Martinique (The Acolyte Book 1) Read Free Page A

about where you were."
    I did not, nor had I intended to.
    "Létice, you've always been a good girl. You have never been naughty or defiant. But the influence of these new friends, the Ducasses, is causing you to behave as they do, and I won't have it! I haven't inflicted corporal punishment on you since you were eight years old, but I'm afraid you've forced my hand." I was stunned when he added, in a tone I knew better than to defy, "Now, lean over my desk, and lift your skirts." When I demurred, my face flaming, he added quietly, "At once, if you please."
    With that he reached down and produced a switch, obviously having already prepared it for my chastening.
    I shook my head back and forth, truly appalled that he would do such a thing, but it availed me nothing. Stepping around to my side, he took me by the arm, firmly and with authority, leaning me over the front of his desk. I was, in fact, so shaken that I didn't realize I wore nothing under my muslin day gown. But once I assumed the position of complete submission, my forehead coming to rest on the cool island rosewood of his desktop, he raised my skirts since I had refused, and discovered it for himself.
    "Létice Marie!" he thundered, "just where, may I ask, are your pantalettes?"
    I offered no reply, for I had no defense. I'd always detested them, particularly in the jungle heat, the horrid linen drawers inflicted upon their charges by the nuns, for the sake of modesty beneath the thin cotton gowns of fashion. I was seventeen, and no longer a little girl. The great ladies of Paris wore scandalously little beneath their sheer lawn and muslin, and feeling myself now a woman grown, I followed where fashion led.
    "You have just earned yourself another ten. And if you were a son, it would be with a leather strap, so count yourself fortunate," he said harshly, and before I could take it in, the switch descended on my bared backside.
    It made a swishing sound as it snaked through the air, far softer than the gasp I cried out with the first blow, but this did not deter him. The second fell even sharper, and the whiplash motion of his wrist made the sting worse, like a wasp. I suppose he chose my humiliatingly bared cheeks because to lay it across my back would have been too much a suggestion I was a slave rather than a daughter. I did not agree, for I had come of an age to find my position degrading.
    Squirming, I turned my head enough to see part of him, his waist and broad chest, and sensed his movements, his shoulder rising, the muscular arm in his white linen shirt descending forcefully in a relentless rhythm. Between the gasps I began to moan, twisting helplessly on the desktop to escape him, while his other broad hand spread wide and pressed my back to pin me down.
    As the sting blossomed into heat, spreading down toward the inward curve of my bottom, I began to feel something that startled me. Despite the pain, I was growing damp between my legs, and a thrumming ache was born there, the ache I both provoked and eased in bed at night, though it was far more acute. For the first time, I connected that nightly ritual with something else, something occurring in broad daylight. By the tenth blow, despite the searing lacerations that were making my eyes tear, there was a hunger as well, a turbulent excitement as the flesh grew even hotter, more alive to sensation, including a deep craving for the opposite of what it was being given.
    When he was done, the final lash laid on with the greatest force, I felt my knees had turned to water, and wasn't certain I could stand. I wished more than anything that he would press his huge hands across my abused cheeks, that he would soothe the reddened welts, and then move downward, between my legs. For the first time, I wanted it to be someone else's hand, and far worse, I desperately wanted it to be his. When I stood, I dared not look him in the face.
    Nana used a balm on me that night, all the while agreeing with my father that, though