Rocky Mountain Discipline Page 7

  "That was—" she began, then found herself on her belly over his knees with her skirts pushed up around her head.

  "You will never," Johnathan's hand crashed down, punctuating his words, "ever, ever put your life in danger so again."

  "Yes, sir," she whimpered, squirming. She'd worn her silky drawers this morning, in hopes to stir his blood.

  Now, feeling his anger through his punishing hand, she wondered if she'd pushed him too far.

  A minute passed and his hand didn't let up. Bottom aching, she felt a growing pressure inside her, something she'd kept bottled up far too long. She shifted forward, spreading her legs, and her drawers fell open. He smacked between her legs and she cried out widening her knees.

  Above her, Johnathan drew in a harsh breath and stopped the spanking. His hand rested on her backside and squeezed. She moaned, but the sound heralded more pleasure than pain. Then Johnathan shifted and she came to her knees, staring up at him with a dazed expression.

  "Your punishment is not over," Johnathan growled. "You could've fallen to your death. You deserve a good caning, but since you are still recovering, I will have to improvise." He glowered at her as if daring her to talk back.

  Without a peep, she let him lift her and direct her to the corner.

  "Stand there and think on what you've done."

  Struggling to catch her breath, she pressed her nose to the wall. Her husband's sternness and punishing hand should've cowed her, but she felt excited instead.

  "Hold up your skirts," her husband ordered, and she did so, and a flush stole over her, her body blushing in shame to match her hot red bottom. She knew what he saw: her cheeks red and peeking at him from behind her divided drawers, her hands and nose in place just as he ordered it. Behind her she could hear him moving around, and she wondered what implement of pain he would unearth.

  He must have found something, because in a short time, Johnathan took her in hand and led her to the bed. He helped her strip down to corset and drawers, then positioned her over the bed, face down, her legs straight so her bottom presented a perfect target.

  Johnathan came beside her and laid a hand on her back. His hand started squeezing her cheeks, and Esther folded her arms above her head and buried her face in them.

  "Tell me why you're to receive punishment."

  "I climbed a tree."

  "You disobeyed me to put your life in danger," Johnathan said, kneading her buttocks. "And a few days ago, you left the room without my permission."

  "I only wanted a bath."

  Johnathan's hand started tapping her bottom lightly, little smacks that would warm her skin. "Esther, I love your spirit. I just wish you'd temper it with wisdom."

  Then her spanking started again. It hurt more than Esther remembered it, but not so much that she couldn't keep from squeaking in pain. Other than a few twitches, she kept still and quiet as Johnathan's hand slapped every inch of her heated skin.

  A pause, and then something hard and unyielding smacked her skin. Esther yelped and gripped the quilt to keep her hands from flying back to protect her poor bottom. Glancing back, she saw her husband raise a familiar object high. He was paddling her with her own hairbrush.

  The smooth, wooden surface hit her yielding flesh with a satisfying crack, and she jumped as the pain reverberated out from the original point of contact, spreading all over her already toasty cheeks.

  "Hold still, Esther. You asked for this."

  In no time, Esther was squirming and moaning. "Please, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Johnathan. I'll never do it again. Please."

  With each passing second, the hairbrush seemed to crash down with more force. Johnathan spanked her until she was crying, then laid the painful implement aside and whispering soothing words to her.

  "Shhh, Esther, I know you're sorry. You're forgiven."

  Even though the punishment stopped, Esther's bottom still throbbed like the hairbrush was still in use. Johnathan stroked her hair while she cried it out. As her sobs quieted, his hand dipped down and explored her lower lips. Sucking in a breath, Esther let her legs fall open even wider.

  "Oh, Esther," Johnathan murmured, and fed her his fingers. They were soaking wet, but Esther lapped at them like a cat with cream. "My naughty one. What will I do with you?"

  Her husband chuckled and his fingers continued stroking her, before he moved behind her and she heard his clothes drop to the floor.

