by Maren Smith
I couldn’t resist one small backwards glance, but the master of Hawkhaven had already climbed into the carriage. As the vehicle rolled past me, he barely did more than glance out the window, catching and ever so briefly holding my gaze with his. God forgive me, his eyes were my undoing. Heat and hunger swirled in those summer-blue depths, and that was all it took to melt me right there in the middle of the street.
I spent my first free-day hiding in my room, half expecting to hear him at my door much later on that night. If he had, I never would have had the strength of will to turn him away. Perhaps that is why he stayed away.
Chapter Eight
“I’ll have my dress back now,” Lady Victoria said, her first words to me bright and early the next morning when I answered her waking summons.
“Good morning to you, too,” I said wryly. My servility, I think, must be directly linked to the quantity and quality of what sleep I’d gained the night before. Last night, had not been a good one for sleep. All of my dreams had centered on Hawkhaven, on the delicious things my mind conjured for him to do as we lay together in my bed. None of it had been very restful. Erotic and interesting, yes. But definitely not restful.
My eyes burned. I could easily have crawled back into bed for another few hours. And probably dreamt of him all over again, and here I’d be all over again, grumpy and insubordinate, with my body both exhausted and aching to experience for real all the things I was dreaming of.
For all that I was in no mood to pander to Victoria’s bitterness, she must have thought herself in just the right mood to deal with me.
“You will either fetch my dress to me now, or I will have you arrested for theft!”
“Just who do you think is going to fetch the constable for you?” I asked, pointedly.
Her face darkened. “You will do as I tell you, girl.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at her. Oh no, there was absolutely no hint of servility within me this morning.
“I think I’m going to keep the dress,” I said as I shut her bedroom door behind me. Victoria glared daggers into my back as I crossed the floor to her wardrobe to begin our morning routine. “Which do you want, the blue or the yellow gown today?”
“Who do you think you are?” she seethed.
Not bothering to answer, I made the selection for her and put the yellow one back in the wardrobe.
“Do you think you are the only girl in apron strings to attract my brother’s attention?” Victoria smirked at me from her mountain of pillows, shaking her head, her blue eyes glittering with mean superiority. “Oh no. He has a long history of sniffing under mongrel skirts.”
With her gown draped over one arm and her stockings held clasped in my hand, I tried not to let my annoyance show as I approached her bedside. “Your loyalty to your brother is astounding.”
“He may have my contempt and be glad of it,” she muttered.
“He has nothing but brotherly affection for you.”
She laughed bitterly. “Oh, yes. He crippled me with all his ‘brotherly affection!’”
“Shall I ring for your breakfast now,” I interrupted coolly, “or would you like to wait to eat until after your self-pity party has concluded?”
She frowned, her lovely face pinching into a mask of ice. “You forget yourself.”
“Uh!” I sighed, dropping her clothes at the foot of her bed without care or ceremony. “I only wish I could. I am not interested in hearing your tale of woe today, Victoria. Your accusations are as unjust as they are unkind.”
Her blue eyes widened. “Unjust!” she cried, her thin nostrils flaring indignantly. “He has ruined me!”
“Liar,” I told her flatly, and her mouth gaped in shock. “You enjoy watching your brother writhe in guilt. This is a game for you. You’re pitiful.”
Too tired and disgusted by her supreme selfishness even to want to do my job, I sank down to sit by her feet. I was careful to keep myself out of striking range just in case she got angry enough to hurt me, but Victoria only grabbed a pillow from out behind her back and flung it at me.
“Get out!” she shouted.
“Get up and throw me out,” I calmly countered.
She all but screamed her frustration. Grabbing at her bedding, she whipped back the blankets and yanked the skirts of her nightgown up, revealing the length of her pale legs all the way up to her thighs. As if I had not seen them before. As if I hadn’t dressed and undressed her every day for over a week. “How can I? Look at what he’s done! How can anyone walk on ugly sticks like these?”
