Warming Emerald: The Red Petticoat Saloon Read online

  “Ha!” she barked, more defiance than genuine laughter. It also didn’t last long before her involuntary smile faded back into wary confusion. She studied him, searching for the trap but unable to imagine much less see it. “All right,” she grudgingly conceded. “Go on, then. Tell me. How are you going to convince me to agree to a punishment I don’t think I deserve, am not sorry about, and won’t apologize for?”

  Garrett stopped dancing, though he wasn’t about to let her go. Lydia stopped too, one eyebrow arched as she waited. She obviously didn’t think he had a reason (much less a good one). He wasn’t exactly happy about the ease with which he was about to win this battle of wills, but still he smiled.

  “Where is your son?” he softly asked her. If words were physical jabs and she a man, that would have been a nut shot.

  Lydia went statue still. He felt the wave of her affront shoot straight through her, flushing her suddenly pale features to a dull pink. “What do you mean? He’s home.”

  “With whom?” Garrett pressed. “Was there anybody left at the Red Petticoat while you… and Nettie… and Jewel, and all her other gems were locked up here in jail?”

  She stared at him, silent. “I left him in my room. He was…” She hesitated, faltered, and then insisted, “He was perfectly safe.”

  “In a town filled with soldiers?” Garrett grimly continued. “Every one of whom is here under orders to take him into custody?”

  Horror crept in, slowly wiping away all lingering traces of anger and defiance in her expression. She opened her mouth. Again, nothing came out. Knowing his point was made, he abandoned that reason and went on to the next one.

  “It wasn’t that you struck Mrs. Crankshaw,” he said, once more cupping her chin and locking her in the unwavering intensity of his stare when she tried to look away. “The problem is, you attacked the only material witness scheduled to testify in your son’s hearing tomorrow morning. Even if he wants to, Judge Johnson won’t be able to overlook what, on the outside, appears like an attempt to force her—under threat of personal harm—to change her testimony. Because of your actions, you may well have turned Paquah’s hearing into a trial.”

  Her mouth wasn’t just hanging open now, she had also stopped breathing. As if she’d suddenly forgotten how. “Th-that’s not what—”

  “I know it’s not,” he agreed. “Judge Johnson doesn’t know that, though. He could take your son away from you,” Garrett deliberately repeated, “because you lost your temper. Because you didn’t stop to think.”

  She was thinking now, though. He saw the deep collapse of her breasts as what air she’d been hoarding now abandoned her. She covered her mouth, breathing in sharply through her fingers. Her eyes were huge and filled with terror. He hated himself for putting it there, but she was in too precarious a position not to think.

  “So.” Garrett let go of her hand. Stepping away from her was hard, but he did it and didn’t stop backing up until he had reached the only bunk in her small cell. With a tug at the leggings of his trousers, he sat down and let his hands come to rest upon his thighs. “Lydia.”

  Her eyes, already fixed on him, sharpened and grew focused.

  “In my opinion, you deserve to be spanked. If you agree, I want you to come stand beside me. You will lift your skirts. You will lower your drawers. You will keep your hands and feet firmly upon the floor, and you will accept what I believe to be the full measure of the punishment your actions have earned you. What do you think?”

  Twin spots of color flushed the very apples of her cheeks. Her hands remained over her mouth as, for the longest time, she didn’t move. She started to. Twice, she seemed right on the verge of taking that first retreating step, but both times she stopped and stilled again. He was just beginning to wonder whether he might have to chase after her if she bolted, when she dropped her gaze to stare at his lap. Taking her hands from her mouth, she dropped them into fists at her sides. She gulped a hasty breath and then visibly steeled herself.

  She came to him. She did not tell him she had been wrong or that she deserved to be disciplined, but it was there, a ghastly haunt of regret that etched lines of worry all over her too young face. She stared at his lap with such foreboding, but when he patted his knee, she bent to gather the hem of her skirt and dragged it upward. Past her knees. Past her thighs. Her hands trembled, but she still reached in under her own skirts and around her back to unfasten her undergarment ties. They sagged, but she was standing too tensely and her legs were squeezed too tightly together for them to fall. That was all right. He was prepared to help with that part.

