Her Master's Hand

by Korey Mae Johnson

  Hoel argued that a broken-mind spell like the one she was apparently under could have only been broken with sex, which he had decided to take before he knew who she even was.

  Ashcroft said that that fact was moot, since she was, indeed, his ex-pupil, and Hoel proceeded to rage that it wasn’t moot, and what sort of teacher would take advantage of his pupil in the first place.

  This sort of argument had been going on for hours. At least Ashcroft was still a man who didn’t like to be put in his place by anybody.

  Anwen finally came and sat next to her. “Don’t worry yourself, darling,” Anwen said. She immediately began to twine Charlotte’s hair with her fingers. “Hoel isn’t actually going to kill him, no matter what he says. He loves you and wants to see you happy, and he doesn’t want your child to grow up fatherless in any case.”

  She shook her head. “Mama, really, that’s absurd, isn’t it? We only had relations a few days ago.”

  “Trust me, that’s long enough for Hoel to know.” She pattered her knee soothingly. “Don’t worry—we’ll make sure Ashcroft does right by you.”

  She squinted. “He was already going to marry me,” she assured Anwen.

  Another knee pat. “Of course he was, darling,” she said, though it was obvious that the goddess expected that Ashcroft had just been telling Charlotte that to woo her into sleeping with him.

  “But—”

  “There’s no reason to buy the cow when he’s getting the milk for free,” Anwen said stubbornly, and Charlotte saw no use in arguing with her.

  In truth, Charlotte was surprised that they were still treating her like a member of their family after Charlotte was now fully connected to her past. So far, they acted like nothing was different.

  Charlotte was more than extremely embarrassed that she had been treated like a child for years, but even now she couldn’t stop feeling love for Anwen and Hoel. They were stubborn and had forced her into marrying against her will, but in the end they were still caring people who had kept her safe all those years.

  Anwen shook her head and continued. “Though I’m so sorry what a rough time you’ve had… we should have never matched you with that horrible man,” she said, nodding toward Lachlan, who didn’t even blink in recognition that he was being talked about. Anwen tilted her chin up as she assessed him and then made a “Hmpf!” sound before turning back to Maili. “So… your name’s Charlotte?” she began.

  Charlotte nodded, still quite astounded, and not because they were finally seeming to swallow that she was someone else before she was named by them.

  She was, not for the first time that day, consumed by wondering if Hoel was right. Could she already be carrying a child? Ashcroft’s? Already? Twenty years ago she would have balked, but… now… she’d been dreaming about her own child long before she’d remembered Ashcroft.

  “Yes,” Charlotte answered distantly.

  “That’s a pretty name,” Anwen told her. “Not as pretty as Maili, perhaps, but it’s really quite cute.”

  “Thank you,” she said just as Hoel’s voice boomed, “It’s about the principle of the matter!”

  Anwen groaned. “Oh, he will be in a rotten mood for weeks! I see exactly where this is going.”

  A few minutes later, which was far less time than she’d expected, since they had only been shut away in that room for an hour, the door opened and Hoel shouted, “Maili! Get in here this moment!”

  “It’s Charlotte, dear,” Anwen corrected him patiently, standing up with her.

  “Fine, fine. Charlotte. Whatever you’re called, I want you in here, now!” he boomed, then he looked at a nearby servant who was standing near the door, looking like he wished he didn’t have to. “You—get that Moriarty Miles and also his wife, and be quick about it!” Hoel clapped his hands, and the servant ran down the hall like there was a fire burning his tail.

  Charlotte shuffled quickly into the room, followed by the silent, graceful steps of Anwen, who closed the door behind her. Hoel was standing in the center of the room with his hands on his waist. His horns nearly scraped the room’s ceiling, and Ashcroft immediately came to stand next to her as Hoel decreed. “You’re getting married, and this moment! I don’t want to hear any if, ands, or buts about it, either! I’ve had enough of it. Hopefully nobody will even notice that the child was conceived without my blessing—not that’s ever been a concern of yours.” He glared firmly at Charlotte, but then couldn’t seem to help but turn to give Ashcroft an evil eye.

