Disciplining the Duchess (31 page)

From there they went to the stables where she learned of his boyhood mounts and extensive riding instruction. He’d only been allowed the gentlest sort of horses as a child, lest he meet with disaster. One old nag was still there, cosseted and sheltered in her old age. His miniature-sized tack was there, his initials engraved on the fine leather. They went into the house then, shed hats and cloaks and ventured into musty, dark rooms where he told more tales of his childhood. So many of them were sad. Stark lessons learned, harsh discipline meted out for one thing or another. She’d understood he had an unusually rigorous childhood. It was something else altogether to hear about his everyday experiences within these walls.

He told her of servants dismissed for being too kind to him, relating the exact places where they were sacked as he looked on in horror. He showed her the places he’d hidden when his parents fought, great screaming fights that terrified him, fights about his father’s extramarital affairs and many, many fights about him, Courtland’s sole heir. “And here,” he said, leading her to the middle of the great room just inside the door, “here is the first and last place I ever cried in public. I was six years old. My dog died…Mercury, you remember.”

Harmony nodded with a hot, tight feeling in her throat.

He stared at the parquet floor as if he could see his own self in the gleaming tiles. “I was looking for my mother, to tell her, and my father found me crying and knocked me to the ground. ‘A gentleman never cries in public. Especially a future duke.’ And so it was.” He looked up at her and touched her cheek. “And I have never cried since, not like you, who cries so gustily and sweetly whenever it moves you to do so.”

Tears filled her eyes. “I shall cry now, unless this tour is at an end. I can’t bear much more of this.”

He reached in his pocket for a handkerchief. “I love that you cry. I pray you will never stop.” He made a face, rocking back on his heels as she dabbed at her tears. “Well, I don’t mean that in a literal sense, of course.”

She giggled through sobs. “I didn’t think you did.” She fluttered his wet hanky in frustration. “There has got to be some middle ground, hasn’t there? Something between never crying at all and always making a scene. And you, and this childhood… There has to be some center ground where one can be disciplined and mannerly, and yet enjoy the fullness of life’s pleasures. There must be a balance between joy and duty. There
must
be.”

Her husband brushed away her tears and looked intently into her eyes. “When we return to town we shall dismiss your tutors and instructors and find this middle ground so we can both be at peace. We shall endeavor to make our marriage as harmonious as your name.”

“Do you believe that’s possible?”

“We’ll find a way.” He sobered, stroking a ringlet of her hair drawn askew by her bonnet. “For one thing,” he said, lowering his voice, “I don’t intend to spank you anymore.”

Harmony couldn’t say why, but the idea troubled her. “Why have you decided that?”

“I don’t want you to get the idea that you are not good enough as you are. That you need improving. Because you don’t.”

She made a face. “Sometimes I do.”

“You don’t.”

“What if I am terribly stubborn and start calling you Benedict even though you hate it? Or Benny?” she persisted. “What if I started calling you Benny from this moment forward?”

His lips twitched in a shadow of a smile. “It is not worth a spanking.”

“What if I put pepper in the dowager’s unmentionables? That is surely worth a spanking.”

“You would not.”

“I might, to get what I wanted. I am terribly headstrong and reckless when it suits my needs.”

“Harmony.”

“What if I stuff bits of odiferous leaves and grass into Mrs. Lyndon’s hats where she cannot see them? She’ll be sniffing about everywhere, trying to discover who smells so bad, and the whole time, it shall be her. What if I publish my own book about Mongol hordes and pass it about at the Courtland ball with my name emblazoned on the cover?”

Court cupped her chin, stifling laughter at her wild examples. “Why must you plague me? You have, you know, from the very first. I am not a man who can be comfortable with women hiding under desks, or conversing of hordes, or sponsoring historical expeditions. How on earth have you ended up in my life?”

“Fate.”

“Chance,” he countered.

“Magic,” they both laughed at once. She threw her arms around him, pressing her face against his chest and breathing in his reassuring, familiar scent. “But if I am good enough as I am, so are you. I don’t want you to change to suit me. If I earn a spanking I wish you would give it to me. Otherwise I shouldn’t know what to do with myself. I’ll be an utter mess.”

