book JdM6x1406931-20978754 (8 page)

Chapter Nine

There was a huge cheer when Angus opened the door. Elisabeth knew what he was doing, for her cousins had whispered to her about it, but she had never understood what they had meant by “maidenblood”. She had been sure it must have something to do with her monthly bleeding and that perhaps one’s husband did something that brought on a little bit of that, so that it somehow proved you were a maiden (though of course she had not until now even known what it truly meant to be a maiden).

To be a maiden… not to have felt a man’s… thing (what had he called it?) doing… that (and what had he called that—that thing that he had done to her?).

And it seemed there was a new word also for her own parts—the places she had been taught to call her private part and her secret part. Now it seemed her husband would call them that word he had said, which she turned over now in her mind, unable to help herself. “Cunny,” he had said. How could such a simple word, with such a delicate little sound, somehow be so shameful to think about, she wondered. Facing the wall, her eyes open now that Angus had gone for the moment, she mouthed it silently, “Cunny.” She put her hand down there, touched it—touched her cunny, the way she used to touch her secret part sometimes, when she was feeling very wicked. It felt strange, but the burning pain she had felt when he had entered her was gone, and it was soothing to caress herself lightly there.

And then suddenly she remembered the other words with an intense blush. She whispered to the wall, “My husband fucked me. He fucked my cunny with his yard.”

And I loved it,
she thought, feeling a sob rise into her throat again.
I loved it above all when he grew angry, and he took me, and deflowered me, and treated me like an animal to be tamed. I have never felt pleasure anywhere near as great as I felt when I struggled against him, and I knew there was no escape, and I felt those powerful muscles, and I knew that I belong to him, and he will fuck me as he pleases.

What was she to do? She must let him fuck her, of course, for she knew that was his right, and although she knew she must never show it, she loved to make him happy, even now, already, on the day of their marriage. Surely it was a holy, good thing to make your husband happy? When he had… finished and his yard had done that funny slippery thing inside her (which she did not really understand), he had seemed so very happy. Indeed, it had seemed to make him happy to hold her down beneath him, and that feeling had awakened in her the terrible pleasure that seemed her own response to what his yard had done.

So she would do her best to make him happy in his bed as in his little croft-house. She would try not to earn the strap, no matter how much her strange desires seemed to cry out for it. But she must not let him call that pleasure from her again, for it did not befit the Lady of Urquhart to be a slave to her body and to her husband’s yard, as Angus MacGregor had just shown her she might be unless she were very careful.

When Angus returned to his bed, then, she had prepared herself to be agreeable. When she heard his footsteps approaching, with a firm resolve she turned herself back towards him with a smile and said, “Welcome back to your bride-bed, Angus MacGregor.”

He greeted her with a smile so warm and loving it made her heart ache. “Are you alright, then, lass?” he asked.

“More than alright, My Lord.”

He laughed. “And how is your cunny, milady?”

She felt herself color, and she knew her face had betrayed a moment’s displeasure because his brow furrowed of a sudden. Oh, if only she could tell him that she loved to be abased by his words and by his body! That her displeasure was not at him but at herself for the way her cunny tightened when she heard it called by its shameful new name!

She put the smile back on her face. “It, too, is more than alright, husband. Did I please you?”

Angus lay down beside her and lifted the plaid that covered her and regarded her naked body for a moment before he wrapped himself up with her in the wooly cloth.

Outside, the sounds of parting company came to Elisabeth’s ears, and the pipers were playing the traditional farewell tune. It made her sad to think the day was over, but the die she had wished to cast had been cast, and she knew that she had made the right choice, for her true pride and her true honor, to wed her Highlander.

“My dearling, my Elisabeth, you pleased me more greatly than I could ever have dreamt.” He reached out under the plaid with his powerful arms and gathered her into himself, then ran his right hand up and down her, as if trying to reassure himself of her truly being there with him in his bed.

“I love you, Elisabeth MacGregor,” he said.

