Training Lady Townsend (Properly Spanked 1)

Hunter pursed his lips. “It’s wrong to use force in sexual matters. She’ll resist me and start sobbing or something.”

“I have more faith in you than that. If you go about things the right way, there won’t be much resistance at all.”

Hunter rubbed his temples and groaned. “Says the man who’s not married to the daughter of Laudable Lansing. I have as much chance of training her into a whore as I have of sprouting wings and flying across the Thames.”

“Not a whore, my friend. A wife who obeys. A wife who wishes to please her husband and has been trained how to do so.”

Hunter lay back on his friend’s divan. A wife who obeys. Lansing had drilled obedience into Aurelia from her earliest days. If Hunter could prevail upon her desire to obey, train her to perform these acts, even enjoy them, what a dream their life might be. But she was so unresponsive in bed. She hadn’t the first inkling of sensuality or erotic awareness. She was as glacial as a block of ice. The idea of training her to please him was so absurd it was beyond imagining.

“She cannot even tolerate straightforward intercourse,” Hunter said. “She hates when I touch her.”

“If that’s true, then you have a lot of work to do, old boy.”

“I can’t, Warren. It’s a ludicrous idea. It would never work.”

His friend stood and brushed at a spot of lint on his rumpled dressing gown. “In the end, you’ve no other choice. Lansing has got you hemmed in. You can go without the finer bedroom games for the rest of your miserable existence, or you can teach your wife to play them with you. Now, if you please, I am dead tired and you are three-parts drunk. Sleep there on the divan if you want. I’m headed to bed.”

Chapter Six: Denial

By the time Hunter woke with a clashing headache, Warren had summoned the other lads to his place. They drank with him and agreed he was in a hell of a situation, and that Lansing was a wretched old blowhard with more rectitude than wit.

It was evening before he made his way home to Townsend House, mostly sober, but no less unsettled than the night before. He had the damn bad luck to run into his wife at the bottom of the grand staircase. If she could have avoided him, he was certain she would have, but she couldn’t very well flee back up the steps.

“Good evening,” he said, sketching a slight bow. He looked a fright, he knew. Disheveled, puffy eyed, unshaven, not like any sort of gentleman at all.

Miss Perfect Lady Dormouse, on the other hand, was dressed in pristine ivory silk with puffed sleeves, mounds of petticoats, and an ornately splendid bodice that revealed the lovely expanse of her breasts. She blinked at him, a blush spreading over her cheeks. “Good evening, my lord.”

“You can call me Townsend, you know. Or Hunter. We’re married.”

“Good evening, Townsend,” she repeated in a level, hollow tone. “You are well?”

“Perfectly well. I’ve been with my friends.”

He saw in her face that she didn’t believe him. She believed he had spent the past few nights with dissolute women. If only... If he had, he wouldn’t feel so roused by her curvaceous figure, her pleasing, upthrust breasts bundled into her lace-trimmed gown. Damn her for such heartless temptation. He’d best get away from her and regain control of his lustful emotions. “I will see you at dinner,” he said.

Her gaze flicked down at his dusty, rumpled clothes in a way that made him feel chastened. “I have a bit of a headache,” she replied, lifting a hand to her forehead.

He had no patience for theatrics at the moment. “Let me restate, then, Lady Townsend. I expect to see you at dinner, headache or no.”

She narrowed her eyes, dropped the briefest of curtsies, then turned from him to continue on her way. Her tightly coiled curls bounced as she fled across the hall and into the southernmost drawing rooms. She did boring, mousy things in there, like reading and embroidery. What a waste of her luscious body. He’d rather fill her hours with training on how to do the perverse acts the women performed at Pearl’s...

Hunter shook his head. Warren was a blighted idiot for suggesting such a thing, since there wasn’t a chance of it coming true. He stalked to the study off the grand, high-ceilinged foyer, and knocked out a half hour of necessary correspondence, then went to his rooms to bathe and dress for dinner. His valet hung up his wrinkled coat and waistcoat and shaved his overgrown stubble without a murmur of judgment or question. The warm water, the rasp of the razor, the familiar ritual of putting himself in order finally worked to calm his nerves.