“And what of the sulking afterward?” he asked, leaning in so she was on level with his raised eyebrows and teasing gaze. “How shall I deal with that? And your petulant moods?”

She melted against him, feeling the evidence of his burgeoning desire thick and hard against her middle. “I think you will find a way to bring me out of them.”

He held her tightly, brushing his lips across hers. The kiss deepened, a celebration of closeness and acceptance, of divisive problems solved, at least for the moment. She sighed against his mouth as he embraced her without the least of gentlemanly manners. “Oh, Court,” she whispered.

“Courtland!” Her father’s loud voice carried across the soaring room.

Court released her with a jolt, and Harmony turned to find her papa stalking toward them, the tutting dowager at his heels.

“They are perfectly fine, Harry, you see?” said the dowager. “I told you they only needed a little time away.”

Harmony’s eyes went wide. “Did your mother just call my father ‘Harry?’” she whispered to her husband.

“I believe so,” he muttered back. “What the devil’s going on?” He addressed her father, holding out a hand to greet him. “Welcome to Courtland Manor, Lord Morrow.”

“I’ll speak to my daughter before I accept your ‘welcome,’” her father snapped.

“Papa!” Harmony shot Court an apologetic look.

“Come with me, dear,” the old man said. “We’ll have some words in private. I got a letter yesterday eve that deeply unsettled me.”

“It was not from me,” the dowager protested to her scowling son as Harmony’s father pulled her from the room into a smaller, adjoining parlor.

“Well, you have made an entrance,” Harmony said to him once the door closed. “But I am happy to see you anyway.” Was it only yesterday she’d so desperately wanted to seek shelter in his arms? She hugged him, thinking how much everything had changed in the meantime. Then she drew away and frowned. “Now, tell me. What on earth has got you in such a temper?”

“What has he done to you, poppet? I got this letter yesterday at the house. No signature or direction, but I’m sure it came from St. James Square. Here.”

He held out the note. Harmony recognized Mrs. Redcliff’s hand in the hastily scrawled missive. She hadn’t the heart to read it, thinking of what her protective lady’s maid might write to her father after the uproar of the past couple days. “Papa,” she began. “Well, we have had some recent difficulties…but…”

Her father threw himself down on a yellow chintz sofa, beckoning Harmony to sit at his side. “I tell you true, I figured the duke for a fine man. I trusted he’d make you happy, but even before you married I’d heard things about him that didn’t sit well with me.”

Harmony recalled the barrage of caricatures in the papers. They’d been embarrassing enough, but the thought of her father seeing them…

“What does he do to you?” he asked. “Does he beat you? Make rough with you? If he does, I’ll take you away from him this very moment. Duke or no, I’ll not allow a daughter of mine to be abused.”

“It’s not at all like that.” She was blushing to her ears from this mortifying conversation. “He doesn’t beat me. He doesn’t do anything outside the law. It is…oh, how to explain? He likes a…a disciplined sort of lifestyle. I’ve agreed that this is good for me too. It keeps me focused and thoughtful. After all, I’m a duchess now.” She’d exhausted the extent of her capabilities to explain the matter. “Please trust me. All is well. If it wasn’t, I’d send Redcliff or one of the other servants to tell you right away.”

He didn’t look convinced. “You know, I never laid a finger on your mother. I never hit her—or you—even though it was within my rights to do it.”

“I know. You were a gentle father.”

“I loved your mother just as she was. There are other ways to enforce discipline, such as kindness and loving guidance. These are skills every husband should have.”

“He does have those skills.” Harmony twisted her hands in her lap, then looked back up at him. “Papa, I knew when I wed him what our marriage would be like. I agreed to it. In some way, I wish for order and propriety too. It comforts me to know that he will gather me in when I go too far. And I always go too far, you must admit. I was allowed to run…perhaps…a bit too wild in my formative years.”

