Chapter 4 #2
She blinked as he pressed down on the small of her back and something hard pressed up against her belly. Then he struck her buttock with his palm, making her exclaim in shock, “What are you—?”
He struck again, her other cheek, his slap stinging, though he struck her through her drawers. Realizing, at last, what he was about, she began to squirm against his hold, desperate to escape the blows he now rained down in ever more heavy-handed smacks.
“Let me go!” she cried in horror. “You are … You are hurting me!”
Only the Baron did not heed her pleas. He continued to spank her, his blows harsh enough to start tears in her eyes.
And then, just as suddenly, he stopped to catch his breath.
Elizabeth remained over his lap, stunned, as his hand briefly, gently rubbed her smarting cheeks. Before he viciously tore her drawers in two, exposing flesh.
She thrashed with all her might to escape the Baron’s clutches, but he held firm, the bulge in his pants pressing more deeply into her belly. This time he kneaded her blazing buttocks with a more controlled, rhythmic grip.
“I told you not to cross me, Lizzie.” His voice brooked no argument.
“I warned you I would punish disobedience, yet you flaunted it in my face.” His hand still kneaded and stroked, eliciting an altogether different, strange feeling in her gut.
“Had you but heeded my words and obeyed me, I should not have needed to punish you as I just did. And will again, if you continue to challenge my authority.”
She bit her tongue, debating furiously how to argue her way out of this, fuming that any man should treat her like some misbehaving child. She was suddenly afraid he might do worse, alone with her in these woods.
“I know what you are thinking.” His voice sounded off, gruff.
“You think I am no better than a beast, to strike a woman’s arse, then stroke her blushing cheeks.
” His touch, if possible, only intensified her body’s inexplicable, irrational response.
A moan escaped her lips, the sound embarrassingly wanton, needy almost. He pressed his hips harder into her belly.
“But there are men and women aplenty in this world, Lizzie, lords and ladies finer than yourself even, who have paid me to strike them thus, begged me to beat their backsides raw, whip them naked and trussed, desperate for debasement.”
She shuddered.
“I have seen the depravity of men, women, and children, Elizabeth, and nothing, I tell you nothing shocks me anymore. So if you think you can control me, tease or manipulate me into indulging your whims and becoming your puppet, you’ve another think coming.
” He inhaled a slow breath. “Do you understand me now, Miss Winthrop?”
She remained silent, her heart pounding in her ears, with fear, rage, and—
“Do you?” his hand urged, slipping between her legs to tease her aching center, wet enough he slid his finger inside again, forcing a different, more shameful moan from her lips.
It was impossible she should now feel pleasure.
Impossible! But she ground against his hand, despite her fear and loathing. Despite all better sense.
“Good girl,” he crooned, making her abhor how her flesh craved the unseemly pleasure he now offered. His hand worked her deeper, stoking her inner fire, building sensations perilously, embarrassingly close, far too—
“Beg me, Lizzie,” he whispered in her ear, so near she felt the heat of his words while his hand kept her unbearably close to climax. “Beg for your release and just maybe”—his finger caressed her into fresh agony—“I will grant it.”
Elizabeth wept, a cry rent from her throat which tore through her chest as she pleaded for release, reduced to utter, sodding servitude. Suffused with shame, she begged him for relief.
And in his wicked mercy, the Baron granted her explosive wish, right before he spanked her again, that much harder.
When it was over, her body shook, her thoughts an utter mess. The Baron merely gathered her sobbing person to his chest and kissed the top of her head.
Elizabeth cried herself silly on his lapels, weeping less for what her betrothed had just done and more for all she’d endured for years: her father’s incessant lies, her mother and stepmother’s deaths, the constant stream of moneylenders she’d been forced to deflect, marriage suits she’d fought to reject—all of it done to protect and shield Annabelle.
Every past grief now came rushing back, flooding her with feelings so acute a knot of pain burst in a torrent of emotion she’d kept dammed up for years.
A wall inside her had just crumbled, and with it, a slew of old fears.
All this had been accomplished with but a few harsh strokes of the Baron’s steady hand, the irony of it not lost on her otherwise confused, conflicted mind.
Elizabeth’s soul felt undeniably lighter, as if emptied of a vast and weighty fog.
She lifted her head from his tear-dampened waistcoat to say “Thank you” to the man who’d just handily spanked her bum. “I believe I may have … needed that,” she clarified, exhausted.
“Hmm.” He stroked her hair, which had escaped its pins. “Perhaps y’ did, miss.” His voice sounded different, softer. “I am sorry I hurt you, Lizzie.”
“I am sorry I goaded you, sir.”
“Hmm,” he mused again.
“Mmm,” she hummed in response.
They remained this way a while longer, each lost in thought as he continued to pet her. Somewhere deep inside, she did not want the moment to end.
“Elizabeth.” He broke the spell. “Do you feel well enough now to—?”
“Yes, I am better.” She righted herself on his lap, careful of her bottom, then stared up at him, close enough to notice his features had softened, relaxed. “My spectacles though. They must have fallen when you—”
***
“Christ, I forgot all about your blasted eyepiece.” Milton berated himself for being so careless. He removed her from his lap, only to watch her wince as she settled on the rough log.
