“Good girl,” he said once the servant was gone. “Your obedience arouses me, as does your naughty little mouth.” His fingers toyed with her curls. “He didn’t see you, I promise. And I am very, very close.”
As he said it, his cock bucked between her lips. He instructed her to lightly stroke his balls, and when she did, he made such urgent sounds of pleasure that Aurelia strove even harder at her task. When he stiffened, his hands clamped on either side of her head, she prepared herself for his hot liquid seed, and swallowed it without being told.
She looked up at him, blinking. She felt so vulnerable in these moments. She knew she could never live up to the loose women who inhabited his premarital life, but she tried her best. He gazed down at her with a lazy smile and a great sigh of contentment that made her feel like a very talented lady indeed.
“What are you thinking?” she asked as he did up his flap.
His smile widened to a grin. “I’m thinking that a regimen of spanking and sexual training suits you very well. I’m also thinking that you may wish to rise and compose your appearance before the footman returns with the ginger I ordered for your bottom.”
She gawked at him as he smoothed her disarranged curls and patted her skirts. “You...you sent a servant for ginger?”
“Did you expect me to go fetch it myself from the hothouse? The cook knows precisely how to prepare it to my specifications. At least, when it is to be sent upstairs, since it’s only requested then for one reason. For ladies’ bottoms,” he specified when she continued to gawk in silence. “For your bottom, tonight.”
“I don’t understand the point of this activity,” she said.
“You’ll understand shortly. Ah, here we are.” The servant returned, crossing the library with a covered silver tray. “Leave it there, would you?”
Aurelia breathed a sigh of relief that the footman wasn’t going to take off the silver lid and present the ignoble item to Townsend as she stood there beside him, the obvious recipient. But of a certainty, the servant knew. A deep blush showed about his ears and neck. The household staff were trained to show no interest, judgment, or emotion in matters, but his blush gave everything away.
Townsend dismissed the man, so she was left alone with her husband in the midst of this very alarming situation. She heard the deep click of the library doors as the servant pulled them closed.
He faced her, wearing a piratical smile. “I would like to reassure you this will not be so bad, little grasshopper, but in truth, the entire point is to unsettle you. Come closer and have a look.”
He took the lid off the tray and Aurelia stared down at a very ordinary finger of ginger and a small knife. No, not entirely ordinary. Upon closer inspection she saw the lump of ginger was shaved into a phallic shape with an exaggerated flange at one end. On the whole, it was rather thicker than she would have liked, since he’d already told her where it was going.
“Sometimes I wish I could have married a very boring and continent man,” she said, meaning every word. “Is this absolutely necessary? Why do you find pleasure in tormenting me?”
He picked up the small knife and began to carve shallow ridges into the ginger. “It’s not the tormenting I enjoy, but your reactions to it. Your moaning, your kicking, your pleas for mercy. It gives me a great, delicious feeling of power and sexual arousal. If you could feel what I feel, you wouldn’t question the things I do.” He looked up at her from his curious task. “I wonder what you feel. Is it only pain and dread? Or other feelings? Some of the ladies I frequented in London were happily affected by all the things I do to you.” His voice lowered a bit. “Sometimes you seem more happily affected than you profess to be.”
She could not in a thousand years answer his question, not honestly, at least. Instead, she posed him a question. “What are you doing to that?”
He put down the knife and showed her the bit of ginger, its scent grown stronger in the past few minutes. “I am feathering the flesh, so the effect becomes more potent. Just a bit, you know, since this is your first time. One can employ all sorts of methods to increase the sting.”
She swallowed hard. The sting? Was this to be a sting like the sting when he used a birch rod or strap on her bottom? But this was to be inside her bottom... Her hands crept back to cover her posterior.
“I wonder if my father has perhaps lost interest in monitoring your extramarital peccadillos. If there are ladies who enjoy this, perhaps you would do better going to them. I wouldn’t mind.”
