The Lord's Right (6 page)

She’d certainly never be caught dead
in men’s clothing, having shot better than a group of experienced
hunters.

But here his Amber was. And she was
his. There would be no way he would be able to stand that anyone
else could ever have her. What if one of his men decided to marry
her? They could. He knew for a fact that King William would
encourage that. It was good for his men to intermingle. It settled
the men and the natives to intermarry. It was harder to kill the
enemy if he was a member of your family.

That thought worried him like nothing
else had in years. He needed to do something about that, but he
wasn’t sure exactly what, but the answer would come to him in
time.

His cock ached as if he hadn’t felt
relief in years. Indeed, it had been a while since he’d known a
woman’s warmth, but he wasn’t in a hurry. He could wait for her,
although he would also send for Josette. Piers didn’t like feeling
this out of control. He could imagine how much Amber hated it. She
was very much like him in that respect. How it must chafe to have
to stand in front of him like this, to be commanded by him, to
allow him to touch parts of her that had, as he had discovered not
so long ago, never before been touched.

“
I want you to lie face
down on my bed, Amber.”

She bit her lip, and he knew exactly
what she was thinking. He could see that she was calculating
whether or not she could make it to the door before him, and that,
in a split second, she knew she couldn’t, that he’d catch her and
it would be just that much worse for her because he’d punish her
much more for running from him than he was going to if she simply
obeyed him and positioned herself on the bed as she’d been told
to.

So she walked to the bed, albeit
slowly. But when he began to spank her very hard and very rapidly,
she began to move a lot more quickly until she found herself on her
tummy on the fur covered bed. He moved things around her, making
sure that she was the highest point on the bed, going so far as to
put several folded furs under her hips so that they were well
raised. Piers didn’t want the furs to be subjected to his
discipline, when she was the one that needed to benefit from
it.

“
Have you dressed like a
boy before, Amber?”

“
Yes.” She probably should
have lied to him, but it didn’t come naturally to her, so she
hadn’t thought of it in time.

“
Why?”

“
I started doing it as a
little girl, because boys got to do all the interesting things I
wanted to do. I didn’t want to stay around the house and learn how
to cook and clean. I wanted to hunt and fish and track and be in
the woods.”

“
And your father let
you?”

Piers returned to the bed with an
implement that she knew she didn’t want to see, so she didn’t turn
her head. “I don’t know if it was really a matter of letting me,
Sir. Once Starr was old enough to take over the house, I kind of
did what I wanted. I was a better hunter than he was,
anyway.”

“
And he still disciplined
you?” Piers remembered the day they’d met, when her bottom had been
so ravaged.

“
Yes, he’s still my
father, and I was living in his house.”

He nodded. “You submitted to his
authority, just like you submit to mine. Both are as they should
be.”

“
I would like to live
under my own authority, some day.”

“
That’s unnatural, Amber.
Women need to be controlled. Tightly controlled. Your own behavior
has been an example of that. Women like yourself need to be more
tightly controlled than most, and more strictly disciplined than
most. And that’s something I definitely intend to see to.” With his
last word, he brought something down onto her nates that felt like
it was going to kill her, and then he did it again.

She had exhaled all her breath with
the first swat, and now she couldn't even begin to deal with the
second, which he had laid carefully right next to the first. Amber
didn’t even want to begin to think what would happen when the swats
began to overlap, as they would inevitably begin to do at some
point. He spanked her very slowly, and very deliberately. This was
no flurry of swats landing every which way. Piers was plotting and
planning the instant it would hit, and the real estate it would
cover.

When he’d thoroughly decorated all the
way down her entire backside, he went back up, starting from where
the last stroke had ended, at the flesh that was the most recently
tenderized.

Amber was beside herself, howling and
screaming and crying and moaning. She knew the entire population of
the castle—probably everyone in the county—could hear that she was
being disciplined. How could she face any of them ever again—that
was, if she even survived this?

Once he’d covered the territory before
him twice over—once down and back, he slid off the side of the bed
and stood at her feet, bringing the implement down vertically,
twice.

Then he coaxed her knees open with the
implement, which she had still yet to see but which felt like
something wooden to her, while she was still sniffling and
hiccoughing sobs, and he told her that he would stop, right there,
if she was dry between her legs.

Amber wasn’t quite sure she understood
what he meant, and she was pretty sure she didn’t want to know,
either. She had to hope that she was dry as a bone, but didn’t know
how to control it.

What she did know was that she was on
his bed with her knees spread before him obscenely, and his hand,
that was at least twice the size of hers, was probing, delicately,
she had to say, between her legs. His fingers ran through the
thatch of hair she’d grown years ago down there, then a thick
finger parted her lips, making her sob out loud, and then sob
again, even louder, because she lost such control of herself around
him.

“
Put your head down on the
furs, love. That’ll make it easier. Aren’t they warm and soft
against your cheek?” She was up on all fours, wanting to fight him,
and he’d found that the more submissive the position, the easier it
was for less submissive females. Although, he had to say, Amber was
the least submissive female he’d ever encountered, and he was
thoroughly enjoying the taming.

His finger, his middle finger,
deliberately using the biggest finger he owned, split her majora
then further delved into the heart of her, needing to know the
fullness of her response, although he believed in his heart that he
already knew the answer, and he was not disappointed: his finger
was drenched in her thick honey.

Piers gathered as much of it as he
could on the tip of that finger and brought it around to the other
side of the bed to show her. “Look at this. This is you. This is
yours. This is your own cream, produced because I punish you so
hard with this.”

He showed her a longish, flat wooden
implement, less than a yard long and two inches wide or so, with a
certain amount of substance to it.

She looked absolutely appalled at the
sight of both his finger and the implement she had so diligently
been trying to avoid. “But no, I don’t want it–I
can’t–it–no–please!” It was as close to begging as she would allow
herself to get.

