Captured by Time (10 page)

She could bring him into the future, she supposed, if he wanted to go, although she would worry that it would be too much of a shock to his system. It was one thing to go backwards, into a more primitive era, but it was an entirely different thing to take someone who had never seen a really big city, or used electricity, or seen television, and plunk him down into the noisy fray that was the twenty-first century.

As hard as she tried not to, she must have finally fallen asleep, and she only knew that because, when she awoke, she was being carried back to the bed.

"No, please. Put me back!"

He stopped, startled at how strident she sounded. "What's the matter?"

"I'm worried that, if we're on the bed together, then we'll end up… doing something we shouldn't, and I'll have to leave you."

Jude stopped in his tracks. "Do you mean you left me because I made love to you?"

"No, well, first things first, I didn't leave you because I wanted to leave you." She knew she was revealing entirely too much about how she felt in that statement, but she couldn't bear to think that he thought she had run from him in shame because they'd had had sex together, or anything else along those lines. "I think the time travel thing has something to do with—with me being sexually sated or aroused, or something to do with sex, and then falling asleep," she said.

He began to walk again, with her still in his arms, arriving at the bed and lying down with them both on their sides—him on his good one, of course—so they were facing each other.

"If you do, then I'll climb on top of you and go with you," he said.

Cimmy's lips pressed together in a manner that was entirely unbecoming but very funny to watch. She liked hearing him giggle—it was such an unusual sound from such a big guy. "Cut it out; this is serious. I worry that you'll be… overwhelmed by life in my time. It's very, very loud and very, very busy."

"I've been to Boston and Philadelphia and New York."

Cimmy tried to estimate how big those places had grown compared to what he had seen. "Well, take whatever you experienced in the way of noise and crowds and… multiply it by a thousand." That was probably an overestimation, but she'd rather scare him a bit than not.

"Really?"

"Yes. And we don't ride horses anymore, except for recreation. We ride in automobiles—cars, and they're loud. We have buses that carry a lot of people and they're loud. We have tons more people from tons more places, and they're loud in a million different languages."

"Is everywhere a city like that? Is there no more open land at all?" he asked.

"No, there's open land, but the coasts in particular are very crowded."

"And the women regularly become doctors?" he asked, playing with her hair.

"They become whatever they would like to; doctors, lawyers, Supreme Court justices, presidents of very, very big companies called corporations…" She would have loved to have listed 'President of the United States', but she wasn't going to lie to him.

"And are all the women as stubborn and headstrong as you are?" he asked, using his hold on the hair at the back of her head to force her to tilt her face up to him so that he could capture her lips.

That one, long, drawn out kiss had pretty much wiped every intelligent thought out of her brain. "Wh–what did you ask?" she whispered, when he finally raised his head.

His whisper was unbelievably sexy as he nibbled at her ear. "I asked if all of the other women of the," he paused and said very deliberately, "twenty-first century are as naughty as you are?"

Cimmy chuckled softly. "Most of them are much, much naughtier than I."

"Oh dear. Well then, I guess I'll just spread some old-fashioned on you and not worry about anyone else."

"Some 'old-fashioned'?" she asked, confused by the term.

"Yes. Old-fashioned discipline and old-fashioned loving. I think that's just what you need."

She would have argued about the former if he had let her, but he didn't, his lips claiming hers in another kiss that robbed her of the rest of her functioning brain.

There was no 'letting' him do anything to her, as much as she would have liked to have thought of it that way; that was very far from the reality of the situation. He did to her what he wanted to, and she was lucky enough that that set fire to every little bit of her. He undressed her, marveling at the quality of the clothes she wore, as well as their accuracy, just as he had over the clothing she had brought for him.

"From a distance, without being able to see just how fine and even the stitching is, I wouldn't be able to tell that this wasn't bought just yesterday," he said, dropping her skirt and its matching blouse to the floor of the cabin.

She didn't even feel the compulsion to hop up and scoop them off the dirt floor—that was just how far gone she was whenever he took her into his arms. She didn't want to fight it anymore. She wanted to revel in it.

"Ahhh. This is what I've wanted." He went to kiss her, then pulled back suddenly and stared down at her with a very serious look in his eyes. "I wouldn't have thought it could happen, especially considering what a naughty girl you are, but I missed you when you were gone. And I worried about you something fierce. Don't ever leave me again, Cimmy."

He was the one who was caught off guard by the vehemence of her answer, but then, so was she. She was taken by the moment, and spoke entirely from the heart. "I won't. I won't ever leave you again of my own free will, Jude. If I'm gone somehow, either I've been kidnapped, or it's happened again, and I'll do my best to get back to you as soon as I can."

"How is it that you're not married?" he asked, devouring her lips eagerly. "Does no one in your time have eyes?"

She was going to blush herself to death around him, she could tell. Between kisses that had her melting against him, she answered, "Well, I'm pretty involved in my work, and… well, I'm considered to be a bit… chunkier than some men have evolved to like, unfortunately. Where I come from, men prefer women who are rail thin and look like they haven't eaten in weeks." She couldn't control the catty tone of her voice. It was automatic whenever she discussed this subject.

