Humbled (4 page)

“Come, we will pay for a room and meal for the night.”

“Do you have coin for that?” she asked, guilty over the wealth she carried unbeknownst to him.

“I have enough for one night. And I believe we have reached our limit with sleeping outdoors.”

“Thank you,” she breathed.

“Remember, you are my wife, Justine. Try not to speak more than you must.”

“Yes, husband,” she said, batting her lashes.

He inquired for directions to the inn and introduced them to the lady of the house.

“Good evening, Citizen Armand,” she greeted them. It was the same title Jean-Claude received from the peasant on the street. This was the new France, where all titles were banished save the equal “citizen”.

The innkeeper served them a warm meal of stew, and it appeared Corinne’s assessment had been correct, as Jean-Claude’s mood improved greatly after he had eaten. The innkeeper brought him a second serving and he beamed at her as if she were the Virgin Mary herself. After the meal, she led them to a room upstairs. It was small and dirty. The blankets were moth-eaten, and there were surely bedbugs in the bed. When the door closed on them, she turned up her nose.

He lifted a finger in warning. “Not one more complaint—not one more, Corinne, or I will turn you over my knee.”

“You would like that, would you not?”

He smirked. “What is that supposed to mean? I am not the Marquis de Sade, if that is what you infer.”

She gaped, her face growing warm at hearing the name of the infamous marquis. “How do you know about the Marquis de Sade? You have read his stories?”

Jean-Claude grinned, advancing toward her. “No, I have not read them, but I have heard. And I can read, if that is what you wondered. But what of you? Your blush tells me you know the stories, too. Did you read them, Corinne?”

She swallowed. She tried to say no, but the lie stuck in her throat as she saw Jean-Claude already knew the truth. She sank onto the stool and removed her slippers, ignoring him.

“Why did you read them, Corinne?” He wrapped his large hand around the knot of hair at the back of her head and tugged it so her head fell back. Lowering his lips close to her ear, he said, “Did you want to understand how a man could find pleasure hurting a woman?”

She licked her dry lips, unable or unwilling to answer.

He circled around to the other side of her, still holding her captive by the hair. “Or did you wonder why a woman might let him? Can you believe there are women who do? Who have? For their own pleasure?”

Her inner thighs trembled and her heart fluttering like a bird’s wings in her chest.

He pulled her up by the hair, backed her slowly against the wall, where he insinuated one thigh between her legs.

“Cretin,” she managed.

“Am I?” he murmured, his voice low and throaty. “I think part of you wishes to test it. Come, I have no switches here. Only my knee and my hand. You can sample the pleasures of the Marquis de Sade for yourself. All you need do is issue
one—more—complaint.
” His words came as little more than a whisper, as if he were the devil himself, hovering on her shoulder, tempting her into debauchery.

Her mind emptied of thought. “The room… is filthy,” she rasped.

* * *

He could not believe she had given herself to him. Snatching her up by the waist, he carried her to the stool, plopping upon it and folding her over his legs. Her hands grasped his calf and she whimpered, likely already ruing her decision.

He lifted her skirts, baring the alabaster skin of her shapely bottom. This time could not be more different than the last. Having her sprawled across his lap with her bare flesh available—
no,
offered
—to his hand invoked so much more intimacy than a switching in the woods.

Had she goaded him just to be stubborn? Or did she truly wish to explore the sensuality of pain? The way her cheeks pinkened when he asked about her interest in Sade said she had thought about it and her thoughts shamed her.

He brought his hand down with a loud smack, immediately rubbing the sting away, then repeating the action on the other side. “What might a woman or man get out of being punished at the hands of another, Corinne?” he asked.

He slapped again, striking her low buttocks and lifting and spreading her cheeks wide with the blow. She squeezed her cheeks together, but when he gave a low chuckle, she relaxed her bottom, as if embarrassed by his laughter.

His work-roughened palm against the smooth down of her skin made her position seem even more exquisite—her delicacy, her softness, her nobility offered as a target for his boorish abuse.

