His Untamed Mate (Swarii Mates Book 1)

by Korey Mae Johnson

  It only took a couple of strokes with the belt for her to learn that the thick leather, though painful either way, was far more tolerable when it landed on her rear than on her hands.

  The belt sent a startling, fiery pain across her flesh, and in moments it was everywhere. It was so quick and so sharp that it left her gasping and sputtering before she was able to get enough breath to start screaming.

  Nobody would come to her rescue; that she knew. She had heard the sound of Peyton’s spankings many times herself, and done nothing to stand in his way. She had been content that at least he wasn’t spanking her. In fact, she thought that the fact that Peyton had never spanked her meant that she was simply better than anyone else; that Peyton had too much respect for her. That she was the only woman he considered his equal.

  That respect had to be gone—how could Peyton possibly consider her his equal now? Now that he was watching her submit, be it unwillingly, to this horrible, shameful chastisement. Now that her bottom, once the pinnacle of his sexual gratification, was bearing his punishment. She could only imagine how unappealing she appeared to him right now, tears running down her face, bare ass bright red and splotchy with marks.

  * * *

  Peyton was far from thinking that Mary looked unappealing. Although she was getting her bottom properly thrashed, as she deserved, Peyton couldn’t help but suffer through an incredibly uncomfortable erection. There was something unbearably sexy about forcing his wife to submit to his punishment, even though it confused him. He had done this with many women, and never thought of himself as a ‘spanking man.’

  But maybe he was—at least with Mary, who was already unbearably sexy no matter what she was doing. Every second of every day, she looked good, smelt good, and tempted him with her luscious hips and bemused him with her large, expressive doe eyes. Now, he couldn’t keep his eyes off her beautiful, reddening bottom as she squirmed about, trying to avoid the stripes from his belt to no avail.

  The only thing that was really getting in the way of him putting his belt aside and burying himself in her wet, bare, fully exposed pussy was the fact that he didn’t want to confuse her. This wasn’t about sex. This was about punishing her for her disrespect.

  “If you ever so much as think about slappin’ me again, girl, you’ll come away thinkin’ you sat down on a hot stovetop. You get me?” he forced himself to lecture, to keep his mind on topic as he went into a quick rhythm with his spanking.

  “Yes! Yes, sir, I get you!”

  “And if you bite me…”

  “I’m sorry I bit you! I was scared!” she blubbered, pushing her hands down on her thighs, trying her best to keep them off her bottom.

  What he had planned to do in the beginning of the spanking was to start with the belt and end off with his hand—to give her two spankings. One for the slap and one for the bite. But he didn’t—he could easily see the tears streaming down her agonized face. It was as if pain in itself was a whole new, horrible sensation that Mary had never felt before. No, he couldn’t proceed much further. “You do it again, you’ll think today was just patty-cake,” he warned, and meant it.

  His father had been a true head-of-household, and although Peyton had never seen it growing up, it was no secret that his mother was spanked from time to time. “Don’t you worry, son,” his father had said to him once on the issue. “A woman’s bottom can take more than you might think.” The advice had served him well when he was prime.

  Still, he didn’t want to push her first experience. Not long after she stopped fighting and started sobbing, he let go of her and dropped his belt to the side of the bed. When her feet were back on the bed, she rolled over to her side, her body vibrating from her ragged breaths and her hands gripping her bright red bottom tightly.

  Peyton laid his massive body down next to her and carefully brushed some hair out of her face and behind her ear. He kissed the back of her neck.

  “I only want to keep you safe,” he told her softly, moving his rough, thick fingers to her hip and petting the soft, naked flesh there gently. “You have to let me make some rules.”

  “But I’m your wife!” she finally sobbed. “How could you just… just spank me?”

