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"Your Royal Highness," the voice said again, and I could tell that its owner had detected my having woken up, because now it sounded stern. Not impatient, really: it sounded as if the person speaking had all the time in the world, but they intended to take a good deal of that time imposing on me the consequences I had earned. "I want you to turn over and get up."
No please. Not even a hint of anything but command.
The thought of turning over made me think, for the first time since consciousness had begun to return to me, about the position of my jeans — the tangle they currently formed just above my knees, and what that meant about the visibility of my ass… and, of course, what it would mean to sit up, with respect to the visibility of my pussy.
I didn't sit up, but I did pull my right hand out from between my thighs, hoping desperately that the man had somehow not noticed its being there. I opened my eyes, and I propped myself up on my elbows, and I turned my head. I tried very hard, absurd though the effort was, to do it all casually — as if whoever had woken me up had disturbed me in my own room, from which someone had kidnapped me and brought me here, but really it didn't matter, it was all cool, and I would just clear it up with whoever he was. I would get him to leave the room for a moment, and I'd pull up my jeans and pull down my top, and sashay out of the cottage and back to my suite in the palace.
I blinked my eyes as I kept craning my face around to look at…
Not him.
Them.
Two men and a woman. All of them in military uniform. Gazing back at me with steady, patient, but very serious expressions. Well, no, I realized as my mind tried to catch up, and I had to deal with the difficulty that no one but my grandfather had ever looked at me that way — even my parents. These three soldiers were angry at me.
Me. A princess. Their princess. Their Forthian army uniforms said that they were supposed to be willing to die for me. The modern world doesn't go in for that kind of thing, I know, and until that moment I hadn't known I cared about it, but right then I felt like I would very much like to have their assurance that, yes, they would each and all stop a bullet for me should it come to that.
"Hi," I said, instantly conscious of how absolutely ridiculous I sounded. "I'll… yes, definitely. I'll get up."
The idea of asking them to leave didn't seem worth trying, but I thought maybe I could at least take a moment to put my clothing to rights.
I turned my eyes to the woman. She had her muscular arms crossed across her medium-sized chest. Her black hair was tied in a severe ponytail that accented her high cheekbones. Her ice blue eyes told me she came from the sizable minority of Forthian citizens whose families had emigrated from one of the Slavic countries to our East. I met her gaze instinctively, thinking that as a woman she would understand better than the two enormous men who flanked her, about the importance of having a moment to pull my jeans up.
At the same time, awkward though the movement felt, I reached down, intending to grab the waistband of the jeans, trying to beam into the woman's eyes a request for sympathy.
She shook her head, her eyebrows going up slightly. She spoke, her voice a rich alto full of unexpected authority.
"No, Susanna," she said.
"In fact," said one of the men — the one whose voice I hadn't yet heard, "you'd better go ahead and take all your clothes off."
"That's…" I said, as a flare of heat seemed to turn my face incandescent. The word ridiculous died in my throat, because I got my first good look at the other man, the one who through process of elimination had to be the one whose deep voice had first awakened me. His neatly trimmed chestnut hair and beard had streaks of silver in them — he was obviously the eldest of the three. His body, though, had all the muscle of his younger colleague's, filling out the chest and the arms of his uniform to an extent that made my heart skip a beat.
His physical appearance didn't render me suddenly speechless, though. That happened because of what he held in his hand, and what I saw behind him — as sight so terrible I thought for a moment that I had indeed emerged from sleep into a fantasy world, one of nightmare rather than of pleasure.
The officer — I could tell from the insignia on his chest, whereas I thought the other man must be a sergeant, and the woman another, lower ranking officer — had a long, thin length of what I thought had to be the kind of cane they make furniture out of. I had never seen one, but I knew immediately what sort of cane it had to be.
Rattan. The word floated up unwelcomely into my consciousness. Not for helping a person walk. The male officer might have a few years on the female one and the sergeant, but he didn't need a cane to help him get around.
He needed it to discipline those who had earned a very old-fashioned punishment. This cane was the kind people in authority used to teach a young woman the sort of lesson she would never forget.
The cane, however, didn't make me shake my head violently as my mouth tried to form words of protest. Not all on its own, anyway.
These three soldiers had brought a piece of furniture into their bedroom that hadn't been present when I had entered to finish off my shameful act of trespass. Behind the older man, set more or less in the center of the big bedroom, stood the discipline horse from the school storage room.
He must have followed my eyes and watched them go as wide as the proverbial saucers when I saw the horrid thing.
"That's right, Susanna," he said in an even, serious voice that still didn't betray any anger. "I'm going to cane you over the horse before you leave this room. That's just the beginning, though. You belong to us, Your Royal Highness Princess Goldilocks, until we feel you're ready to take responsibility for your actions and your life."
CHAPTER 6
Goldilocks
Like an idiot, I turned to look at the woman and the younger man, as if they might feel some surprise and shock at what their senior officer had just said.
He — a red-haired giant, at least six-foot-five, with freckles on his cheeks and bristly nearly orange hair on the backs of his hands — seemed to regard me with a little bit of sympathy. The compassion in his eyes didn't say, I'm going to tell my commanding officer that what he's doing is wrong, though. It said, as far as I could tell: You're absolutely right to fear the cane, Susanna. It's a shame you earned such a terrible punishment.
His steady green-eyed gaze also seemed to tell me that he wouldn't mind watching my punishment, either. He might experience a pang of fellow-feeling as I received my awful lesson, but this sergeant had no intention of letting that get in the way of his enjoyment of the humiliating spectacle of a princess whipped for her misbehavior. I guessed, suddenly, that his chair had been the one I broke, and that he had been very fond of his chair.