  Garrett patted his knee again and, clinging to the crumpled roll of skirt bunched up around her waist, Lydia dropped her stare to his hand. Her knees buckled in and out; her eyes were bewildered. As if she couldn’t believe she was doing it, she bent to lay herself bottom-up across his lap.

  “Good girl,” Garrett said, and he meant it. Every word.

  She whimpered, though whether because of what he’d said or because his hand had just settled hot in the small of her back, ready to pin her down if it hurt too much to endure, he couldn’t tell. She repeated the sound as his other fingertips skimmed across the round swells of her vulnerable bottom, parting the open halves of her white ruffled drawers to bare her backside for the second time that day.

  There were no visible reminders of his earlier spanking, but she still flinched when he cupped her buttocks. Small wonder his brother took after Chin as often as he did. There was no pleasure quite like the sight he glimpsed as his fingers gripped and squeezed, parting the plumpness of her flesh and inadvertently exposing the dusky moon of her back passage, tucked so secretively within that deep crease. Below that, the even more secretive furrow of her nether folds were full with just the tips of slender vaginal petals peeking out from between them. His mouth ran dry. He stopped squeezing before the temptation to boldly cup and fondle between her thighs overwhelmed all his other intentions.

  “Very good girl,” he said again, his voice huskier than before.

  Lydia bowed her head. That sobered him. Here she was in the grips of her remorse and guilt—both of which, right or wrong, he’d instilled—and here he was, behaving like a lecherous fool.

  That helped center him. So did the fact that both Crankshaws were watching: Myron looked uncomfortable; so did Millicent. Her face was every bit as pale as Lydia’s; her breathing, every bit as shallow and rapid as she shrank from the bars.

  “Don’t,” she croaked, seeming unable to tear her gaze from the scene unfolding before her.

  It was a plea Lydia did not echo. Not when he took his hand off her bottom. Not even when he brought it cracking back down to catch the fullest part of her right cheek, flattening all that beautiful round flesh beneath the hard callouses of his work-rough palm. He made it quick but fierce and before he’d laid the first dozen swats, he had her arching and dancing upon his knee. One hand kept snapping back behind her, but each time it did, she caught herself and grabbed for the floor once more. Her feet kicked up too, but she caught herself then as well and each time snapped her legs back down. The tips of her black shoes dug and scraped against the floor as she bit her lip. She squeaked and mewed, tossing her hips while his open palm turned all that soft, pale flesh a bright, hot pink, but she never once cried out for him to stop. He was proud of her for that, especially since he did not spare her and he knew it had to hurt. It had to, because it was absolutely killing his hand and by the end, Lydia was gasping and sucking for air. She was also fighting herself both to stay in position as well as not to spill loose the wailing cries he could hear her biting back. He left no trace of white anywhere on her backside. It was all a mottled shade of hot, fiery pink, so full of burning pain that he could feel it throbbing right through her battered flesh and into his palm. Or maybe that was his palm. It was hard to tell. He flexed his hand, holding her in position until she had calmed enough to realize he was done.

  “You’re a monster,” Millicent whispered. Once
more, she had plastered herself into the corner of her cell between her bunk and the black-barred window. “A monster!”

  Garrett couldn’t have cared less what she thought of him. He rubbed Lydia’s bottom, soothing that fiery pulse until her squeaks dissolved into ragged pants. Only once her writhing had dwindled back to stillness did he pull her drawers up and quietly tie them into place.

  Lydia lay gulping for air while he smoothed down her skirts and gently helped her up. If she’d pushed away from him then, if she’d bolted for the door, he’d have let her go. He’d have followed to make sure she got back to the Red Petticoat safely, but he wouldn’t have forced her to endure any further contact between them if that wasn’t what she wanted. Not tonight, anyway. But Lydia didn’t bolt and she didn’t push him away. She didn’t even stand up. Instead, she remained sitting on his lap, one hand pressed to the seat of her skirts while she gasped and shook and scrubbed her other wrist across eyes that fairly shone with all the unshed tears she refused to let go of.

  “I’m a horrible mother,” she whispered.

  “Naw,” he corrected. “You made a mistake.”