“Jean-Claude,” she choked, her voice thick.

“I asked you a question,
ma chère
.”

He did not expect her to answer, but he enjoyed making her think. He picked up the speed, offering a series of slaps now before he stopped to rub. Her soft orbs flattened and sprang back, lifted and parted, jiggled and jounced under his hand. She danced under the spanking, yet each time he stopped to rub, she lifted her bottom into his hand, pressed back at him.

He grew dizzy with the sight of her, the smell of her nectar filling the room. His hardened cock grew uncomfortable in his trousers.

No. He should not take her. She was not his for the taking.

Did she understand she was aroused? Did she sense her body’s reaction? While she was not overly-dramatic about being seen naked or lying beside him, he was quite certain of her innocence. She hid her blushes well, but he had not missed them. He rubbed her heated flesh, dragging his hand with weight, parting the cheeks and revealing her glistening sex. He slid two fingers across its surface.

She jackknifed, clamping her legs together as her back sprang to horizontal. Horrified with himself, he shoved her to her feet and stood, pacing away so she could not see his erection.

The air was thick with silence, the sound of their panting breaths too loud in the room. He thought to leave, but he had nowhere to go, nothing to check on, no business to conduct. He thought to apologize, but could not seem to think of any word—no excuse or explanation fit.

He pulled one of the blankets from the bed and folded it in half, spreading it on the floor. When they first entered the room, he had thought to make her share a bed with him—to make the point he was no lower than her. Now, giving her the bed was the only right thing to do. He washed his hands and face with the water provided, then shaved the scruffy growth that had grown in since they left Gramont.

When he turned, Corinne was curled on top of the covers. When he moved away from the basin, she stood to use it herself, and he cursed himself for not thinking to offer it before he had dirtied the water.

“I will get you fresh water,” he said quickly, picking up the half-full ewer.

“No. There is enough.”

The strain between them thickened, and he became acutely aware of the sound of his footsteps on the wooden floor as he walked to his blanket, imagining the shape of her every movement, though he did not look.

“Forgive me, Corinne. I should not have touched you so. I am sorry.”

He expected anger. He feared tears. Instead, she walked calmly toward where he sat upon the floor, wrapped her fingers in his hair as he had done to her just a short time before, and yanked his head back.

“Do not do it again,” she ordered, looking every bit the aristocrat.

He burst into laughter and she smiled, too. He laughed until tears squeezed from the corners of his eyes and his full belly ached from the movement. She still stood over him, smiling at his amusement. He picked up her hand and brought it to his lips. “Mademoiselle, you are as unique as the Marquis de Sade himself.”

She arched a brow. “I cannot say I understand your meaning.”

He shook his head, wiping his eyes. “Never mind. Go to sleep. Enjoy a bed for a change.”

She climbed onto it. “I am not certain it is sanitary. I may be safer from bedbugs on the floor with you.”

When he opened his mouth, she shook a finger in his direction. “That was not a complaint.”

He burst into a fresh fit of laughter.

She moved over on the bed. “I will share it with you. We will not be any closer than we have already been sleeping on the ground.”

He stood, picking up the blanket from the floor. “I will accept your offer, as the floor seems far harder than the ground.”

He climbed in beside her, breathing the smell of her, trying to erase the image of her undulating bottom spread across his lap or the feel of the moisture at the entrance to her sex.

* * *

Jean-Claude kept far to his side of the bed. Anger over his touching her most intimate area had dissipated as soon as she had realized his embarrassment was greater than hers. It gave her a sense of power to think she had been such a temptation to him. And his mirth when she had given him a dose of his own medicine had washed them both clean of it.

Still, her mind whirled with confusion. There had been something intoxicating about giving herself over to Jean-Claude. Surrendering to his punishment and trusting him not to hurt her more than she could bear. It had been so different from the switching in the woods—it truly had been pleasurable, though she could not say why. The spanking itself had stung and the humiliation of it, the shame of being turned over his lap and bared for chastisement, should have been terrible. Except it was not.