"Well then, that's their loss and my gain." His head dipped low to capture a nipple, tugging wetly at it until she gasped, unable to catch her breath. His hands came up to frame her face, and then she could see almost see a thought come into his head. "Ah, I'm getting ahead of myself, aren't I? We have something to discuss, don't we?"

The last was not formed as a question, but rather a statement.

"No, we don't," was her automatic response.

"I know you were asleep until I spoke to you, but there was no mistaking where your hands were, Cymbeline."

She'd always hated it when anyone used her full first name.

"Do you have a middle name?" he went on.

She hated her middle name even more than she hated her first name, so her answer was given on a heavy sigh. "Yes."

"What is it?"

If they had been standing, she would have been staring at their feet. She was reluctant to tell him, not that he was going to let her get away with not doing so.

Instead, he levered her chin up so she was looking him in the eyes and said, by way of a not so friendly warning, "I don't like to have to drag things out of you, or to have to repeat myself, especially not to you, who ought to know better than to make me do either of those things."

She rolled her eyes a bit and sighed again before she finally got it out. Cimmy knew enough to know he didn't like having to wait any longer, or that her obvious disobedience and no doubt would punish her for making him do so, but she truly hated her middle name. "Ophelia. My middle name is Ophelia."

"Someone in your family was a Shakespeare fan, I take it," he said, flipping her almost casually over to lie across his lap.

But Cimmy was beyond worrying about her name now. She was on to trying to get herself out of this spanking. "No, you can't do this. You'll pull your stitches."

He countered her claim calmly by saying, "It's my left side that's hurt. The only thing that could damage it while I discipline you is you; if you should move wrong and hit me with your elbow or something like that. However, I trust you've done your job well enough that even that wouldn't be a serious problem."

Well, when he put it like that, calling into question her professional abilities, what could she say? And worse, what could she do? He was obviously going to spank her, and she would have to make sure she didn't wiggle around too much while he was doing it or she might hurt him—even the mere idea of which had her nearly in tears before he'd even begun. It was damned near impossible to take one of his spankings when she could flail around like mad; she couldn't imagine how hard it was going to be to be subjected to one and have to move as little as possible, because the alternative was unthinkable.

The bastard!

And it wasn't a spanking she was going to get, apparently. She realized this when he placed something stiff and, she guessed, wooden, across the very crest of her bottom.

"I never thought my hairbrush would come in this handy. It's hand-made from mahogany. I've had it since I was ten or so. My father gave it to me. It's got a nice, wide, flat head, just the right size for chastising naughty girls," he said.

When he didn't commence immediately, she twisted around to look back at him.

"Tell me, Cimmy, do men spank women in your era?"

That was a loaded question if ever she'd heard one. She should tell him a loud, emphatic, "No!" and hope that that dissuaded him from doing it to her. Although she knew that was a long shot. And lying didn't come easily to her, and everyone who had had occasion to tell her had mentioned that she looked guilty when she even
thought
about lying, much less did it. And she knew she didn't want to compound the trouble she was already in.

So she told him the truth. "It's very rare. In fact, most parents don't spank their children, either."

"Really? I don't think I'd be very happy in your time then, 'cause I think that some women need that kind of attention from their men, and you are definitely one of them."

"Even if I really don't want to be?" she pleaded, only half kidding.

That got him laughing, which she liked. "Yes. I think that very few people would voluntarily submit themselves to a spanking, but that they—as adults—would say that they were a better person because of it."

"But you're going to spank me for touching myself, and that was the only way I knew of to get back to you!" she pointed out.

He didn't miss a beat. "It's the principle of the thing, Cimmy."

She wasn't sarcastic often, but occasionally it slipped out. "So I should have gone and gotten me a man to—"

"Don't be ridiculous!" He sounded as horrified as she felt at the suggestion, but it had to be made for her point to sink in.

She had forgotten, though, who had the upper hand here, and that hand contained a big ass hairbrush, apparently! That first swat was eye opening, as was every other one after it. In the few days that they had been together, she had been amazed—and thoroughly ashamed—at just how short a time it took him to reduce her to tears, and this time was absolutely no different. Swat one had her struggling to deal with what the rest of the punishment was going to be like. She had no idea that wood against flesh hurt quite so much! Swat two had her wishing she hadn't done whatever it was that she'd done to earn what she was receiving, and swat three had her blubbering. If she'd been asked, Cimmy would have said that her pain tolerance was above average, but that theory was not being borne out in the least by these situations.

* * * * *

Jude was of a mind to take it easy on her a bit, because she did have a point. But then, he'd never been much of a fan of doing anything at half measures. And he didn't like the message that that would send to her, either; that if she found the right words in an argument, she could talk her way out of a punishment he had said he was going to give her.

Perhaps it would have worked just as well if she had merely thought about sex before going to sleep. She probably didn't need to actually touch herself, especially knowing that that was the one thing he had told her she could not do.

"If this happens again and we're separated by time, then I want you to fantasize only—about me, of course—and not touch yourself. You disobeyed me, and you're going to be punished
every time
you do that."

