Buying His Mate (16 page)

Then had come the moment when he ordered her to clean herself up, and told her brusquely that he would fuck her in her pussy again, and in her bottom, and would start to train her mouth. She could see in her master’s eyes and hear in his voice that Martin hadn’t wanted to hurt her feelings, really, but that at the same time he
did
want to assert his authority over the girl he had just taken as his wife. She could see that a deep part of Mr. Lourcy wanted a wife not only because it would mean a life of companionship but also because it would make his relict girl belong to him more deeply than she could under the constraints of the Enclosure Act.

He wanted a wife to fuck just as he pleased, forever, not only a wife to keep him company. Even as she tried to get her mind around the idea, Gretchen realized that she loved it, and she loved him. To know that she could experience even his terrible masculine violence—that he wouldn’t keep it hidden from her the way other men hid the violence Gretchen knew very well, from her life in the wild lands, all men must have to survive—made her heart feel light and her pussy feel warm.

When he came into his bedroom to use her pussy and then her bottom for his pleasure, over the cushion that raised her backside high to give him the sight and the freedom he required, she had trembled. The way he had fucked her—the way he seemed intent, so unlike his manner just the previous hour, that Gretchen not find the fucking pleasurable, especially when he had peremptorily decided to take her anally, and had spanked her when she wouldn’t open to him, and then taught her her duty back there so roughly with his slippery fingers and finally his thrusting cock… it had thrilled her, paradoxically, though it made her blush terribly even to remember it afterward.

She
had
remembered it, though, as the most troublingly wonderful moment. Gretchen had absorbed her husband’s rage and violence and cruelty, and he had found her pleasing. She remembered it even then, right after he had come inside her bottom, with a thrill of perverse arousal, as he ordered her out of bed to get the soapy washcloth he had then taken from her hand, in the moment when everything had seemed to fall apart for good.

To have to clean off his cock what her bottom had left there, and then to please that cock with her mouth—shameful and degrading. But, again, she felt fulfilled somehow, in the way he honored her by commanding exactly what he wanted. Men desired dark things. Gretchen herself desired dark things, too. No one ever talked about them, but when it seemed, for an hour, that the man who had decided she should be his wife would from henceforth enforce his savage will upon her, she had begun to feel that in coming to Athena, traveling through outer space to the sky-star, she had come home.

And then the strange veil of tenderness had covered it all. No lessons on the lesson table. No spanking, no anal sex. No turning Gretchen on her face and pounding his hips against her backside as he sought his animal release. Just a nightly visit to lie atop her and thrust gently until he came inside her pussy. Just kind words, and earnest questions about whether she thought she might be pregnant.

“Take it easy, my dear,” Martin had said as he left for work. And she would go to her classes and to the market, trying to take it easy because at least that would mean that she had given him her obedience that day.

“He married me,” she blurted out to Ms. Feld. “And he won’t punish me.”

“What?” Beth said, puzzled, but Ms. Feld looked around to make sure the two staff members hadn’t heard. They seemed intent on watching the monitors, where two new sex scenes had begun to unfold: an elite man had borrowed two club girls and was making them go down on each other while he watched in another private room; and in a big room with mirrors all around and a kind of railing along one wall, an elite woman was visiting a redheaded girl’s backside with an enthusiastic application of a punishment strap while the girl held onto the railing and did strange little exercises that involved bending her knees.

“Come to my office,” Ms. Feld murmured.

* * *

Ms. Feld’s office wasn’t like Mr. Lourcy’s office in his quarters—or like his office at the agricultural administration, where Gretchen had come to see him once, hoping that he might show her off to his colleagues and even be inspired by her naked charms to do something dominant like fuck her in his office. He hadn’t, of course, but perhaps if his office had possessed the furnishings Ms. Feld’s did, he might have found the inspiration, Gretchen thought.

There was a desk in the corner, but there was also a strange horse-like structure that had straps over the top and at the corners, and racks of things hanging on the wall that made Gretchen blush and get wet between her thighs just to look at them.

