Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Epilogue
Bonus: Extended Preview from Protected by the Scotsman, Book Two of the Stern Scotsmen Series
Additional Books in the Stern Scotsmen Series
More Stormy Night Books by Katie Douglas
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Reformed by the Scotsman
By
Katie Douglas
Copyright © 2017 by Stormy Night Publications and Katie Douglas
Copyright © 2017 by Stormy Night Publications and Katie Douglas
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published by Stormy Night Publications and Design, LLC.
www.StormyNightPublications.com
Douglas, Katie
Reformed by the Scotsman
Cover Design by Korey Mae Johnson
Images by Period Images and Shutterstock/Angelo Cordeschi
This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults.
Chapter One
Edinburgh, 1922
Edward Wolstanton stood at Edinburgh Waverley train station and checked his watch. Two minutes until the 6:04 from King’s Cross would arrive at platform nine. He pulled out the letter from his pocket and reread the words for the umpteenth time.
Dear Mr. Wolstanton,
I received your last letter and am most grateful for your kind and fortuitous offer. We shall send Poppy to you in a fortnight. She will take the 9:43 train from King’s Cross to Edinburgh Waverley, arriving at 6:04 p.m. I shall remain hopeful that you might reform my wayward daughter before she becomes irredeemable. You have my express support to employ any means necessary to necessitate an improvement in her behavior. She has changed greatly since last you saw her. So that you might know her from the train, she has dyed-black hair (naturally blonde) which she has mutilated into what the younger folk are calling a ‘bob,’ blue eyes, height 5′4″, of slim build. She dresses in the dreadful ‘flapper’ style and speaks in a most vulgar manner. I am extremely grateful for your assistance and I look forward to hearing news of your progress in due course. Arthur sends his best.
Yours Sincerely,
Rupert Hawthorne, third Earl of Hathersedge
Edward didn’t know quite what to expect from Poppy, given what her father had told him, but underneath it all, she must still be the same girl, surely. If he were honest with himself, he was more than a little excited to get to see her again, after all these years.
When the steam engine arrived, Edward gazed across the platform, ready to assist his wayward charge with her baggage, but nobody matching her description seemed to have alighted the train. Once the platform was clear, he searched for the conductor.
“Pardon me, have you seen a flapper girl with a black bob at all?”
“Oh, yes, sir; got off at Haymarket, she did. Helped ‘er with ‘er luggage, I did. Thought it were odd that no one was there to meet ‘er, sir. Did you get the stations mixed up? Next train headed that way is the 6:09 to Newcastle, sir.”
Edward furrowed his brow in consternation. Why had the girl decided to give him the slip? He gave the conductor a shilling for his trouble, and got the next train to Edinburgh’s Haymarket district.
Further enquiries revealed that the girl had taken a taxicab to a nearby address. Edward went straight there and knocked on the door of a tenement building. From inside, he heard strains of a piano. When nobody answered, he pushed the door open and proceeded down the long corridor to a curving staircase. Following his ears, he reached the second floor door behind which the piano was being played, and he banged on the wood loudly. Abruptly, the piano stopped. The door opened a crack, and a white, round face peered out at him through heavy kohl. The scent of opium was rife.
“You’re not the milkman,” the face said.
“Most definitely, I am not. I am here to collect a certain Miss Hawthorne.”
The face looked away for a moment, then turned back to him. “She’s not here.”
“I have it on good authority that she is,” Edward replied.
“No, she’s just climbed out of the window.”
He cursed and ran downstairs, through to the basement. As he suspected, there was a back door leading to a communal garden. A young woman, whom he deduced was his wayward charge, was carefully climbing down a metal drainpipe with a carpetbag on her left shoulder. She reached the ground, and her face fell when she turned and saw him. He was a little disappointed that she was unhappy to lay eyes upon him, since they’d always gotten along in the past, but given the reason she was here, he understood why she might prefer not to be near him.
She had changed so much in the intervening years since the time he danced with her, and now, he barely recognized her. Her black hair fell to just past her earlobes, with a straight fringe that nearly scraped her eyebrows. Thick black-rimmed eyes and bright red lipstick contrasted with pale powder, but it all conspired to obscure her natural features, which had been rather pleasant when last he saw them. He stood with his arms folded and a stern gaze as he looked upon her.
“You’ve not aged a day since I last saw you,” she remarked.
“You, on the other hand, are now an adult of twenty-two. And you were given instructions to get off the train at Edinburgh’s main station, not here, and to wait for me, were you not, Poppy?”
She startled and glared at him, her face twisted into a furious snarl. “It’s Adeline now. Don’t ever call me that again.”
He decided to not rise to the bait she was trying to give him. Instead, he nodded. “All right, Adeline. There must have been a miscommunication because your father never mentioned that you were going by your middle name these days.”
“He’d have to get his head out of the clouds for long enough to remember that I have a name.”
