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“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.