“Get over the spanking bench, Gretchen,” Ms. Feld said casually, once the door was locked. “Beth, you may help her, and strap her down.”

“What?” Gretchen said. “No… I—I just…”

“Beth,” said Ms. Feld, “what happens to relict girls who disobey my commands, here in the Maenad Club?”

“The cane, ma’am,” Beth said quietly.

“No!” Gretchen wailed. “You can’t! I don’t belong to you!”

Ms. Feld sat down in the chair in front of her desk, a chair that Gretchen now noticed seemed perfectly suited for taking girls over one’s lap and spanking them.

“I’ll have to settle that with my old friend Martin,” she said, “if any trouble arises. It’s clear to me that he’s put himself in a bit of an ethical and even a legal dilemma. I could probably have him exiled, and take you for myself at auction. I know he won’t want to try me, on that score, so I think you’re going to have to submit to my discipline.”

Gretchen looked wildly at Beth. She thought she could see on her friend’s face a little concern that her mistress might be going too far and being too hard on Gretchen, but to her mingled dismay and faint reassurance, she could also see that Beth trusted her mistress absolutely.

“I don’t understand,” Gretchen whispered.

“If you want to understand, girl, obey me and get over the spanking bench.” Ms. Feld’s eyes had narrowed, and a little smile—the same piercing smile of knowledge Gretchen remembered from the taking, on Earth—played upon her lips.

Was Ms. Feld really trying to help? Was she playing some game against Mr. Lourcy?

What choice did Gretchen have, in light of how badly she suddenly wanted to be over Ms. Feld’s spanking bench? Shaking like a leaf, she walked to it. Beth came to stand next to her.

“Put your knees here,” she said softly, patting a corner of the thing, where there were little ledges covered in padding, “and your hands over there.”

Gretchen began to obey, understanding as she did so how the construction of the bench would render her even more open and offered than she had been atop the pillows on Martin’s bed.

When Beth had fastened the straps around her knees and wrists and waist, Gretchen felt that at last she had come where she belonged. In her imagination, though she knew she had traveled beyond the truth, Ms. Feld would now punish her for the way Gretchen had made Martin Lourcy give up his savage desires.

“I am going to mark you, Gretchen,” the elite woman said.

Suddenly panic shot through Gretchen’s body, and she strained against the straps, trying desperately to get up. She watched Ms. Feld walk slowly to a rack, and get a long, thin thing, with a crook at the end.
The cane. Oh, no.

“No… please, you can’t… he’ll… he’ll…”

“What will he do?” Ms. Feld asked, not teasingly but earnestly. “If I’m correct about what’s happened between you and your master, the worst you can expect is to be sent to your room to think about what you’ve done.”

“How… how did you know?” Gretchen gasped.

“I know Martin,” Ms. Feld replied simply. “I know that he struggles with his nature. And now I am going to help him understand how to resolve that struggle.”

She stepped out of Gretchen’s field of vision. Gretchen heard a terrible sound, the swishing of the cane, and she cried out, but the cane did not strike her.

“Make certain,” came Ms. Feld’s voice, from behind her, “that he sees these marks.”

The swishing sound again, and this time a thwack and a burning line across Gretchen’s upturned, opened bottom. The pain seemed to build, until she cried out, and at the same time her pussy seemed to melt with the excitement of it and the passion to submit. But not to Ms. Feld.

Then, in the blink of an eye and before the next cut of the cane could fall, Gretchen understood.

Chapter Nineteen

When Martin got home to his quarters, he entered to find Gretchen standing at the kitchen counter, slicing vegetables, her back to him. His eyes went guiltily to her sweet backside, and then his jaw dropped, for her bottom bore six double lines of red: the unmistakable marks of a caning.

He stood there for a long, long moment, torn between more different emotions than he could parse, at first. Anger was uppermost: wrath that someone had caned
his
girl—his
wife—
without his knowledge and without his permission.