  “Because you are my wife. And you’re so important,” Peyton told her firmly. “You know—those Swarii’ll protect anyone they’ve Unioned with because their life now revolves around them, and their life would be pointless without them. I know how they feel. When I saw you, it was magic. You’re the sun I merely revolve around… If somethin’ ever happened to you, it would kill me. Literally, I think. I couldn’t imagine it. So, if you do somethin’ that scares the shit out of me, Mary, that only gives me one option and that’s to do anythin’—and I mean anythin’—to keep you safe. Even if you do think I’m errin’ on the side of caution, and you think I’m an overprotective brute. I’m okay with that, as long as nothin’ happens to you.”

  * * *

  Mary’s crying and her anger were subsiding, although Peyton didn’t see the confusion in her eyes. It was very sweet, what he said. She had never once doubted his loyalty or commitment to her. When she first met him, she was practically knocked off her feet by how this large, handsome, normally grumpy man could treat her so differently than any other woman. And this was why; because she was different. She was more than a woman to him.

  So Peyton never considered her as his equal, after all, like she had thought. No, no—Peyton had put them both on different planes of existence from the beginning. She wasn’t beneath him, though. She wasn’t a possession to him as much as someone who could possess the air he breathed. It was nothing like she feared and far beyond what she hoped she was to him.

  She slowly turned around and pushed her head into his chest, finally accepting his comfort. “I love you,” she admitted tenderly.

  “And I love you, too,” he assured her.

  “I know. And so, unfortunately, does my bottom.” She felt his chest echo with a deep laugh and grinned into him. “Let’s say we try to avoid these displays of affection in the future?”

  “That’d be fine by me, darlin’. I’ll just follow your lead on that.”

  She pouted for a second at that answer, but then snuggled into him harder, content, even as her bottom continued to feel as if it was on fire. “I’m still angry at you, you know,” she added.

  “And I’m totally okay with that. Still not gonna change my mind, beautiful,” he replied, then chuckled when she grumbled at him.

  * * *

  Graham toweled off his hair as he came out of the shower. He thought he was alone and was in fact trying to loosen some water from his ear when he heard a voice from the doorway. He startled before he turned and saw his small wife, leaning her shoulder against the doorframe.

  “Are you sure I can’t come?” she asked, her tone whiny, but not overly so. It nearly made him smirk to see her whine at him, because she had been so well-behaved for the last three days that he was beginning to grow suspicious.

  “Believe me, little one—you don’t want to come. These planets are filthy, polluted, dangerous, cold… It’s better you just stay here with Fie.”

  She glowered slightly when he mentioned Fie’s name, which was the same expression she’d used when she first learned that Fie was the one chosen to stay behind and protect the ship and the girls in Graham’s absence. Fie was normally the one who stayed on the ship in these places since, in the case of a medical emergency, it was the better idea to have the medical professional in a place where he could be easily located. Besides, Fie was the least trained for battle, as most medical officers were.

  However, Fie was also obviously the person who Eleanor primarily blamed for what had been inserted into her bottom ten days ago.

  “Look, it’s extremely exciting out there, and it’s boring as hell in here, Graham. How many times do I have to count pockmarks on the ceiling?” she grumbled, kicking her heel against the doorframe distractedly.

  “Ask Fie to help you on your studie
s,” he replied with a shrug. He had been glad that she’d been doing so much of that the last few days. She had spent most of her time being quiet and either in sight or in their bedroom with a learning tablet, trying to practice writing out Swarii alphabets. But whenever he asked her a question in Swarii, she didn’t seem to understand him. Apparently, she didn’t at all have an ear for other languages, but he wasn’t going to argue with her technique.

  They had been almost getting along the last few days. There had been barely a threat of a spanking. She seemed more sedate and less belligerent, and she appeared to be really making an effort at getting into her new life since she’d spent so much time learning languages for him. “Fie would be glad to help you, you know,” he went on, ignoring her disgusted expression at the idea. “It’d be nice if you could say more than ‘hello’ to Admiral Masterson.”

  “Doesn’t he know shal’ta? We can just speak that,” she reminded.

