Page 18 of His

At one point, while they were waiting for the doctor, she'd lain there, curled around the toilet, with her feverish head pressed to the cold, cool porcelain, and whispered, "Just shoot me now, please."

His level of alarm about how she was feeling ratcheted up to an astronomical level. If he hadn't already called his doctor, he would have bundled her up and taken her to the Emergency Room. As it was, he soaked every towel he could get his hands on in cold water and simply lay them around and on her, hoping that evaporative cooling would help.

It took the lion's share of two weeks for her to start to feel human again, and he made her stand down for nearly all of it. He didn't allow her to even look at a piece of paper from work for ten whole days, and even then, when she finally coerced him into letting her try to get back into the swing of things, he allowed her secretary to come to see her, but only for an hour the first day, two hours the second day, and so on, and he was entirely unrepentant about it.

Raina was feeling quite a bit better and also feeling her oats a bit more than he was going to tolerate, whining loudly that that was nowhere near enough time to do what she needed to do.

He had gotten right into her face and asked her fierce scowl as she avidly avoided his eyes, "Would you prefer that I said you couldn't see her at all until next week? Because that's where you're headed, besides earning yourself a punishment for arguing that I'm going to give you on Wednesday of next week, if I'm sure you're fully recovered. Write it down with a star."

Sighing as loudly as she dared, Raina reached into her nightstand for her Punishment Book. It was something he'd created himself and had published at a vanity publisher online. It had a place for the date, the offense, and a number of stars - the more stars, the worse the punishment. It didn't get too much use, because there wasn't often a need for them to delay punishments. But occasionally he was going somewhere, or he was already gone and couldn't get to it in as timely fashion as he would like, so he made her write it down. And it was also her responsibility to remind him on Wednesday evening if there was an entry in the book, that she was due a correction. Raina knew that he would think long and hard at that time as to whether or not to actually go through with it, and that would depend completely on how well she felt.

That next Wednesday, she joined him in their bed at ten, which was the time he required that she retire - not sleep; that was eleven - but at least come to bed. "Sir?" she said, as he readied himself for bed. "I have a punishment coming this evening."

"Very good, Raina," he praised. "I had forgotten."

It had never even crossed Raina's mind to try to get away with letting him forget. She was on too many pins and needles when she knew she had a punishment coming. It was almost a worse punishment in and of itself when she was made to wait like that.

He met her at the end of the bed, noting that for only the second night in a row she wasn't wearing the pajamas she had been while she was sick. In small ways, she was getting back to normal. Raina stood tall and strong before him, although as far as he was concerned, she was too thin. He hated it when she was sick; he just hated it. He hated when she was so small and vulnerable. Even when he was giving her the worst of beatings, he still felt her inherent strength. But that tiny, sick woman curled around the toilet kept popping into his head at the worst times.

"How are you feeling?" he asked, looking deeply into her eyes, his brow furrowed worriedly.

"I'm all right. Still a little tired, but not much more so than usual, Sir," she answered truthfully.

He had to smile. If she had so much as hinted that she wasn't feeling well, he knew that she knew that he would have put the punishment off indefinitely. But she was completely open with him, which was a sign of just how deep their relationship was.

"Okay. Go and get your leather strap."

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Raina wished heartily that she had decided to play sick for another day or two... or twelve. The strap was an awesomely bad implement that - in his more than capable hands - could reduce her to whimpering tears with one blow.

"Bend over," he said without preamble, once she'd handed the horrid thing to him.

Raina planted her palms on the end of the bed, which was just low enough that, in this position, her bottom became a nicely prominent target. This was going to be hard - keeping still for however many strokes he gave her.

"I think twenty five should cover it, don't you?" he asked rhetorically, and then the strap fell and Raina knew that the next half hour of her life were going to be pure hell - and it was.

The strap was about three inches wide and twenty inches long, and sometimes he would wrap the end around his hand to give him a little more control as to where the leather seared her skin, and sometimes he simply let the entire length fly, always careful that it didn't wrap around to her more tender areas. As far as her Master was concerned, her bottom, her breasts, and the backs of her legs were created specifically to handle the discipline that he meted out, and he did his best to make sure that none of his corrections caused her to experience pain anywhere else.

He liked the strap, for its history and its aesthetics - he liked leather implements in general - and the fact that it truly worked her bottom over very nicely, causing bright, wide swathes of sore, swollen ridges to form immediately that grew exponentially worse as they inevitably began to overlap.

He loved her full throated howls, and drew the punishment out as much as he could, allowing the strap to dangle some times against the very flesh it had been busily roasting as he checked in with occasionally to ask her if she was okay, and she knew that he wasn't asking her if her bottom hurt. He was being extra careful to make sure that she wasn't somehow having a relapse.

Sometimes, even in the middle of an atrocious strapping, he could be so damned tender.

But, far as the punishment itself went, he was far from it. When she went to sleep that evening, it was on her stomach, bound as he liked it some times, hand and foot, her bottom throbbing atrociously from his tender ministrations.

Two months later was Raina's birthday, which was the only day of the year - besides when she was sick - that she was given a complete reprieve from having to submit, as long as what she wanted to do wasn't going to be detrimental to her health. He had a history of simply indulging her all day, asking her long beforehand for some things she thought she might want to do or have so that he could get it arranged.. If she wanted lunch in Paris and dinner in L.A., then that's what they did. If she wanted to go to the Island for the day, he made sure that that was what happened. Even if work intruded and they couldn't do it exactly on her birthday, he made it a moveable feast and simply procured the next available day to gift her with. If he had to do that, though, she actually got two days of presents, because he always made sure that on the right day, he had something for her, be it her favorite imported Belgian chocolates and a fabulous meal of her favorite foods, or having her office filled to the brim with her favorite pastel pink roses.

This time, she couldn't think of anything she wanted to do, or anything she wanted as a gift. He would have moved Heaven and Earth, and she knew that, but she was so content and happy that she couldn't think of anything else she wanted or even needed.

So he had to think of something himself, and he wasn't at all sure about what he decided to do.

If there was nothing major going on at work, he always made her take it off - and he was in cahoots with her secretary to try to make sure that that was always the case, although it didn't always work. This time, it just so happened that her birthday was on a Friday, and that gave her an impromptu three day weekend. Normally, he might whisk her away to some exotic place, but unless she'd expressed some sort of interest in going anywhere in particular, he couldn't see spending the travel time.

So what he did was throw a small, casual party for her and some of their closest friends, with all of her favorite foods, and no presents allowed, and a very ostentatious birthday cake with multiple tiers, because he knew that one of her few indulgences was a big slab of cake from a particular bakery in town. The only gift allowed at the party was his own, to her, which he gave to her as he toasted her with Cristal champagne, telling her in a voice that carried, but in a way that no one else would really know the intimate meaning of, "One of the things I'm giving you for your birthday is the weekend off."

Her smile nearly blinded him, and what he'd given her hadn't cost him a dime - that was so like Raina. He could have given her a diamond the size of her head on a gold necklace as wide as a belt and he knew that her smile wouldn't have been any bigger or brighter.

Applause and giggles tittered through their small audience, and one of their friends piped up with, "Is that all?"

---