Her father bit at his lip. She didn’t mean to chastise his parenting skills. His voice was gruff when he spoke. “I wronged you, poppet. I abandoned you after your mother passed. You see, it was so difficult when you got older, because…well…you recalled her so much to me. You have her same beauty, her same energy and charm.” His eyes misted over, and Harmony’s throat tightened with emotion. Her father composed himself and took her hand. “I miss your mother so, even to this day. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better father to you these last years. If I can do anything to contribute to your happiness, I will. Stephen too. That scapegrace has been tamed something awful by his Meredith. You wouldn’t recognize him. There’s a baby on the way, he’s just written.”

Harmony clasped her hands. “Truly? How wonderful. I’m to be an auntie. But, father.” She lowered her voice. “What is afoot with you and the dowager? How did you arrive here together?”

Her father puffed up with a pride she hadn’t seen in evidence in a while. “Why, I’ll tell you how. We rode here together. A gem of a woman, the dowager Courtland, when I can steal a moment without that Mrs. Lyndon by her side.”

Harmony had to laugh at that picture. Her father and the dowager, evading Mrs. Lyndon like two young people dogged by a chaperone. “You are not… Surely you are not courting the dowager?”

Her father waved a hand. “I am too old to court anybody, and she’s too high above me anyway. We talk and write letters. Perhaps one day I’ll marry her or perhaps I won’t. Depends what she wants, if you know what I’m saying. She’s the type to rule the roost. These Courtlands,” he said, with another wave of his hand. “What are we to do?”

“I don’t know, papa. I really don’t know.” Harmony’s head was reeling. The dowager and her father?

“Harry?” The dowager’s voice shrilled from the doorway. She poked her head into the room with a beleaguered expression. “My son would like to have a word with you in the library. Something about discussing the honor of your intentions.”

“What?” Her father rose from his chair.

“He believes we should not have ridden all this way without a chaperone!”

“That young upstart.” Her father crossed the room and offered the dowager his arm with a lazy bow. “I’ll tell you this, Ermie. I shall set him straight if he thinks to trap me into marrying the likes of you.”

The Dowager Courtland giggled—
giggled!
—as her father turned and winked at her. Then the two of them put their heads together and sailed out the door.

“Oh my goodness,” Harmony said, burying her face in her hands. “Oh my goodness, it is too much.”

Two Months Later

They decided—together—on a weekly system of accounting for her transgressions. Not that he didn’t occasionally spank her in a rush of exuberance, or lay on some heat before he made love to her. Harmony loved those spankings tossed over his knee in the bedroom. But for purposes of discipline, both of them found a weekly session suited them very well.

These sessions did not occur in her bedroom, or his, or in the study, but in his very stark and male dressing room, where things like belts and straps naturally abounded, and where he discreetly stored other tools such as riding crops, paddles, and various sizes of birch rods. The canes were left in the study. “A possibility,” her husband warned, “for the very worst misbehavior.”

Harmony tried not to think about that, but she did wait with a queer and excited feeling for Sunday evenings to arrive. She would sit at dinner with Court, barely noticing any other family members or guests, thinking only of what she had done that week in the way of naughty acts. She would stare at her husband’s hands and his stern and handsome face and wonder how he would choose to punish her. Sometimes he would catch her eye and she would shiver in guilty anticipation.

“You enjoy this far too much,” he teased one Sunday. After that, he had introduced the use of ginger figs into their punishment sessions. He’d procure lengths of the root from the kitchen gardens and carve them into slender phallic shapes with a flange at one end. He would carefully feather the edges of the ginger while she watched with wide eyes, and then…

Being spanked or whipped with ginger burning in her bottom was so very different than being spanked without it. When she admitted to Court that it made her feel much more punished, he made it a regular feature of her weekly disciplinary regimen.

This Sunday he had moved their session to an earlier time since the Courtland ball was to take place that night. Harmony headed toward her husband’s rooms just before the appointed hour in a pretty flocked dress and stockings, with her hair drawn up in a fetching style. At these weekly sessions, she took care to present herself in her very best light, and to accept gracefully his efforts to discipline her. In truth, these sessions kept her dearly connected to him. Even if they hurt like the devil most of the time…

The closer she came to his chambers, the harder her heart beat with excitement and alarm. She was already fit to fall apart over the ball and her role as hostess. Perhaps this time with Court would help her calm down and refocus her wits. It seemed the sessions always ended with her feeling clear-headed and relieved of stress.