Royal Discipline Page 7

  Violet closed her eyes in horror. “Please, no. No, Your Grace.”

  “Very well, then. Before I go, I want to reiterate once more that I expect you to spend your time today thinking about the value of submission, and proper manners, and the gracious acceptance of authority. Do you understand? That’s the entire point of your stay here. I’m trying to teach you, Violet. I suggest you take my instruction to heart.”

  She accepted these words in silent resignation, for all the anger and disgust she felt. She was a princess! Submission was not a necessary part of her vocabulary. Manners, propriety, the acceptance of authority? Not her concern.

  Saint Valentine’s Day seemed an eternity away, and the Duke of Thornton would never understand how misguided he was, with his endless talk of feminine virtue and submission. But he would understand when she brought him to justice for his crimes against her pride.

  This thought sustained her as he returned, hour after hour, sending Jeannie away for the ten minutes or so it took him to lecture Violet and blister her bottom with twenty firm strokes from his demon paddle.

  Oh, how she wished to turn away from the pain, to bury her bottom in a chair, or in her bed, or any protective shelter, but she couldn’t, because the cylinder impeded any such action. The last few times, he took up the lubricating oil and dripped it onto her bottom hole again, and manipulated the bulbous shaft inside her, easing it in and out before he subjected her to the paddling.

  It did, finally, begin to sink in. He was her master. She must obey him or pay the price. She literally could not hide that part of her, her buttocks, her bottom hole, any region of her body he considered suited for discipline. She must please him or be punished, and as long as she was with him, that would never change.

  The final time he came in, he walked to the back of the couch to face her, and asked in a low and serious voice, “Tell me, Violet, why I have subjected you to this ordeal today.”

  She looked up at him, dreading the last of the blows to come, but understanding that she could not escape them. “To show me that I cannot escape discipline. That I must submit to your will.”

  He nodded, studying her closely. “Do you believe that, or are you only saying what you think I wish to hear?”

  It would be easiest for her to bow her head and murmur, “Yes, Your Grace, I truly believe it.” But her pride would not allow that. Instead, she looked into his eyes and said, “It’s very complicated.”

  “In what way?”

  “The thing is, Your Grace, I don’t believe I should submit on every occasion to a man. It is too...sweeping. It does not allow for my own will.”

  “I agree. You would not submit if I told you to do something against the greater good of the kingdom, or the greater good of your family. But what if I ask you to submit for your own good? For your own peace and harmony, and that of others?”

  She could barely hold his gaze. “I don’t know. I suppose... I suppose those are acceptable reasons to submit.”

  “Sometimes it’s necessary to subdue your will and accept that someone else knows better, especially when you’ve behaved inappropriately. There’s something freeing about it, isn’t there? In being punished? In enduring consequences for what you’ve done wrong?”

  Her thoughts were muddled, and his eyes were so intense. She felt a sudden, fervent desire for his approval, for his positive regard.

  He touched her hand, a fleeting touch, and then brushed back a bit of hair from her forehead, where she had pulled and harried it all day. “You look a mess. After this last paddling, I’ll remove the bulb. Then you must bathe and take dinner in your bed until I return for your nightly spanking.”

  Her nightly spanking? After all this? It was the final straw for Violet. She burst into piteous tears. “Please...Your Grace...”

  “Violet, why do we do the nightly spankings?”

  “So I—” She sniffled, trying to catch her breath. “So I will learn to submit.”

  “And if I do not give you a nightly spanking, the impetus of our training might begin to slip. You understand that we cannot slide backwards from where we are.”

  “But I’m so tired,” she sobbed. “So tired of being spanked over and over.”

  “What will make that stop?” he asked, tilting up her chin. One of his fingers brushed over her tears. “What will make the spankings stop?”

  “They will stop when I ch-change,” she said with another great gust of sobs.

  “Indeed. And discipline will change you. It may not seem so as these days drag by, but the old you is in disorder, being chased away by a consistent course of consequences and punishment. A new, ‘changed’ you is waiting to be born.”

  “I wish she would hurry up and be born then,” said Violet. “I wish it very much.”

  “So do I.” His regard softened, and his lips turned up in a heartbreakingly handsome smile. “For I would very much like to meet that person, with her unselfish grace and virtue, and inner moral strength.”

  Then he was gone, taking up a position with the paddle behind her. Violet arched her bottom, only because Thornton took a firm grip of the wooden cylinder and made her do so.

  “What a useful tool this is,” he said. “From now on, whenever you refuse to submit to a spanking, I’ll simply insert this...what shall we call it? The ‘Handle’? I believe I’m a genius, my dear.”

  I believe you’re a madman, she thought. The paddling commenced with the hardest whacks yet. She’d known it would be that way. She knew by now, almost a month in, that he always saved the most painful strokes for last. She sobbed and clung to the back of the couch, unable to stop crying. Really, what did it matter if she soaked the sofa cushions? If he did not punish her for that, he’d find something else to punish her for.

  If only he would succeed in changing her. If only he would approve of her. Since when had his approval come to mean something to her? Sometime over the course of this six-hour ordeal, he had planted this thing within her...a tiny, struggling, glimmering, grasping motivation to change.