  He pushed into her wetness. Pressing her body against the bed, she thrust her bottom back, inviting him to drive into her from behind, moaning as he did just that. As he moved, his hips slapped her sore cheeks, but the pain only fueled the pleasure and built a torrent of arousal inside her.

  Planting one hand on the bed to steady herself, Esther used her other to tug at her corset, struggling to pull it down. Johnathan reached around to help, freeing her breasts, then finding a nipple and rolling it between his fingers.

  The pain in her bottom and in her breast swept over her, and her climax followed. Johnathan groaned as her muscles squeezed his cock. When it was done, Esther arched her back and pushed against him with new vigor until he gripped her hips hard and came deep inside her.

  "So," she panted while they recovered. "Do you believe me when I say I'm well enough to travel?"

  "Esther," her husband laughed against the skin of her neck. "I believe you'll be the death of me."

  Before winter, they settled into a little white house in a small outpost between Florence and Royal Gorge. Their friends, the Wilders, lived further west, but with Mary doing poorly, the Shepherd's visited often.

  "That Lyle is certainly a fancy fellow," her husband remarked one day. They were down in the kitchen, Esther making a cake to celebrate their first little church service at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. The Wilders were there, and Miles Donovan too, though the latter wasn't speaking to the former, and Mary's cough was much worse. A few miners came, and Johnathan promised to ride out to their camp to lead them in prayer once a week, as well as see to any illness or wounds the rugged men sustained.

  In contrast to the mining men, Lyle Wilder looked like a dandy in his fine black vest and coat, his frail and beautiful wife on his arm.

  "I prefer someone steady and true." She smiled at her husband. "Like Mr. Donovan. Of course, that man would be handsomer if he smiled. I wonder if we could write home and find a woman to come and be a wife to him."

  Johnathan just shook his head at her, and she couldn't resist adding, "A good Christian woman. Someone wise, but young, who will make him laugh."

  Her husband dropped his paper. "Esther, leave the poor man alone. Donovan doesn't want a matchmaker."

  She turned away to hide her smile. "Oh, but he needs one. You know as well as I, it is not good for a man to be alone."

  The kitchen chair scraped back, and she felt her husband's heat at her back before he put his arms around her and sank his head onto her shoulder. "Are you going to be a busybody, or will you listen to your husband and leave Mr. Donovan alone?"

  "I don't know," she pretended to think. "I think I was put on this earth to meddle. Stir things up." Sticking her finger into the batter, she gazed at him over her shoulder, and then licked her digit clean.

  She reached for a spoon, but he'd already snapped it up, before relieving her of the mixing bowl.

  "Lift up your skirts, wife," he ordered, tapping the wooden spoon against one hand. "And bend over the table."

  A mischievous light in her green eyes, Esther hurried to obey.

  The End

  Author's Notes

  The story of Esther and Johnathan is loosely based on the real life account of Mary Richardson and Elkanah Walker. In 1837, both Mary and Elkanah wrote separately to the American Mission Board, offering to serve as missionaries. The Board wrote back to Elkanah: "You ought…to have a good, healthy, patient, well-informed, devotedly pious wife. There is a Mary Richardson of Baldwin, Maine, who has offered herself to the Board, but we cannot send her single…If you have nobody in
view, you might inquire about her."

  Some of the Walkers details I preserved for Esther and Johnathan's story (set much later, in 1858): Mary was the oldest of eleven and attended seminary; Elkanah really was six foot four. After a courtship through letters and a few meetings, Mary was married in black as was her family's tradition. But there the similarities between the two couples end.

  We know from Mary's journals that she and Elkanah fell in love, and had seven children and were devoted to each other until death. So even though, outside of a few details, the story of the fictional Shepherds and the real Walkers diverge, both couples have a happy ending.

  Personal Note:

  In 2010 I suffered shooting pains in my abdomen. After a night of agony, I was alarmed enough to ask for a ride to the hospital, where I was treated for an ectopic pregnancy. According to Web MD, up to one in every fifty pregnancies ends with the egg implanting outside of the womb, in the fallopian tube.