I would not have called them ugly sticks, but her legs certainly did not look right. They were much too thin, soft and unshapely, withered in other words from having lain in bed for years. I hardened myself against the flicker of sympathy inside me. An overabundance of sympathy had left her like this in the first place.
“Get up and move,” I said flatly. “I have fought you in and out of your stockings enough to know there’s good muscle left in those ‘sticks’ of yours. You could walk again if you worked them.”
“You are as blind as you are stupid,” she spat at me, her blue eyes flashing. “What do you know about it? Where you here when I tried before? I can’t do it!”
I stood up, already rolling up my sleeves for the battle of my life. “Get out of bed; I am done pampering you.”
“They will not support me!” Victoria grabbed her blankets before I could pull them from her completely. She yanked them all the way up to her neck, fortifying herself in the fiery bitterness that I had well come to expect from her. “Why else would I just lie here? Do you think I like be waited on by you? You think I enjoy being shut up in this house? I hate it! I hate all of you! I hate being crippled and defenseless!”
“Defenseless, ha!” I laughed harshly back at her. Seizing her blankets in both hands, I struggled to wrest her cover away, but she held fast to her end of them, her knuckles whitening with the force of her grip. “You love punishing your brother, that’s what you love!”
Her whole countenance grew as black as a thunderstorm. “I should slap you for saying such a thing!”
“In that case, you definitely need to exercise.” Gaining the leverage, I yanked the blankets right out of her hands. “You’ll have to run me down before I let you strike me!”
I whipped her covers all the way off the bed, dropping them in a heap on the floor. Victoria latched onto her mattress with both hands when I grabbed her ankles.
“No!” she screamed. “What are you doing?! Ella, have you gone mad?!”
Ignoring her shrieks, I dragged her lower half to the edge of her bed. Her toes crinkled, and her feet twitched as fury melted into panic. She tried to drag herself further back onto the bed, but I was stronger and swung her legs out over the floor. With gentle hands, I guided her feet to the floor.
“Let me alone!” Her voice cracked, turning almost to a sob as she cried, “Ella, you put me back this instant!”
“Not until we have exercised your legs,” I said, firm in my resolve. “You wiggle about just fine. Put a little effort to it, and I’ll bet you could walk by Michaelmas!”
“I’ll fall!” Something in her voice made me look up. Victoria’s blue eyes were wild, and she clutched at her bedclothes with claw-like hands. I had never seen anyone look as terrified as she did right then. “Put me back, Ella, please!”
With all her regal haughtiness stripped away, for a moment she almost seemed human. My sympathy got the best of me.
“I am not going to let you fall.” I reached up to take her hand, giving it a reassuring squeeze, but I did not soften my will. “I’ll stay right by your side, my lady. I promise, I’m going to help you do this.”
“I will fall!” she cried, tears welling along her lashes. “I will!”
“So what if you do?” I softly reasoned, hoping to calm her fears. “We’ll get right back up again and finish what we started.”
Like the slamming of iron doors, her minute frailty vanished behind a wall of
fury.
“Don’t you touch me!” she hissed, but I heaved her hips to center her at the edge of the mattress. She slapped at my hands, but I caught her wrist anyway, dragging her torso off her pillows until she lay horizontally across the bed, her body even with her limp legs.
Hands on my hips, I looked her over. So far, this had been more of a workout for me than her. I was already breathing heavily, and we hadn’t even started yet.
“I suppose we should start with some stretching,” I mused out loud, but the instant I touched the satin softness of her calf, Victoria erupted off the mattress in a volley of bucking and bloodcurdling screams that would have done a banshee proud.
She threw herself from side-to-side, thrashing the upper half of her body like a two-year-old throwing a shameful tantrum, and I must say my patience wore out with a snap.
“Sympathy, my big toe! You need the birch, that’s what you need!” I bent down and took firm hold of her right leg. “Shame on you, behaving like this!”
She grabbed a pillow and swung wildly at me. Ducking my head, I took blow after goose-down blow, but my stubbornness was at least equal to hers. I gently forced her knees to bend and flex, perhaps even for the first time since the accident and her self-imposed—as I suspected it was—exile to bed.