  Chapter Seven: A Civil Tongue

  He left her alone for three wondrous days after that, when her courses came upon her. In truth, she needed the time for her well-spanked bottom to heal. Violet had intended to be “indisposed” for as long as a week, but Jeannie, that treasonous viper, reported to her master when her flow ceased to appear.

  She hated Jeannie for that, although she loved Jeannie for making the innocently stupid decision to keep her mending in a low trunk in Violet’s dressing room.

  She noticed it the day Jeannie had been forced to sit with her for hours on end, mending servant’s aprons, gowns, capes, and livery. At last, a viable plan: she would, at some time while Jeannie was about, pretend to take ill. Jeannie would run from the room to fetch help, leaving the door unlocked. Violet would then don the servants’ clothing she’d secreted away, find a hiding place in the ensuing rush of household mayhem, and stay there until she could skulk off unnoticed, garbed as a scullery maid.

  She did fear that she couldn’t get into the clothes fast enough, and make it to a decent hiding place before she was discovered missing. The other worry was collecting food to sustain her on her journey, and keeping it hidden from the maid. It had taken two hours to ride here in the king’s fine carriage, but it might take her two days to walk, or longer, depending on how often she had to stop and rest. She’d begun hiding nuts, dried bread, and other foodstuffs that would not spoil; in a day or two, she’d have enough to feel comfortable leaving. She prayed she’d be able to find or beg water on her journey, for that was the one thing she couldn’t think how to take along.

  Because she would have to be quick, and run fast. Recapture was not an option.

  Now that she had a plan in mind, and a schedule of action, the hours dragged by even more slowly than before. Violet found it exceedingly difficult to behave civilly to her captor, now that she was so close to being free. This resulted in a sound birching the first day following her courses, and a
return to the discipline parlor the second day. This time, the metal bulb—without the cylinder—was inserted in her bottom before she was bound to the wall for a lengthy bout with an even stouter strap.

  It hurt. By God, of course it hurt, and of course she flailed and cried and struggled against the pain and indignity of her situation, but at the same time, she knew this treatment would soon come to an end. She’d stand up to him to the last, for she didn’t want him to think he’d managed in any way to change her. She might have felt some fleeting wish for his affection or approval, but that was only weakness born from the length of her ordeal.

  When he came to her the following day, and she knew she was so, so close to grasping her freedom, she did not even try to behave in a biddable manner. He quickly grew exasperated, especially when his threats to produce “The Handle” did nothing to rein her in.

  “Is it your wish to be punished ever more frequently?” he asked.

  “Yes, I wish it,” she sassed. “I love it.”

  “Very well. Go and kneel on the couch.”

  Violet did not, of course, kneel on the couch like some obedient, submissive cretin, which was why he saw fit to call for rope and a couple of footmen to bind her, hand and foot, to the velvet piece of furniture. They used another length of rope to secure her in the kneeling position the duke required.

  “You’ll never change me,” she said, as soon as the footmen exited the chamber. “You can tie me up and spank me as relentlessly as you wish, but I will always be a royal princess and you’ll always be a mere duke. I will always be above you.”

  He smiled down at her from where he stood. “I am above you right now.”

  “You know what I mean,” she went on, as he moved between their rooms collecting his various instruments of torture. “I think you were not loved enough as a child. Or perhaps you were regularly beaten.”

  He rolled his eyes, returning to her, shaking the jar of oil between his fingers. “I was rarely beaten. Only when I was surpassingly bad.”

  “You are surpassingly bad to me every day. You’re nothing but a tyrant and a bully. You hurt me because I’m better than you, and it addles you to your very core.”

  “You addle me to my very core, but not for the reasons you think.” He drew apart her buttocks to prepare her clenching hole with the oil. “As for being better than me, that may be so, but you are the one having a metal bulb seated in your arse to curb your pitiably poor behavior.”

  He pressed it forward into the tiny orifice as she squirmed and gasped. “I don’t care,” she lied. “I can barely feel it.” Her voice trembled on the last words, for she felt it very well, and it hurt and stretched as badly as ever.

  He’d attached the extruding wood cylinder this time, and gave it a sharp flick. “If this bulb fails to inspire the necessary humility, perhaps I must consider having a larger one fashioned.”

  A larger one? Her memory wandered to the line of shafts in his discipline parlor, each in a graduated size. Her mind shied away in its sudden comprehension, and she quickly changed the subject. “I suppose you will spank me now, or paddle me, or strap me, or some other form of—oh—” She wiggled her bottom some more. It was suddenly becoming quite sting-y and hot. “What—what have you done? Why is it stinging so?”

  “Is it stinging? Excellent. It was an experiment, to mix some concentrated ginger to the rest of the lubricating oil. I may have to play around a bit with the amounts, to adjust the sensation.”

  “Oh!” Her bottom twitched, growing hotter by the second. “Please, you must take it out.”

  “On the contrary, I may add more. You’re being punished, remember?”

  “No,” she shouted. “Please, it’s awful.”

  “You asked for The Handle,” he pointed out. “You professed to love it.”