  “I’ve p-put m-my baby at risk!” She looked at him, her eyes so huge and lost. “I c-can’t lose him t-too! I c-can’t!” The first tear spilled past her lashes and she slapped it away so hard it turned her cheek pink within seconds. Garrett caught her wrist before she could do that again because once that first tear escaped, it released the unstaunchable tide of all the rest. Her face crumpled and her voice failed, forcing her to whisper, “What am I going to do?”

  Garrett couldn’t help himself. Though she initially tried to bat away his hand, he touched the backs of his fingers to her flushed cheeks, catching the tears as they fell. “You,” he told her so softly that no one else in that room would hear it, “are going to go home now. You are going to hug your son. You are going to put him to bed. And in the morning, you are going to walk into that hearing with your head held high and all that beautiful fire that I love so much wrapped up tight inside you. Because you may need to fall back on some of that fire tomorrow, but before you do or say anything, I expect you first to think.”

  Lydia stayed as she was, her face cupped in his hand until he chucked her lightly under the chin and let her go. She sniffled once. Starting to stand, she hesitated, then looked at him again. The uncertainty made her sound so much smaller than he knew her to be when she asked, “Will I see you?”

  He knew she meant at the hearing, but he wasn’t the kind of man to be bound by such restrictions.

  “Yes, you will,” Garrett promised. And if she didn’t yet know him well enough to realize that he meant every minute of every hour in between… well, she would soon enough.

  Chapter Eleven

  Lydia stood at the window of her room, serenaded by the sounds of Charlie pounding out a cheerful tune on his piano, kept in time by the clapping of dirty hands and the stomping of even dirtier boots. Whatever Silver was singing had many men laughing. Others were gambling or drinking up the courage to flirt, and God alone knew the traffic up and down the hall outside was steady enough. She should have been downstairs with the other gems, mingling with cowboys, inviting miners back into the bathhouse, doing whatever she had to to make the money she and Paquah needed to survive in a world that catered only to men, but she just couldn’t bear the thought of it. Not in a saloon half-filled with the very soldiers who might well steal her child away in the morning, and definitely not with Garrett looming in the background, never more than a dozen steps from her side.

  Not even now. Currently, he was lounging on her bed. No man had ever lounged in her room before. They did tons of other things, but none had ever stayed long enough afterward to do more than put their clothes back on and get out again. She had never wanted them to.

  Chewing at her fingernail, Lydia alternated between staring out the window and studying Garrett’s reflection in the windowpane. He wasn’t alone on that bed. Paquah was stretched out at his side, listening skeptically as Garrett read to him from the newspaper. Well… “read” was one way to interpret what he was doing. If half the stories he was telling were true, then Culpepper Cove had had a very interesting day.

  Being completely landlocked, Culpepper Cove had no docks, so she had no idea how pirates could come swashbuckling their way up Main Street. Having been out most of the day, she was pretty sure she’d have noticed if they had, but to hear Garrett tell it, they had made front page news by robbing the Savings and Loan. No mean feat, considering page two’s story consisted of roving gypsies who had taken two children for refusing to eat their green beans (riding in swift pursuit, neither Sheriff Justice nor any of his posse of twelve could be reached for comment).

  Also on page two was the mysterious sighting of two galumphing beasts spotted at the Circle-Bar-Bar ranch. The reporter was cautious enough to specify the beasts might have been cows, but as the sighting had occurred at night, it had been too dark for anyone to be sure. That Paquah had reservations as to Garrett’s credibility was as clear as the look he kept giving the man. But he listened nonetheless—looking up at Garrett, then down at the newspaper, and then back up again—and kept his doubts to himself. For her part, Lydia tried not to, but she was finding it very, very hard not to like the homey visage they made cuddled up together like that, all stretched out side-by-side, with their backs to the pillows propped along her headboard and one of Garrett’s arms tucking Paquah up against him.

  Licking his thumb, he turned the page and with all due seriousness began to spin a complete yarn about two miners who, while panning for gold, were very nearly devoured alive by a massive crocodile, now nicknamed Old Toothy. She ought to protest. He had no business lying to her son like that, but Lydia said nothing. She couldn’t. For all intents and purposes, Garrett was acting as if… well, as if he were Paquah’s father.

