A Punishment Marriage

by Emily Tilton

  Her eyes narrowed, then, though, and he knew she had gotten some of her resistance back at least. Should that displease him? It didn’t: she had a spanking coming, and she would get more if she decided to misbehave.

  He stepped toward her with the bathrobe, and her eyes widened again for a moment, as if she thought he was coming to take hold of her, to put her over his knee at last, but Eric stopped and held the bathrobe out. “There are slippers in the closet, too. Put them on so you don’t ruin your pretty stockings.”

  The adorable frown returned to Lily’s face. Eric had a moment’s pride in defying his bride’s defiant expectations. She gave him a final look, this one unreadable to him—perhaps because Lily herself didn’t know what she felt at that moment—and turned to put her right arm in the sleeve of the bathrobe.

  While she put on the white slippers that matched the bathrobe, Eric took off his uniform jacket and hung it up, then loosened his tie and removed that, too. He took Lily’s hand, thinking she somehow still looked sexy in the fluffy bathrobe, and led her through the living room. The sun’s fading brilliance filled that room now, as its twilight came through the French doors. Lily gave a little gasp even at the sight of the view from the opposite side of the room.

  “I’ve…” she said, stopping in her tracks as if overwhelmed. Eric led her on, through the doors and onto the porch. At the railing, where the mountain seemed to drop away into nothing, he finally turned to look at her, her sweet, unguarded expression lit so warmly by the golden rays that he thought his heart might melt. Lily looked out over Star Valley with her eyes full of wonder, and she finished her sentence at last. “I’ve never seen anything… like that.”

  “You’ve seen pictures, though,” Eric said.

  Lily turned to him. She shook her head. “I mean, I must have, but why would I look at them? What did they have to do with me?”

  Eric dropped her hand and put his arm around her shoulders. The feeling of her lithe body inside the bathrobe, yielding to him but still tense, filled him with desire, and he kissed his bride now in a dominant way he hadn’t done in the car. Lily struggled for an instant, as if feeling now for the first time the urgency of her husband’s need for her, but then she yielded, and he held her close and kissed her very deeply, using his tongue to teach her about the way her body must accept his enjoyment, must be available for his pleasure when he wished to use his wife as was his right, and find his release inside her.

  He prolonged that kiss until Lily whimpered into his mouth. The sun’s last ray had departed, and a sudden chill came into the air. Eric had his right hand on her lower back, holding her against him. Now he moved it to his bride’s bottom, and squeezed her there through the thick, soft fabric. She repeated the whimper, and he suddenly wondered whether the first little sound had indicated that Lily had remembered she must be spanked before bed.

  Eric broke the kiss, but kept his hand on Lily’s backside. He had his left hand in her short hair, holding her head still, the better to kiss her the way he felt a husband should kiss his wife when the need came upon him, and now he used it to lay her cheek against his chest, stroking her hair gently and thinking with a smile of how nice it would be when her soft raven locks had grown out a little, how he would run his fingers through her tresses.

  “Is it time?” she whispered, to his surprise.

  “Yes, Lily,” he replied, kissing the top of her head. “It’s time. Go back into the bedroom and take off the bathrobe. Stand with your nose in the corner until I get there.”

  She gave another little whimper. He released her from his arms, and she turned to go back through the French doors, her head hung low. She stopped, though, with her hand on the knob, and turned back to him.

  “Sir?” she asked. Her eyes had gone blank again.

  “Yes, Lily?” Eric said, pleased at the sir but also hearing in her voice the return of defiance, as if she had decided to call him that in order to have more traction over his will, yielding in one place so that she might break free in another.

  “May I keep the bathrobe on, please? It’s getting colder.”

  He felt a slight irritation rise inside him, but he could see in Lily’s eyes that this apparently small matter of the bathrobe meant a good deal more to her than body temperature. The way the lingerie made her feel seemed to have brought on this new reluctance, and Eric would have to find the proper way to deal with it.

