It was an uncomfortable journey
for Betty. For starters she was uneasy about the whole trip. Michael had
insisted on it.
“I’m not going to marry a woman
who disobeys me the way you do. If you want to be my wife, I have to make sure
I can handle you. Away from everybody, I can make sure.”
So he had chosen this remote
cottage on a cliff above the sea.
“We were very lucky,” he told
Betty. “They had a last-minute cancellation. Otherwise I think the place is
booked up solid all through the season.”
Lucky indeed, she had thought.
There wouldn’t be a soul around, which was obviously the idea.
The other reason Betty was
uncomfortable was that Michael had given her ‘a foretaste of things to come’ as
he had put it. She had stayed the night at his place so as to be ready for the
early start next day, and in the room where Michael had put her, she had stayed
up late, lying on the bed in her Chinese silk dressing gown, reading magazines.
Michael had seen the light
under the door and had come in without pausing to knock.
“You were supposed to go to
sleep hours ago. That’s exactly the sort of thing I mean. Now I’m going to give
you a foretaste of things to come.”
With that he rolled her over
onto her front and with one deft movement of his hand, slid the dressing gown
up. She was not wearing anything underneath.
“No, Michael, don’t!” She had
protested wildly. “I’ll turn out the light now. It’s just that I wasn’t quite
sleepy yet.”
“I’m not interested in your
excuses,” Michael countered.
With that he put one hand
firmly on her waist so that she couldn’t roll away, and with the other he
slapped her bare bottom several times, hard.
“There,” he said when he had
finished. “You can sleep on your front tonight.” Without even kissing her, he
had left the room.
Betty had sneaked to the
full-length mirror on the door of the wardrobe and peeked at her bottom.
Michael’s finger-marks showed plainly on the white flesh. He had not spanked
her sufficiently for them to blend into one mass of red, but the punishment had
been severe enough for her to be squirming this morning on the seat of
Michael’s car.
It was still very early.
Michael had had to rouse Betty from sleep, harangue while she dressed and then
steer her yawning down his front steps. His car was a convertible; he had
opened the top to let the wind wake her up. Normally she would have minded
because it would mess up her hair, but today she hadn’t arranged it so it
didn’t matter.
They had one stop in which
Michael propelled Betty forcibly into a motorway café and ordered her a coffee
which she drank meekly.
While they were still some way
away from their journey’s end, Betty could smell the sea air. It reminded her
of her childhood: a holiday every year on the same stretch of coast – fish and
chips and winkles in a bucket. But she soon realised that this place was
different.
Even she had to admit that the
cottage was picture-perfect. It was low and white, with a grey slate roof and a
little garden surrounded by a stone wall. The most wonderful thing about it was
its setting: perched on the edge of a cliff that shelved steeply to a stony
beach.
Michael parked the car in the
lee of the garden wall and slid the roof up, but he didn’t unpack the car
straight away. Instead he went to stand almost at the edge of the cliff and
looked down, the wind stirring his dark hair.
“It’s low tide. I’ll bet you
there’s no beach at high tide,” he said.
Betty joined him and peered
down also. “I guess so,” she murmured.
“Don’t go too near the edge,”
Michael admonished. “It might not be a sheer cliff but it would be dangerous to
fall down it all the same.”
With that he produced the
cottage key from his pocket and unlocked the front door.
“Oh!” Betty gasped.
They walked straight into a
large, airy living room with a chintz sofa and armchairs. The windows, one of
which was a French window, looked out onto the sea.
“We can explore after lunch,”
said Michael. “We’ll unpack first.”
“No, please,” Betty squealed.
“Surely all that can wait. It might be high tide soon. Lets’ explore now!”
Michael gave her a look which
instantly quelled her. “This holiday is about you learning to obey me. Don’t
show me you’re incapable of that in our very first hour here.”
“OK,” said Betty, putting on
her best ‘dutiful wife’ look.
They unpacked and had the
picnic lunch which Michael had had the foresight to provide, then they walked
for a while along the cliff top. There was a wooden stairway down to the beach
but Michael didn’t want to go down there yet and Betty didn’t argue: she was on
her very best behaviour. But she didn’t even manage to get to the end of the
day before she incurred Michael’s wrath again.
She had forgotten to bring her
make-up bag into the cottage. In the panic of the early morning she had crammed
it into the glove compartment of the car. She remembered and went to open the
car, but found it locked so asked Michael for the car key.
“I can do better than that,”
Michael teased her. He was in a good mood; the cottage was even better than the
agent had led him to believe. He took the car key out of his trousers’ pocket
and pressed a button on it. Through the open front door, Betty heard a click
and saw the car lights flash.
She reached into the car,
retrieved the make-up bag, and went into the bedroom of the cottage to apply
eye-shadow and lipstick so she would look her best when they went down to the
Pub for their evening meal and a bit of socialising.
Suddenly she saw Michael in the
mirror behind her. His expression was grim.
“I just found my car unlocked,”
he said quietly.
“I thought since we were just
going out …”
“Never mind what you thought.
It was sloppy.”
“I thought you’d realise! I got
what I wanted, and all you had to do was press …”
Betty never finished her
sentence. Michael grabbed her from behind and took her to the end of the bed.
He sat down, and with an incredible strength which Betty could feel all through
his body, he manoeuvred her round and flipped her up so that she landed face
down over his knee.
“What was that?” he asked in a
quiet, menacing voice. “Did I hear you trying to blame me for your
carelessness?”
“No, Michael, no! You didn’t.
We have to go out! They’ll stop serving meals if we’re not careful!”
“In that case we’ll have to be
quick. Quick and hard.”
With that he flicked up the
flimsy skirt she had chosen so carefully for their first evening out in the
place, slipped his hand under the elastic of her knickers, and pulled them down
till they were half way down her thighs.
“Now let’s see how quick we can
be and still get the same result.”
The dressing table where Betty
had been seated moments before was just in reach. He grabbed her hair brush and
spanked her with the flat side, hard and fast till she wriggled and cried out.
“You know the rules,” Michael
warned her. “If you wriggle you get more. I can pull your knickers down to your
knees and spank the back of your thighs as well.”
Betty lay still after that and
Michael didn’t carry out his threat. The pain was intense but the punishment
was soon over, just as he had promised.
