The Lord's Right (5 page)

Then he made her get up, straighten
her clothes, and kiss the tawse. He saw that she wanted to
hesitate, but she recovered and didn’t. Piers presented her the
hand that had chastised her, and she kissed that, also, valiantly
resisting the urge to bite it instead. He gave her the tawse, and
told her into what drawer in the sideboard she should tuck it.
“That’s where it will reside, Amber. I have thought that it will
get much use.” He had taken up his position back in his chair, and
motioned for her to come stand next to him again.

“
I want you to stand in
front of me.”

She did as she was told.

“
Bend over.”

Bend over? Why did he want her to bend
over? Was he going to punish her more? She wasn’t at all sure she
could take any more.

But Amber did as she was ordered, for
fear of just that. He reached out and pulled up her clothes,
exposing her seared thighs and bum, and then he told her to spread
her legs apart.

She’d never been in a situation like
this before, where she’d felt quite this powerless. She grew up
knowing she could out run, out hunt, and overpower most of the boys
in her area, and once she’d established that, few of them came
around her. She’d not had to submit much in her life, except
perhaps to her father, and this man was far from her father. He was
a stranger to her, and he was requiring her to do something she had
no interest in doing, yet she had an obligation to obey him. And
she knew that if she didn’t, he wouldn’t hesitate to send her back
to the sideboard to fetch that damnable leather thing
again.

The tears she’d worked so hard to dry
up were returning again, but she did her best not to let him see
that as she did as he told her to do, and moved her legs a bit
apart. The tunics weren’t very far up her legs, so they prevented
her from spreading them very far. His voice was surprisingly
gentle, almost insultingly so, when he said, “Amber, pull your
tunics up to your waist. I want to see your lovely punished bottom.
And then spread your legs well apart for me, and bend
over.”

She’d never wanted to beg anyone for
anything in her life, but she desperately wanted to beg him not to
make her do this now.

But she didn’t. She stood up and took
a deep breath, then did exactly, to the letter, what he
asked.

Jesu, she was magnificent. And Piers
wasn’t just referring to the glorious portrait in front of him at
all, although it definitely was that. She’d submitted beautifully.
He could tell that she hated him for every second of it, and that
it had been sublimely hard for her, but she’d done it anyway. He
knew that if he hadn’t taken that blade away from her, that he
might well be dead at the first given opportunity, and he might
well still be in the future, but he’d take his chances with the
little lady. What was life worth without a little risk?

He leaned forward, and she did, too,
until he cautioned low, “Stand still.” His callused fingertips not
really even able to discern the fineness of the creamy skin on the
inside of those thighs, which he decided right then and there that
he would definitely need to see strapped in the near future, maybe
the next time she was naughty.

And he knew, with Amber, there would
always be a next time.

Piers let his fingers delve gently
between the folds that offered themselves so eagerly to him,
dipping himself into the creaminess he had been hoping to find, but
wasn’t at all sure would be there. Some women warmed to a
punishment in a way that others didn’t. They didn’t want to. No one
really wanted their hind end roasted as he’d just done to hers. It
hurt, and it hurt badly; they cried the same tears, experienced the
same level of agony that anyone else did. Still, to an infrequent
few, it triggered something in them, something primal and
pleasurable that mingled with the pain, and she was, as he’d hoped,
one of those rarest of gems.

And, he learned, as he probed further,
closing his eyes and reveling in both the heated moistness of her
as well as her barely discernible whimpers of pure, unadulterated
stress, that she was a virgin, completely and thoroughly
intact.

He withdrew his hand quickly, with a
shudder that was embarrassingly, humiliatingly close to completion,
standing and turning away from her to go to the window. “You may
leave now.”

Confused, humiliated almost beyond
bearing, Amber straightened and left the room as fast as she could,
running down to her room, ignoring Mrs. Tulane’s calls from behind
her and bawling her heart out onto the rough rope bed and straw
mattress she’d been given.

Mrs. Tulane let herself in to the
girl’s room, which wasn’t much more than a closet, wondering what
it was that had happened in the master’s room. He wasn’t the sort
to abuse girls, really, unlike a lot of the higher ups. He amused
himself with them, yes, but they usually ended up the better for
it, like this one seemed to be. She’d helped run his households for
quite some time and had never had a complaint from any of his
chits, much less seen one go crying from his chambers like this
one.

“
What’s the matter, Amber?
Did the master get after you for wandering off into the woods?” She
was a kind of a strange girl, at that, but she did have a gift for
the plants. Alice had seen that from the start. She was not a very
girly girl, either, although that Fitzwilliam boy liked to tag
after her, as well as that no good upstart Troy.

“
He beat me because I
pushed Troy into the fountain, and then he–then he–”

Mrs. Tulane really didn’t want to know
what had happened then. She’d found that, with the upper classes,
the less she knew the better. She just hoped she didn’t turn up
pregnant. “I’m sorry, my dear. Is there anything I can get
you?”

“
No, thank you,” Amber
snuffled. She’d never snuffled in her life. What was she becoming,
so far from her home and her family? She sat up and asked, just
before the older woman left. “Is there anything else I need to do
for the day?”

“
No, my dear. I think
you’re done.”

Amber got up and walked out the door
to head into the woods, while the old woman watched her, shaking
her head and wondering what exactly it was that she found so
enticing there.

Since she was in a new place, she had
to learn new trails. It was rather exciting, and the woods always
provided the solace she sought. She had to set up new hidey-holes,
and find a new way to secure new stores and new weapons, which
actually was easier than she’d thought it was going to be. Amber
had befriended the cook’s daughter, who was close to her age. And,
although she hated to do housework, she hung around the kitchen in
order to be able to get scraps, which doing some of the excess
chores allowed her to do. The cook was always glad for the help,
especially with Sir Piers in residence. She had a reasonable larder
hidden away in the woods within the first few weeks she was there,
simply by keeping her eyes and ears open and carefully taking that
which had been discarded by others.