Dropping her pillow, Victoria screamed. “Stop! You’re hurting me!”
I’d have paid significantly more heed to her howls if only they hadn’t sounded angrier than pained. Keeping my head down when she grabbed up her pillow again, I continued to massage and flex her legs, probing with my fingers until I felt the tight cords of atrophied muscle move. Until Victoria suddenly rolled onto her side and grabbed a small lotion pot from her bedside table. At less than two feet’s distance, her accuracy was unerring. The jar pelted my shoulder hard enough to knock me backwards, and I fell to my bottom on the floor.
“Oh!” I gaped at her in angry surprise. “You wicked, selfish thing!”
“I have not yet begun to be wicked!” Rolling onto her belly, Victoria struggled to drag herself back up to the headboard by the strength of her arms. “When I am through with you, you’ll wish you had never stepped foot outside of London!”
“Ha! You’ve already done that!” I scrambled to my feet and quickly grabbed onto hers. Her nails raked the sheets as I heaved her back to the edge of the mattress. Then, hiking my apron and skirts out of the way, facing her feet, I swung my leg up to straddle her thighs.
“Get off me!” Victoria threw herself into a tantrum loud enough to rattle the walls, certainly it shook the bed frame, which jumped with the fervor of her thrashing. Her fists beat the mattress as she tossed back and forth, hunting for something more to throw. Well, let her! My back could bear the brunt of her abuse much better than my head could. And all the while, I continued my work upon her lower legs, noticing as I did that now and again her feet would hop and thrash as she fought me.
In retrospect, hindsight almost always being a clearer way to look at things, even though I hadn’t exactly planned any of this, I probably should have taken a moment to warn Hawkhaven before forcing this new exercise regime on his spoiled sister. Failing that, at the very least, I should have locked the door.
Victoria’s banshee screams brought her brother running, dressed only a pair of tan breeches, both his feet and his chest bare, and his scruffy chin not even shaved for the day. He must have got the shock of his life as he drank in the appalling sight of us: Victoria beating at the bed and shouting, ‘It hurts! Stop! It hurts!’ as if in the greatest agony imaginable; and of course, me, sitting astride her thighs, looking for all the world as if I were throttling her feet.
We both of us jumped half a foot straight up in the air when he bellowed, “What, by God, do you think you are doing?!”
Victoria was clearly more sharply witted than I. She not only found her tongue first, but she burst into tears. “Help me, Matthew!”
“I-I-I—" But Hawkhaven had no interest in hearing any sort of stammered-out excuses from me. He descended on me like a blackened fury, grabbing me by the scruff of my uniform and dragging me right off his sobbing sister.
The room spun as he upended me, bending me right over his hip until I stared in stunned disbelief at my upside-down view of the floor. His arm wrapped around my waist like a band of steel. Now it was my turn to shriek and flail as he lifted me—all but the barest tips of my straining toes—off the floor and walloped my bottom with a vengeance.
He spanked me with the same brute force reminiscent of the way the maids beat the carpets on dusting day, smacking so fast and hard that I felt the smarting pain of it even through my uniform and threadbare drawers.
This was a spanking born first of startlement, and then anger. A knee-jerk reaction brought about entirely by my own lack of communication. A part of me knew this, but it didn’t make the barrage of furious spanks any easier to bear. The flat of his open hand set my bottom on fire, and he didn’t even need to bare me first to do it!
“Get her away from me!” Victoria shouted above my gasps and yelps. “Look at what she’s done! I hate her! I HATE her!”
“Stop!” I wailed, thrusting back my hands in a vain attempt to ward off the jolting rain of smacks.
“Move them!” he snapped.
He had to be out of his mind! “No!”
He abruptly switched his painful attentions to the backs of my thighs, making this one miserable but short lesson in obedience that I hope never to have to experience ever again. I grabbed his leg to keep from reaching back again, my eyes flooding with tears that I fought to keep from falling. Until I saw Victoria’s vicious smile. How could she be so cruel as to enjoy this? How could anyone be that heartless?
