The MacNaughton Bride (15 page)

“Do as you please.
 
But except for when you’re chaperoned,
you’re still to stay in this room.
 
And all of you people get back to work.
 
My brothers will let you know when she’s going to be
available and where.”
 
He stormed
out of the room and out of the house, and
Aislinn
couldn’t resist running to the window to watch him stride across the
courtyard.
 

She sighed.
 
She’d won, sort of.
 
She hadn’t won her freedom, but the
right to treat the villagers, and also, hopefully, bring the cuisine in this
place to a somewhat higher standard.
 
It was a small victory, but it was something.

Too bad her husband still
hated her.

Within the next few days,
the brothers, on her behalf, had commandeered a small cottage on the estate for
her to use as an office.
 
They
picked that location because it was a ways away from the house, and she would
be able to have a good walk to get there, spending some precious time out of
doors. They rotated coming to get her, which was great.
 
Grant and Burke were wonderful –
it was too bad their older brother was such a pigheaded ass.
 
She’d referred to him as just that in
front of each of them, and they had both dissolved into giggles, which made her
laugh, too, at such a high pitched sound coming out of such strapping
lads.
 

Chapter 8

“Don’t say that around him,
Aislinn
lass.
 
You’ll get a strapping like you’ve never felt before,” Grant imparted to
her as if he was telling her a state secret.
 
“I mistakenly said something I oughtn’t not too long after
our Father died, and I couldn’t sit down for a month.”
 
He absently began rubbing the offended
part before he realized he was in polite company.

Aislinn
couldn’t resist.
 
“I have a poultice
for that, too . . .”

Grant looked abashed, then
laughed when she burst out giggling.
 
“You are a bad, bad girl.”

“Am not.”

They laughed there way to
the small house.
 
As he helped her
off with her cloak, Grant said, “I wish my brother would come to his senses,
lass.
 
I’m sorry he’s treating you
so.”

Aislinn
tried to smile, but didn’t really accomplish her goal.
 
“It’s okay, Grant.
 
It will resolve itself, eventually.”

She worked hard, every day,
but it was one of the most fulfilling things she’d ever done.
 
And the people were incredibly
thankful, and almost always tried to pay her in some way.
 
The food in the castle was getting
better only because the women of the village were gifting her with breads and
cakes and pies as a way to pay for her services.
 
The men most often offered repairs to her “office,” and soon
the run down little cottage sported real glass windows and a beautiful stone
fireplace as each man repaid her by using his own skills to her benefit.

Kell
continued to ignore her, making sure that
Sile
and
the cook, who were now assisting Jenny regularly in
Aislinn’s
care, knew to inform him when the Lady began her show of blood for the
month.
 
That hadn’t happened so
far, but he questioned them occasionally, just to be sure they hadn’t
forgotten.
 
Eventually, it got to
his ears that she had been venturing beyond her little station to treat some
patients who couldn’t get to her, and that his brothers were gradually leaving
her alone rather than staying with her while she worked.
 
They had things to do themselves, but
he needed to make sure that she wasn’t alone with any men.
 
She couldn’t be trusted.

One night, she didn’t come
home on time.
 
His brothers were
nowhere to be found, but he knew for a fact that Grant was off on a trip to
Edinburgh at his own behest and Burke had gone to visit the one and only lady
that was a true rival to his devotion to the Church.
 
For his part, despite what a travesty his marriage was,
Kell
hoped that Burke chose
Tavia
Douglas and had a
hoarde
of kids instead of spending
his life in devotion.
 
It just
seemed more natural, and he wanted Burke to have a chance at the kind of
happiness that he himself obviously wasn’t going to have.

Kell
spent the evening in an extremely uncomfortable chair in the shadows, lying in
wait where he had a clear view of the door, a bottle of good – family
brand – scotch by his feet and a half full glass in his hand.
 