Edward frowned. He didn’t know the Earl of Hathersedge very well, but it seemed a shame that anyone would simply ignore a young lady who was so obviously in need of assistance. Climbing out of windows and down drainpipes was not an appropriate way for a young woman to deal with something she didn’t want to do. Someone surely must have taught her that by now.
“Where’s the rest of your luggage?” he asked.
“Didn’t bring any. You’ll send me home tomorrow and we’ll forget this ever happened.”
If Poppy—Adeline, he hastily corrected himself—thought for a moment that he was going to give up on her so easily, she had another think coming.
“Balderdash. Now come along, or do I have to carry you?”
“Well, if you’re offering,” she remarked saucily, then sashayed toward the gate. It led to a side road, which took them back to the vicinity of the train station in no time. Edward summoned a cab.
“Where to, guv’nor?”
“Eleven Moray Place,” he said, taking Adeline’s hand to ensure that she had no opportunity to give him the slip.
The cab drew up in the circular street where Edward’s townhouse stood in a neat row with two dozen others. In the center, there was a small grassy area. It was the most sought-after address in Edinburgh and Edward had bought his house here as soon as his inheritance had been finalized, eight years ago.
Edwa
rd unlocked the door and held it open for Adeline. Looking rueful, she stepped in behind him.
* * *
The sound of Edward closing the door behind her put Adeline in mind of the clanging of cell doors at the various constabularies where she’d been briefly incarcerated for numerous reasons. Normally, if she was incarcerated, she would lie to the arresting officer about her name and where she lived, so her parents never found out and so she didn’t have a criminal record. Unfortunately, given that Edward knew her father and brother, she couldn’t exactly give him a false address and wait for one of her chums to post bail.
This was such nonsense. Why did her family have to get in the way of her living life to the fullest? As Edward finished locking the front door, a chill ran through her body. He was very dapper, in his dark blue suit and matching tie, and a crisp white shirt. His blue eyes hadn’t changed, although his brown hair seemed darker, somehow. When had he become so… eligible? The last time she’d seen him had been at the engagement party, when his sister and her brother had celebrated their forthcoming wedding. The wedding that never happened.
She put it out of her mind a moment too late, and the memory of Arthur and Felicity’s doomed love stabbed at her heart. Seven years ago, Adeline had been fifteen and Edward had recently turned twenty, and everyone had still been optimistic that the hateful Great War would be over by Christmas. It had become a maxim, year after year, so that when the detente was finally agreed, no one had been able to believe it was really, truly going to end before Christmas 1918.
She tried not to think about it all, but seeing Edward again had dragged up the past. So Adeline did what she always did when she felt sad. She got angry, and she immediately started planning how to escape.
“I’ll show you to your room. There’s a woman who cooks and another who cleans, and there’s my valet, Guy. They will see to your needs. Dinner is served at seven-thirty sharp. I will expect you to be appropriately attired; if you’ve nothing suitable, Guy shall fetch something of Felicity’s from her room. Under no circumstances are you to go into her room, it is exactly as she left it before she… before she departed for the Somme. Am I making myself clear?”
Adeline shrugged then nodded. They began to walk up the stairs. The walls around the staircase were decorated in a pretty wallpaper consisting of a white background with blue damask patterns over the top. Occasionally, the damask was punctuated by framed photographs that seemed to be old daguerreotypes of stiff Victorian people. The staircase opened into a wide second floor landing above the main entrance hall, and it was papered in the same damask but instead of photographs, there were three framed embroideries on the wall.
“Did Fliss sew those?” Adeline asked. She saw a momentary flash of sadness cross Edward’s features before he regained control, then he frowned and nodded. She regretted asking.
He opened a door for her and placed her bag on the floor, but didn’t enter. “This is your room. Remain here until the dinner bell. After dinner, I shall decide on the consequences for your earlier behavior.”
The room was nice enough; it was papered with pale pink roses on a white background. The ceiling light was electric, which Adeline always preferred to the gas ones, and the carpet was a nondescript, faded tartan of some sort, in red and gold. It matched the curtains. There was also a single bed, with a white-painted metal frame that put Adeline in mind of a hospital, and a wooden dresser with a decent-sized mirror. Beside the bed, a nightstand held an empty glass and a jug, both on doilies, clearly put there in anticipation of Adeline’s arrival. There was not a speck of dust to be seen anywhere.
“I wait with bated breath,” she said sarcastically as she stepped inside. Consequences? Was he going to withhold dessert? She wasn’t going to let him control her. Why her parents had the preposterous notion that he would be able to handle her, when they couldn’t, she would never know. She certainly had no intention of dressing up for dinner. Eager to show him that she couldn’t be pushed around, she lined her eyes with extra-thick kohl and added her reddest lipstick, then rolled her skirt up an extra turn beneath her top.
When the dinner bell rang, Adeline went downstairs, defiant in her short, pleated skirt and low-cut top.
