I watch as Knowland rises from his chair, his huge form descending to mine backs me into a corner, where I can’t help but shudder. His eyes peer down at me, while one hand goes for my throat, the other points a finger an inch from my eyes.
“You are the wife of the Brannoch priest and you are returning home with me.”
“That is not my home!” I almost shout, though the constriction of my throat makes that difficult.
“They say you like being whipped, well perhaps a whipping will persuade you,” he decides. I am in utter awe of him as I watch that pointing finger go for the belt at his waist and undo the buckle so he can slip the leather from his pants.
“You think that will change my mind?” I mock him haughtily. I feel completely foolish talking to him this way, but I’m raging mad, my anger erupting like volcanic ash, my heart spitting fire. How dare he come on to me like this? I have no more time to think, finding myself swiftly clutched under the man’s mighty arm, my ass toward his front so he can beat it into submission. He flings up the shift and my naked rear inspires him. Then the belt comes down on my flesh—it must be doubled in his fist. Though it is fruitless, my anger makes me struggle. My hands beat at his body, though they make no impression on him at all. My kicking makes him more furious and he strikes my ass harder. I should take this spanking easily—I have certainly been through far worse, but the pain that rips my body, also rips at my heart and soul, those places that have gone so cold. Finally, I’m screaming for him to stop, and though for a time he ignores my pleas like he has all the others, he finally stops.
I remain firmly in his grasp going nowhere.
“You’re going with me, bitch!” he blares.
So exhausted and in pain, I have no strength to fight him anymore.
“You want the man, Teagan Brannoch!” he tells me.
“You can’t call me that!” I protest, enraged again.
He lays the belt on at the first sign of renewed agitation and I shut up.
“It is your name and who you are and you belong with the man who gave it to you. He loves you, and by your response I know you love him.”
“What do you know of love!” I shout.
“Do you deny it?” he shouts back. He underscores his question with another blast of the belt.
“Do you deny it?” he shouts again right through the beating I’m getting.
“NO!” I blare and he finally stops.
“You are a willful bitch, but you are the only thing that will repair my friend. And that you will do. You cannot tell me that what happened to you in Utopia was worse than this horror?”
He lets me rise finding how subdued I’ve become, though he keeps a hand around my arm as he stares into my face.
I see where I am again. I can see out the window to the prison barracks where I live. I can think about the cage where I lie lonely late at night and the rack and the chains and the pole and the physical pleasure. But staring into Knowland’s eyes I see what I miss. I see Keven in his eyes, I suppose because we both love the man.
“If Keven knew where you’ve been, he would die,” Knowland tells me in a quiet voice.
“Then you won’t tell him,” I reply.
“I won’t tell him if you come with me.”
“That’s blackmail.”
“I’m not above it.”
“I swear, I can’t live with him.” I shake my head and I start to cry.
“Then you live someplace else. You find that house where you used to stay and live there. And he can come screw you when he’s lonely.”
“Just that easy?”
“Maybe not easy, but you are returning with me if I have to hogtie and gag you and throw you in the truck.”
I know Knowland never lies, especially about what he loves.
Chapter Sixteen
I can hardly believe what I breathe, that this world is so vastly different than the South. I wonder why that chaos hasn’t overrun these pristine valleys before. I see Knowland and I guess I have my answer. He’s like the other men that defend the borders of Utopia, fierce, brutal and loyal beyond all else. He has been all of that to me.
Approaching this familiar ground I want to take off my shoes and run my toes through the mud, and the grass through my hands. I want to taste the water in the streams. I can already hear and smell the ocean just over the bluff, where, if I race full speed, I could find our cove and dive into the clear wet sand and look for pieces of rope we left there.
Sighting my house, I see flowers blooming by the doorway, little violets and yellow heather. I am surprised no one lives here now, except that there’s a sign on the door. It’s a rather ominous one for trespassers, I note when I’m close enough to read it. “Property of the Province.” There must be a lot of power behind that sign.
Knowland rips the sign away and opens the door for me with a key.
“Stay here, and when you’re ready I’m sure he’ll see you.”
“I won’t do that, Knowland, I tell him. If I sinned before our marriage, I have sinned tens times more since I left.”
“You may have fallen on difficult times,” he counters my reasoning, “but you’ve always been Keven Brannoch’s property, and the world, even that wild one below, knew it. That is what saved you and brought me.”
I look at him puzzled.
“The brand and the tattoo. Face it, Teagan Brannoch, you can’t run from that, you never will.”
“Then I guess I’m cornered, aren’t I?”
“You’ll come around. You settle in and I’m sure what you felt here before will return.”
He sounds oddly wise for a man I’ve known to need nothing but his heritage to live by. Perhaps, he’s just practical. Perhaps his counsel is sound, though I’d rather not hear it.
“There’s a guard nearby if you try to leave,” he says as he starts toward the door.
“Are you going to tell him I’m back?”
“I will, but I know my friend. He won’t come to you. You’ll have to go to him.”
“Is that some sort of priest’s honor?” I ask.