  In Esther's time, the death rate for an ectopic or tubal pregnancy exceeded fifty percent. For me, it was a simple surgery. The doctors assured me that I'd still be able to have a normal, healthy pregnancy (they were right!). For Esther, I'm not sure that's the case.

  Stay tuned!

  Smooches,

  Lee

  Rocky Mountain Bride

  Rocky Mountain Discipline Book Two

  Published by Blushing Books

  An Imprint of

  ABCD Graphics and Design, Inc.

  A Virginia Corporation

  977 Seminole Trail #233

  Charlottesville, VA 22901

  ©2015

  All rights reserved.

  No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The trademark Blushing Books is pending in the US Patent and Trademark Office.

  Savino, Lee

  Rocky Mountain Bride

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-68259-156-7

  v1

  Cover Art by ABCD Graphics & Design

  This book contains fantasy themes appropriate for mature readers only. Nothing in this book should be interpreted as Blushing Books' or the author's advocating any non-consensual sexual activity.

  Rocky Mountain Bride

  The stage coach bounced over the rough terrain, its team of tired horses kicking up dust as they raced towards a lonely cluster of buildings. Sighting the short line of drab buildings, the driver turned the team, then cried “Whoa,” and brought the coach rattling to a halt.

  As the dust settled, a pale face in a cheery yellow bonnet peered out of the window.

  “Here we are, Miss Winters,” the driver called.

  Carrie Winters pushed back a curl that had escaped her bonnet and looked over the few squat buildings aligned around a rocky street. “This is the town?”

  The stagecoach driver leaned down and grimaced at the young woman. “Yes, ma’am. This is it.”

  She opened the door to get a better look. “Are you sure?” The buildings—too few for Carrie to call them a town—were barely larger than some of the rocks she’d seen on the side of the road. They sat, dusty and insignificant in the barren landscape. She leaned further out of the stagecoach and saw nothing but dry soil and scrub brush all the way to the jagged mountain range on the horizon.

  She, Carrie Winters, had come to the middle of nowhere to meet a man.

  My name is Miles Donovan. I am a farmer and homesteader near Royal Gorge, Colorado.

  A rough voice broke her thoughts. “Help you down, missy?”

  Clutching her skirts, she shook her head and managed the long step off the coach on her own. She could hear the other passengers muttering jokes about her hesitation, but she ignored them. She’d had six days of travel with the dirty lot, and although they’d been polite enough to the only woman aboard, she couldn’t stand to look at them anymore.

  Turning her back on the stagecoach, she tottered towards the nearest building. Her feet still felt the sway of the carriage, even though they were firmly on the ground. After a few steps towards the nearest desolate structure, her resolve crumbled. Biting her lip, she looked back at the carriage. Mean and dirty, it had been her home for six days, and was the most familiar thing for miles.

  One of the passengers, an older man with a grizzled beard, poked his head out and grinned at her, showing a mouthful of half rotten teeth. “Looks like a lonely place to find a husband.”

  The driver laughed. “You want to give up on this venture?” he asked, looking down at Carrie from his seat atop the stage coach. “I’ll drop these prospectors off, then take you back to Colorado Springs. I’m sure you could find a man to marry you there.”

  “No, thank you,” Carrie told both men, wishing she’d never confided in her carriage mates the reason for her journey. “I’ll have my bag, please.”

  The driver handed it down, and she clutched the sack to her, for the first time grateful that she hadn’t enough money to bring a trunk. There wasn’t a soul around to carry it, and no one in the stagecoach was gentleman enough to help.

  The grizzled man shut the coach door. “Oh ho,” he called to Carrie, then nodded at the nearest building. “That could be him. The lucky groom.”

  A man, short and lean except for a rounded stomach, stood on the porch, wiping his balding head with a red handkerchief.

  “Good day,” he called. “Wasn’t expecting a delivery so soon in the month.”