  His instincts came to his aid as usual, and he had no second thoughts as he responded, “No, honey. The bathrobe comes off, and when I get back there I’m going to see your backside in your pretty panties, and the rest of you, too, in your special white lingerie. We’ll be going to bed after your spanking, and you’ll be having sex for the first time. You need to get used to wearing sexy lingerie when your husband decides he wants to have you. Plus, as a naughty girl who’s about to learn her lesson, you’re not in a position to make requests. Get that disrespectful backside into the bedroom, and do as I’ve said.”

  Lily’s brow puckered, and Eric’s instinct told him that the arousal she wanted to deny, the arousal at his frank dominance and the way he could unleash it whenever he pleased, had returned. Then, as if she had thrown a switch, that expression turned to a very different one: fully defiant, determined not to go without a fight. For a moment he thought she would talk back to him, that he would have to drag her into the bedroom and hold her down over his knee while he gave her what she had coming, but then she seemed to make a different decision, though the anger didn’t depart. Lily turned again and went through the French doors.

  He gave her five minutes, as he looked out on the rest of the mountain resort, where lights twinkled in the other lodges and coalesced in the blaze of warm lighting that poured from the big central building where he could make out an illuminated swimming pool. He wondered if Lily knew how to swim; he had picked out a bikini for her, but it occurred to him that if she had really never been the outdoorsy, athletic type, he might have to teach her even that.

  The thought appealed to him greatly; he wanted to teach Lily so many things, and see if he could bring out in her the happy good girl he knew lay hidden behind her defenses. Having had that idea, he almost wanted her to say no, she didn’t know how to swim. He pictured holding her in the water, stealing naughty touches under the surface and making her blush as his fingers found their way inside the skimpy blue bikini.

  Those images still in his mind, he crossed the living room in a good humor. But when he reentered the bedroom, he saw he would have to put the thought away. The bathrobe lay on the floor, and so did Lily’s lingerie. She was just pulling on a black t-shirt to cover the gray everyday bra she had found in the luggage. Down below, she wore the jeans Eric had decided he would have them pack for her, thinking that he could let her wear them as a reward.

  Fully clothed in what he knew must be her usual garb, prior to her punishment match, Lily stood and looked at him with what he felt sure represented what she hoped would appear a calm, businesslike expression. Her breathing betrayed her, though: she panted through parted lips, and her breasts heaved.

  Eric nodded. That seemed not to be the response Lily had expected, because her eyes went wide, revealing to him just how brittle her defiance was.

  “Well, honey,” he said. “I guess we’ll have corner time after your spanking instead. And after you’ve put your lingerie back on, of course. Right now, though, you’re going to take everything back off again and lie on the bed, on your tummy, so I can give you the belt.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Oh no, Lily thought. She had forgotten about that. Or… no, of course she hadn’t forgotten. How could she forget about that threat, the way he had told her right there in the doctor’s examination room that he would do this, make her lie on the bed naked and whip her with his belt?

  So why did it feel like Lily had forgotten that terrible promise he had made? Had she thought he wouldn’t actually do it? If she had, she would have been stupid, and Lily was not stupid. She
knew already, after having only met her husband the previous morning, that Commander Eric Burton didn’t do anything idly, least of all make threats and promises that way.

  She had felt so sure she had made a logical choice, when she decided that instead of standing in the corner she would deliberately take off the embarrassing lingerie, in all its lacy whiteness, and put on the regular clothes she had found at the top of the suitcase Mrs. Smith must have packed for her. The gray bra and panties, and the jeans and t-shirt, had lain right there on top, when in confused despair at the thought of going over Eric’s knee after putting her nose in the corner, she had decided just to open the suitcase and see what they had packed.

