The Patriot Bride (4 page)

That, of course, was as it should be. And he knew that he couldn’t go soft on her now, couldn’t give in to the lust that was raging through him as her supple body draped over his thighs. He needed to let her know just how things were going to go within their relationship – he was her husband, and was going to give the orders, and she was his wife, and she was going to carry them out, or rue the day she didn’t!

He flattened his palm consciously and brought it crashing down onto those fleshy mounds, which automatically cringed away from his assault.

“No! Stop this immediately!”

Wolf couldn’t get over her audacity. Few men, much less women, dared to give him orders, and the little chit even sounded like she really expected that he was going to obey her! Well, she was going to get a little taste of who was going to be doing the obeying.

His hand cracked sharply down onto her flesh, until her bottom was a mass of angry red handprints. And then he went to work on the backs of her legs. She had commenced screaming from the very first swat, and had become successively more shrill thereafter. Luckily for him – and most definitely not for her – the little cottage she occupied was well on the outskirts of town, and there wasn’t anyone around to hear her angry screams.

Hannah was truly outraged, and the angrier she got, the worse the spanks seemed to hurt. And none of her flailing, which she knew only served to wiggle her bottom in front of him in a most unseemly fashion, did her any good whatsoever. He was too blasted big, and too blasted strong for her own good. “Let go of me, you bloody oaf!” she screamed at the top of her lungs, but that only got her a lecture on a lady’s use of proper language.

Wolf grimly accented the important words with blistering swats. “I will not have my wife sounding like a sailor, or a fishwife! You will conduct yourself at all times with the comportment expected of a duchess, if I have to beat you every single time you misspeak for the rest of your life.” It was almost worse to be lectured in that low, throbbing baritone of his. Unlike Hannah, he was completely dispassionate about it, and from her short acquaintance with him she was quite sure that he meant what he said.

He certainly meant to teach her a lesson this time.

Wolf spanked her until his arm was starting to get sore, and his hand felt like it was going to fall off. But he’d accomplished several goals. She wasn’t screaming any more, and she most certainly wasn’t swearing. He set her on her feet in front of him, saying in his usual command voice, “Stay.”

She stood. And she stayed. Hanna was seething with anger, her bottom throbbing even worse in this position, when the blood kind of pooled back there, she guessed, not wanting to think about such a torrid subject, but forced to by her complete discomfort. She dashed away the tears he’d inspired with such depressing ease, not wanting to show that weakness, not wanting to give him any part of herself whatsoever.

At least when he’d stood her up, her skirts and petticoats had fallen to cover her shameful nudity, although her drawers were Lord knew where. She’d kicked and arched and flexed so much that they’d long since been thrown off with complete – and thoroughly embarrassing – abandon. She looked around a bit, and saw them hanging off the corner of her night table.

Just when she thought she couldn’t possibly be any more humiliated.

Chapter Three

Hannah tried to move over a little, keeping her eyes on him the whole time, hoping to just snag them and throw them under the bed, somehow.

But he – who wasn’t paying the least attention to her and was fussing with something about his uniform – seemed to have eyes in the sides of his head, and immediately chastised her again, warning, “I said stay! Do you need another lesson over my lap?”

If there was anything she hated in this world, it was being spoken to as a child. No one had used a tone like that on her since she could remember, because she had been her mother’s right arm. Her mother had expected her to parent her sisters, and usually it was she that was using that scolding parental tone.

He didn’t see the glare she gave him, or he would have had the grace to drop dead from it right then and there. But she stood still, nonetheless.

Wolf turned his attention to his recalcitrant little wife. She wasn’t looking any too happy, but then that was understandable, considering what he’d just done to her bottom. But he had to admit to himself, that even blotchy skinned and red eyed, she was still extremely pretty. His mouth quirked downward. Too pretty for her own good, probably. He found it very hard to believe that she’d had a long, unaccompanied sea voyage, then lived here for Lord knew how long completely unchaperoned and hadn’t succumbed to some eager young dandy with no respect for womanhood, despite her supposed status as a widow.