He was definitely going to hell, especially considering the fact that her little whimpers and moans—even of the considerable discomfort he himself was responsible for—were lighting his fire at least as well as the one he was stoking on her bottom. He couldn't even feel the stitches in his side. Instead, he could feel every twitch of her privates as they danced—albeit in a much more subdued manner than he'd ever seen her do before—directly over his own.

Usually she was all over him, bouncing and twisting and turning—he looked down at her as his hand rose and fell each time, and when the head of the solid wooden hairbrush connected with her backside, she stiffened and groaned loudly, her legs coming up off the bed, but her arms remained tucked underneath her as if she was afraid of what they might do if she let go of them.

The little minx was holding herself carefully tense so that she didn't do what he had suggested she might and hit him in the side. He couldn't believe she was trying to do that for him when he was fine. She could have come at him with a sledgehammer while she was over his lap and hit him directly on the wound, and he wouldn't have felt a thing.

"Cimmy, you don't have to worry about hurting me, honey. The wound is barely more than a scrape—"

"No, it's not! I've seen it!"

That was the problem with women becoming doctors. How did men lie to them about how serious their wounds were when they were the ones who had stitched them up?

"I've had much, much worse and never seen a doctor and not let it affect what I did or didn't do. This just happened to get infected—"

"And you could have died!" She said it with such abject horror that he did something he had never done before and gave her twenty hard, fast swats just to get the punishment over with, then threw the hairbrush away—hoping it didn't crack when it hit the wall—and gathered her into his arms, because she wasn't crying about just the hairbrushing now.

She was crying about him, about her worry about losing him, and he couldn't stand it.

So he did his best to soothe her, in the best way he knew how; with his body. If she was going to cry about him, he wanted it to be because of how he had made her feel from the intimacy of his discipline, not when she thought about him dying.

"I'm right here, honey. And you're right here too," Jude murmured as he kissed every bit of her face and her hairline, her tiny shell ears and down her neck. "You made it back to me. I can't tell you how brave I think you are for even
considering
coming back here."

* * * * *

The last part of discipline he applied wouldn't let her really think about what he was saying to her, although it sounded wonderful, whatever it was. But she was still surrounded by a cocoon of pain; both physical and emotional. While she'd been getting ready to go back, she hadn't allowed herself to think much about the very real possibility that he could be beyond her reach if she was able to time travel again. There were no guarantees that it would work the first time, and there was no telling how long it could take her to decipher the secret. If it had taken her very long, he very well could have died of that infection, regardless of the miracle drugs she brought with her.

And those might not have made it, either. She had only been making an educated guess about how she might get things to travel with her. Luckily she had been right, but if she had arrived there without any meds, she'd have been pretty much just as helpless as any other doctor in the nineteenth century was against a raging infection. And her fears for him almost overrode the distress he'd brought to her behind. At least it distracted her, which lessened the pain considerably and replaced it with another, much more insidious one.

But Jude was doing his best to get her to stop thinking at all. His hands were filled by her needy breasts, and he spent long, teasing moments doing nothing but suckling and flicking, pinching and pulling, occasionally squeezing the entirety of her flesh at the base then nibbling with the edges of his teeth on those upturned nipples.

She had come to expect that he would take her in his mouth, but that wasn't what he did. Instead, she found herself on her hands and knees across the bed while he stood next to it, leaving her at just the perfect height for him. Then he told her to put her head down so the right side of her face was on the bedspread, and to reach out her hands and grasp the opposite railing of the bed.

After he'd issued that order, and she didn't hop to, Jude placed a big hand on her right cheek in blatant warning. She complied, albeit slowly and tentatively.

"Don't let go, Cimmy, or I'll have you go out and cut a switch."

* * * * *

He heard her shocked, indrawn breath and felt her try to cringe away from him, but he reached down and hauled her hips back up against him. "No–b–but you just spanked me!"

"Yes, I did, but you having just been spanked is not going to stop me from disciplining you again whenever I see the need, Cimmy. A woman like you needs frequent loving and even more frequent punishment."

As he spoke, he pushed her legs apart with his hands, forcing them much further apart than they needed to be for his purposes, but he knew that positioning her so would make her feel more submissive, and heighten every sensation thereafter. Then he reached up and cupped her pussy, firmly and possessively. "This is mine. Say it."

"That—"

"No, say, 'my pussy is yours to touch, not mine.'"

Cimmy swallowed, taking just a bit too much time to respond as far as he was concerned, and she earned herself ten tremendous whacks to her already devastated behind for her truculence. As quickly after he'd finished as she was able to draw the breath, she rushed out, "My pussy is yours to touch, not mine."

"Good girl."

The big bold fingers of his right hand laid claim to her much more intimately, while his left hand reached across her back and grabbed hold of the mass of hair that cascaded down it, using it to both pull her back, further impaling her on his fingers, and to control her in general. She couldn't move away from him now even if she wanted to, although he doubted she would in a minute or two.

He began to fuck her with strong, powerful strokes, twisting his hand and his fingers within her as he did so, screwing himself into her with each thrust, and just as he'd predicted, it was a few short seconds later when she began to pant and moan.