Humbling His Bride

by Loki Renard

  “Yes,” he nodded. “And we know that it can break down.”

  Lydia frowned. “It can break down? You mean… stop working?”

  “Mhm.” His forearms rippled with the motions he was making as he scooped the cut carrots up and put them into boiling water. “It breaks all the time, actually. It’s just that the technicians fix it before anyone notices.”

  “It breaks all the time?” Lydia had never given much thought to the machinery before. It had always just been there, like the sun and the rain. It hadn’t ever occurred to her that it could stop working any more than it had occurred to her to worry that the sun might go out.

  “Yes. And when it does, people die unnecessary deaths because they don’t know how to look after themselves, or each other for that matter.”

  “People die!?” Lydia was horrified. “What do they die from?”

  “Hunger, dirty water…”

  Hunger? He was referring to the uncomfortable feeling that came on an hour or two after the last visit to the synthesizer. She had never known it was dangerous. “You mean you can be so hungry you can actually die?”

  Tristan took a deep breath and looked at her with a quirked brow, as if he was trying to decide whether to believe her question or not. She had seen that expression on his face a great deal in the short time they had known one another. It was that expression more than anything he said that made Lydia realize that she had just been kept so separate from the real world that her existence barely came tangential to it.

  “People used to die of hunger a lot. Food synthesizers haven’t always been around, and may not always be around either. It’s important to be able to find food and cook your own meals.”

  Lydia looked at him suspiciously. Perhaps she shouldn’t believe absolutely everything he said. Dying of simply being hungry seemed unlikely. She had been hungry many times in her life and not died on one single occasion. In her experience, one either died of getting very, very old, or from leaving New Paris and getting radiation sickness in space. As long as one stayed indoors, one was safe from death. That’s what her mother had always said. Then again, Lydia had to admit to herself that her mother had always been an outrageous liar.

  Tristan went on cooking, surprising her with his capabilities, and how very appealing he looked with his formal coat removed, his sleeves turned up, his brow furrowed slightly with the concentration necessary to complete his task. He was the most inordinately handsome, intelligent, capable man Lydia had ever laid eyes on, and she could not quite believe that he had chosen her for his wife.

  “Are you paying attention to what I am doing?” The question was delivered in gently chiding tones.

  “Uh, yes, of course,” Lydia lied. Well, it wasn’t a complete lie. She was paying very close attention to the way his body moved, how powerful it was even at relative rest, how tall and strong he was, the way his pants were just tight enough to show the muscled rounds of his buttocks when he moved…

  In what seemed to her to be a remarkably short time, dinner was ready. They sat down at a table that she set with forks and knives and placemats, and ate together.

  To Lydia’s surprise, the food tasted unlike anything she had ever experienced before. It was rich and full of textures and flavors. All the different colored items had a unique set of qualities, each of which seemed to please her body in different ways.

  “How is this so good?”

  “Synthesized food looks like food and has a similar basic amino profile, but isn’t the same as real food,” Tristan explained, pouring a little red wine into her glass. She took a grateful sip.

  “Where does this come from?” She held up a brown bit of food that was particularly tasty. On the synthesizer it would have been B45, but she was pretty sure that wasn’t what it really was. Tristan had emphasized how all the food came from real things.

  “That’s a steak from a wild cow.”

  Lydia looked at her fork in confusion. “How do you get it from the cow?”

  “Well, you kill the cow, then…”

  Lydia dropped her fork and shoved her plate away in horror. “You kill the cow!?”

  He nodded. “Sort of unavoidable, really.”

  She scowled, furious at the revelation. “Well, why not just go around killing everything then, Tristan, you brute! We don’t have to sustain ourselves through murder.”

  “Actually, we do,” Tristan replied. “What do you think the base materials for the synthesizers are?”

  “Powder,” Lydia said. “I’ve seen the powder. They deliver it once a week to the house and Father complains how heavy it is and how we need another labor robot and then Mother says that she can’t stand how… anyway,” she said, returning to the original thread of the story. “It comes from powder.”