“No, but it is a man’s. He won’t ask anything of you you can’t give. He already knows he asked too much before.”
***
I haven’t seen Knowland in three weeks. Queleah tells me he went South, as though I couldn’t have figured that out myself. When I press her for more information, like why he went, she shrugs.
“She doesn’t want to be found,” I tell her.
“Maybe that doesn’t matter,” she replies.
When I see Knowland for the first time, it is in chancel of the church. He’s been looking for me.
“Teagan’s here,” he says as he cleans off his muddy boots, while I glare at the mess he makes on the stones.
“And she came willingly?” I ask.
“No.”
I’m sure she fought him tooth and nail. “How is she?”
“She’ll be all right, once she breathes clean air again and her complexion can face a different kind of sun.”
“How did you find her?”
“I didn’t. She was found by Southern bounty hunters looking for women of interest to return to slavery or, as with Teagan, marks that identified her origins. I was contacted three weeks ago by a fellow that said she was in a Southern prison waiting for someone to claim her and pay the ransom they wanted.”
“You paid gold?”
“Very little. Seems they didn’t want trouble from us, so I paid for just the food she ate—so they said.”
“And where is she now?”
“In the old house.”
“But not willingly?” I inquire again.
“No, not willingly,” he shakes his head. “I had to whip her ass to get her to agree to come. And no, it wasn’t sexual. The bitch needed the kind of persuasion she understands best.”
“She thought she was saving me, I suppose.”
“I’m sure.” He thinks a moment—dangerous thing for my brute friend. “I wouldn’t th
ink the law requires the confession of a woman who’s been made to slave for sex. What happened to her in that prison was not by her consent.”
“Possibly,” I say. I imagine there is truth to that, though I know my wife well enough to assume she found her sexual pleasure. She is a master of that.
“She says she won’t come to you and I told her you won’t go to her. But I figure the two of you will find some way to work this out. I have never known real love myself, except for what I sometimes feel for Queleah, but I know you two, and well …” He stops. “You two can figure it out. I don’t care how.”
“And what if how we “figure it out” rocks this gentle province?” I ask him.
“I’m not so certain this is a gentle province, or that it doesn’t need to be rocked with some Southern anarchy.”
I’m shocked to hear him say this.
“Maybe you’ve rubbed on off on me, my friend.” He smiles and leaves me knowing that the woman I love is just minutes from my embrace.
***
I have missed this beach and the tide that brings me shells and sparkling rocks, and the spray of salt water and the breeze that blows my hair off my face. My barefeet are nurtured by this sandy shore. I have no idea what I will do, but the beach makes me calm. It allows my thoughts to drift away. As the sound of the surf pounds inside my ears, I hear nothing but my heart calling to me. I feel nothing but peace.
When I spot a figure at some distance from me, I know it’s Keven. There’s something so distinct about his relaxed walk, the way his shoulders slightly swagger, the way he pockets his hands in his pants and strolls to me with the wind blowing his thick hair just as it blows mine. It’s been three weeks since my return, and every day I’ve come to the beach hoping I’d find him here. Now my heart leaps so excitedly that I want to run to him, and yet, I let him approach as I stand with my feet planted firmly in the wet sand.
He speaks first as our faces remember well the look of love in the other’s eyes. “I don’t go to you, and you don’t come to me,” he says. “But here we meet.”
“I suppose we figured this would happen. I have been waiting.”
“I can’t live without you, Teagan,” he says.
“And I can’t live with you, Keven.”
He shakes his head. “But you will?”
“And how will that be?” I ask. “You think I’ll flourish any better this time?”
“If we break the rules, so be it. If I decide not to hear sexual confessions anymore, then so be it. If I become a different priest, or no priest at all, then so be it. I won’t give you up again to what you found as a wasteland. If you can’t live in my sanctuary with me, you’ll live in your house and I’ll live there with you.”
I’m shocked. But his blasphemy almost makes me smile. “Won’t this shatter your ties with your ancient wise men?” I ask.
“What if it does?”
“You’re talking a like madman.”
“That’s what Knowland says and he brought you back to me. I’m a man in love, Teagan. Let the chaos come, let the order die away. All things change, worlds come and go. I wasn’t born into this one with conflict to let it simmer and then destroy my life—which it has done to this point. Loving you solves the conflict for me. The rest I don’t care about anymore.” He shakes his head, and I’m crying, and when our arms go around each other, I’m hardly at peace anymore, but the ocean still crashes, and the waves come and go. Perhaps it is best to drift with it and not worry. Some things, like the constant ocean, remain the same and that is a comfort in a life so filled with change.
***
He is in my house with me. Three days, we’ve hardly thought of anything, except the feel of each other’s hands, and the smell of sex on our skin and the taste of our bodies and the sight of eyes and asses and groins and chests that grovel and press and throb.
While drinking from my china teacups, I told him every nasty thing that happened to me in the South, and it only aroused him, much the way my tales aroused Mariel. I must say I did this at his insistence. He decided that we shouldn’t have any secrets between us. I think this is okay, until he confesses about the night he spent with the whore. My only problem is that this arouses me too, and makes me angry because I’ve never been in his dungeon.