  “I was only being difficult when I said that, which you very well know. Plus, at that time I didn’t realize you were going to coat the blasted thing with some godforsaken oil of hellfire!”

  “Violet,” he said, pressing his fingers over her lips. “You talk too much, and in such an abrasive manner. It’s time to tame that mouth of yours. Or rather, set it to more pleasing tasks.”

  The only pleasing task she could envision at the moment was biting off the fingertips that rested against her lips.

  “I want you to listen to me,” he said as she thrashed in her bonds. “I’ll take out the bulb and allow you to relieve yourself of the stinging on one condition. You are to comport yourself with submission and obedience while I exact an act of discipline upon your naughty mouth.”

  “What kind of discipline?” she asked. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to thrust my cock inside your mouth in a repeated fashion, until I’ve decided you’re ready to speak in a more pleasant and modulated voice.”

  “You’re going to what?” she shrieked.

  “Precisely. Until you’re ready to speak in a voice that is nothing like that. Have you ever seen a man’s cock, Violet?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about. I wish you’d let me go!”

  As she yanked at the ropes, the duke drew back the sides of his coat and undid the ties of his breeches. He reached within and brought forth a thick, rigid shaft of flesh with a swollen crown at the end.

  “This is a cock, Violet. My cock.”

  She gasped. “That is part of your body?”

  He pressed away his clothes to show her how it jutted from a thatch of dark hair at his pelvis. Two sacks of flesh hung beneath. It was altogether outrageous that men bore such appendages tucked into their breeches.

  “Something’s wrong with you,” she said. “Other men do not have that. I would have noticed.”

  “All men are fashioned so, although their cocks only grow this large and stiff when they need to be attended to. A man will sometimes slide it into his wife’s mouth if she needs humbling, or into her arsehole, if she needs more than that.”

  She stared at the huge, veiny thing in shock. God have pity on the woman the duke wed. The thought of such a shaft invading her backside reminded her of the much smaller shaft in her own bottom, and the ache and sting of the oil. She could not bear to look at Thornton’s cock any longer, so she turned away and resumed her helpless attempts to break out of her bonds.

  “I am not attending to you,” she said. “We are not wed.”

  “No, but you’re in need of punishment. Open your mouth for me, Violet,” he said, stilling her with a hand atop her head.

  “What?”

  “I told you, my cock is going in your mouth. In the same way a virtuous woman is obliged to offer her bottom for correction, she must also sometimes offer her mouth. I don’t doubt your husband will require it often, due to your penchant for disrespectful outbursts.”

  “You cannot...possibly...think to put that thing in my mouth?”

  “If you prefer, you may start by applying your lips and tongue to the tip.”

  “No, I would not prefer,” she said through her teeth. “I absolutely won’t.”

  He paused a moment. “Very well.”

  He left her and walked around the couch, his cock bobbing obscenely from his opened breeches. She heard him take up the jar of oil, and then the bulb was pulled halfway out of her bottom, followed by a liberal application of wetness. He pressed it back in, and the sting followed at once, heightening the previous irritation by several degrees.

  “Oww,” she cried, wiggling her bottom back and forth. She almost wished he would spank her, just to take her mind off the burning, nagging sensation in her arsehole. “You’re killing me.”

  “As I said, there’s only one way to have it removed.”

  She couldn’t wait to escape him. As long as she was here, she would be put in these impossibly subordinate positions, and forced to do outrageous things. “I don’t want to do what you ask,” she said.

  “Then you should speak more placidly, with less cursing. Otherwise this method shall be r
epeated until you learn your lesson.”

  Oh, what to do? She would soon go mad from the stinging in her arse. Since cooperation was her only option, she opened her lips and glared up at him in hatred.

  “You’ll have to open a bit wider,” he said, stroking his thumbs along the edges of her mouth. “And of course, you’ll not want to use your teeth in any fashion, lest you be forced to sleep with the ginger oil in your bottom for an entire night.”

  It had crossed her mind to bite him, but it seemed too far to go, sort of like throwing his books on the fire. She shut her eyes and swallowed as he pressed the tip of his cock between her lips. A moment later he pressed deeper, so his cock slid over her tongue.

  “Ah,” he sighed. “Blessed silence.”

  She had to subdue the urge to swallow. Her mouth was full of him, and his male scent teased her nostrils when she tried to draw in a gasp. He pulled away to let her breathe, and then pressed between her lips again. She did not like it. Aside from the lack of breath, her jaw ached, and her lips were stretched uncomfortably to protect him from her teeth.

  She jerked her head back from his flesh. “I don’t see how this will make me use better language.”

  “Then you have not learned your lesson yet.”

  He thrust between her lips again, even deeper, and she couldn’t escape since she was tied to the couch. For long minutes, he continued thrusting and withdrawing, choking and suffocating her until she began to understand the concept of submitting with her mouth.

  He gave her no more chances to speak. His cock acted, in effect, as a gag, preventing any words or sounds aside from helpless mewling, and his fingers gripped her head so firmly that she couldn’t pull away. After a while, her eyes began to leak tears. She wasn’t weeping. She was too preoccupied with her ordeal to weep, but the repeated act of taking his cock to the back of her throat seemed to choke the tears out of her.