  “Have you learned to communicate to others in shal’ta and not told me?” he asked. “Last I knew you could only understand the shal’ta of others, not use it speak to them.”

  “I’m going to get that figured out soon. It’s on my to-do list…” she replied sheepishly.

  “I’m sure it is,” he responded, sounding skeptical, “but even once you learn to communicate with shal’ta you need to keep in mind that we typically only speak shal’ta to enemies or outsiders.” Before her stare could darken any further, he continued, “I just want you to make as good of a first impression as possible. Once someone falls out of the admiral’s good graces, they tend to stay out of his good graces.”

  She blinked at him, looking like she was considering this, but then she lifted her shoulders and replied, “Let’s face it, he’s probably not going to like me sooner or later. Why raise the bar for his expectations so early in the game? And wouldn’t my using his language to the best of my ability by learning a few words right before I meet him be doing exactly that?”

  She had a point, there. He pursed his lips for a moment, trying to regain optimism, and then continued to dry himself. “Point taken. But you’re going to learn Swarii eventually, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll be fully immersed,” was her response. After he continued to stare at her, she continued, “I’m not going to not learn your language just to be obstinate, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

  As that was the promise he was hoping to secure out of her, he decided to take a calming breath about her meeting with his father. He would probably see his father within the next forty-eight hours at the most, so it was unavoidable that he was simply going to see that his only son was married to what could only be seen to as an untamed, positively feral alien woman from the outer regions of the known universe. And his father wasn’t part of the situation—he hadn’t seen what it was like for Eleanor back at Jazeel’s palace with his own eyes. He wasn’t going to fully understand that Eleanor was a new species and was raised amongst a people and in a culture that did things differently and where mates’ behaviors toward each other, and their expectations of one another, were so entirely different than their own. And so Graham anticipated a lot of unsolicited advice about how to handle his own mate.

  That advice he was just going to have to swallow and accept because he had no other choice. As many people that he worked with and lived amongst couldn’t seem to understand, he and his father hadn’t had a normal relationship with each other since the plague.

  “How long are you going to be marching around on this supposedly craptastic space atoll?” she asked conversationally.

  He knew her words were vulgar, and he had told her several times that she needed to start talking in a more genteel manner, but he wasn’t going to fight that battle when she spoke in her human tongue. So, after giving her a chiding look, he grabbed his cleaned pants out of the freshener next to the shower, pulled them up his bare legs, and said, “I don’t know, darling, but it shouldn’t take more than twenty hours.”

  Her eyebrows narrowed over her eyes and she stuck her hands on her hips. “Twenty hours?” she admonished. “That’s forever! And Mary and I are just supposed to sit here with our thumbs up our butts?”

  “Well, you have to stay on this ship, but where you put your thumbs is up to you,” he replied curtly, now pulling his shirt over his head. He refused to get into yet another argument with her today. He had too much to do, too much on his mind, and he had duties to attend. He was certain, in any case, that arguing the same closed case this many times was a bad habit. He couldn’t think of anyone else he’d ever known who would argue with their mate even half as often as he did.

  She was a pretty little thing, though. Even now, as she stood looking frustrated and pink-faced, her long, coffee-colored hair beautifully framed her round, angelic face. Her body was just good enough to eat. Her breasts were so round, and when she was upset, the nipples would turn into tiny pebbles whose shape pierced through her shirt. If time wasn’t of the essence, then he would surely have to bed her right at that moment. His mouth was watering just thinking about pressing his lips up against those juicy mounds…

  He could only imagine taking her with him out there! Within the first couple of minutes, he was sure that a pirate or slaver would run up, shoot him, and kidnap her. Hell, it’s what he would probably have done if he was born a pirate, despite her attitude.