  It wasn’t real and she knew that every bit as much as she knew Maska would not, could not, rise from the dead and take up that mantle of responsibility. It wasn’t real, but that didn’t make her want to bring this intimate moment to its inevitable end. She’d had her chance for this—the whole husband and wife and sweet little boy, all abiding together thing. Paquah never had, but she did and she’d lost it. She could never have this back again and she shouldn’t want it so much. Not now. Not when she’d become this… this shell of a woman, swaddled in anger so prickly that it could be worn like a barbed wire shawl. Most of all, she shouldn’t want it with Garrett. She could barely stand to look at him and yet she couldn’t look away for fear she might miss some part of this.

  It was an act. It had to be. Garrett wasn’t usually this parental or… normal. He actually didn’t seem to mind that Paquah was lying against him. Or that he was a half-breed.

  Or that she was a whore. Why was he chasing her so hard?

  “You don’t have to do that, you know,” she said, interrupting the tale just as Old Toothy was disappearing back beneath the surface of a creek that had never known a turtle, much less a voracious crocodile.

  Taking advantage of the pause, Paquah peered more closely at the newspaper. He tipped his head, but he couldn’t read any more than she could.

  Giving the boy time to look his fill, Garrett licked his thumb to turn the page again. “Do what?”

  “Pretend to want to be with him because you think it’ll improve your chances of fucking me.” She was used to being blunt, to saying things exactly as she saw them. What she wasn’t used to, was the sharp pang she felt thump inside her chest once she’d said it out loud.

  Garrett lowered the newspaper until it lay flat across his lap. “Beg your pardon?”

  Still tasting the bitterness of having said it once, Lydia folded her arms tight across her chest so that pang couldn’t get in at her again. “I said…”

  “I heard what you said,” he interrupted, his tone mild but his stare hard as stone. “Let me make you a promise, one I swear I will keep from now until the day I die, but which I aim never to voice
again. That promise is this: I don’t care how often or hard I’ve had to bust your butt today, or any other day for that matter, the next time you say anything like that again, I’ll give you the granddaddy of all whuppings. You won’t sit for a week. Do you understand me?”

  For a change, he wasn’t smiling when he said it.

  Lydia looked at Paquah, then dropped her eyes. She hadn’t known it was possible to feel any pricklier or any more ashamed of herself than she already did. Hugging herself tighter, she spun back to the window. Her eyes refused to focus on anything outside, but when they finally did, it was in time to see four soldiers striding across the street, heading straight for the Red Petticoat. They were laughing and jostling one another, and completely relaxed, so she knew they were coming for pleasure rather than the dispensation of business. She wished she could relax, but already the anxiety was plucking the strings of anger inside her, building them back up again.

  “Tell me that story,” Paquah ordered suspiciously, pointing at part of the newspaper lying forgotten across Garrett’s lap.

  “Naw, that’s enough for tonight, I think.”

  “You can’t read any more than I can,” the little boy decided. “You’ve been making it all up.”

  “Paquah!” Her anxiety made Lydia’s tone sharper than she intended. “He said enough. Go ask Nettie for a cup of milk and honey. It’s time for bed.”

  The heaviness of his sigh was Paquah’s only voiced complaint. “Yes, Mama.” He climbed over Garrett and scooted off the bed.

  “You let him go walking downstairs alone?” Garrett asked, sitting up on the edge of the bed to watch as Paquah let himself out of Lydia’s bedroom.

  “He’ll be all right.” Lydia turned her attention back to the window. “He knows to use the back stair. It goes straight to the kitchen. No one in the saloon will see him.”

  Grunting, Garrett folded the newspaper down to size and set it aside. Even if she couldn’t see his reflection in the glass, she still would have felt his approach. Big as he was, almost twice her size, boots and all, his steps were very quiet, and yet they trembled her. She could feel him in the slight movement of air shifting between them and in the faintest vibrations of the floorboards under her own feet as he came to stand directly behind her. Her hands lost their grip around her own waist to clutch at her shoulders instead.