  When she saw the clothes—the underwear and the t-shirt were new, but the jeans were her jeans, the ones in which she had gone so arrogantly and stupidly to the bureau for the medical examination—some false chain of reasoning had taken hold, she could see now. If she put on her regular clothes, the kind of clothes in which she belonged, how could Eric fail to see that Lily James was not the kind of girl who got spanked on her wedding night, or at any other time? How could he not see that this punishment marriage wouldn’t suit him, really, and that they should come to some amicable arrangement whereby they pretended to the government that they were married, and maybe they even treated each other as friends, but they slept in separate beds, and Eric didn’t pretend that he had some stupid leadership role in their relationship?

  He had never seen Lily James in her real clothes, before he asked her to marry him. The whole difficulty lay in that, Lily had thought as she looked down at the suitcase. Plus…

  Plus, she needed to set a limit, here. Even if they were going to be married in the traditional sense, and sleep together—Lily supposed as she pulled on the gray underwear, since Eric wouldn’t legally be able to have sex otherwise—she refused to do it on the terms he had established. Here they were, on their honeymoon, now. The bureau and its doctors lay hundreds of miles away. She had to put her foot down: if Eric wanted to have sex tonight, he needed to understand that he would have sex on her terms, not his. All that stuff he had said, and Dr. Fredrickson had said, about her submitting to him… well, he could forget about it.

  So she had gotten into her jeans as unhurriedly as she could manage, facing the door and ready for his coming back into the room. She had the t-shirt over her head, but when she pulled it down to cover her tummy, there he stood. Even before Eric spoke, Lily could tell she had made a terrible mistake. But to admit that mistake would take away the last shred of her ability to resist, she felt, and she refused to capitulate that way.

  “You can fucking forget that,” she said, and although her legs felt like jelly she managed to begin a march toward the door, which unfortunately lay on the other side of Eric. Not that she could have made it anywhere safe from his belt, in any case, she thought, but she desperately wanted at least to be able to turn on her heel and walk away, rather than having to try to get by the big man who had started to roll up his right sleeve as he watched her movements.

  Why isn’t he grabbing me, or something? she thought as she walked by him, feeling a little foolish for expecting some furious, violent reaction from a man whose nerves clearly were made of ice.

  “Lily Burton,” Eric said in a low, calm voice. “This is your last chance. If you walk out that door, I promise you that you won’t be able to sit down comfortably for your whole honeymoon. When you wear your bikini at the pool, the other guests will see that you had to be whipped by your new husband. I’m sure they’ll whisper about it to one another.”

  Lily stopped in her tracks. “You wouldn’t,” she whispered. But she knew—of course she knew—that he would.

  She had no idea which part of what he had just said struck her hardest. She trembled, feeling she might actually fall down, as her mind unfolded his words.

  Lily Burton. Perhaps that actually constituted the worst part: in the two words of her name’s transformation Eric had said so much. You are not Lily James anymore. You are my wife, and my wife obeys me, or she learns a painful, shameful lesson.

  Then, the lesson, nearly as terrible. First the pain, and then the soreness lasting for days, for her whole honeymoon, when she as a bride should be treated as a princess. She knew, too, that Eric would treat her like a princess, if she learned to be a good girl for him; she couldn’t deny that she knew that, because she couldn’t deny that she already knew him, her husband, despite having only met him the day before. He might have inner depths that Lily would have to plumb over time, but everything that mattered about Eric Burton lay on his bluff, genial, masculine surface.

  Next, the bikini. As soon as Lily pictured it—and she had glimpsed the thing in the suitcase, she realized now, though her mind had failed to process the strange sight—the heat mounted into her face and the faintness grew so great she actually staggered, and felt Eric’s arms around her. A surge of gratitude mingled with fear and terrible shame filled her as her body responded to his touch the same way it had in the car, and out on the deck looking toward the natural beauty she had never dreamt might affect her as it did.

  Stupid. Didn’t you just tell yourself you weren’t stupid? But how could it be anything but stupid to forget that when his arms are around you, you feel that way?