  After he pulled his boots on, she followed him like a kitten from the bathroom and into the adjoining bedroom where he pulled on his coat and gun belts. “Now, it’s very, very important that you listen to Fie and you stay inside the ship at all times. Fie is going to keep the door locked and secure,” he told her firmly as he locked and snapped everything into place. He checked his ammunition carefully, though he still felt her eyes upon him.

  “Aren’t you a little over-armed?” she asked.

  “I wish that was true,” he muttered, then put his ammunition back into the pocket within his jacket. “Remember—although you’re not happy with me or about my decision to keep you safe on the ship, please—please, Eleanor—do this for me and just stay inside. And try not to give Fie a great amount of trouble, eh?”

  She just pouted in reply. He smirked, thinking about how cute she looked, and he stepped up to her and looped his hands around her waist and then bent down to kiss her nose. “Eh? Promise me that you’ll be safe, little one?”

  Her bottom lip was sticking out a little like an angry child’s might, but with a huff she conceded. “Okay.”

  “You promise, then?” he asked, since he understood that, much like his own people, humans by and large were more honest when they made formal promises.

  “Yeah,” she groaned. “I promise. Even though I just want to say that I think it’s really sucky of you to stick me with Fie. Couldn’t you have left someone entertaining behind? Like Thorton or Jio?”

  He smirked. “It won’t be for very long. We won’t dally—as soon as our business is finished and we have a reputable buyer for the ship, we’ll come back and we’ll all wait here until a conveyor docks from the mothership.” He tilted her chin so that she looked up at him. “And then you’ll enjoy exploring that mothership until we get to Swaraan. It’s not a small ship. It’s the size of a large city, so you won’t feel quite as cooped up as you are here.”

  This elicited a small smile from her, but then as she slowly curled herself back into his embrace she said, “And can we then talk about me getting back to work?”

  He closed his eyes. He so wished that they could just be here, enjoying each other’s warmth and smell and presence, without squabbling. “Eleanor,” he sighed. “I thought we decided not to talk about this.”

  “No,” she replied, her tone still sweet and unchanging. “That’s what you decided. I am trying to get you to change your mind.”

  “Well, can you stop trying?” At this, she pulled herself out of his arms.

  “No,” she replied firmly. “I can’t.”

  He felt anger and frustration boil up inside o
f him, but then swallowed it back. He had no time to argue with her, let alone chastise her for bringing up things he’d told her not to. At this rate, they weren’t going to have enough time to find a suitable buyer. He grabbed his jacket and, slinging it around his shoulders, said, “We’ll talk about this when I get back.”

  She pursed her lips together and crossed her arms in front of her bosom, hiding her perfect charms underneath. “Can’t wait,” she grumbled in return, rolling her eyes toward the sky.

  He shook his head and left, dreading the upcoming days and his father giving his impression of his mate. Even Graham knew that she had one of the sassiest attitudes of any woman he had ever come across. Hell, her attitude would be bad even if she were a man.

  He didn’t want to break her spirit, however. He just wanted respect, not to have to worry about her doing something that’d get her killed, and marital bliss. What was so hard about that?

  “Ah, no,” Braum grumbled as soon as he saw Graham approach. “He’s pissed again.”

  Graham wasn’t going to dignify that with a response, so immediately he started barking orders. “We’re going to split up into two search groups. Braum and Jio, you’re with me taking the blue squadron. That’s the western side. And Beast?” He looked around and saw Peyton slide into the room, pulling on a heavy fur-lined coat over his body, which was already covered in several layers. Smart man. “You’re with Thorton on the hovercycle. You’re taking the east. Try to keep Thorton out of the gaming halls. We don’t have time for it.”

  Thorton, who pulled his goggles down over his eyes, gave a smirk. “There’s always time for—”

  “Not today, Thorton,” Graham snapped, and Thorton immediately silenced and frowned. Graham noticed Thorton and Peyton exchanging meaningful glances and tried to ignore it. “Just get your mission down and rendezvous back to the ship. Keep in contact with us via the intercom.”