The Lord's Right Page 11

  He whispered after her, as harshly as he could, that she should stay put, and he knew she heard him, but he could hardly scream at her without giving themselves away. If they lived through this, he was going to make sure she learned how to obey.

  But she was gone, and he knew agony such as he’d never felt before at the idea that she might not return.

  Amber circled well around the clumsy oafs that were trying to harm her husband, and the idea occurred to her that she would really like to toy with them, because she could, but she knew she shouldn’t, so she simply set about capturing them as quickly and efficiently as possible. As they began to either drop from arrows, or encounter various quick traps she’d setup, they never saw their enemy, and that was a great psychological advantage. As their numbers dwindled, the remaining imbeciles became even more reckless and easier to capture.

  When they had all been rendered harmless, she tucked her inappropriate clothing into a makeshift spot and donned her tunic again, and walked back to where the men were, falling on Piers in a dramatic scene that wasn’t very like her, except that she had been very worried about him until she’d found him.

  “Husband! Are you all right?” She lay full on top of him, not caring what anyone else thought or said. She was a newlywed. She could get away with it.

  The other men were quite bewildered at her appearance, especially when they still considered that they were in mortal danger.

  Amber spun quite a story as the men ate it up, all except her husband, of course, who watched her quietly from under a hooded brow. She worked on the king as she spoke, telling them of a young man in the same style of clothing as she had actually worn, who had come to get her while she wandered in the woods looking for them, telling her that he’d rendered all of the rebels moot and leading her to them, knowing that the king needed her medical attentions.

  “What was his name? Did you recognize him?” King William asked, although he was in great pain. “I would reward this young man.”

  “No, I didn’t recognize him, Your Majesty.”

  Once she’d had him stabilized, the men decided to bring the king home as soon as possible, where he could be better treated, and would be more secure.

  Amber spoke up, though, as he was her patient. “I’m not so sure that that long trip would be good for him at this point. I have an idea.”

  Within the hour, the king himself was comfortably ensconced at her father’s house, and her father was about as close to beside himself as Amber had ever seen him. It was a brilliant move. The cottage was unassuming and quiet, all by itself in a quiet clearing in the thick woods. They had departed quietly, as if they were taking him home to be treated, but had instead diverted with as little fuss—and as few men—as possible, to the cottage.

  Amber had even suggested that a decoy carry on with the majority of men acting like they were still bringing the ailing monarch home, while he recuperated at her father’s house.

  She concentrated every bit of medical knowledge she had on restoring the king’s health. Luckily, he was of fairly robust health to begin with, but he had also endured a fairly serious wound. Her worst fear was infection, so she did her best to keep the wound clean, which meant cleaning it regularly, which made her cry every time she did it, while he bore it quite stoically.

  “Tell me,” he’d asked one time, having taken to talking to her to distract himself while she was seeing to him like this, “are you happy in your marriage?”

  He knew she’d stopped, because his pain level had lowered quite considerably, but then she resumed and he wished he’d shut up. “Yes, thank you, my liege. I am.”

  “But you weren’t certain there, at the first.”

  “I hadn’t intended to marry anyone, Your Majesty.”

  “Not marry at all? Were you bound for the nunnery?”

  “No.”

  “That’s quite unnatural, my girl. Women need men to watch over them.”

  “So I’m told.”

  Her tone let him know that she had grave doubts as to the veracity of his statement, and he actually chuckled, despite his discomfort.

  “I tell you, Lady Amber, if I didn’t have my Matilda, I would have given Sir Piers a run for his money.”

  She blushed beautifully. “Why, Your Majesty, what makes you think I would have chosen either of you?”

  He fairly roared at that comment, slapping the bed and moving when he shouldn’t have. Everyone—except Piers—who was outside the house listening couldn’t believe that he was laughing during such a painful part of his treatment, but there it was.

  Piers knew how his wife could be, and that she was probably just speaking her mind to the man, which could probably end up with him becoming a serf, but that was okay, as long as she was still his wife.

  When Amber finally poked her head out of the house, wiping her hands of the solution she used to clean out his wound, Piers waylaid her and guided her towards the woods. He knew these sessions were at least as hard on her as they were on the king himself. She always cried right after them, and probably all the way through them, if he knew her. She had such a soft heart, and he knew that she couldn’t stand the idea that anyone was in pain, especially someone close to her.

  “He should sleep,” she said, collapsing into his arms in tears.

  “So should you,” Piers said, kissing her forehead.

  “I’ll sleep when I’m sure he’ll live.”

  He tipped her chin back and forced her to meet his eyes. “You won’t be any good to him, or me, if you’re dead.”

  Amber didn’t say anything. She couldn’t. She was too exhausted.

  “He was laughing this time.”

  She smiled wearily. “I talked to him. It helps to distract him. He wanted to talk about us. He asked if I was happy in our marriage.”

  That perked him up. He wanted to know what answer she gave. “Well?”

  “I told him I am, but he caught my hesitation and asked about it.”