“I’ll have to take you there,” he says, humored by my jealousy. “I actually forgot about it. I was ashamed to take her in the church, even the purification chamber, so keeping her in the basement seemed like a logical choice.” When he says things like that, reflecting the old rules, I wonder if our marriage will really work this time. I’m only becoming more of who I am, while Keven defies everything he was supposed to believe in. He assures me otherwise.
I wake at some hour in the afternoon of the fourth day, famished, remembering that we have hardly eaten. I didn’t put much food in the cupboards, and what is there is not the delicious kind that I prefer. Seems, however, that Keven is not particularly hungry this afternoon, at least not for food. He tied me while I was sleeping. I’m face up with my arms drawn above my head and tethered to the sides of the headboard, my feet similarly restrained. When I finally open my eyes and realize my captivity, I smile.
He must assume I’m excited about this, except for spanking my ass rather vigorously several times—just to raise a “little” pain, he tells me—we have forgotten about practicing our darker sexual lore. Sharing our secrets aroused us so that we couldn’t think about performing the dastardly rituals ourselves. Even so, I’m sure for all we’ve made love his cock is sore—my cunt certainly is. That is pretty amazing when we remember that I’ve hardly been abstinent since I left my husband for the South.
Ah, but now! Keven has something dangerous in his head. The eyes that have been so completely kind to me, now flow with a deeper passion that immediately makes my cunt start happily. Even the air teases the hair at my snatch and that tickles my labia and torments my clitoris. He has a thin cane in his hand that he moves lightly over my body as I watch his lips turn on the corner when he smiles.
“You’re going to take me dark?” I speculate in a whispering voice.
“I’m going to purify you,” he says and immediately I recoil. “But this is a private purification, Teagan, my love. Just between you and me. This one is going to sting worse than that other one, and this time, I’m not so sure you’re going to orgasm from the pain.”
I recoil all the more, yet his words embolden my cunt so it jumps and starts and wiggles before him, as though it can’t wait for the torture. He runs the cane tip along my arms and I try to shake it off … right down my side, the point passes along my underarms and down my torso to my hips. He lifts it then, and moves it to my mouth, running the flexible thing along my lips, and I lap it with my tongue. Drawing it from my mouth, he brings it to rest against one breast, then pokes the side of it, thrusting hard into the soft flesh. The pain pours from me in a steady stream, as I wait for him to draw back his arm and snap the rod against the wobbling tit.
He sneers meanly as he slowly drags the end down my belly. My tummy flutters and I cringe, sure he’s going to crack the thing into my skin. Reaching my hips, he pokes the tip here and there, bobbing it briskly but without force across my pubis, and pushing my labia apart, so he can relish the look of me as I quiver in fright with the thing pressing dangerously close to my clitoris.
“Ah, ah nooooo,” I pant briskly. My breathing is irregular, my pulse strong under the ties that bind me, and my blood moves rapidly through my veins from my beating heart to my head that pounds hot. When he points that miserable tip right into my clit, I am tempted to scream again, but once again, he keeps me at the very fine edge of expectation—still unfulfilled.
“Please, now, don’t make me wait,” I cry desperately.
“I like making you wait, Teagan, just as you made we wait in hell for you to return. I’ll give up my robes just to spend the rest of my life torturing you the way you deserve. If I make you wait days for the first strike, so be it. You h
ave earned every vile thing I do to you.”
“But you love me,” I sigh.
“That I do.” There is no indication of love in his look, just the vulgar darkness I love so well.
“Then give it to me hard. You are right, I have earned it all. I deserve nothing but your punishment. I can never be purified, but I shall die loving your efforts to make me your righteous lover. Please do not hold back.”
He snarls at me again with a cunning I adore. “I’ll do as I like,” he tells me as he takes the cane and pulls away altogether, and turning his back on me strolls about the room. An instant later, he’s suddenly on me again, that reluctant cane whipping a swath of pain across my thighs, and then at my belly, my breasts three times, and then back to my cunt. It thrashes me a dozen times and then stops.
My screaming ceases, though I can still hear the sound of it in the room, echoes coming back to me. The sensation that breeds inside me searches out passageways that it can follow. I buck my ass against the sheets, find Keven’s hand toying with my pubis, but ever so lightly, I can’t stand this torture. And still the climax builds, ripping through me, toes to fingers, wave on wave rushes on in a steady stream as he teases the ticklish hairs at my crotch and they bloom like flowers with sensation.
“Oh, come in me,” I beg him as I see his erection pulse in his pants, and then when it springs free with the full measure of himself. Hovering over my hips he spears with its fullness me so I scream again, and ride another wave of orgasmic spasms until ours together have died away.
***
“Are you really going to spend the remainder of my life purifying me for my crimes?” I ask him.
“I am,” he answers, with a finger doting tenderly on my lips.
I am still spread-eagle, tingling in the prickly afterglow, expecting that he’ll find some way to inflict pain on me again and very soon. His eyes still hold that dreadful quality that shocks me so.
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