His by Carolyn Faulkner (best historical fiction books of all time .txt) 📗

It had never even crossed Raina's mind to try to get away with letting him forget. She was on too many pins and needles when she knew she had a punishment coming. It was almost a worse punishment in and of itself when she was made to wait like that.

He met her at the end of the bed, noting that for only the second night in a row she wasn't wearing the pajamas she had been while she was sick. In small ways, she was getting back to normal. Raina stood tall and strong before him, although as far as he was concerned, she was too thin. He hated it when she was sick; he just hated it. He hated when she was so small and vulnerable. Even when he was giving her the worst of beatings, he still felt her inherent strength. But that tiny, sick woman curled around the toilet kept popping into his head at the worst times.

"How are you feeling?" he asked, looking deeply into her eyes, his brow furrowed worriedly.

"I'm all right. Still a little tired, but not much more so than usual, Sir," she answered truthfully.

He had to smile. If she had so much as hinted that she wasn't feeling well, he knew that she knew that he would have put the punishment off indefinitely. But she was completely open with him, which was a sign of just how deep their relationship was.

"Okay. Go and get your leather strap."

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Raina wished heartily that she had decided to play sick for another day or two... or twelve. The strap was an awesomely bad implement that - in his more than capable hands - could reduce her to whimpering tears with one blow.

"Bend over," he said without preamble, once she'd handed the horrid thing to him.

Raina planted her palms on the end of the bed, which was just low enough that, in this position, her bottom became a nicely prominent target. This was going to be hard - keeping still for however many strokes he gave her.

"I think twenty five should cover it, don't you?" he asked rhetorically, and then the strap fell and Raina knew that the next half hour of her life were going to be pure hell - and it was.

The strap was about three inches wide and twenty inches long, and sometimes he would wrap the end around his hand to give him a little more control as to where the leather seared her skin, and sometimes he simply let the entire length fly, always careful that it didn't wrap around to her more tender areas. As far as her Master was concerned, her bottom, her breasts, and the backs of her legs were created specifically to handle the discipline that he meted out, and he did his best to make sure that none of his corrections caused her to experience pain anywhere else.

He liked the strap, for its history and its aesthetics - he liked leather implements in general - and the fact that it truly worked her bottom over very nicely, causing bright, wide swathes of sore, swollen ridges to form immediately that grew exponentially worse as they inevitably began to overlap.

He loved her full throated howls, and drew the punishment out as much as he could, allowing the strap to dangle some times against the very flesh it had been busily roasting as he checked in with occasionally to ask her if she was okay, and she knew that he wasn't asking her if her bottom hurt. He was being extra careful to make sure that she wasn't somehow having a relapse.

Sometimes, even in the middle of an atrocious strapping, he could be so damned tender.

But, far as the punishment itself went, he was far from it. When she went to sleep that evening, it was on her stomach, bound as he liked it some times, hand and foot, her bottom throbbing atrociously from his tender ministrations.

Two months later was Raina's birthday, which was the only day of the year - besides when she was sick - that she was given a complete reprieve from having to submit, as long as what she wanted to do wasn't going to be detrimental to her health. He had a history of simply indulging her all day, asking her long beforehand for some things she thought she might want to do or have so that he could get it arranged.. If she wanted lunch in Paris and dinner in L.A., then that's what they did. If she wanted to go to the Island for the day, he made sure that that was what happened. Even if work intruded and they couldn't do it exactly on her birthday, he made it a moveable feast and simply procured the next available day to gift her with. If he had to do that, though, she actually got two days of presents, because he always made sure that on the right day, he had something for her, be it her favorite imported Belgian chocolates and a fabulous meal of her favorite foods, or having her office filled to the brim with her favorite pastel pink roses.

This time, she couldn't think of anything she wanted to do, or anything she wanted as a gift. He would have moved Heaven and Earth, and she knew that, but she was so content and happy that she couldn't think of anything else she wanted or even needed.

So he had to think of something himself, and he wasn't at all sure about what he decided to do.

If there was nothing major going on at work, he always made her take it off - and he was in cahoots with her secretary to try to make sure that that was always the case, although it didn't always work. This time, it just so happened that her birthday was on a Friday, and that gave her an impromptu three day weekend.