steps returning to her.
“I feel you have earned twenty strokes of the switch due to your behavior this week.”
Harmony gulped. She knew he’d deliver them carefully, due to her pregnancy, but she also knew he wouldn’t shirk on the heat. The first stroke came in a swish across the juncture of her bottom and thighs. Oh, God help me. The switch, while thin and not particularly heavy in impact, delivered a shocking amount of sting as it flicked across her skin. She cried out and clenched her buttocks, gasping at the answering burn of the ginger.
“I am waiting for your count,” said her husband after a moment. “Or shall I begin afresh?”
“One,” Harmony said. She didn’t want even one stroke to be repeated, which is why she tried to be accurate at her counts. Of course, the whole purpose of making her count was so she must stay alert throughout her spankings, and not drift away from the sensation and pain. That would make things far too easy for her.
“Two,” she cried at the next whistling stroke. “Three!”
Four, five, and six fell in a heated lattice of lines. She decided as she counted through the following volley of lashes that she despised the switch, and all trees everywhere for providing the torturous things. “Ow! Twelve!”
“Eleven,” said Court acerbically. “You are getting ahead of yourself.”
“Oh, sir!” She pounded her palms against the top of the chest. She used to beg him to stop, but eventually learned that got her nowhere. “Twelve,” she said on the next stroke. “Thirteen. Fourteen! Ow!”
“If you clench, my dear…”
“I know,” she wailed. How could she not realize by now that clenching her bottom only added to her misery? “Fifteen. Oh, it hurts,” she said, shifting from foot to foot. “I do not like switches.”
Court made a soft sound of amusement. “I will be certain to remember that.”
Oh, curse him and his predilection for spanking. Curse her for going along with it and marrying the man and submitting herself to his hand. “We are nearly finished,” he said. “Perhaps you will bear it better if you think at the same time of how you will improve.”
“Perhaps I would bear it better if you removed the ginger,” she said, shifting again. “This fig seems unusually potent.”
“It is newly harvested. You will be pleased to learn I have instructed the gardener to increase the ginger yield this coming year by at least fourfold.” He paused in the act of drawing his arm back. “I did not tell him why.”
Harmony’s face burned as he pushed her down a bit more over the unforgiving wood surface. The strokes began again, in such quick succession she could barely count the numbers. She hopped in agony on her toes, then reached behind to cover her bottom.
Court tsked and seized her hand. “Where does that belong?”
“In front of me,” she cried as he placed it on the chest again.
“You know the penalty for reaching behind you. Five extra strokes. That will bring us to twenty-five, dear, and we were so close to finished. Pray, control yourself so we needn’t make it thirty.”
“Oh, no.” The very thought of it had her grasping the edge with renewed focus. Each stroke in itself was not unbearable, but her backside and upper thighs throbbed with a vicious-feeling heat, and the ginger seemed to burn hotter, not milder, as the spanking went on.
“Eighteen. Nineteen.” Oh, the burn of it—and he was not even hitting her full force. “Twenty. Oh, please, sir! I have learned my lesson. Please, no more. I can’t bear it.” Penitent tears dripped down over her nose, into her mouth, wetting the wooden top of the chest—not for the first time.
“Harmony, there are five strokes remaining and you shall take every one. How you manage is up to you, but I suggest relaxing and accepting this as your due consequence. You may cry and you may flinch, but you must take it.”
She shuddered and squeezed the hem of her gown in her hands. “Yes, sir.”
The last five strokes fell with strict, controlled regularity, and Harmony accepted each blow as it came. Resignation did help. When she relaxed, the ginger didn’t goad her as much, and he had explained many times that her buttocks bruised less when they weren’t clenched tight. Somehow she never managed to relax until the near end of these sessions, but when she did there was something transcendent about the pain. “Twenty-five,” she finally gasped out.
“Very good.”
With those words, her husband crossed to the bureau to put down the implement, and then back to her, brushing his palms across the heated skin of her bottom. Even though it hurt, she lived for this moment when he would measure out the damage he’d done to her and give her a couple of sharp, finishing slaps. It gave her some sense of accomplishment—and relief.
“Stand up, my dear.” She stood and turned, and let him wipe away the sheen of her tears with one of his ever-present handkerchiefs. “Do you feel better now?” he asked. “Cleansed of your petty sins?”
She nodded and leaned toward him, letting her chemise fall down over her smarting bottom. He kissed her forehead, her eyes, her cheeks, her mouth, an ending ritual of nurturing that always made her squeeze out a few more tears. “Well then,” he said, releasing her. “Go into my bedroom and await me there.”
“Yes, sir.”
She only visited his bedroom at this time—after spankings. The way he made love to her here was quite unlike the way he made love to her in her room where they slept together every night. His room was a place of mystery and authority, and his bed…his bed was only used for one thing.
She heard him enter and turned to face him. He was fully naked now, an aroused and vigorous male, his body enticing even after months of intimacy and marriage. Now, in the light of late day, the windows cast warm shadows across the sculptured beauty of his muscles—and the more compelling features of his physique. He was prodigiously erect. Her center tightened and even the biting retort of the ginger couldn’t dampen her body’s reaction to his virility.
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