His (12 page)

"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 breakfast 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!

She acquiesced to his requests easily, mostly because he'd piqued her interest. Once she was dressed, he took her hand and guided her out the back door, then down the gentle slope towards what had been an abandoned guesthouse. It didn't look abandoned any more, but then it had been years since she'd been down here. If they had guests, which was rarely, they stayed in one of the multitude of bedrooms in the main house.

As they got closer and closer, and she saw how it had been cleaned up and painted, Raina supposed that, if his present to her was to have renovated the place, so that they could have privacy even when they were invaded with family or friends, that would be lovely.

But just then, his surprise - one of them, anyway - decided to announce itself, and a big black head craned over the half door of what had been converted to a stall, joined seconds later by a second, beautiful, fiery red ginger head that nickered at her as if they'd been friends for years.

Raina was overwhelmed, and ran to pat those sleek necks and scratch the big, friendly faces. She'd had horse fever all her life - since she was six or eight or so and discovered horses through an ancient copy of "Black Beauty", but of course her family had absolutely no money for such luxuries. And then, now that she did have the money, she hadn't remembered the yearning, although it had never really left her.

She'd confided her interest in horses to him one evening months and months ago, when they were talking quietly in the darkness. He'd suggested that she look into lessons, but she'd never gotten around to it.

The sorrel kept butting her chest, as if demanding a special something. "I'm sorry, sweetie, I don't have a treat for you - " she started to apologize, but only until he produced a big bag of apples, which she doled out to the grateful animals, then threw herself into his arms.

"Thank you so much - this is too generous!"

He gave her a look that said she'd better not go any further with that sentence, and she didn't. She was much too tickled.

"The stable is just big enough for the two of them. You have all the tack you need, and I have someone coming on a daily basis to take care of them."

"Oh, wow, I was wondering how I was going to muck out a stall and get into work at the same time!" She was so happy she was practically dancing, and her happiness was infectious.

"No, that's not all of your surprised, you know."

When Raina turned to him, her eyes sparkled with dainty greed. "It's not?" she whispered, not really believing him.

But he was shaking his head. "Nope. C'mere."

They rounded the corner of the stable, to an area that had been converted into a tack room. And there, in the corner of the small room, was a basket, in which resided two babies, one of the canine persuasion and one of the feline, both festooned with big red ribbons that were bigger than they were.

Raina was totally lost. She'd wanted animals and he hadn't, and she'd never pushed him about it at all. She'd lost her cat several years before they'd gotten together, and had always wanted to find another friend, and now she had two.

"Oh, they're gorgeous!"

She actually cried over them, and he wondered if he'd done the wrong thing, but she explained good tears versus bad to him. He was still left wondering if she was a little fragile from being sick, even though that was a while ago.

She was also surprised that he was going to let them into his relatively pristine house, but he seemed to enjoy them as much as she did. Raina was glad that he'd gotten them together, so that as they grew up, they could be buddies.

That weekend was one of the best in Raina's life. He'd waited on her hand and foot, up to a point, of course. He would never quite be able to pull of subservient, and she didn't really want him to, anyway. He'd cooked most of her meals himself, and they were even edible. She could eat chocolate at midnight, and had no bedtime the entire weekend, so they stayed up and watched DVDs, and even went out to a drive in at one point.

He had the chef at one of her favorite restaurants come to make dinner for her - a beef bourguignon that was absolutely amazing - then happily, it seemed, helped her begin to potty train the puppy and establish a litter box for the kitten in a guest bathroom.

And that Sunday night, before midnight came and he turned into a pumpkin, he worshipped her in the best way he knew how, but in a way he rarely did - with no leather, no bonds, no humiliation and absolutely no pain.

He bathed her himself, in the huge sunken tub in their cavernous master bathroom. He'd surrounded it with jasmine scented candles, and stripped down to his underwear, dragging the softest washcloth he could buy over every single inch of her body, and even tenderly washing her hair, then wrapping her up in a huge fluffy towel and carrying her into their bedroom, where he dried her thoroughly and toweled dry her hair as much as he could. She let him spread her out on their bed in a very different way from how he usually did it, fanning her hair out behind her so that it would dry, if slowly, then letting him massage her until she was just a puddle of ooze on the comforter.

And then he put his mind - and everything else he had, and all his intimate knowledge of her - to the wonderful task of pleasuring her. He kissed and licked and sucked every bit of flesh he could get to, and then settled down for the feast of a lifetime as he stretched out with his face between her legs, and half of himself hanging uncomfortably off the bed. Even so, he wouldn't have traded places with any man in the world. He was doing exactly what he wanted to do, for the only person in the world he wanted to do it to.