She’d even managed to commandeer a set
of boy’s clothes, like she’d had when she was home, although they
were more like men’s clothes and they were very baggy on her. Amber
was able to hide her namesake hair under a disreputable hat and she
looked the part, if a small, scruffy, malnourished boy.

A hunt was organized in the master’s
honor, and all of his soldiers were allowed to participate, since
there were few of his peers around. The men, including the master,
who adored hunting, his right hand man Bruce, Troy, Fitzwilliam,
and all the rest, left early in the morning, just about the same
time Mrs. Tulane went knocking at Amber’s door to find her
missing.

They were about to give up when the
hounds began to sound, and Piers and a small group broke off from
the others, following them to find a huge buck in a small clearing.
The five of them raised their bows to shoot, and let them fly. They
all missed—except one, which was none of theirs. The stag was down,
but it was none of their arrows.

They looked around at each other, and
watched a scruffy young boy bound past them with a big grin on his
face. Bruce got to the lad first, and picked him up by the scruff
of his neck. “What do you think you’re doing? Poaching on the
count’s land?”

The young man said nothing, but shook
his head vigorously, gesturing to the deer, and then to the
men.

“
Mute or not, it seems
he’s a better shot than any of us,” Piers said, leaning against a
tree as Bruce brought the boy to dangle before him.

Troy took immediate offense at that
statement, of course. “Why would you say that?”

“
Was it your arrow that
felled the buck?” Bruce asked. He had very little patience with
Troy, whom he found tended to ride on the coattails of others work,
gathering their praise for having made no effort of his own. He was
also quick to blame, especially the servants, if anything went
wrong, even if he was the one truly at fault.

“
Well, no, but it might
have been.”

“
It might have been any of
us, but it was his,” Piers looked the lad up and down. “I’ve half a
mind to give him his trophy. He looks like he hasn’t eaten in days.
Put him down, Bruce.” Something in the way he landed on his feet
reminded him of someone, and Piers took another, closer look. The
boy’s head turned away from him to stare at his feet. “I grow tired
of the hunt. Let’s take the kill and go home.” He shoved the boy in
front of them and marched him home, right into the castle and up to
his room, where he knew everyone was going to assume he was going
to be interrogated and probably killed, or at least imprisoned in
the oubliette until he died.

That was what he might have done, if
he thought the poacher was a man.

What he did instead was put him in the
middle of his bedroom and strip every stitch of clothing off him,
until he could see Amber’s beautiful hair and the curve of that
luscious backside, and the remnants of the punishment he’d given
her not very long ago.

Her hair fell long down her back,
almost but not quite enough to afford her bottom and the backs of
her legs shelter from his prying eyes. What would she think of
next? Dressing up as a man—or more closely a boy—and hunting with
the men? She could have been killed.

“
Do you want to tell me
why you did what you did, or should I just begin beating you now?”
Piers had to admit, he was curious about most everything she did.
She was such a different woman from any he’d met. And she’d bested
all of them at the hunt—even himself. And he liked to think of
himself as a reasonably good huntsman, yet this little slip of a
girl had it over all of them.

“
You were all talking and
taking too long. He was going to leave, so I took the
shot.”

Piers took a firm grip on his anger.
“Not why did you best us in the hunt, Amber. Why did you go on the
hunt dressed as a man, no less, in the first place?”

“
I like to hunt, and I do
it well. I haven’t been able to since–” she looked down, then
brought her head right back up, “–since we lost the war. I wanted
to go, so I went.”

Piers could see that she was
shivering, and stoked the fire. “You know that I could have you
killed for this, don’t you?”

He watched her swallow hard, but she
shed no tears, and he knew that she neither expected nor would she
ask for any quarter to be given, which was braver than a lot of the
men he’d known, professional soldiers, who had been faced with the
same realization. “I know, although it was never my intent to keep
the meat. I’m more than well fed here.”

“
Do you like it here,
Amber?” he asked, circling her and trailing his fingertips at will
over her, while she did her best to try not to dance away from
them, knowing he wouldn’t like that.

“
Yes, Sir,” she
whispered.

“
Why the whisper?” Piers
tucked her hair behind her ear and spoke into it.

She hung her head, and he knew it had
to be something important to her. Her voice was even softer this
time, if that was possible. “Because I miss my Da and my sisters,
even Faine the Pain.”

Still, no tears, not even for her
family. But she’d practically wailed like a baby while he was
disciplining her. It was one of the things that had been most stark
about it, how different she was, how uninhibited, how uncontrolled.
He’d thought about it long after she’d left, in the middle of the
night when he’d profaned himself multiple times, like he hadn’t
been able to since he was a lad.

He wanted her. He wanted to spread her
open and take her hard. He wanted to bend her over every possible
available surface, and some that weren’t possible or available. He
would press her against walls, front to back and back to front,
beds, tress, grass, moss, take her in lakes, sea, baths, on horses,
nothing and nowhere would be safe from his lust for her.

He would gladly lose himself in her,
but that was exactly what he didn’t want. She was dangerous, this
one. She needed to be controlled, so that he could control
himself.

He should send for Josette as soon as
possible. Josette had a calming influence over him. Josette who
wasn’t demanding and wasn’t unusual or intriguing to the point of
near madness. She did exactly what she was told, never anything
different or unexpected. He would never need to take a tawse to her
backside, because she’d always submit to his authority,
unquestioningly.