Edward’s dining room was decorated with more of the damask wallpaper, although this time it was deep red, and the fireplace had a painting of a man in a redcoat, looking fresh from the American War of Independence; a dog sat dutifully at his heel. It was all so colonialist, and Adeline hated it. Feeling mutinous, she sat down squarely at the head of the table and proceeded to begin carving the meat. She knew that, according to etiquette, the man of the house sat at the head of the table and cut the first slice of meat, and that it was terrible manners for a lady to try to carve her own meat at all, but she chose to disregard that in favor of doing what she liked.
“Good grief!” Edward proclaimed when he reached the doorway to the dining room. She was halfway through putting the beef on her own plate when Edward crossed the room in four strides and snatched the carving knife out of her hand before yanking her out of her seat.
“Guy, we shall be a few minutes at most.” Edward spoke to his manservant in clipped tones. Adeline tried to pull free but he held her upper arm with an iron grip as he dragged her from the room. He propelled her into a sitting room filled with overstuffed armchairs and chintz fabrics, and shut the door behind him. The curtains were closed already.
“After your behavior this afternoon, it would have been sensible to do as you were told this evening.” He stood before her and at this distance, she was very aware of his presence. Her legs quivered, but she tried to stand her ground. This was no time to back down just because his masculine scent was making her feel strange.
“I’m not wearing a prissy dress!”
“If you will not dress appropriately for dinner, then you shall not dress at all.” He yanked her skirt down and she squealed in horror. Covering herself with her hands, she couldn’t stop him from unbuttoning her top. The closeness of his body to hers made her inhale sharply. She blushed shamefully as her shirt fell down her shoulders and exposed her underwear. He eyed her semi-naked body for about half a second longer than was respectable, and she didn’t know whether to hide her cleavage or thighs with her hands, which suddenly seemed very small and unsuited to the task of hiding her body from a man’s gaze. He seemed to be fighting the urge to smile, but whether there was any approval in the expression, or if he was simply amused at something, she did not know.
“At least you had the decency to put on some underthings beneath that getup,” he remarked, but his approval seemed slightly sarcastic and made her flush a deeper crimson.
Once she was in her underwear, he reached down to her stockings. His fingers softly brushed against the untouched skin of her thighs, and she quivered as she imagined his hands around her waist, reassuring but firm, his thumbs caressing her belly. She dragged her thoughts back to the present just in time for him to unclip her garters and discard them.
Wanting to fight him off, to show resistance, she just couldn’t rouse herself from her reverie. A mild horror accompanied the realization that she was an adult, confronted with a childhood friend who was undressing her for some sort of punishment, and she wanted him.
He rolled her stockings down, making her feel more naked than she had ever thought was possible, while he picked each leg up in turn to remove the hosiery. Now, she stood before him in only the sheer silk chemise, which barely covered her breasts and gaped between them, as was the current style.
Feeling furiously embarrassed and extremely hot, she turned her head away from him before she recovered her scathing sarcasm.
“Like what you see? Bet you collect magazine pictures of girls in their underthings, don’t you?” she said.
Instead of wrong-footing him or provoking a series of denials, she seemed to have galvanized his will, for he chose that moment to sit in an overstuffed armchair and pull her over his knee. The position was not lost on her, and she inh
aled sharply in horror because there was only one thing anybody did once they had a girl over their knee, bottom upturned, face and feet near the floor. Her black silky knickers almost completely protected her bottom cheeks, though, so even if he really was going to spank her like an errant schoolgirl, it couldn’t possibly hurt.
Telling herself there was no possibility that stuffy, proper Edward would really spank her, she yelped when his hand connected loudly with her bottom, resonating throughout the room with a loud clap. The sting was instant and seemed to cover most of her right cheek. He brought his hand down over and over in a brisk pace, raining hard swats of fire over her bottom cheeks before she opened her mouth to protest.
“How dare you? When my father hears about this, you’ll be sorry!” she protested, trying to avoid the spanks. She was infuriated. How dare he punish her like a naughty child? She shifted around on his knee hoping to escape, but he held her firmly. A warm glow flashed through her nether regions as she realized he had bested her.
“Your father gave me express permission to use any means necessary to improve your attitude, young lady, and that is what I’m doing.” Edward spoke calmly. His voice didn’t match with the flurry of sharp swats he was subjecting her sit-spot to.
“No! He wouldn’t! Not if he knew you were… doing this to me!” she retorted hotly.
“I don’t think he was especially interested in the details,” Edward said. She kicked and wriggled and generally made a nuisance of herself attempting to inconvenience him as much as possible during this spanking. Truly, she was unable to escape, and part of her liked being thoroughly helpless while someone held her to account, not because she had conceded to their pathetic protests, but because they had the guts to overpower her and compel her to obey. There was a strong sense of satisfaction that accompanied the feeling of helplessness. Her underwear grew wet and her nipples hardened in response to being forced to submit.
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