Barely thinking, she replied, “I love you, Angus MacGregor.” The response had seemed to well up in her, born out of the way he had mastered her and the way he had cherished her. She hardly knew what she meant, but her heart had responded of its own accord. Surely it was right that a woman should love her husband, she thought as she drifted off to sleep.

* * *

When she awoke, to the crowing of roosters, he was not in bed with her, and she felt so forlorn she could hardly credit it. How could he, the man she had put in the pillory only two days before, have become so important to her happiness? Along with the loneliness, though, there was relief, because he would not see how much she needed his presence. She lay, thinking again about her strange wedding day, about mutton and whiskey and Highland dances.

Did she miss her father? No—she had never known him really. Did she miss the noble life she would, it seemed, never have again? She missed rooms that did not smell of peat and blankets that did not smell of men’s hard labor, she supposed, wrinkling her nose at the smell of the plaid under which she lay even as she nestled herself deeper into it. But for that price she had gained Loch Glanaidh and the Highland sky and freedom.

The door opened and Angus came in. His first look was towards her, she saw with a rush of joy that she tried to contain in her heart as she let the smile it caused show upon her face. He met it with his own smile.

“Calum and Alan did my chores for me,” he said as he banked the fire on the hearth, “the rascals.”

“And mine?” she asked, though she did not even know what her chores might be.

He laughed. “Yours, too.”

“You’ll teach me them? As you taught me about the fire?” Another dangerous feeling of warmth, just at the thought of Angus teaching her, showing her, holding her little hands in his big ones.

“Yes, lass,” he said. “But this morning we have time to enjoy one another, it seems.”

She felt her face grow hot and her brow furrow. Surely her resolve was not to be tried again, so soon? How could she bear it?

Angus lay down again beside her, and she tried desperately to look happy that he had done so, wondering whether she were losing her wits. To be so madly happy that your husband has come back to your bride-bed that you feel your honor is in mortal peril, and therefore to be terribly anxious that he has come back to your bride-bed, and thus to need to pretend to be happy that he has come to lie beside you—surely those were not the feelings of a sane woman.

But for once he did not seem to notice her misgivings, and he smiled into her eyes kindly and warmly. He put his right hand gently around the back of her neck and kissed her, and she tried to respond the way she thought she was supposed to: modestly and yielding just a little—not the way her body really wanted, giving everything to him and crying out for more.

“There now,” he said, drawing his head back. “Was that so bad?”

She had done it—he had not sensed that it was so far from bad that in her heart of hearts she wished that he would lie atop her again and fuck her until she screamed that she could not bear any more of the pleasure of his yard inside her cunny.

“No, Angus, it was not,” she said, softly.

“All right, then. Are you ready to learn more about the ways of pleasing me?”

She nodded obediently, though she was mystified as to what he meant. Had he not already enjoyed her utterly?

“There is a thing that a wife must learn to do for her husband,” he murmured, narrowing his eyes to show that she should heed him, “that will seem to you very strange and even shameful. It is nevertheless a pleasure I will often require of you, Elisabeth, and when I tell you that it is time for you to do it, you will obey me. Do you understand?”

Elisabeth could feel that she had begun to develop real skill in dissembling how greatly her new husband’s masterful ways moved her. She made her face a kind of mummer’s mask of innocent trepidation at the thought that husbands imposed such duties, while her loins were afire beneath the plaid and the wetness had begun to flow anew just at the idea that she would be forced to do something shameful that would please Angus.

“What is it, Angus?” she whispered.

He did not answer, but instead got out of bed as Elisabeth watched in confusion. He unbelted his dark red and green plaid and shrugged it from his shoulders. Then he laid it before him on the swept dirt floor of the croft-house.

“Come kneel here, Elisabeth,” he said. “In front of me.”

Oh, no.
She still had no idea what he would do to her once she had knelt before him, but the very thought of being naked, upon her knees, while he was in his long shirt, took hold of her mind. The war inside her flared into battle.