  Ashcroft surprised her by holding up his chin, proudly. He reached for her hand and grabbed it into his own.

  Charlotte smirked at him as Hoel explained how they had to get better lodgings since a stodgy old wizard’s tower in one of the most dangerous lands in the Otherworld wasn’t going to cut it for his grandchildren, and that their first son would be named after him, Anwen if it was a girl, and ‘that was all there was to it.’ All magic would be used expressly for good, with no ‘fancy fripperies,’ as he liked to call it.

  “What’s this all about?” Moriarty eventually said as he walked into the room—and thank goodness before Hoel decided what color their children’s hair would be, Charlotte thought with a grateful look toward the ceiling. Moriarty had Alice on his arm and looked quizzically at them. Both he and Alice seemed surprised that everyone was in one piece.

  “Apparently,” Ashcroft replied, “it’s of the utmost importance that Charlotte and I become married at once. You need to witness.”

  “Finally!” Alice grumbled, getting a questioning stare from everyone. She shrugged. “Well, it has been the longest engagement I’ve ever heard of! Twenty years?” She turned to Hoel, somehow keeping a straight face. “I agree—it’s time to get these two to commit.”

  Moriarty glanced at the door. “What about Lachlan? Or Damen? Damen Lachlan? You know—him?” he said, jerking his thumb to indicate the person sitting outside. “I was hoping I was coming to see his head go ‘pop.’”

  “No,” Hoel grumbled. “Too easy. I think a good, long thousand years in the nearby spice mines will help him see his ways. I’ll make sure I’ll put a cuff on him that he can’t remove this time.” He rolled his eyes. “I suppose I’ll have to put it on his spine or something—but trust me, I know best and I’m saying spice mines.”

  Moriarty frowned, seeming extremely disappointed, and looked over at Charlotte. “How bad could those be?”

  “They’re pretty bad,” she assured him, somehow happy that Ashcroft didn’t have to kill off his own brother this time. It couldn’t have been an easy thing to do, even though his brother was the most horrible man ever born. “It’s like hell, only he’ll be the only one in there forever.”

  Moriarty obviously wasn’t as happy about this as he would have been with death, and shook his head. “Fine, fine. But only if it’s very bad, indeed. Now let’s get this going. My son’s in a hurry to leave.”

  “Why?” Ashcroft actually asked.

  “Girls sometimes get… infatuated. With… their… boy… friends…” he drawled slowly. He and Moriarty exchanged knowing looks as Alice put her hand over her eyes with embarrassment. “At least he didn’t make her pregnant that I know of—that would be horrible.”

  Hoel growled then, long and low, his gaze boring into Ashcroft, who shifted his weight awkwardly.

  Moriarty balked at the sudden tension in the room. “What?” he asked, looking around the room for someone to clue him in on what he seemed to be missing in the situation.

  “Just… Just carry on, papa,” Charlotte said, rolling her hand around in the air, and then threading her fingers between Ashcroft’s. “I’m ready.”

  Epilogue

  “I absolutely hate it here,” Moriarty drawled, looking around and eating a sandwich from a picnic basket. His wife was dressed in a floral summer dress and was just beginning to show their fifth child, and Daniel was just a little ways off, trying to make his first sandcastle.

  It had only been two years since they’d lived
on the shores of Westeryn, and Moriarty had never complained about it before except that the Earthside was further away than he liked, and the nearest Earthside portal opened to America, of all places, which was extremely unfashionable in his opinion.

  “Do you?” Alice asked, not believing him for a moment.

  “Oh, yes,” he assured.

  Alice picked up the baby, who had wandered off of the blanket, and set him on her lap, and then asked, “Why?”

  He frowned because just then Charlotte interrupted them. She was with only her second child and making a big show of it. She put her hand over her stomach and said, “Moriarty, get up and help me sit down, will you?”