  “And?”

  “I told him the truth.”

  Piers wasn’t at all sure that that was a good thing.

  “That I hadn’t intended on marrying anyone, and he said that women need men to look after them. I said that that was what I had been told, but I don’t think I said it in a very convincing way, and he found that uproariously funny. Then he said if he wasn’t attached he’d give you a challenge for me, and I said he shouldn’t count on the idea that I would choose either of you, and that set him off again.” She put her hands on her hips. “Why don’t you think it’s so funny when I speak my mind?”

  “Because I know you’re not kidding. It’s the best if he thinks you’re not, that you’re amusing. We’re likely to keep our heads longer that way.”

  She gave up trying to make sense of how men thought and simply curled up against him, letting him wrap those big arms around her and hold her impossibly tight. They weren’t the most logical of creatures, as far as she could see.

  As he rubbed her back soothingly, he said, “I don’t want you to think that I’ve forgotten what you did, though.”

  “Did?”

  “You risked your life. When you first found us, which you shouldn’t have in the first place, before you left, I whispered, very loudly and clearly, that you were to stay put. I know you heard it, my flower.” Again, he tipped her chin up, so that she had to meet his eyes.

  Amber always met someone’s eyes. One of the easiest ways to tell when she felt guilty was that she tried to avoid his gaze, and she was definitely doing so now. She was looking just past his shoulder, and at his Adam’s apple, and at his hairline, but not into his eyes. She stomped her foot in a manner he found charmingly childish. “But I knew I could handle those buffoons. I don’t know how they managed to accost you and win—I could have led a better raid on you guys.”

  And well he knew she could. But that wasn’t the point. “We would have taken care of ourselves, I assure you. I was fine, Bruce was fine, we had plenty of able bodied men; we just
hadn’t had the time to put a plan into action yet, and then you came along.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “And it was a good thing I did, too.”

  “But what did I say, little flower?”

  Her lips twitched, then pursed on the words. She sighed, but confessed. “You said to stay put.”

  He let his emotions take a hold of him, just this once, as the fear he’d felt, watching her walk away to her possible death flooded over him again. His palms cradled the sides of her face. “Do you know how frightened I was, not knowing if I’d ever see you again? If we’d get up to defend ourselves and I’d stumble over your body?” Piers crushed her to him in an embrace that literally took her breath away. “I will not lose you, Amber. I will not.”

  With that, he produced the belt that her father had used on her, just before they’d met the first time. He looked around them and picked a large tree that allowed her to stand straight up against it, and that had a good sized trunk, one that kept her arms stretched out and didn’t allow them to meet at the back. He secured her wrists around the trunk, ensuring that she couldn’t avoid even one second of her punishment, then lifted her dress and belted it well up around her waist, so that the material was in no danger of falling and providing her any comfort or respite there, either.

  She was at his mercy, and he has her father’s disciplinary tool, which, in his hands was bad, but he didn’t have anywhere near the power that Piers had, being about half Piers’ size. He thought of everything, though, and even put a scrap of fur under her cheek, so that it wasn’t scraped by the tree bark. There was only one part of her that he wanted to remember her correction, and that was her backside.

  For a long moment, he simply stood to one side of her, long thick belt in one hand, letting those horrible emotions course through him. “Amber?”

  She was already crying. “Yes?”

  “I love you.” It was the first time he’d ever said that to a woman. He’d certainly had his share of women in his life, and, frankly, he’d heard it from them quite a few times, but never said it back, because he didn’t want to say it and not mean it. But the time had come, and it was right with this woman. He loved her more than life itself.

  That made her cry even harder, because she knew it was going to make him discipline her even harder, each and every time. If he hated her, he wouldn't care about it. If he loved her, he would care enough to make sure that she got things right, and if she didn’t, that he got it right when he corrected her for it.

  “I love you, too, my lord.” She meant it, too. Despite the fact that he had been her enemy and that he spanked her with alarming frequency, she had fallen deeply in love with this man, and everything that he was—honorable, smart, and more careful with her than she was with herself.

  And the first stroke fell.

  Long before the last one, she had soaked the fur beneath her face. He had blistered her bottom, and the backs of her thighs, and then the backs of her calves, which was worse than either of the others, she swore, as they were the tenderest and the least used to punishment.

  But the worst thing he did, by far, was to have her spread her legs as far as she could and take the very end of that belt, and slap it down hard on the very delicate insides of her thighs.

  The combination of those two things was what had brought her to uncontrollable tears.

  And in the end, it was his mouth that soothed her, that kissed the raised ridges of her pain and trailed wetly up the length of her spine as his hands reached forward, fingers splaying and claiming as much of her territory as he could.

  Amber wiggled and tried to writhe, but found her movements severely limited. She couldn’t touch him, couldn’t move away from him. She was, as he put it quite succinctly when his mouth finally reached her ear, staying put.

