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  On their first night back, they didn't do a thing, but each of them had full schedules starting the next day. Despite how vibrant and healthy she was when they got back, though, within three weeks she was flat on her back with some sort of strange flu. He had his personal physician come and look her over, and was very careful to mention over the phone exactly where they'd been over the past month and a half, just in case it was something exotic.

  It turned out just to be a case of the grip. He cut her a lot of slack because she was sick, and because he hated to see her that way. He generally wasn't permissive with her in the least. He held fast to her rules, even when it wasn't convenient for himself and it didn't really seem to be what she wanted.

  But she got sick so seldom, and this thing seemed to take such a hold on her, that he simply spent most of his time nursing her, and anything but getting her well flew right out the window, as it should have. Now, he could just as easily have hired someone to take care of her, but he honestly couldn't imagine doing that. When she started to get really sick, right after he'd called his doc, he got on the horn to his secretary at home and told her to rearrange his appointments for at least the next ten days. Then he called her secretary and told her to do the same thing for Raina, over his wife's weak protests.

  He missed a board meeting so that he could stay home and care for her, not that he minded in the least.

  That invisible line in their relationship came into play at times like this - that line that was drawn where he no longer had power over what she did, and although it was usually not that blurred, he put his foot down when it came to her health. She was so sick that she was losing weight, and she really didn't have it to lose. He wasn't going to let her out of his sight until he was sure that she was going to be okay, and that overrode anything work wise for either of them, as far as he was concerned, and it still came down to the fact that she'd entrusted herself to him, and he was the final authority on everything regarding her life - especially matters of health.

  The fact was, though, that she was almost as bad a patient as he was, and he rapidly expended all of the mercy he was going to allow her once she started to get better. His doctor had told her that it really just had to work its way through her system, although he had given her a shot of phenergan, he'd also left a prescription for it, and he'd managed to convince the doc without too much effort that since she couldn't seem to keep much down, that the script should be for suppositories rather than pills. He'd also asked for as many extra as the doctor could spare.

  So, every four hours he would go to the fridge and get two out, along with a fresh pair of gloves. It was strange to actually have medical permission to do things to her that he'd already been doing for the past two years, but he also appreciated the irony of how well it fit into their lifestyle.

  Raina quickly became very cranky at this treatment, to a certain extent because it was less adult than his usual methods. There was no leather involved, there was no bondage, there was no punishment... yet. The first time he did it, he caught her unaware and thus had the advantage. But this time she gave him a jaundiced look when he approached her with medicine and gloves in hand, and tried as best she could in her sick and weakened state to crab her way across the bed, well away from him, and using her newfound ability to say, "No!", since she was too sick for him to punish her for it.

  He was frowned down at her in a distinctly paternal manner that was almost as bad as his usual frown. "Raina, stop."

  Despite how horrid she felt, she recognized that tone down deep in her bones - and her bottom - and did as she was told. But she didn't come towards him.

  He could see that rebellion in her eyes, and thought, not for the first time, that she must've been a handful of a child. But it was the woman who was lying there about as far away from him as she could, when he held the key to her feeling better in his hand, just because she didn't like the fact that he had chosen a distinctly submissive method of delivery for said medicine.

  Chapter Eight

  But her childish petulance wasn't his problem. He leaned over and wrapped a long arm around her legs, dragging her towards him. She didn't quite have the nerve to fight him out and out, but she certainly wasn't cooperating, either. He, for one, didn't see what all the fuss was about, really. The suppositories were extremely small in consideration of what other things he'd plied that opening with over the past several weeks, but with the fuss she put up as he pulled her over his lap, you would have thought that he was going to kill her. She was crying and whining and moaning and saying "no" enough to more than make up for the restriction she'd been put under about it.

  It was the tears that got to him more so than anything else. She wasn't a weepy woman - unless, perhaps he was holding the cane in his hand. But he steeled himself and pushed the bottoms of the only pair of pajamas she owned down to just below the full curves of her cheeks. She'd gone through various permutations of chills and fever - for which he'd also been taking her temperature every four hours, rectally, of course, with the same fussiness in evidence - and he'd had to rummage through her closet in order to locate them while she'd been literally shaking the bed with shivers behind him.

  He had to admit, it was a damned cute picture, to see that luscious bottom framed by the hem of the top of her pajamas and the elastic waist of the bottoms as it clung lovingly to the tops of her thighs. He didn't want to undress her any more than that because he didn't want to set of those awful chills again. Instead, he donned the gloves he'd brought, not forgetting that eloquent snap around each wrist, unwrapped the first little white bullet from its protective foil, and opened those rounded pillows to expose his target.

  For someone who was, he knew, absolutely exhausted, she certainly could wiggle enough, until he gave her a warning, "Raina," drawing out her name as if he was speaking to a six year old rather than his submissive wife.