Watching her openly – feeling that as her rightful husband he had no need to be covert about it, regardless of how obviously uncomfortable it was making her, Wolf was debating as to whether or not he should sleep here this evening. It wasn’t that he had any hesitation whatsoever about treating her as his wife. He turned to look down at her spare bed with a frown. It was more that he wasn’t much interested in having to sleep in the fetal position on her tiny bed. He’d slept in worse places, of course. An Army man didn’t always have a choice. But as he’d rose in the ranks – and was no longer a green youth – he found he preferred as many bodily comforts as he could get, although he had to admit that at his height and overall size, he often hung over the edge of whatever bed he was in. His room at Preston Hall – the master suite, since his father’d died – had a huge feather bed that was custom made to his size requirements.

The innkeeper next to the barracks where the majority of his troops were quartered had offered him a very nice room with, thankfully, a much larger bed, and his world weary bones were crying out for it right about now. He could, of course, take her there with him. It was well within his rights as her husband.

He wasn’t a monster, and he knew she was probably quite overwhelmed by his appearance on her doorstep. But he didn’t want to give her the chance to escape him twice. She’d proven to be just a little too savvy for him to trust that she’d be there in the morning if he went back to the inn.

So instead, Wolf reached out and settled his hands onto her hips, pushing her back just a bit and grinning at her immediate, protesting squawk. But he wasn’t concerning himself with her right now, and proceeded to simply stand and begin to unbutton his vest.

Hanna had been quite sure that he was going to attack her again in some horrid, embarrassing way or other, and then he just started undressing, which was almost worse.

She moved away to the other side of the cabin, which had been considerably reduced in size merely by his presence, fiddling with the wildflowers in the vase, wiping imaginary crumbs of the table, and beginning to stoke the fire for the evening.

“Leave it. I’ll do that.”

His voice startled her. It was more usually a man’s job – the chunks of split wood in the box next to the hearth practically weighed more than she did and were full of splinters, but she was used to it. Her father had deeded that lovely job over to her when she was about eight, and the logs were practically half her height.

She continued doing exactly what she’d started, until he stomped over and grabbed her arm, carefully removing the hunk of wood gently from her hand, his bare chest rubbing obscenely up against her as he did so. “What did I just say? You shouldn’t be doing this in the first place, and if you absolutely have to, then you need gloves to protect your hands.”

Hannah couldn’t reel away from him fast enough. His presence was so big it nearly pushed her away, and his unusually tanned skin burned hot, even though her clothing. Unable to take her eyes from his bare torso, staring at him unwittingly entranced, she didn’t come out of it until she felt the wooden bed frame pressing against the backs of her calves, and the errant thought flew into her mind that at least he hadn’t spanked her there. She was finding that, since she lacked the proper underclothes to protect her enraged flesh, even the smallest of movements of her petticoats irritated the skin he had so recently tended to.

Her mouth tightened. If this was a sample of what he was going to be like as a husband...

No. He wasn’t going to be like any kind of a husband to her. She was just going to have to find another way out of this. At this point, she didn’t know what, but some way, some how, she had to extricate herself from this situation. She just had to keep her eyes and ears open and plan something, like she had when she was in her Father’s house.

The fire was going great guns – much better than she ever bothered with, and she always ended up awakening in the morning nearly frozen from the cold air that relentlessly seeped into the cracks in the shoddily built cottage.

“Thank you for doing that,” Hannah said reluctantly, not wanting him to do anything for her whatsoever. “but you can leave now. I’m quite used to taking care of myself.” She had been too wrapped up in his audacity at spanking her to realize she should have been shepherding him towards the door long since.

But he wasn’t leaving. Instead, he was walking towards her, effectively trapping her against just the place she least wanted to be with him around – the bed. Although it was entirely contrary to her character, there was nothing more than Hannah wanted to do as she saw him looming ever closer out of the corner of her eye than cringe away from him, to shrink down and hopefully away from him, disappearing into the dust under the bed, somehow.