  “That powder is shipped here from colonies where various animals and plants are harvested, desiccated, ground up, and packaged for transport.”

  Lydia’s jaw dropped. “No, it isn’t!”

  “Denying it doesn’t make it any less true,” Tristan said calmly. “Now, finish your meal.”

  “I will not!” She folded her arms over her chest and gave him a look of great dissatisfaction. “If living a traditional lifestyle involves killing things, then I won’t do it!”

  “Nobody is asking you to kill anything,” he said. “Besides, you don’t have to eat meat if you don’t want to. People in the past often didn’t. Finish your vegetables.”

  “Hmph.” She turned her head and pouted, uninterested in what he was saying.

  “You are headed for another spanking and a very early bedtime,” he said in warning tones.

  Lydia narrowed her eyes. “Do not speak to me like I’m a little girl, Tristan.”

  She didn’t quite know where she was getting the courage to speak to him in such a way, but she suspected it was her outrage that was making her bold.

  “If you behave like one, you will be treated like one,” he growled back. “Now finish what you will of your meal and go and do the dishes.”

  “Do the dishes?”

  “Wash them,” he clarified.

  “I suppose you expect me to wash them with my hands like some sort of cavewoman,” she shot back. “Well, I won’t. This is all very unseemly and unnecessary and…” She stopped talking because Tristan had patted his mouth with his napkin, pushed his chair back, and was rising from the table. One long stride brought him to her. His hand wrapped around her upper arm and Lydia found herself hauled up from her chair, marched into the kitchen, and held while Tristan fished around in a drawer for one of his primitive implements—a wooden spoon.

  “Turn around and touch your toes,” he ordered, releasing her.

  “I will do no such… ow!”

  She yelped as he pulled up her skirt and landed the flat of the spoon against her outer thigh before repeating the order.

  “Stop it!”

  “Do as you’re told.”

  She looked into his handsome face and saw pure determination there. Her thigh was stinging and she knew her bottom soon would be as well. Should she capitulate and hope that he showed her mercy? Or should she fight him tooth and nail?

  “You have taken me from my home. You have made me your wife. You have taken my modesty. But you will not break me, Tristan Kane.”

  Fight it was.

  He sighed, took hold of her hand again, spun her around, and bent her against the kitchen counter so that her bottom protruded at a rather vulnerable angle. He kept her in place with one hand on the back of her neck while he used the other to throw up the hem of her skirt and reveal her bare bottom. The spanking she had received at the palace had faded, leaving her skin slightly tender but otherwise unharmed. As he rubbed the spoon against her bottom, she did not know if that would be the case for long.

  “You are acting like a spoiled little girl,” he lectured sternly. “I told you I expect obedience from you. I certainly do not expect backtalk and argumentativeness, and I will absolutely not tolerate defiance. Do you
understand?” He punctuated the question with a sharp swat from the wooden spoon that stung the middle of her left cheek much like an angry hornet.

  Lydia gasped as heat radiated from the spot in a blaze that was added to with subsequent swats peppered over her exposed rear. The wooden spoon stung in a way his hand did not, the little surface area of the flat wood focusing the power of the swat in one relatively small point. Tristan had to put his palm flat between her shoulder blades to keep her in place as her body reacted with squirming and kicking and a great deal of sounds of complaint ranging from gasps to curses.

  The spoon landed ten times on each cheek, never catching the same place twice until her bottom was a patchwork of stinging heat. He released her after the dose was delivered and she leaped up immediately, dancing about the kitchen in an effort to rid herself of the heat.

  “I will not tolerate a spoiled brat as my wife,” he said as she bounced on her toes and clutched her bottom.

  “That’s unfortunate, because you have one,” she flung back at him.

  He was handsome when he smiled, which he did broadly in response to her attitude.

  “Lydia,” he sighed, shaking his head. “Your tongue will get you into so much trouble.”