He gave her a look both affectionate and reproachful. “I have no wish to test your father, not when you have proven such an erotic delight.”
An erotic delight. She could hardly fathom it. “You’re only saying that so I don’t run away screaming.”
“If you ran screaming, I would drag you back, as we both know. I am saying it because it’s the truth. I’ve come to prefer tormenting my wife to tormenting hardened working ladies. For one thing, there is some perverse excitement in the way you struggle to comply.” His lips pursed, and his expression sobered. “For another, you have grown more than a little dear to me. You are beautiful and compelling to me in a way the others never were.”
She took in this brash avowal, not knowing whether to smile or dissolve into tears. There was a time she had believed he hated her. Now they got along in a much more congenial way and she was happy for that, but for him to call her beautiful, and profess that she compelled him? She ducked her head, wringing her hands in her skirts. “I can hardly believe you mean what you say.”
“Well, we shall lie that at the Duke and Duchess of Lansing’s feet, for never allowing you to learn how very alluring you are.”
Those words too, she could barely process, but then her husband was in motion, drawing her over his lap and pushing her skirts up and out of the way. He caught one of her arms and held it tight at the small of her back. With his other hand he caressed her bottom cheeks.
“The first thing you must understand about your arsehole, darling, is that for me to put anything inside it, you must let me have my way. You cannot resist and clench the passage shut.”
“I am very sure I can’t help doing that,” she complained from her defenseless position.
“And yet you must learn how. I shall put things inside it on a more regular basis now, in order to prepare you for eventual copulation.”
“Copulation? Who decided copulation there would be a good idea?” Frustration had rather coarse and whining words spilling from her mouth. “Your thing is far too big, and that hole is far too small, and whoever invented this method of sexual congress must have been a dunderhead indeed.”
“Perhaps. A lustful dunderhead who enjoyed tight spaces, as many men do. Calm yourself, little one,” he said, pausing a moment to massage her tense back. “There shall only be ginger for now, until you grow more used to these earthier pleasures.”
Only ginger, she thought. And earthier pleasures? More like an abominable act against nature. She felt him reach to the tray, then felt the cold, wet tip of the ginger fig pressed to her bottom. She braced, but so far, it wasn’t terribly painful or stinging where it touched her.
“I am going to press it inside you now,” he said in the calm, implacable tone he always used for moments like these. “You’ll feel pressure and discomfort, but you’ll receive no injury. The wider edge will keep it from disappearing inside.”
Heavens, she hadn’t even thought of such a thing. Then she was unable to think of anything at all as the thick bit of ginger entered her bottom hole. He had told her not to clench but she found it happening instinctively, from alarm or uneasiness. He held her still as he pressed it deeper and deeper. At last the intrusion stopped.
Aurelia lay limp, afraid to even breathe. There was no sharp pain, only a shameful, stretched awareness that the thing was there where it should not be. And then...she felt the sting.
It was bearable at first. Her husband murmured something that might have been “good girl” or “there now” or some other platitude, and Aurelia realized that the burning was intensifying moment by moment. Her bottom hole, which she had always tried very hard to forget existed, now felt alive with a burning, stinging achiness. She twisted her hips, moaning softly.
“Don’t fight it,” he said. “You shall tolerate this in your bottom for quite some time yet.”
“But why?” she wailed. “Why do you want to do this to me?”
“Because it excites me to a magnificent degree.” Indeed, she could feel him going hard against her side, although he’d just climaxed in her mouth a short time earlier. “Be still,” he chided as her cries of protest mounted and her feet began to kick. “It cannot be that bad.”
“It is that bad! I wonder, husband, if you should like to have a piece of ginger shoved in your bottom.”
He chuckled, rubbing and playing with her bottom cheeks. “Of course I tried it once to see what it felt like. I discovered that I don’t enjoy receiving it very much, but I do so love inflicting it on others, especially kicking, sassy, naughty wives.”