It was nearly midnight when she decided
to come home, peeping in the door and looking around, obviously not seeing him
in the shadows.
 
She crept in on
tiptoes, closing the door with nary a sound, then making her way slowly, so
slowly, to the stairs.
 
Kell
was able to get up and across the foyer just as
quietly, and as she lifted her foot to use the first step, he leaned forward so
that his mouth was inches from her ear, and said, “It’s nice of you to come
home.”

Her shriek hurt his ears,
but he ignored it.
 
Several
servants came running, but
Kell
waved them away.
 

“It’s especially nice since
you shouldn’t have been out in the first place,” he hissed, grabbing her upper
and pulling her up the stairs, then pushing her into her room ahead of him.

She shirked out of her coat
herself – her husband being the gentlemanly type that he was didn’t offer
to help her – and threw it on the bed.
 
She didn’t need this right now, but apparently she was going
to get it anyway.
 
“Yes, I was
out.
 
Yes, I was by myself.
 
But – “

“I don’t want to hear a
‘but’ – not from you.
 
I
don’t need those kinds of details rolling around in my head – I’ve
already conjured enough of them from the morning after our wedding night,
thanks to you and your maid.”

Aislinn
sighed and began to get ready for bed.
 
There was nothing else she could do. She didn’t intend to spend the rest
of her life defending herself against a charge that was bogus to a husband who
really didn’t want to believe her anyway.
 
So she disrobed as far as she could, but with no Jenny appearing, she
had no way to get to the buttons that ran down the back of her dress.
 
She walked up to him and turned around,
piling her hair in her hand and lifting it out of his way. “Would you unbutton
me, please?”
 
He’d seen most of her
already, she reasoned, and he was her husband anyway.

Disconcerted by her request
and her nearness,
Kell
did what she asked without thinking,
watching the line of her back as it was revealed by the parting fabric.
 
God, he wanted her.
 
He thought he would give his left
testicle to be able to throw her onto that bed right now and drive himself into
her.
 
His somewhat besotted mind
– fogged not only by the fine,
smokey
liquor
he’d consumed but by the teasing scent of her lilac perfume and the softness of
her hair as it fell down onto his hand before he removed it.

He knew there was a reason
– and a damned good one – why he shouldn’t do it, but for some
reason he couldn’t seem to remember it.
 
She smelled so good; she looked so good, that he just couldn’t resist
her a second longer.

As she turned to remove her
dress, the bands of his fingers locked around her arms and
Aislinn
found herself guided over to the bed.
 
Before she could marshal any sort of resistance, he had her over his lap
and her skirts hid almost the entire room from her view – she could only
see exactly what was beneath her nose – that awful carpeting she’d seen
much too closely once before.
 
She
recognized this position, and knew she didn’t want to see where this was going,
but even in his cups, as he apparently was from the wreaking smell of his
breath, he was too strong for her.
 
No amount of struggling or contortions was going to help her.
 

In her own defense, she
didn’t think she should have seen this coming.
 
He hadn’t come near her in a long time, and she’d forgotten
that he intended to take pretty much any time she displeased him as a reason to
spank her.
 
She had begged to be
let up the last time, begged him to stop spanking her long before he’d
finished, and it was humiliating – the entire experience was humiliating,
but it was that much worse to remember that she’d wasted her breath pleading
with him to stop when he acted like he’d never heard her.

So
Aislinn
resolved not to do that this time.
 
In fact, she resolved to take this spanking as quietly as she could.

That firm resolve lasted
through about eight swats with that broad, flat hand, and when the tears she
tried desperately to hold back began to flow down the set of cheeks he wasn’t
reddening, she found she could no longer suppress her voice.
 
It was like his swats hurt a thousand
times worse when she tried to ignore them and convince herself that they were
little love pats.
 
His hand cracked
loudly against her
nates
, sometimes hitting exactly
the same spot twice.
 
It was this
– coincidence or not, she wasn’t sure – that made her cry out for
the first time as tears raced down into her open mouth.