  Chapter Ten

  There was something about him that drove her beyond control. And the better he got to know her, the worse it seemed to get. Even before his fingers found what they sought, she knew what he was going to do to her, and her body began to prepare itself. Her body had already begun submitting to the inevitability of him—his mastery of her, his control of her, his domination—even without the consent of her intellect.

  It drove her mind crazy that she couldn’t reel that part of her in and say no, don’t do that. She felt he shouldn’t be able to do that to her, and yet it happened as naturally as if it was exactly what God intended, and, of course, he would say that that was exactly correct.

  He loved how wet she got in anticipation of his touch. It was a point of glory to him, a trophy, a ribbon. If he could have worn something or toted something around that said that his wife was constantly wet even when he didn’t have his hands on her, he would have. She knew the exact tone of the sigh he would give once those marauding fingers found their target.

  And she still thought of them as marauding and invading, even though he rarely sought to hurt her with them, unless he was spanking her. In fact, it was the exact opposite; he sought to please her much more often than he spanked her, and it was her own problem that she chafed at that, too, just as much if not more than the spankings.

  It was control. She was controlled by both the pleasure and the pain, and he knew, expertly, how to administer both of them, just right, for her.

  “Mmm.”

  There it was, and there she was. She couldn’t possibly think any more. She couldn’t be annoyed or resentful. She couldn’t try not to respond. It was a lost cause, and had been, probably, since that first time he’d touched her intimately. He knew her too well, and her body wanted him above all else. Above food and air and water, it wanted his hands on her and his cock inside her.

  It wasn’t going to get the latter this time, but she knew he would bring her to fruition, and that he would definitely enjoy the fact that she was bound and couldn’t interfere with his intentions.

  Her own body worked against her, easing the way of the two fingers he worked gently up into her, taking her from behind with one hand while the other rubbed over and over her most sensitive part, whispering in her ear things he knew she liked and hated to hear—how red her bottom was, how strict he was going to be with her now that she was his countess, how he couldn’t wait to get her back home where he could attend to her properly, how he thought that he’d include a punishment room just off their chambers in the new castle, so that he’d have a place that wasn’t their bedroom in which to discipline her.

  But mostly he described how much he enjoyed touching her like this, when her hands were bound and her dress was up to just under her breasts, and there was nothing she could do to avoid the pain he’d given her moments ago, nor the pleasure he was inflicting on her now. He understood the dichotomy that she was: that she had to be in control, but that she needed not to be sometimes, and that having basic control taken away from her was very thrilling to her.

  He understood, and what’s more, the usurping of it was thrilling to him, too.

  They fit together, almost frighteningly well, and he intended to exploit that in every way he possibly could.

  Eventually, he would work on making her control her pleasure, so that she didn’t let go until he allowed her to, among other things. But right now, he just wanted her to enjoy herself. She was working herself into a nub taking care of the leader of their country, and he knew she needed some release.

  “Let go now, Amber. I want you to let go. You can scream. We’re well away from everyone. Do it now, my flower. I have the belt right here. Do it now.” Learning to release on command was another thing he’d teach her eventually, too.

  When she screamed, and she did, long and loud, he closed his eyes and absorbed it into himself, not letting her escape one bit of pleasure, playing her fully to the end, coaxing every last drop of ecstasy from her body, and then some, until her legs became jelly and he released her from her bonds to hold her in his arms and rock her reassuringly.

  His own needs presented themselves urgently, but he ignored them i
n favor of seeing to her. Piers carried her back to the cottage, giving her his own small pallet in the barn to sleep on. He stayed close, making sure no one disturbed her so that she got several hours of good, solid sleep.

  * * * *

  It was nearly a week before they were ready to travel, and the trip home took twice as long as the trip there, because the king was too uncomfortable to spend long on his horse. But it was a smaller crew coming home, and they grew much closer to His Majesty because of it.

  Two others had become quite close, and there had been a small addition to their cozy entourage that Amber was somewhat unsure about. Bruce and her sister, Starr, had become quite friendly while the men had been staying at their family home and watching after the monarch. Amber knew about Starr’s animosity towards the fact that she had pretty much refused to get married, but she wasn’t any too happy about the fact that Starr was now going to profit from the fact that she’d been married—against her will—to a count.

  She supposed she should forgive and forget, but she knew herself and doubted that that was going to happen any time soon. So she decided to ignore the situation as much as possible.

  But leave it to her husband to latch onto something like that. One night, the last night they would be away from Fordwick, when they were all settled down for the night and supposedly sleeping, he whispered into her ear, “You and your sister don’t seem to be very close.”

  “That’s very astute of you, milord,” she answered, not trying to hide the sarcasm behind the statement.

  Piers reached down and pinched and twisted her nipple, hard, holding his hand over her mouth as he did so, so that she wouldn’t disturb the others, especially the king. “I didn’t ask for a cheeky response, did I, wife?” He still held and pinched the nipple tightly.

  “No, my lord.”

  He released the injured part. “There are ways to punish you that don’t make a sound, Amber, so watch your tongue. Why don’t you like your sister?”