Now there would be a few extra blows while he held her hand behind her back, but she couldn’t help that. It was instinct, to try to protect herself. At least now she was truly powerless to escape, and Edward’s tight grasp upon her wrist reminded her there was nothing to do but survive the ending of this.
At last he stopped, and the ball of dread in her middle unwound a little bit. Her body went limp with relief. Switches, paddles, straps, even his hand, whatever he chose to punish her with had its own noticeable evils. With the slipper, she would remember the stinging impact of a thick leather sole. The night she dressed for the ball and put on these slippers, she would remember it.
That was probably his intention in using it in the first place.
She knew she was expected to lie still and wait to be dismissed from the punishment, to have her skirts rearranged by him, to be helped up by those same hands that punished her. As she lay with her spanked arse in the air, she could count her heartbeat in the throbs of pain, and nearly feel where each blow had landed, from the crest of her bottom down to the tops of her thighs.
Today, he made her wait longer than usual. He ran his hands over her cheeks, an action that soothed at the same time it recalled the depth of painful heat still radiating outward.
“You’re starting to understand,” he said. “I can see it.”
She swallowed hard, her face still hidden. “Yes, my lord.”
“It pleases me so.”
She did not know if she was pleased. She wasn’t sure how she felt, exposed as she was, in pain. Yet somehow feeling satisfied too, for enduring the punishment she’d earned.
“I would like to have you now, Jane, just like this, with your bottom red and hot.”
Even as he said it, he placed the slipper next to her on the bed and undid his clothes. She could hear the rustling, the unbuttoning as he opened the front of his trousers. His desirous words had the effect of readying her, making her wet. When he grasped her hips and slid into her, it was an odd melding of two separate activities, lovemaking and punishment.
Yet it felt so appropriate in the moment to combine them, she wondered why they hadn’t melded together before now.
Oh goodness, he drove hard in her, so her knees slid forward upon their platform. His hips hurt her tender arse cheeks as he thrust forward, so she felt the pleasure of his thickness and the lingering pain of her spanking at once. Was she allowed to enjoy this? Or was she still in disgrace? It did not seem the time to ask, and soon enough the choice was taken from her as she began to feel so warm and aroused in her middle she could hardly be still.
She began to arch back to him, to swivel her hips so he might thrust deeper. Each time he did, he drove her mons against the footboard and her arousal flared higher. His fingers stroked up her spine; it seemed silent permission to seek the same relief he was. The whines and “ows” of her spanking were replaced by breathless moans, and then she was clenching around him in trembling release. She tried to muffle her sounds of bliss in the bedsheets, caught between punishment and ecstasy. Edward rode her so hard then, she was glad the footboard was padded for cushioning. He pinned her against the bed as he finished, gasping and clutching her hips.
Afterward she could not have proceeded without his assistance, she was so drained. She was still sore from the slippering, but oh, weak from satisfaction too. Once he collected himself, he helped her wash up and rearrange her gown, and then had her sit on his lap, as he always did after punishments.
She shifted, trying to find a comfortable position upon his hard, strong thighs—as she always did after punishments.
He was generally quick to launch into a post-spanking lecture, just to be sure the point had been driven home, but no such lecture came today. Well, she had shown him that she understood things better now. She had taken a very hard, very painful spanking with relative grace, and he had recognized this progress, and told her It pleases me so.
As she nestled against his chest, he stroked her arm and back and played lazily with her hair. Janie, he had called her with clear affection. She wished he would say it again like that.
“We are not such a bad match,” he said after a long silence. “We aren’t, are we? It’s true I punish you sometimes, but it’s only to keep things properly in order. Are you happy enough?”
The wistfulness in his question unsettled her. “I have been happy here,” she answered. “You’ve been very kind.”