  But the bikini. Lily knew the bikini now as the worst part, the most humiliating part. Whether it displayed a well-whipped bottom to the other guests of the resort or not, to wear a bikini would mean… surrender. Lily loved to swim. It was practically the only exercise she didn’t find terribly tedious and uncomfortable. She swam fast, too, in her racing suit. She had set two records, at school.

  She had never said it in so many words, even to herself, she supposed, but she had also vowed never to wear a two-piece bathing suit. Bikinis weren’t just stupid; they assumed that the world wanted to see your bare tummy and, in most cases—and Lily felt sure this category included the blue one she had seen in her suitcase—the greater part of your bare bottom. Two-piece bathing suits ranked even higher than long hair in Lily’s list of things to avoid.

  When a man… your husband, who had his arms around you, and who you knew would whip you with his belt very soon… when he told you to wear a bikini, though, despite the absolute certainty that other people at the pool would notice that your bottom had received recent disciplinary attention… what could you do?

  Eric held her up gently against his body, with his arms around her midriff and her back to him. She realized as the confusing impressions his words had left in her mind began to sort themselves out that she could feel what must be his erect cock through his trousers and her t-shirt. Another wave of faintness came over her at the knowledge.

  “Are you going to obey me, and learn your lesson?” his voice rumbled from above her. “Or do I have to strip you and hold you down for your whipping?”

  A sob burst from Lily’s throat. Are you stupid, or aren’t you? her mind demanded.

  “I’ll… I’ll obey you, sir,” she whispered.

  Eric opened his arms, and Lily moved back toward the bed on shaky legs. She stood, looking down at the ivory comforter, trying to take comfort from its evident softness. They would lie under it soon, wouldn’t they? Commander and Mrs. Eric Burton, in their marital bed after the taking of Mrs. Burton’s virginity. After the whipping. Truly man and wife. A flash of heat between her legs took her by surprise, then, and it snapped her out of the little reverie. She started to pull the t-shirt off.

  She felt him watching her undress, and that seemed to make the heat grow down there even as the blush in her face continued unabated. She remembered the way the asshole Dr. Fredrickson had fondled her after the paddling, how her body had seemed to revel in the perversity of it, of somehow enjoying her punishment. Now she would get an even more severe punishment, from the man who had acquired the title to her body and would soon claim the rights attached to that title.

  Suddenly the shaking in her knees became a great deal more ambiguous, and a litt
le whimper came from her throat. She pulled down her jeans, imagining the way Eric must see her little bottom in the gray underwear. Did he only like to look at girls’ backsides in lacy lingerie and bikinis, or would he sometimes like to see Lily’s in the kind of panties in which she felt more comfortable? Was his cock swelling at the sight of his virginal bride awkwardly pulling off her jeans so that she could lie naked over the bed?

  She bit her lip as she straightened, reaching back to unhook her bra as she did so. She shrugged the bra from her shoulders and dropped it on the floor. She was reaching to hook her thumbs into the waistband of her panties when he said, “Once you’re naked, fold those clothes and put them away in the dresser. If you’re a good girl from now on, I’ll let you wear them home, the way I’d planned to do.”

  Lily froze. Knowing that Eric had had a plan where her regular clothes were concerned affected her very strangely. He wanted her in skirts and dresses—and lacy lingerie and bikinis. He had made that clear. Lily had almost gotten used to that. No, she thought suddenly, I’ve almost started to like it.

  But though he wanted his wife to dress in a more traditionally feminine way, he had held himself to his word. He had had them pack regular clothes—as Lily still couldn’t help thinking of her jeans—so that she could feel comfortable when they returned home. To our new home. Our married home. Lily almost felt like she would cry.

  “Panties down, honey,” Eric said softly behind her.

  Another whimper—Lily didn’t seem able to control the noises she made when Eric stood in close proximity—and then a sobbing gasp. She fought the urge to turn around and give him a beseeching look, and lost the battle, but she managed as she saw the firm, but somehow also kind, expression on his face to obey him and start to draw the gray cotton downward over her thighs, past her knees, her calves, until she could step out of them.