Royal Discipline by Annabel Joseph

behaved inappropriately. There’s something freeing about it, isn’t there? In being punished? In enduring consequences for what you’ve done wrong?”
    Her thoughts were muddled, and his eyes were so intense. She felt a sudden, fervent desire for his approval, for his positive regard.
    He touched her hand, a fleeting touch, and then brushed back a bit of hair from her forehead, where she had pulled and harried it all day. “You look a mess. After this last paddling, I’ll remove the bulb. Then you must bathe and take dinner in your bed until I return for your nightly spanking.”
    Her nightly spanking? After all this? It was the final straw for Violet. She burst into piteous tears. “Please...Your Grace...”
    “Violet, why do we do the nightly spankings?”
    “So I—” She sniffled, trying to catch her breath. “So I will learn to submit.”
    “And if I do not give you a nightly spanking, the impetus of our training might begin to slip. You understand that we cannot slide backwards from where we are.”
    “But I’m so tired,” she sobbed. “So tired of being spanked over and over.”
    “What will make that stop?” he asked, tilting up her chin. One of his fingers brushed over her tears. “What will make the spankings stop?”
    “They will stop when I ch-change,” she said with another great gust of sobs.
    “Indeed. And discipline will change you. It may not seem so as these days drag by, but the old you is in disorder, being chased away by a consistent course of consequences and punishment. A new, ‘changed’ you is waiting to be born.”
    “I wish she would hurry up and be born then,” said Violet. “I wish it very much.”
    “So do I.” His regard softened, and his lips turned up in a heartbreakingly handsome smile. “For I would very much like to meet that person, with her unselfish grace and virtue, and inner moral strength.”
    Then he was gone, taking up a position with the paddle behind her. Violet arched her bottom, only because Thornton took a firm grip of the wooden cylinder and made her do so.
    “What a useful tool this is,” he said. “From now on, whenever you refuse to submit to a spanking, I’ll simply insert this...what shall we call it? The ‘Handle’? I believe I’m a genius, my dear.”
    I believe you’re a madman , she thought. The paddling commenced with the hardest whacks yet. She’d known it would be that way. She knew by now, almost a month in, that he always saved the most painful strokes for last. She sobbed and clung to the back of the couch, unable to stop crying. Really, what did it matter if she soaked the sofa cushions? If he did not punish her for that, he’d find something else to punish her for.
    If only he would succeed in changing her. If only he would approve of her. Since when had his approval come to mean something to her? Sometime over the course of this six-hour ordeal, he had planted this thing within her...a tiny, struggling, glimmering, grasping motivation to change.

Chapter Seven: A Civil Tongue
     
    He left her alone for three wondrous days after that, when her courses came upon her. In truth, she needed the time for her well-spanked bottom to heal. Violet had intended to be “indisposed” for as long as a week, but Jeannie, that treasonous viper, reported to her master when her flow ceased to appear.
    She hated Jeannie for that, although she loved Jeannie for making the innocently stupid decision to keep her mending in a low trunk in Violet’s dressing room.
    She noticed it the day Jeannie had been forced to sit with her for hours on end, mending servant’s aprons, gowns, capes, and livery. At last, a viable plan: she would, at some time while Jeannie was about, pretend to take ill. Jeannie would run from the room to fetch help, leaving the door unlocked. Violet would then don the servants’ clothing she’d secreted away, find a hiding place in the ensuing rush of household mayhem, and stay there until she could skulk off unnoticed,