Favourite for June

They do say that every day's a school day. On this particular day, Barbara found herself doing a lot of learning and in charge of that learning was her boyfriend.

"It's not a request - it's a requirement. Either you apologise to my mother or you get a smacked bottom."

At which point Barbara laughed. She laughed because talk of a smacked bottom was the sort of thing that might apply to a little kid but not to a 22-year-old woman expecting to graduate in a few weeks with a first-class honours degree in Electrical Engineering. So it was just a euphemism, wasn't it?

Had it been a euphemism he might not have taken exception to her laughing at what he said.

So the first thing she learned was that a four-foot-eleven-inch engineering student, if she was unprepared and not expecting this to happen, could fly through the air remarkably quickly and land across his knee and over the back of the sofa. The next thing she learned was his reference to a smacked bottom was anything but a euphemism. She would have thought, strictly speaking, that 'a spanked bottom' might have been a more accurate description than 'smacked bottom' but wisely decided that this was not a good time to correct his English usage.

She was also rapidly learning that her favourite brief denim shorts which she had always thought made her look really sexy were not very effective at providing much in the way of physical protection. At the same time, she was learning that all the time and money he had invested in his gym membership was really paying off in terms of the strength in his upper arms as the one kept her very firmly pinned down and the other walloped her bottom mercilessly.

The final element of learning was the realisation that no amount of crying and saying she was sorry was going to make one jot of difference until he felt the point had been well made.