But mingled with that anger, and seeming to twine with it somehow so closely that Martin felt he couldn’t feel it pure and hot the way he wanted to feel it, was cock-stiffening arousal at the sight, and at the idea. He would never have given permission, would he? Why then did he picture himself saying to another man,
Go ahead and cane that sweet bottom of hers. She’s a naughty girl.

He would never cane her himself, either, would he? He had bought a cane, yes, in the little shop owned by a Maenad Club member where they sold the sort of implements certain elites liked to use on their relict girls—and he had bought several other things, too—in the days after Gretchen had come to Athena and had to go through orientation.

But once he had realized, that first night, that he must treat her tenderly and push the cruel
having
part of him down, he had put away all thoughts of those things. When she had forgotten to start dinner, and his palm had itched to spank her, he thrust the anger down and away, and sent her to her room.

When he went to her room to make love every night, enjoying his conjugal rights as he thought of them, he quieted the
having
part, and entered her ever so gently. He rode in and out of her pussy knowing that he must never let her see the way he truly wished to fuck harder and harder, and turn her over and fuck her that way in her pussy and in her anus.

And in her mouth. When Gretchen had asked if she could kiss his cock, it had taken every ounce of resolve for Martin to say no. He had pictured her sucking his penis so many times since the Taking, when he had thrust gently into her mouth, without the slightest inkling of the emotional and moral minefield he would soon create for himself. But he knew that if he let her do it, the savagery would come out again, and he would end by making his wife afraid of him, as she had been that first night.

Suddenly, though, looking at her unmistakably caned backside, he wanted to cane her himself. He wanted it so badly that he almost turned to go to the closet where he had put the cane. His anger and his savage arousal rose higher and higher, together: he must reclaim his wife—lay his own red stripes across her prim, creamy white bottom, and then enjoy her the way he had a right to enjoy the relict girl he had married, according to the law and according to his hardness.

Anger and arousal. Then guilt. First, guilt at how stiff his cock had instantly become at the sight of Gretchen’s well-punished bottom. But second, and stronger, guilt that someone else had had to take it upon him or herself to discipline his wife.

When he had decided to take the tender path, he had known—especially the night Gretchen had forgotten dinner—that he might fail to give his relict girl the necessary discipline to keep her in line on Athena. Now, clearly, she had offended an elite and although the Enclosure Act prohibited the corporal punishment of relicts by anyone but their owners, unless a duly appointed authority served notice to the owner first, in practice that notice was rarely given, and girls were caned by elite enforcers relatively frequently.

Gretchen knew that, from orientation, but she had clearly been cheeky, or gone somewhere relicts weren’t allowed to go. As her owner, legally—and as her husband, ethically—that was his responsibility, and Martin would have to find a way to discipline her, clearly, without letting his cruelty come out. Could he send her to her room and keep her there for a day or even two? What did they call that in the old fiction books?
Grounding,
wasn’t it?

He took a deep breath. “Gretchen,” he said.

She whirled around, still holding the knife. Her cheeks had turned pink, and the little white apron seemed to him to suit her even better than the lacy lingerie he had never had her wear again. Over the weeks since their strange wedding night he had grown mostly used to her nakedness, mainly because he knew he needed to get used to it so he wouldn’t feel the constant need to take her roughly, the way he truly longed to do. Now, though, in the apron, and with the stripes across her backside that Martin couldn’t forget despite their now lying hidden from him behind her, against the counter, Gretchen’s beauty seemed to him just as terribly provocative as it had been in the lace. He took another breath. Controlling himself would be terribly difficult, he realized.

Gretchen’s wide eyes stared at him, and for a moment, as if she could see the hunger of his
having
thoughts and feelings, she almost seemed to brandish the big chef’s knife at him.

Martin’s control fled. To have this lovely girl, whom he wanted to love and to cherish, to have and to hold, look at him as if she needed defending, could not be borne. He took the three strides necessary to reach her, across the kitchen. The knife wavered before his chest and then, swiftly, he had her wrist inside his right hand, across both their bodies. He twisted—not hard—and with his left hand he took the knife from her hand and laid it behind her, on the counter.