  Of course, he didn't just give her the suppository. He had to press his finger well up inside her, to make sure that she wasn't going to be able to just pop it back out. That was what she seemed to object to the most, not that it deterred him in the least.

  When he was finished, he rolled her back into what had become her most comfortable position - on her side, in an almost fetal position. He made sure that she had a bowl within reach if she needed it, but she'd been very stubborn even when she was extremely weak, and had always gotten up and gone into the bathroom rather than just be sick in bed, which is what he would have preferred. He'd gotten up each and very time to go in there and hold her and help her and, if she couldn't quite stand the idea of a toothbrush in her mouth yet, then to hand her a mouthwash rinse that would help get that awful taste out of her mouth.

  At one point, while they were waiting for the doctor, she'd lain there, curled around the toilet, with her feverish head pressed to the cold, cool porcelain, and whispered, "Just shoot me now, please."

  His level of alarm about how she was feeling ratcheted up to an astronomical level. If he hadn't already called his doctor, he would have bundled her up and taken her to the Emergency Room. As it was, he soaked every towel he could get his hands on in cold water and simply lay them around and on her, hoping that evaporative cooling would help.

  It took the lion's share of two weeks for her to start to feel human again, and he made her stand down for nearly all of it. He didn't allow her to even look at a piece of paper from work for ten whole days, and even then, when she finally coerced him into letting her try to get back into the swing of things, he allowed her secretary to come to see her, but only for an hour the first day, two hours the second day, and so on, and he was entirely unrepentant about it.

  Raina was feeling quite a bit better and also feeling her oats a bit more than he was going to tolerate, whining loudly that that was nowhere near enough time to do what she needed to do.

  He had gotten right into her face and asked her fierce scowl as she avidly avoided his eyes, "Would you prefer that I said you couldn't see her at all until next week?
Because that's where you're headed, besides earning yourself a punishment for arguing that I'm going to give you on Wednesday of next week, if I'm sure you're fully recovered. Write it down with a star."

  Sighing as loudly as she dared, Raina reached into her nightstand for her Punishment Book. It was something he'd created himself and had published at a vanity publisher online. It had a place for the date, the offense, and a number of stars - the more stars, the worse the punishment. It didn't get too much use, because there wasn't often a need for them to delay punishments. But occasionally he was going somewhere, or he was already gone and couldn't get to it in as timely fashion as he would like, so he made her write it down. And it was also her responsibility to remind him on Wednesday evening if there was an entry in the book, that she was due a correction. Raina knew that he would think long and hard at that time as to whether or not to actually go through with it, and that would depend completely on how well she felt.

  That next Wednesday, she joined him in their bed at ten, which was the time he required that she retire - not sleep; that was eleven - but at least come to bed. "Sir?" she said, as he readied himself for bed. "I have a punishment coming this evening."

  "Very good, Raina," he praised. "I had forgotten."

  It had never even crossed Raina's mind to try to get away with letting him forget. She was on too many pins and needles when she knew she had a punishment coming. It was almost a worse punishment in and of itself when she was made to wait like that.

  He met her at the end of the bed, noting that for only the second night in a row she wasn't wearing the pajamas she had been while she was sick. In small ways, she was getting back to normal. Raina stood tall and strong before him, although as far as he was concerned, she was too thin. He hated it when she was sick; he just hated it. He hated when she was so small and vulnerable. Even when he was giving her the worst of beatings, he still felt her inherent strength. But that tiny, sick woman curled around the toilet kept popping into his head at the worst times.

  "How are you feeling?" he asked, looking deeply into her eyes, his brow furrowed worriedly.

  "I'm all right. Still a little tired, but not much more so than usual, Sir," she answered truthfully.

  He had to smile. If she had so much as hinted that she wasn't feeling well, he knew that she knew that he would have put the punishment off indefinitely. But she was completely open with him, which was a sign of just how deep their relationship was.

  "Okay. Go and get your leather strap."

  As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Raina wished heartily that she had decided to play sick for another day or two... or twelve. The strap was an awesomely bad implement that - in his more than capable hands - could reduce her to whimpering tears with one blow.

  "Bend over," he said without preamble, once she'd handed the horrid thing to him.

  Raina planted her palms on the end of the bed, which was just low enough that, in this position, her bottom became a nicely prominent target. This was going to be hard - keeping still for however many strokes he gave her.

  "I think twenty five should cover it, don't you?" he asked rhetorically, and then the strap fell and Raina knew that the next half hour of her life were going to be pure hell - and it was.