  “No,” he said, and when his wife bristled, he added, “She’s been coddled enough! ‘Get me this, help me up, help me down, lift this heavy box…’ As if I don’t have my hands full already.”

  “I’m seven months along, you dick,” Charlotte immediately threw back at him.

  He shrugged. “I fail to recognize how that is my fault.”

  “Who’s pissed in his Cheerios?” Charlotte asked, staring at Alice.

  Alice shrugged and said, “He was about to describe why all of our lives are so hard here.”

  Moriarty straightened his back and continued to explain, “For starters, England is playing in the World Cup finals, and I have to go sit in a bar with a bunch of drunken people from New Jersey to watch it, which is a wasted experience. Second, it’s a little… too nice here. Too predictable, nothing to fight off, no reasons to look around one’s shoulder. One can become complacent.”

  Samuel hit a soccer ball across the lawn and beaned his father right in the back of the head, as soon as he’d stopped talking. Charlotte laughed a couple of times before she decided that she didn’t like the sensation laughter had on her overly pregnant body.

  “Good shot, Samuel,” Ashcroft said, ambling up toward the blanket while Moriarty shot him a dirty look. He bent down and said to the boy, who was seven already, “But possibly you need to keep in bounds somewhat, eh? Go to it, lad!” with an encouraging smack on the boy’s shoulders, he sent him off. “Will you live?” he asked his friend, who was still rubbing his head and giving him a dirty look.

  “No,” Moriarty grumbled. “Stop teaching my children how to abuse me, or I’ll return the favor.” He straightened his chin.

  “Oh, you’ll probably end up doing it anyway.” Without asking, he helped his wife take a seat next to Moriarty, and his wife immediately stole the part of the sandwich near Moriarty’s leg that he hadn’t begun to eat yet. Ashcroft looked down at Alice and asked, “Did England lose the World Cup again?”

  “No,” Alice assured. “He’s a poor winner and he’s saying that we’re all too complacent now that we live in a place where we or our children could take a midnight stroll if any of us wanted to.”

  Ashcroft smirked and looked back up at Moriarty, who was scowling. “You’re right about complacency. You just let your boy beat you senseless with a football.”

  Moriarty grumbled and reached for something on his lap that was no longer there. He looked down and found himself missing a sandwich. When he looked, he saw Charlotte happily munching on it. She was happy to give him a sweet ‘What are you gonna do about it? I’m too pregnant to manhandle!’ look.

  “You need to keep this one in line. A good birching, perhaps…” he suggested to Ashcroft, nodding in Charlotte’s direction. Alice whapped him with the back of her hand.

  “Where’s Cole?” Charlotte asked, looking about. “I thought he was going to come and eat lunch with us today. Him and that new girlfriend of his… Charlene or Chelsey or Chayna or something or other.”

  “That’s just the thing!” Alice huffed. “Apparently they’re all his girlfriends. Sisters! Anyway, they didn’t know that they were all dating him, but apparently he did. Hoel has him doing chores, since their father complained to him about it. And he’s the one vouching for you horrible Huxians to behave yourselves.”

  For now, Anwen and Hoel were visible, playing near the water’s edge with their first ‘grandson.’ He looked absolutely teeny in comparison to either of them, particularly Hoel, but they were very gentle, very graceful, and Little Hoel seemed to like all the spoiling. It was still going to be decades before the couple was able to have children of their own, and that was perhaps why, before Little Hoel wasn’t even a year old, Hoel demanded that Charlotte and Ashcroft try for more. Ashcroft thought the demand was ironic, since in the beginning Hoel had supposedly threatened to castrate him. “Now, aren’t you glad you didn’t?” he had countered smugly then.

  “Well, hopefully before too long Cole’ll get rescued by a wandering wizard and then set on a great adventure,” Charlotte said sarcastically. “In seven hundred years from now, he might be getting hit on the back of the head with his kids’ soccer balls and complaining worse than a pregnant woman.”