She didn’t have any such luck. It seemed her feet were quite literally rooted there, in the dirt floor.

It took Wolf no more than five seconds to disrobe the both of them – despite the way her hands and feet flailed, trying to deter him from his goal. He warned her, several times, not to fight him, but it fell on deaf ears. So, for the second time that evening, once they were both nude, and before he transferred her to the inside spot on the rickety bed, he easily maneuvered her back over his lap, where he delivered a good nonstop three or so minutes worth of very hard, very swift reminders. “Apparently, for a woman who’s smart enough to read Shakespeare and get herself safely set up in the wilds of the colonies, you don’t learn very well. I am your rightful husband. I expect you to do as you’re told, every time, without question. If you balk or even hesitate, you’re going to find yourself in exactly this position, every single time, without fail, and I don’t care who we’re around or where we are.”

At first, Hannah’s humiliation at her nudity – at their nudity – was overrun by the fire he was relighting in her still extremely tender backside. But his statement about turning her over his knee no matter where, no matter when rang uncomfortably true. Even on such short acquaintance, she wouldn’t put it past this bully of a man. Feeling more defeated than she’d ever felt in her life, Hannah stopped fighting the discipline he was doling out, and hung limply over his legs, hoping that might get him to stop. She didn’t know how much more she could stand, and she was nearly out of tears. Her eyes were practically swollen shut.

Wolf didn’t trust it when she simply gave up. He was sure there was some sort of trick behind it, and he continued to roast her rump with another crisp round of swats, but although she jerked and squealed and tried to cringe away from each descent of his paddle-like hand, she was no longer trying to escape the lesson he was trying to tattoo into her bottom.

When he’d felt that she might have learned her lesson – although probably not, judging from how stubborn she could apparently be – he immediately flipped her onto her back, tucking the both of them under the covers as quickly as possible, figuring, correctly it turned out, that she was going to take umbrage at having to share her bed with her husband, too.

It was going to be a long marriage for her, and Wolf was beginning to think he might need to prolong the life of his hand and make his pretty little wife a paddle of her very own.

Hannah wanted nothing more in this lifetime than to get up, for several reasons. Firstly was the fact that his huge arm was pressing her sore, throbbing bottom into the rough, scratchy straw of the bed that was barely covered by the sheet she kept over it. It was driving her crazy! She hadn’t thought that anything could be worse than the spanking itself, but her poor skin was being horridly irritated and he’d left it so sensitive that she didn’t even want to reach back there to rub or sooth it.

And secondly, his big bare body was much to close to her. That branch of an arm of his was iron hard around her waist, and his lightly hair chest was pressed up against her side, his face so close that she could smell his slightly coffee scented breath. Every time he moved, even if it wasn’t towards or against her, she jumped then yelped as her butt reaffirmed its abused state.

But it was his soft whisper that carried almost directly into her ear that was the most disturbing of the seemingly limitlessly disturbing things that had happened to her since he had barged his way into her home. It tickled her ear and stirred the curly blonde baby hair at her temples, then seeped directly into her brain and somehow found its way to settle in the strangest of areas that she refused to acknowledge she even owned.

“You’re going to have to relax and get used to sharing a bed with me, petite, or you’ll never get a night’s sleep. I don’t believe in separate bedrooms or even separate beds, convention be damned.” As if to drive home his point, he pulled her even closer, ignoring her moans as her bottom was dragged against the prickly sheet.

He wanted to stay awake. He did. He even wanted to take advantage of his new wife, and press his cause home within her. Unfortunately, although both the flesh and the mind were more than willing, they were also exhausted by the long, breakneck ride from Fort Frederick. He fell into a deep sleep, keeping his arm curled tightly about her waist, so that he’d know if she tried to escape in the middle of the night.