  The strap was about three inches wide and twenty inches long, and sometimes he would wrap the end around his hand to give him a little more control as to where the leather seared her skin, and sometimes he simply let the entire length fly, always careful that it didn't wrap around to her more tender areas. As far as her Master was concerned, her bottom, her breasts, and the backs of her legs were created specifically to handle the discipline that he meted out, and he did his best to make sure that none of his corrections caused her to experience pain anywhere else.

  He liked the strap, for its history and its aesthetics - he liked leather implements in general - and the fact that it truly worked her bottom over very nicely, causing bright, wide swathes of sore, swollen ridges to form immediately that grew exponentially worse as they inevitably began to overlap.

  He loved her full throated howls, and drew the punishment out as much as he could, allowing the strap to dangle some times against the very flesh it had been busily roasting as he checked in with occasionally to ask her if she was okay, and she knew that he wasn't asking her if her bottom hurt. He was being extra careful to make sure that she wasn't somehow having a relapse.

  Sometimes, even in the middle of an atrocious strapping, he could be so damned tender.

  But, far as the punishment itself went, he was far from it. When she went to sleep that evening, it was on her stomach, bound as he liked it some times, hand and foot, her bottom throbbing atrociously from his tender ministrations.

  Two months later was Raina's birthday, which was the only day of the year - besides when she was sick - that she was given a complete reprieve from having to submit, as long as what she wanted to do wasn't going to be detrimental to her health. He had a history of simply indulging her all day, asking her long beforehand for some things she thought she might want to do or have so that he could get it arranged.. If she wanted lunch in Paris and dinner in L.A., then that's what they did. If she wanted to go to the Island for the day, he made sure that that was what happened. Even if work intruded and they couldn't do it exactly on her birthday, he made it a moveable feast and simply procured the next available day to gift her with. If he had to do that, though, she actually got two days of presents, because he always made sure that on the right day, he had something for her, be it her favorite imported Belgian chocolates and a fabulous meal of her favorite foods, or having her office filled to the brim with her favorite pastel pink roses.

  This time, she couldn't think of anything she wanted to do, or anything she wanted as a gift. He would have moved Heaven and Earth, and she knew that, but she was so content and happy that she couldn't think of anything else she wanted or even needed.

  So he had to think of something himself, and he wasn't at all sure about what he decided to do.

  If there was nothing major going on at work, he always made her take it off - and he was in cahoots with her secretary to try to make sure that that was always the case, although it didn't always work. This time, it just so happened that her birthday was on a Friday, and that gave her an impromptu three day weekend. Normally, he might whisk her away to some exotic place, but unless she'd expressed some sort of interest in going anywhere in particular, he couldn't see spending the travel time.

  So what he did was throw a small, casual party for her and some of their closest friends, with all of her favorite foods, and no presents allowed, and a very ostentatious birthday cake with multiple tiers, because he knew that one of her few indulgences was a big slab of cake from a particular bakery in town. The only gift allowed at the party was his own, to her, which he gave to her as he toasted her with Cristal champagne, telling her in a voice that carried, but in a way that no one else would really know the intimate meaning of, "One of the things I'm giving you for your birthday is the weekend off."

  Her smile nearly blinded him, and what he'd given her hadn't cost him a dime - that was so like Raina. He could have given her a diamond the size of her head on a gold necklace as wide as a belt and he knew that her smile wouldn't have been any bigger or brighter.

  Applause and giggles tittered through their small audience, and one of their friends piped up with, "Is that all?"

  Raina preempted his answer, hugging him tight and saying, "That's more than enough!"

  Someone - who knew him extremely well and could get away with it - shouted out, "Cheap bastard!" and everyone laughed, knowing, that especially when it came to Raina, he was anything but.

  And he proved them right even more so the next day, when there wasn't a crowd around to comment on it, or even know about it. He wasn't that type of person - he didn't need anyone's approval for what he did.

  He made her breakfast himself the next morning, all of her favorites - both patty and link maple b
reakfast sausage, which she almost never ate, French toast using some excellent Italian bread from the same bakery that had done her birthday cake, drowning in butter and real Vermont maple syrup, and a big mug of Dunkin Doughnuts coffee. Despite the fact that they could afford better - that she could have afforded better before she even met him - that remained her favorite brand of coffee.

  He'd also cut a large slab of the tons of remaining birthday cake, just in case she had a hankering. On her birthday, she could - and did - eat anything, and cake for breakfast wasn't the worst she'd ever requested first thing in the morning. The first time he'd done this, she'd wanted a full New England roast dinner - complete with potatoes, carrots, and onions - despite the fact that it was only seven o'clock in the morning. With a slab of cake for dessert, then, too, as he recalled.

  After she'd stuffed herself - and shared liberally with him everything but the cake - he asked her to get up and get dressed. Raina always had to do an auditory double take once a year, because she wasn't used to him asking her to do anything. And this time, he was even asking that she put clothes on. How unusual!