  “No deliveries,” the driver called back, not bothering to disembark. “Just her.” He nodded down at Carrie, and the man with the red handkerchief stared at her as if he’d never seen a woman before.

  Perhaps he hadn’t.

  Carrie started to speak and got a mouthful of dust, as the driver clicked to the horses and the coach took off towards the mountain range. Coughing, she stumbled towards the town.

  “Here you are, ma’am.” The balding man had come off the porch to help her. Clutching her bag, she let him guide her inside the low building, stopping in the doorway to let her eyes adjust to the dim light inside. The building held shelves with a few bags of flour and a pitiful amount of dried goods on them.

  Inside, the sweating man moved more confidently, fussing behind his counter and setting a pail of water and a cup on his counter.

  Was this Miles Donovan?

  I seek a wife, age 18-25, and in good health, willing to journey west and join me on my homestead.

  She studied the shopkeeper and wondered if he could have penned the letter she had in her bag. Written in neat cursive, it had journeyed two thousand miles east to end up in her hands. Strong words, sure of themselves, that drew her to this lonely place.

  “You must be thirsty,” the man said, nodding to the cup of water sitting on the counter. She realized he’d poured it some moments ago, and she’d been sitting there like a ninny. She drank, relishing the water, cool from sitting under the counter. Everything seemed hotter out here. Even the mountains looked burnt.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The shopkeeper’s rounded face now flushed the color of his faded kerchief. He seemed older than she’d taken him to be. She pretended to pay attention to her cup and realized the townsman was sizing her up as much as she was him.

  She knew what the man saw: a short, plump woman of three and twenty, in a well-washed calico gown, with a few unruly curls escaping her bonnet. Her face was pretty enough, with cheeks pinched pink by the relentless Colorado sun, and a few unsightly freckles—the bane of her existence—pattering across her nose.

  She set down the cup. “Thank you, Mr.—?”

  “Martin. Lawrence Martin, at your service. And you?”

  “Oh, forgive me, I’ve been rude. I’m Carrie Winters.”

  “Mrs. Winters.”

  “Miss,” she corrected. “I’m looking for Mr. Miles Donovan. Could you tell me which house is his?” She thought of the rugged bui
ldings along the street, and felt she was being polite to call them houses.

  “Miles? He doesn’t live here.”

  “No?” Her heart sank, and she pawed at her bag to find the letter.

  “No, I mean, yes, ma’am.” Drops of sweat rolled down Mr. Martin’s temple anew. “He lives outside of town, a good ways towards the range.”

  “This is where Mr. Donovan told me to come. He sent me the fare.” She blushed as she realized what deductions a stranger might make from that. “He wrote to me, through my brother. We’re to be married.”

  “Married.” The shopkeeper’s head jerked back like she struck him. “Miles Donovan, married?” Then, as if realizing his rude outburst, the poor shopkeeper grabbed the water pail and ducked behind the counter, leaving Carrie staring at the roughhewn board that served as a counter top.

  What did Mr. Martin mean? Was Miles Donovan unfit to be a husband? Was he rude, or uncouth, or given to drink? The man who wrote the letter seemed to be a steady, sincere gentleman. A Christian man.

  Her thoughts turned to another horror. What deformity did Mr. Donovan have that kept him from getting married to another woman, perhaps one he’d met face to face? She’d never considered it. When her brother Thomas had first read her the letter, she’d felt relieved and eager to accept the offer. It was a chance to escape, and one she badly needed.

  Now, in the wilderness, having made her escape, she wondered if she hadn’t properly thought things through.

  The sound of a horse galloping down the street broke her thoughts, and she left off waiting for Mr. Martin to resurface from his hiding place. Leaving her bag on the floor, she stepped to the door in time to see a magnificent black stallion slow to a trot and then stop in front of the porch. The rider also wore black to match the horse’s shining, sweating flanks, and his face was obscured with a black, wide brimmed hat. The horse snorted and arched its proud neck as its rider swung down, looped the reins around the porch railing and strode up the steps.