Read Online The Red Velvet Horse (Siren Publishing Allure) by Iona Blair - Free Book Online Page B

stealing quietly into her bedroom after she had heard me leave for work. “Oh you poor little dear…I’m going to call the constable.”
    “No…no…please don’t. I deserved to be spanked…I did a terrible thing…a criminal act.”
    Violet hunched her narrow shoulders in disgust. “I can’t imagine anything that would be bad enough to deserve a thrashing like you’ve just taken,” she argued bitterly.
    But try though she might, was unable to pry out of Mattie; exactly what she had done to warrant such a beating.
    Her thin lips pursed in distaste, she nevertheless bathed the maid’s wounds as gently as she could, and then applied a soothing ointment.
    “Ow…oh lord it hurts...” Mattie moaned, as the sour-faced Violet tended her injuries.
    “Well that’s what you get for having a two-bit whore as an employer. I know a good family who are looking for a nursemaid for their children. I can put in a word for you if you like.”
    “No...” Mattie sobbed. “I want to stay here.”
    “Have it your own way then,” Violet shot back in obvious displeasure. Then she fetched a piece of clean linen and diapered Mattie’s well-scourged bottom.

Chapter Five
     
    April felt stunned and more than a little sickened over the savage beating Hannah had meted out to her maid. And yet, if she had been in her position, and a lover’s letters sabotaged, she wondered if she might not have been just as brutal in her retribution.
    It was also important to judge people in their own time. In Hannah’s age corporal punishment was standard practice throughout society, with servants often being brutally whipped by their employers for trifling misdemeanors.
    She eased Spice gently from her lap and went to stand by the window. A tiny squirrel foraged around the hazelnut tree.
    Since the terrible revelations about Holt’s infidelity, she had refused to speak to him, unless absolutely necessary. An ugly atmosphere of tension surrounded the once happy shop, and it was left to Fern to practically run the place single-handed.
    April was in a state of shock, stumbling her way through a landscape that had become frighteningly unfamiliar and threatening. She just couldn’t understand how Holt could have betrayed her trust so cruelly. The personal pain caused by his cheating overriding even the concern about financial ruin.
     
    * * * *
     
    Holt too, was finding it a torment to live in such a purgatory of the spirit, self-castigation for his transgressions scourging him to the core. He remembered how the affair with Carla had begun, and winced anew at his stupidly for ever having started it.
    April had been away at the time, on family business, and he had found himself getting increasingly lonely and horny. He had always been faithful to her, and although tempted several times, had never strayed. But the lure of something different spurred him on. We’re not naturally monogamous, he told himself to ease the pangs of guilt, and besides April will never find out about it.
    He wondered where to go for that kind of thing? He had been out of circulation so long, he felt like a novitiate trembling at a forbidden altar.
    “Sensuous blonde available for discreet encounters.” He found the brief advertisement tucked away under Escort Services, in the back pages of the local newspaper. It was just what he’d been looking for.
    Carla was a petite, curvaceous woman with large brown eyes and a mischievous grin. “Would you like to start with a bodysuage?” She led Holt into a small room dominated by a professional massage table.
    He felt self-conscious at first, dropping his clothes and lying naked as a jay bird in front of this pay for play stranger. But as Carla worked her magic with sensuous body oils and scented candles, he felt himself begin to unwind and a slow creeping warmth steel furtively into his loins.
    “Hand relief, a blow job or a fuck?” she offered with no inhibitions whatever, after she had kneaded every inch of him with nimble