“Oh, Angus,” she said. “I won’t. The Lady of Urquhart does not kneel before anyone but the king.”

She saw wrath darken his brow. “Would you like a chance to think of that again, wife?” he said. “I have told you that this is a duty I shall require. Recall, Elisabeth, in the barn, how I told you that you must learn to serve me in my bed?”

She pretended that she thought he was jesting. “Oh, but that is the floor, husband! Not your bed!”

His quickness again astonished her as he reached out and ripped the plaid off her naked body and tossed it aside. Then he reached out, and with dread, but also with that strange thrill she could not push away, she watched him take the strap—two layers of dark brown leather stitched together and bound to a wooden handle—from its hook next to the bed. He held it in his right hand and slapped its length across his left palm, twice. Then he said, “On your knees before me, Elisabeth. This moment.”

Making her eyes look as frightened as she could, Elisabeth obeyed him, scrambling from the bed to kneel before him upon his plaid.

“Much better, Elisabeth,” Angus said, softly. “Am I not your king, now, as much as the one in Edinburgh?”

She looked up into his eyes and whispered, “Yes, sire.”

With his left hand, then, he lifted his shirt to his waist, and she saw his yard in the light streaming from the eastern window for the first time. It made her think of a sword and of a pestle, the way it hung straight out from him, swollen so that the skin along the shaft seemed to bulge with veins. The sight stirred her beyond anything she might, she thought, ever express, and it stirred her so shamefully that she wished never to be made to try to express it.
I shall never be truly tamed
, she thought,
for he can never make me tell him what the mere sight of his manhood does to me
.

“Suck my yard, Elisabeth,” Angus said simply.

Chapter Ten

Angus looked down at Elisabeth’s face, mere inches from the tip of his man’s staff. With his shirt in his left hand, exposing himself lewdly before his noble bride, and the family strap in his right, it seemed to him that he had whiskey flowing through his veins, so hot did every part of his skin, and above all his rigid yard, feel at the prospect before him. He once had a lass whom he loved in a barn at Inverness, when he had too much to drink one night at the clan-gathering, take him in her mouth, at her offer, to keep her from getting with child, but this was very different.

He remembered when he had first decided that this duty was one he would require of his wife. Looking by chance through the window of the house of a distant cousin in Achmonie, he had seen a naked wife on her knees before her husband as he cradled her head in his hands, with an expression on his face that indicated that he was feeling a pleasure as great as the sea. His own yard had grown so stiff at the sight, and the masterful side of himself that he was coming to know so well had come to the fore so strongly that he had on the instant resolved that his wife should serve him that way whenever he wished.

That had been before he had known that his wife would be the Lady of Urquhart. He had been at peace with the masterful side of his nature for a good while now, and even at peace with his resolution to drink very little because of it, as he thought about his Da’s drunken, violent rages. When he had told Elisabeth about the kind of wife he would expect her to try to be, he had been sure that would be the end of it; certainly he would have to strap her sometimes so that she knew her behavior must be according to his notions of the part of a Highland bride, but he would do so according to his own responsibility towards her, to help her learn her place and to be content with her new rank and station.

Now, though, the prospect lay before him of strapping those beautiful bottom cheeks red to make her take his yard into her mouth, where he knew a pleasure lay that was greater even than the pleasure of her tight little cunny. The feeling was not as he had thought it would be, for he found that his desire to strap Elisabeth’s bottom was almost as great as his desire to look down upon the Lady of Urquhart with his man’s staff filling her mouth. Suddenly he wanted nothing as much as he wanted to use the strap on her arse while he fucked her prim little mouth, whether she sucked his yard obediently or no.

He looked down into her beautiful blue eyes, and he saw there a resolve that he could not, he suddenly thought, truly fathom.

“I will not,” Elisabeth said, “dishonor my mouth that way, Angus MacGregor.”