  She was still rubbing her bottom, which was now thoroughly aching. The wooden spoon had awakened the slumbering beast of the earlier spanking and left her with a very sore bottom indeed. Sitting down would be utterly out of the question now—though Tristan clearly did not intend on allowing her to sit anyway. His strong arm swept around the back of her thighs as he crouched down and picked her up over his shoulder.

  Bottom hot and stinging, Lydia was carried through the cottage into a bedroom. His bedroom. Their bedroom. She could smell his musk more strongly here than anywhere else. Tristan tossed her down on a large bed covered in a patchwork quilt. She bounced lightly, landing on pure original down that cushioned her small fall.

  Before she could sit up, her smaller frame was covered by his. He slid up the bed over her, large palms planted either side of her waist as he eclipsed the light and pressed a passionate, demanding kiss to her lips.

  If it were not for the burning of her buttocks against the bedding, she would almost have been able to forget that this was the man who had just punished her like a naughty girl. His hands were on her, sliding up under her light dress, caressing her curves and exploring her body with a tenderness that belied his strength.

  “Now,” he said, pressing his lips to the side of her neck, his teeth grazing over the sensitive skin. “Do you promise to be a good girl and do as you are told?”

  With her sore bottom pressed against the soft bed, Lydia squirmed in response to the question, which did not seem to her to be a real one. He knew very well she would probably not be a good girl; she had already proved that she wouldn’t be.

  “So quiet,” he said, looking down at her with dark, amused eyes. “Don’t tell me you’ve lost the power of speech.”

  “I don’t want to lie to you,” she said with the smallest teasing smile.

  “Ah,” he growled. “So you intend on being a disobedient little brat and earning yourself more discipline. I wonder if I know why that is.” As he spoke he drew his hand up between her thighs and cupped her mound where the inevitable moisture was gathering at the seam of her lips. She moaned as he massaged her gently, teasing her with his commanding, possessive touch until she was melting beneath his fingers and suddenly neither of them could stand the tyranny of clothing anymore.

  He stripped her gown from her body, leaving her naked, then turned his attention to his own clothing. Under the urging of agile fingers his shirt and pants slid away and his body came into view for the first time, a powerful length of masculinity so much more defined and harder than her own soft frame. Lydia looked at him with no small measure of wonder, and she licked her lips as the engorged length of his cock bobbed against the plane of his abdomen.

  Tristan seemed to sense her wonder, for he laid down on the bed next to her and allowed her to both look and touch him gently without demanding anything of her. She ran her fingers over his chest where dark hair curled over slabs of muscle, and then let her touch run lower over his abdominal plane.

  She caught him smiling at her with a fond indulgence, an expression that brought about an odd shame.

  “You must think I am terribly naïve,” she said. “Not to know the form of a man.”

  “You have a certain innocence,” he agreed. “And you have lived a life denied of the very things that make us what we are, but you have all the necessary animal instincts well intact, Lydia. You will not be lost for long. Every part of you knows what it was meant for.”

  “How can you be so certain?”

  He answered by sliding his large palm underneath her breast, cupping the soft flesh. “Look,” he said. “Look how your nipple draws herself erect for me.”

  He was right. The little pink bud had indeed become taller and harder in response to his touch.

  “You have been raised in an extremely strange culture that separates man from flesh and makes machinery the source of succor. But we are animals, Lydia. We are creatures of flesh and bone and lust and desire, and that cannot be taken from us no matter how odd our lives may have been.”

  Tristan caressed her as he spoke and Lydia felt the truth of his words resonating through her body. When he touched her, it set off a ripple of reactions in her skin, her blood, her very mind thrilled to him. She found herself relaxing into a state that was not entirely unlike a cigarette-induced haze. Everything seemed brighter and yet somehow slower. Her body felt more sensitive, the little bud between her legs throbbed as his mouth pressed against her neck and placed soft kisses that became rougher as they went on, little love bites turning to more possessive kisses as his hands roamed her body, claiming her along with his mouth.