“Please
nooooooooooooo
!”

Again, it was as if she
hadn’t spoken.
 
She reverted to
trying to be as quiet as she could, but it was damned hard.
 
Even drunk, he was extremely
methodical, and had covered every bit of her vulnerable flesh in his first
round of spanks, and now he was covering the same, already inflamed skin, for
the second time.
 
It was
awful.
 
It was only the second time
in her life that she’d met a pain she couldn’t handle, and part of that was
that she didn’t know how long it was going to go on.
 
A healing bone got gradually better.
 
But his spankings only got quickly
worse.

Spanking her cleared some
of the alcohol induced fog in
Kell’s
mind.
 
Maybe it was her groans and pleas for
mercy, maybe it was the sight of that gorgeously rounded bottom of hers, but
whatever it was, it sobered him up more quickly than anything else could.
 
But he continued to spank her even
after he’d come more to his senses, because she had disobeyed him.

When he finally stopped,
the sobbing girl fell to her knees between his legs, snuffling and choking
loudly, reaching back in that automatic, age old way of the recently spanked to
feel what horrid damage had been done by the spanker.
 
Of course, there wasn’t anything beyond a lot of redness,
but the rubbing still felt good,
Kell
remembered all
too vividly from his own myriad trips over his father’s knee.

She tried to raise herself
off her knees, but
Kell’s
feet were on her
skirt.
 
“Let me up,” she repeated
that oft used phrase from just a few minutes ago.

“No,” he answered gruffly,
putting his hands under her arms to lift her onto the bed.
 
Aislinn
found
herself on her back on the bed, with her only somewhat sobered husband leaning
eagerly over her.
 
He peeled off
the dress that he had already unbuttoned, and split her chemise down the front
with one well aimed rip.
 
Her ample
breasts spilled out, and she found that covering them with her hands or arms
only managed to plump them up as if she was offering their bounty to him, which
couldn’t have been the farthest thing from the truth.

Kell
descended on those gorgeous globes as if he was a starving man at a
buffet.
 
He was a little less
gentle than he might have been if he was truly in his right mind, but his
desire for her overruled a lot of his more gentlemanly tendencies.
 
If the whole chicken bladder incident
had never happened, he would have taken her with infinite care –
believing until the last moment that she was a virgin – and made sure
that nothing he did frightened her, gently talking her through everything that
he did to her . . .

But now he knew there was
no reason for all of the careful tenderness he would have smothered her
with.
 
There was no need to make
sure that she liked what he did, since she probably knew more about it than he
did and could teach him a thing or two.

He captured each nipple in
turn, suckling and flicking his tongue over the tip, using his spare hand to
tug and turn its sister.
 
She was
moaning again, but not pleading – not yet anyway.
 
And the moans were distinctly of
pleasure rather than pain, although they sounded slightly apprehensive, too, as
if she was worried that he might hurt her when he took her in revenge for not
being the virginal bride he’d contracted for.

But
Kell
didn’t like to hurt women.
 
He’d
always gotten a lot more satisfaction out of being able to bring them to
pleasure.
 
It made him hard just
thinking about making his lover scream in pleasure, but he was so hard already
he didn’t think that he was going to have time for his usual tendencies this time.
 
That was all right – he was sure
she wouldn’t miss it and he could make it up to her another time . . .

There was something nagging
him in the back of his mind as to why he wasn’t supposed to do this right now,
but he couldn’t put his finger on it . . . and he could put his finger on her .
. . and more . . .

Kell
scrambled between her legs, thoughts of eventually using all of his tricks to
make her scream with pleasure playing through his mind, making him want to
drive into her with all of his considerable might.
 
He lay atop her, reaching down to adjust his kilt and free
his already rock hard member.
 
Her
bloomers were already long gone from the spanking, and when he settled back
down onto her, he found her notch immediately and began to push against her.