By the time he headed to the dining room, tidied and proper in his formal dinner wear, he felt considerably better. He would approach his present life one day at a time. One evening at a time. One dinner at a time because there was nothing else to do. Perhaps in a few months Lansing would relent, and Hunter could take up his previous pursuits. Perhaps when Aurelia was with child, the confounded old man would bugger out of their business.

One dinner at a time.

Hunter looked around the dining room, finding no trace of his wife. He knew Aurelia had no more headache than he had virtue. He sat and waited for ten minutes, then beckoned a footman.

“Find Lady Townsend and tell her that I require her presence in the dining room at once.”

The man murmured “Yes, my lord,” and bowed out of the room. Not five minutes later he was back, bowing and scraping even lower.

“Where is my wife?” Hunter snapped.

“Her ladyship begs you to excuse her. She is feeling unwell.”

Feeling unwell, was she? Not as unwell as she’d feel when he was finished with her. “Where is she?” he asked the footman.

“Her chambers, my lord.”

Hunter pushed back his chair. He was not precisely angry, only very disappointed in the direction of his marriage and his life as a whole. He had a luscious and sexually alluring wife he couldn’t make proper use of, and a world of needs with no outlet for the foreseeable future. If he must live in such circumstances, the niceties, at least, would be adhered to. His wife would sit with him at dinner in her revealing bodices, goddamn it, and more importantly, she would obey his reasonable commands.

Or he would become much less reasonable, which she wouldn’t like at all.

He threw open her door when he arrived. Her hatchet-faced lady’s maid was there, fluttering about. Her startled glance toward the window seat told Hunter exactly what he needed to know. “Leave. Now.”

When he used that particular tone of voice, an able-bodied man wouldn’t dare cross him. The maid opened and shut her mouth, dropped a hasty curtsy, and fled, shutting the door.

“Aurelia.” He used the same sharply dangerous tone to draw out the syllables of his wife’s name. “I told you—twice—that I required your presence at dinner.”

There was silence, then a strained reply from the recesses of the window seat. “I am not well.”

“Come here.” If she didn’t come he would go in and drag her out, but the authority in his voice did the trick. She poked her head from the curtains and took a few steps toward him.

“Come. Here.” He pointed to the spot of floor in front of him, his expression promising dire consequences if she didn’t comply.

She swallowed hard and crossed to stand before him, all color drained from her cheeks. Let her be afraid. This confrontation was, after all, a result of her very poor choice to ignore his summons. He gave her a stern looking over, from the crown of her glossy, honey-colored curls to the hem of her primrose yellow dress.

“You look well enough, wife. I don’t see you languishing in bed.”

“I am ill. My digestion—”

“You said on the stairs you had a headache.” She fell silent, a flush creeping over her pallid visage. “A headache? Poor digestion? Which is it? Not one lie, but two. I thought you a virtuous woman, Aurelia.”

Her gaze met his but then skittered away. “I did not wish to come to dinner,” she said. “I tried to decline politely.”

“You lied to my face. And

I made it clear—twice—that you would not be permitted to decline. When I send a servant to say that I require your presence at dinner, that is exactly what I mean.”

She stared at the buttons of his waistcoat, still silently in rebellion. It would not do.

“Come on then,” he said, taking her arm.

She resisted, digging her heels into the floor. “Come where?”

“Come and receive your spanking, for lying and being a stubborn pain in the arse.”

“I will not,” she cried.

Resist as she might, he was stronger than her. When she wouldn’t follow him to the chair under her own power, he lifted and carried her, then sat and threw her over his lap. He pinned her kicking legs between his, and caught one of her arms to secure it behind her back.

“Listen to me, Aurelia,” he said. “We can do this two ways. You can accept your punishment without fighting me, or you can fight me and receive twice as many blows. Which do you prefer?”

“This is wrong of you,” she said, struggling against him. “I will tell my father.”

“Your father would agree with my right to discipline you, especially when I told him you’d lied to me and behaved as a disobedient wife. He’s such a stickler for proper behavior. Now, will you fight me, or will you submit?”