Droit de Seigneur Read online

  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, but 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, who he found tended to ride on the coattails of others' work, gathering their praise for having made no effort of his own, and 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.

  But 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 – 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 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 po
ssible 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, and 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.

  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 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 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.

  Chapter Four

  He got off the bed for a second, asking, “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 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 where. 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, then 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, but 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 reactio
n, 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, from both 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 freefall 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.

  She ended 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