But he left and went around to the
back of her again. She felt him put his finger between her legs
again, and it rooted around there quite rudely while she whimpered
and moaned, until he reached a little further forward, and he
stroked a place she hadn’t known she owned, and Amber felt like she
was going to come out of her own skin.

Piers merely chuckled at her reaction,
and then she heard him pick up the implement again, and now she
knew exactly what the implement he was using looked like. But she
never knew, from then on, when it was going to land on her rump.
Piers, for his part, was listening very carefully to the clues
Amber’s body gave him—her breathing, the way her body writhed, the
moans she couldn’t control—that didn’t have to do with the fact
that he’d just brought that ruler like implement he’d had custom
made down onto those gorgeous, red hillocks of hers.

He loved everything about her,
especially about this delightful combination of disciplining and
pleasuring her. She was entirely off balance, and that was one of
the best things about it. Amber didn’t know whether she was coming
or going; she was entirely out of control, both from the pain and
the pleasure, and Piers had the feeling that she hadn’t experienced
that much, even though she was a woman.

He intended that she was going to be
experiencing it a lot more from now on. He continued to alternate,
pleasure and pain, for quite some time, balancing her on that
precarious edge, before allowing her to free fall into a blinding,
searing orgasm that left her hoarse from screaming, partially in
incredible pleasure and partially because she was incredibly afraid
of what was happening to her.

When he was finished, she scrambled
off the bed and away from him, ending up in the corner of the room,
quite wild eyed, clutching an old rusted buckle she found on the
floor like a weapon.

Threatening him was getting to be a
habit with her. Luckily, she was, especially in this situation,
easily neutralized. He had her back on the bed with him in a trice,
huddled against him. He’d never seen anyone react to bed sport that
way, but then he should have expected that Amber would do something
different.

Piers sat back against the wall, with
Amber between his legs, wrapped in all of the furs and surrounded
by his not inconsiderable bulk, because she was shivering. “Amber,
dearest, what’s the matter?”

“
What’s wrong with me?
What just happened? That’s never happened to me before in my life?
Am I dying? I feel like I’m dying! I’m all weak kneed and weepy and
my legs feel like jelly and–”

“
Shh.” Piers found himself
in the awkward, unusual position of comforter. But at least now he
understood what the matter was, and he was annoyed with himself for
not anticipating it. Amber was, after all, a sheltered, country
girl. He knew she was a virgin, he’d discovered that delightful
fact himself. Despite the fact that she liked to parade through the
countryside dressed as a boy, she was still very innocent, and she
had had absolutely no idea where he’d been guiding her, and what
the culmination he’d lead her to was.

He was surprised to find himself
indulging in what he’d always eschewed with other women, even
Josette; the petting and cuddling and snuggling they all wanted but
he abhorred. He tucked her in next to him, tight against his side,
allowing his mere large presence to be a comfort, but also pressing
kisses on the top of her head and stroking that gorgeous, unusually
colored hair. Her breathing regulated slowly as he spoke in a low,
quiet voice. “I’m sorry, Amber. I didn’t do that very well.” She
had no idea this was one of the rarest of apologies; he almost
never apologized to anyone, certainly not to a peasant English
girl. “I should have prepared you for what was going to happen.
That was a gift to me, that explosion in your body. It was a very
precious gift. It happens to a man more often, and a woman much
more rarely. You are an exquisitely unique woman,
Amber.”

She wasn’t sure whether she was going
to allow his pretty speech to placate her or not. “You mean I’m not
dying?”

He chuckled softly. “No, you’re not.
In fact, your woman’s body is so wondrous, that you can do that
again at any time.” He reached down, as if to do it again to her,
but she was out of the bed and across the room in a flash, looking
as if she would throw herself out the window if he so much as
touched her again.

Piers decided it was best not to push
her right now. But he didn’t want her to think that she could
simply run away from him, either. He stood, and commanded that she
come back into his open arms.

Amber did as she was ordered to, but
he knew she didn’t want to, and that she didn’t quite trust him not
to throw her down on the bed and begin either punishing or
pleasuring her again, or some combination of the two.

And she was right not to trust him. He
was her lord and master, and he could do anything he liked with
her, at any time.

But right now, he didn’t want to push
her too far. Overall, besides the fact that she had shown up his
entire hunting party, she had done very well. He crossed the room
to a concealed panel in the wall, and then brought her down a
hidden staircase that ended up in the room she had been
given.

Piers again indulged himself and put
her to bed like a baby, tucking her in and noticing the dark
circles under her eyes. She looked absolutely exhausted. First
orgasms were apparently quite the ordeal. She was already asleep
before he even turned to leave. He pealed back the thin blanket and
observed the handiwork he’d created on her lovely seat, before
turning to sneak back up the stairs while she slept
soundly.

He embroidered a story about the slim
boy poacher he’d sent on his way, making sure no one suspected
exactly who that boy was, despite the fact that everyone knew it
was Amber’s screams that issued from his room so closely
after.

Amber might have wanted to have been
terribly embarrassed about everyone in the keep hearing her being
punished last night, but she didn’t have a chance to—she was much
too busy. Mrs. Tulane keep her going all morning with the weeding
and the fertilizing and the harvesting and the drying of all the
various herbs, to say nothing of the potions she concocted, which
she was eager to learn, with a few she was dying to teach the old
woman. She also liked to go into the nearby village to do anything
she could to help the sick and ailing there, taking the least of
the herbs to the people and distributing them in the count’s name,
which gained him much favor with them. When he rode by the villages
where Amber visited on that big black charger, he heard his name
chanted and saw children following him through the streets, instead
of the grumbles and groans he heard from the other provinces
through which he traveled.