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continued to roast her rump with another crisp round of swats, but although she jerked and squealed and tried to cringe away from each descent of his paddle-like hand, she was no longer trying to escape the lesson he was trying to tattoo into her bottom.
    When he’d felt that she might have learned her lesson – although probably not, judging from how stubborn she could apparently be – he immediately flipped her onto her back, tucking the both of them under the covers as quickly as possible, figuring, correctly it turned out, that she was going to take umbrage at having to share her bed with her husband, too.
    It was going to be a long marriage for her, and Wolf was beginning to think he might need to prolong the life of his hand and make his pretty little wife a paddle of her very own.
    Hannah wanted nothing more in this lifetime than to get up, for several reasons. Firstly was the fact that his huge arm was pressing her sore, throbbing bottom into the rough, scratchy straw of the bed that was barely covered by the sheet she kept over it. It was driving her crazy! She hadn’t thought that anything could be worse than the spanking itself, but her poor skin was being horridly irritated and he’d left it so sensitive that she didn’t even want to reach back there to rub or sooth it.
    And secondly, his big bare body was much to close to her. That branch of an arm of his was iron hard around her waist, and his lightly hair chest was pressed up against her side, his face so close that she could smell his slightly coffee scented breath. Every time he moved, even if it wasn’t towards or against her, she jumped then yelped as her butt reaffirmed its abused state.
    But it was his soft whisper that carried almost directly into her ear that was the most disturbing of the seemingly limitlessly disturbing things that had happened to her since he had barged his way into her home. It tickled her ear and stirred the curly blonde baby hair at her temples, then seeped directly into her brain and somehow found its way to settle in the strangest of areas that she refused to acknowledge she even owned.
    “You’re going to have to relax and get used to sharing a bed with me, petite, or you’ll never get a night’s sleep. I don’t believe in separate bedrooms or even separate beds, convention be damned.” As if to drive home his point, he pulled her even closer, ignoring her moans as her bottom was dragged against the prickly sheet.
    He wanted to stay awake. He did. He even wanted to take advantage of his new wife, and press his cause home within her. Unfortunately, although both the flesh and the mind were more than willing, they were also exhausted by the long, breakneck ride from Fort Frederick. He fell into a deep sleep, keeping his arm curled tightly about her waist, so that he’d know if she tried to escape in the middle of the night.
    Sleep didn’t come as readily to Hannah, despite her exhaustion at having been spanked not once, but twice within such a short time. Her anger kept her awake, burning as brightly within her as her bottom did beneath her. She couldn’t believe the situation she found herself in. She had been so sure that a high and mighty Duke wouldn’t take any notice that she’d run away rather than marry him. What consequence was that to him? She had been quite sure that he could and would find someone else much more suitable to marry, and that she’d be able to get on with whatever life she made on her own in the colonies with no one being the wiser.
    Apparently she had wholly misjudged her intended.
    She wasn’t at all sure what she should do now, and she was equally unsure exactly what she could do. Her . . . her husband was a powerful man, and she doubted there was anywhere in the Empire that she could run to that he couldn’t follow her. He had the money and the inclination, it seemed, damn him. And although she was living simply right now, she had hopes of perhaps starting her own business as a