I gave up trying to get away. I just plain gave up.
“What were you thinking?” Hawkhaven bit out, the flat of his hand peppering every inch of my bottom.
I began to cry, drowning in the swell of burning pain that was rapidly taking over every corner of my awareness. I was almost completely lost to it when, dimly, I heard Victoria laughing, “Send your little whore back to London. I have no more use for her.”
Hawkhaven’s tireless arm ceased to fall in an instant. “If you ever say that again, I swear I will thrash you next!”
“Go ahead,” she purred. “I dare you. Beat me and see how much worse you make this.”
Sobbing beneath his arm, wrapped around his hip, I could feel the fury surge inside him, trembling and impotent just beneath the skin.
“You can’t even whip her right,” Victoria scoffed. “Your hand can’t possibly hurt her enough. That’s what canes are for!”
My face flamed as hot as the fire burning under my skirts. “Let me go,” I whispered. I tried to push myself upright. I could take her abuse. It didn’t hurt as much as Hawkhaven’s spankings anyway. But to have to bear them both together—I pushed harder to get out from under his arm.
My whole world turned dizzily right side up again as Hawkhaven put me back on my feet. He didn’t let me go, however. He took a firm hold of my upper arm and that grip kept me much closer to his side than I wanted to be, particularly when he fixed me with his still very angry glare. “Don’t think for a second that I have done with you. We are not finished here by half, but I should never,” he turned that furious stare on his sister, “never have disciplined you in front of Victoria, and for that I apologize.”
Not done? Not by half? I gasped, completely unable to grasp what that meant. My hands flew back to catch my flanks, rubbing fiercely in an attempt to smother the fire. How could he possibly think us not done? I was! I was very, very done!
I tugged at my arm, but he only tightened his grip. “Don’t,” he warned.
“What are you apologizing to her for?” Victoria snapped, her hands balling into tight fists. Her eyes darkened furiously; her voice grew shrill and loud as she shrieked, “You owe that apology to me! For what you’ve done to me! Look what you’ve done to me!”
She slammed her fists into th
e bed, her whole body thrown into rigid rage that traveled all the way down her legs. I heard the softly snuffling thump as she kicked the mattress, and from the jerk that went through Hawkhaven’s body, for an instant, I thought she had kicked him.
“Victoria!” he said, startled. “You just moved your legs!”
Victoria’s angry shrieks abruptly ceased. She pushed herself up on her hands and stared in mixed shock and disbelief down at her feet. “I did not,” she denied.
“Do it again,” he commanded.
She stared down at her legs.
Forgotten once again, I slashed my wrists across my eyes, scrubbing back the stubborn tears I couldn’t keep from falling, my temper rising into a barely suppressed inferno as, with another soft thump, she kicked the bed. Neither brother nor sister moved, but I did. Getting madder by the minute, I tried to pry Hawkhaven’s fingers from my arm.
“I kicked,” Victoria said softly, her eyes as wide as saucers.
Hawkhaven snapped about to stare at me. “Ella.” He caught first my shoulders and then my face, shaking his head in disbelief as he asked, “How did you… what did you do?”
“She said she was going to help me walk.” Victoria raised her head to blink at me, amazed. “I-I’m going to walk again.”
Turning his back on Victoria, Hawkhaven combed back my hair, the mane of curls thoroughly mussed from my flurry of struggles, both with him and his cantankerous sister. He even wiped away my tears, although to my everlasting shame, my lower lip began to wobble, and my eyes teared up again. He was one day and one spanking too late for me to want his hands anywhere near me.
“Ella…” He shook, his head, obviously at a loss for words.
My bottom smarting and throbbing for the third time since I’d come here, I knew exactly what to say. “I quit!”
My temper in high form, I stomped on his foot with all my might and then wrenched my arm from his grasp. While he didn’t even have the decency to grab at his leg, his fingers did let me go, and I snapped around on my heels to stalk from the room.