He searched for her lenses amidst the forest debris until crunch, he plucked a mess of bent wire and cracked glass from the ground, dangling the eyepiece before Elizabeth.
“Forgive me, Lizzie. I ought to have—”
“It is I, sir, who ought to have removed them the moment you…” She blushed an even deeper shade of red.
Milton sat beside her on the log and took her hand. “I shall purchase you another pair, no, three,” he declared. “In addition to a spare, you shall have wedding spectacles to match your wedding dress. I should have thought of this before. I am an idiot not to have.”
He heard her snort. Good lord, had she just giggled?
“You cannot possibly find this situation amusing, miss. Not after the—”
“Rather thorough spanking you just gave me?” She giggled again. “Forgive me, I cannot seem to hold back my feelings.” More mirth bubbled out. “First I weep and now this need to simply … Oh!”
Fresh tears rolled down her cheeks from laughter so infectious he shook his head at her in disbelief.
“It is just…” She struggled against hysteria. “You must so desperately hate pugs, sir. Because the look on your face when Lady Stanton offered you the hand her beast had licked … Oh!” she burst out again, until he gave himself over to the same raucous relief.
“Miss Winthrop, I despise them.” He chuckled. “I despise all small dogs, but pugs most of all with their—”
“Horrid, mushed-up, squishy faces,” Elizabeth finished his thought. “I hate them too. I hate Lady Stanton most of all though.” She instantly covered her mouth, as if shocked by what she’d just uttered.
A second later, though, she burst into renewed peals of laughter, and Milton found himself shaking his head at his betrothed, amazed.
“She is the most odious neighbor ever.” Elizabeth struggled to catch her breath.
“And in my great and awful stupidity I must now take tea with that … horrid woman tomorrow.” She gulped more air.
“Oh, why did I do it, sir? Why do I do the things I do?” Her laughter faded, giddiness receding as swiftly as it had begun.
Milton again took her hand. “We shall visit her together, Elizabeth. It is the perfect ploy. Why, I could not have devised a better plan myself. For she is a gossip, I assume, and what we need now is for all of London to know we are betrothed. Because our marriage will shock the Ton. You must prepare yourself.”
“So you still intend to marry me?”
He had a mad desire to kiss the crease upon her forehead. “Of course, Miss Winthrop, why would you think otherwise?”
“Because you just…” She stared at him. “Sir, I do not think my sister would suit you.”
He wanted so badly to taste her lips his loins tightened with lust. “Of course she would not suit. That is why I did not offer for her.”
Her eyes grew wide, but she did not press him more, she looked away, shy. It was at once endearing and arousing.
“And may I ask what surprise you had in store for me today, sir, before I ruined it?”
“Oh, I should hardly think you ruined a thing.” He did not wish to tell her the spanking was the surprise.
“You have surprised me this day instead. Come.” He stood to pull her upright, then helped straighten her skirts.
“We must procure you new spectacles, but first we must fix your hair. You look a fright.”
“I did not mean to anger you before, you know.”
He began to fix her coiffure.
“In your phaeton, I mean, when I touched your leg.” She paused. “It was not meant to provoke you as it so clearly did.”
“I apologize for my reaction,” he told her, “but I have been touched in ways I…” A crass cackle echoed maliciously in his head, bubbling from depths he kept well under lock and key. Milton’s heart pounded in his chest. “It is best you ask permission first, always.”
“Then may I touch you now?”
He extinguished a final flicker of callous laughter. “Yes.”
She caressed the side of his face in a touch so tender he thought he’d perish on the spot.
“You are not the devil I thought you, sir.” Her hand felt unbearably light at his cheek; he covered it to keep her from touching him more.
“And you are not at all the woman I thought you, Miss Winthrop.”
That night in her bedroom, Elizabeth’s quill scratched a furious pace, sentences tumbling onto parchment with terrific speed.
She left words half spelled, prepositions missing, articles dropping like the petals of some nodding, rain-drenched rose.
Inside her brewed a storm, emotions threatening to crest. She wanted, needed, more of that unfettered peace the Baron had inexplicably granted.
Until today the only way she’d known to quell her rage was to expel it onto paper.
But now a new path had been delivered by her betrothed’s heavy hand.
Her bottom tingled faintly, a reminder of the relief she’d not only welcomed but embraced, even if the man behind that relief still gave her pause.
Baron of Milton remained frightfully exacting, after all.
Yet what if he were less dangerous, wild beast and more the falconer who captured and then released?
Elizabeth no longer knew with whom she dealt.
She simply wrote her story, ink spilling across the page.
The baron’s hand, heavy on the lady’s head, stroked her as she clung to his legs, her head in his lap, weeping.
She did not know herself, could not reconcile her grief with such intense, unchecked longing.
Nevermore would she see her family—her siblings and her poor, suffering mama.
She wept tears of regret, but also tears of joy, for he had given her a gift most unimaginable.
The brooding baron had broken her spirit, but caused her to break free of all her chains.
She could not bear his touch but longed to touch him.
She could not bear his presence but longed to remain beside him.
Like the Sphinx he was a riddle she must solve to survive imprisonment. If she did not, the baron would consume her. Yet if she did…
No, he would consume her.