  “Not a bad ending, I have to say,” Alice agreed.

  “Unless England loses the finals again,” Moriarty grumbled, then tilted his cap over his eyes and lay back comfortably on the blanket. “Then what’s the point of living at all?”

  Ashcroft settled down on the blanket behind his wife so that she could immediately rest her head back. “What about you, Ashcroft? What’s your happy ending? Does England have to win for all to be right with the world?” Charlotte asked, tilting her head directly up to look at him.

  He kissed her on the forehead and grinned. “If England losing is the most disastrous thing on our plate at the moment, I’d say we’re already at our happily ever after.”

  Charlotte nodded and looked out onto the sea, where her selkie friends waved at them from a nearby rock. She and Ashcroft waved back. “Yeah, or at least we’re close enough.”

  The End

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  More Stormy Night Books by Korey Mae Johnson

  Quite Decided (included in Lords and Ladies: Two Medieval Spanking Novellas)

  When eighteen-year-old Wenda discovers that she is to be married off to a nobleman easily old enough to be her grandfather, she concocts a desperate plan to avoid that fate. Lord Talus, who was like an older brother to her growing up, will marry her instead—she is quite decided on it.

  The only problem with this plan is the fact that Talus refuses it outright. Wenda has grown into a beautiful woman, but he has known her since she was a child and he cannot bring himself to expose her to the dark, hungry, sexual side of him that she would see as his wife.

  Talus underestimates the lengths to which Wenda will go to carry out her plan, however, and he finds a marriage with her forced upon him by false allegations that he has stolen her maidenhood in the night. For her part Wenda soon learns, to her dismay, that her new husband is well within his rights to bare his young wife’s bottom and chastise her firmly for her scheming. Moreover, he intends to thoroughly enjoy every curve of her beautiful body once he feels the time is right to have his way with his new bride.

  Shared Between Them

  Considered untouchable by her kin, Kyra has been an outcast all her life. Then two massive, battle-hardened human warriors stride into her woods on a quest to kill a giant and claim a great reward, and after her attempt at petty thievery is foiled, she finds herself stripped naked and soundly spanked.

  But that is only the beginning, for the reward for the death of the giant
is not only gold and jewels, but the hand of an elf-maiden in marriage, and Kyra is shocked to the core when she learns that the humans have not only completed the quest which cost the life of every previous adventurer, but they have chosen her as their prize.

  Taric and Draeven neither understand nor concern themselves with Kyra’s status as an outcast—all they see is the most beautiful of all the elves, a woman who they have both longed to claim as their own and fill with their seed since they first set eyes upon her. Raised as brothers, they have shared many women before, and now they will share a wife—and take her in any way they please, as often as they please, until she bears a son for them… the half-elven son of giantslayers whose birth has long been foretold.

  Kyra, who had never expected to feel the pleasure of a man’s gentle touch, now must submit herself to the fierce, insatiable needs of two hulking barbarians. Yet something stirs within her, and though she blushes with shame at the very thought, she wonders if a day will come soon when she will beg for more.

  Being Their Baby

  Born and raised in a broken home on the wrong side of town, Sophie spent her childhood fighting to keep a roof over her head, and at eighteen she was homeless and without a single person she could trust or admire… until she met Liz, Charlie, and Josh.

  Though they are both deeply in love with Liz, Charlie and Josh know that something is lacking in their lives: a baby girl to cherish, care for, and, when necessary, discipline. When Sophie gets herself in trouble with the law and needs help and a place to stay, they soon discover that she is just what they have been missing and, more importantly, they can be the family she never had.

  Almost before she knows what is happening, Sophie finds herself living a life she never would have imagined. She begins to realize that having a big, strong daddy, a strict but caring mommy, and a handsome, fun-loving uncle might not be a bad thing at all. As she adjusts to her new home and begins to show her feisty side, though, Sophie learns that when she is disobedient she will be punished.