  When she could take the teasing no longer, he moved over her again, his legs between hers, his cock stiff and straight and pointing directly at the wetness between her thighs. Slowly but surely his hips descended toward hers and then she felt the invader at her gates—his cock pressing against the soft mound of her pussy.

  The touch of him was like hot fire, pumping blood making his flesh sear against hers as he ran the thick head of himself along her slit and pressed forward. Lydia’s eyes went wide and she grasped at the muscular bulges of his arms as she felt her lower lips spread quite naturally around the head of his cock and then draw him in. He was gentle and slow, but it was still no small feat for her body to accommodate him. He was stretching her in a way she had never been stretched before, filling a space that had never been filled.

  “Breathe,” he reminded her, pressing a gentle kiss to her brow as he stilled his hips with only an inch or so of his thickness inside her clenching pussy. It was as though her body was caught between an impulse to relax and allow him in and the desire to hold his flesh tight.

  “I am breathing,” she squeaked.

  “You’re holding your breath,” he corrected her. “And that’s making you tense, which will make this hurt, and I don’t want it to.”

  He slid out of her pussy and she took a deep breath with which to whine in complaint at the loss of his cock. At the apex of her vocalization, he slid back in and this time he sank several more inches inside her.

  Lydia let out a squeal as she felt her inner walls stretch to take him ever deeper. Her hymen had evaporated in the invasion, but she barely felt that. It didn’t seem as though she would be able to fit his full length; there was so much of him and so little of her. Again he paused and withdrew, though this time it was not a complete withdrawal. He slid out an inch or two and pressed forward again with a gentle rocking motion that helped massage her deeper muscles into a state of relaxation.

  Lydia’s eyes remained locked on Tristan’s as he claimed her with a sensual domination that was no less complete for being slow. The expression on his face was one of tender desire and Lydia felt her heart flowering as his mouth met hers. H
e captured her in a kiss that caught the moan she made as he took the last few inches and made his conquest complete. Mouths locked, they moved together, Lydia’s hips rolling out of instinct, her pussy clenching the length of his shaft as Tristan let her take in the full feeling of this new sensation that was like none she had ever experienced.

  She felt as though she had lost herself and become one creature with Tristan, a moaning, writhing animal sharing the fluids of desire. Every passing moment her body welcomed him more with a melting embrace that lubricated the length of his manhood, making his passage easy as he began to move back and forth inside her, pushing his cock all the way in and then pulling out to the very tip so she felt him press in all over again.

  She lost track of time, of her senses, of everything besides the pleasure he was stoking in her tender body. She could feel his power in every motion he made and knew that he was once more taking care of her, ensuring that her first experience with a man was not a frightening one.

  After some time of tender slow thrusting, Lydia felt his hands go down to her thighs and a moment later Tristan had hiked her legs up over his shoulders. The position spread her wide and left her utterly at his mercy, his cock pulsing inside her tight pussy. She was able to look down and see the place where they were joined and found herself marveling at the way her lower lips gripped his girth. It was a lewd sight, not at all delicate. She saw herself reflected in his eyes as a wanton little slut with a body made to be fucked by a man. The thought brought a flush of shame, but along with it, an erotic surge that was amplified when he began to thrust harder than before, making rougher use of her body with pounding strokes that made her bounce against the bed as he drew on every last part of her capacity for pleasure.

  Her breasts jiggled with the rougher thrusting, pink nipples describing the arc of her body’s motion under Tristan’s pounding hips. They were not left to bounce for long. He leaned down and took one nipple between his teeth, lashing the tip of his tongue across the super sensitive bud that seemed linked directly to her clit.

  Lydia screamed as a sudden orgasm tore through her. Her cunt clenched hard around his cock, her legs trembled, her body quivered under his powerful form and Tristan rode her through it, never ceasing his motion even as her pussy began to make the most uncouth wet sounds imaginable. She was utterly soaked with desire and he was making the most of it.