“Jean-Claude?” Her voice crackled in the silent room.

He rolled over to face her. “Yes?”

“Did you spank your wife?”

He remained silent so long she thought he would not answer. “Yes,” he said at last.

“Forgive me, does it pain you?”

“Yes. But it is also a relief to speak of her to you.”

She wondered if the “to you” meant her, in particular, but did not have the courage to ask. “Why did you punish her?”

Jean-Claude rolled onto his back and put his hands behind his head. “It was almost always over silver. We never had enough money, you know, and we had different ideas about what it should be spent on. She would purposely disobey my wishes, accepting I would whip her for it, and remain determined with her decision.”

In the darkness, she thought she saw a rueful smile on his lips. “It was hard to be angry with her. She would confess so humbly and offer herself up for chastisement.”

“You liked punishing her.”

His eyes slid sideways. “I guess I did—most times. She was so terribly sweet about it, and she rarely cried, no matter how hard I punished. She only cried if I was truly angry—she knew, I suppose—and then she would weep before I even began. Those punishments I never finished.”

She had pressed the fingers of one hand over her sex but dared not move them. She burned with curiosity about their punishments—did he rub his wife’s bottom and touch her between her legs during them? Did he take her afterward? And how? Was it possible to take a woman in the position she had been in that evening, bent over his lap? Irrational envy for the dead woman smoldered in her chest for the great intimacy she must have had with her tender blacksmith. She fell asleep with her hand cupping her mons, discreet fingers pressing and releasing on her sex as if playing a pianoforte.

She woke before Jean-Claude for the first time and creeping out of the bed, sat at the dressing table, unwinding her hair before the small, cracked looking glass. She was a bedraggled sight. Her tresses had been twisted in a knot for eight days now, and before that they had been covered by a wig.

She combed her tangles with the wooden comb Jean-Claude had procured along with the razor. She tried not to think about what had happened between them the night before, but sitting on the very same stool where he had sat, the memories returned, and heat flooded her bottom as if she had been freshly spanked.

She looked over, startled to find Jean-Claude sitting up, staring.

“Why do you stare, so?”

He shook his head, as if it took effort to drag his eyes away. “Your hair,” he muttered.

“Oh,” she exclaimed, fingering the dark waves fanning out over her shoulders. Did he find it beautiful? She smiled to herself, thinking perhaps he did.

He climbed out of bed and pulled on his boots. “We should get moving again. We will breakfast here.”

“Jean-Claude? Let’s stay another night. Was it not a delight to eat a meal you did not have to scrounge and sleep under blankets in a warm room?”

He gave a quick shake of his head. “We cannot spend more money, else I will not have enough for your passage on a ship to England.”

She stared at him, her jaw falling open. “Jean-Claude,” she said slowly. “You gave thought when you came to save me, did you not? You packed your things, you had a plan?” She felt awed he had not simply come to the castle with the rabble and then remembered he owed her a debt.

He nodded. “I heard the crowd gathering in the village, getting riled up. I saw you walking in the gardens a week before when I delivered an order, so I knew you were there, though your parents were not. I feared for your safety.”

“Did you bring all your money?”

He nodded.

“Every franc you own?”

“It does not amount to much,” he said.

“You did not think to take something from the château?”

He frowned. “You still think I am a thief.”

“No, monsieur. I think you are the finest gentleman.”

She slipped a silver and opal ring out of her skirts without letting him see where it had been. “Me, I thought of it. We can sell this ring for my passage.”

Jean-Claude’s eyes lit up when he saw the ring, and she thought she had pleased him with the idea of the francs it would bring. He held out his palm. “May I see it?” He examined the jewel, his eyes shining, a smile on his face. “I made this ring,” he beamed.

She gaped.

“You see?” he said, turning the ring to show her the tiny fleur-de-lis stamped on the inside of the band. “That is my mark.” She saw immense pride in his expression, and it was well deserved as the craftsmanship was flawless.