Something Has to Give Read online

  “Looks like she’s made herself quite at home.”

  Quint threw up both hands in disgust, growled, paced, rubbed his face and finally calmed down enough to come back to the sheriff. “Yeah,” he said again, fighting not to lose his temper all over again. “She sure has. You want to do something about that, or are you just going to stand here all fucking night!”

  The sheriff barely batted an eye. “Sir, I’m going to need you to calm down.”

  “Calm down? I just got back from the war to find a woman I don’t know living in my house! How fucking calm would you be?”

  “I understand that, sir. But what I’m telling you is, if you keep yelling and making these big arm gestures, I might just start to feel threatened and then I’ll have to arrest you.”

  Quint was stunned. “You’re going to arrest me? A stranger moves into my house and I’m the one who’s going to get arrested?!”

  “Sir, you have my sympathies. But while you may own the property, she has established a residence on it. Those signs posted on the driveway and on the porch mean she’s not hiding her occupation from the public. That makes this a civil matter rather than a criminal one, so there’s nothing I can do about it. You’re going to have to take her to court and have her legally evicted if you want her out of your house.”

  No longer just stunned now, Quint was floored. He stared at the sheriff, unable to believe what he was hearing. He said as much too. “I can’t believe this.”

  “Again,” the sheriff said, “you have my sympathies. But I’m warning you now, Mr. Rydecker, you’d best keep your temper under firm control. If I have to come back out here to settle a domestic disturbance, the law says I’ve got to take somebody with me. Judging by what I’ve seen since I got here, it’s going to be you riding in the back of my car when I go. And I’d really hate to do that, son, seeing as how this is your place and I can’t imagine anything that would make a soldier’s homecoming suck worse than this.”

  Quint only stared, so floored he couldn’t pull a single coherent thought into his head. His mouth fell open and what came pouring out almost made him cringe. “My wife divorced me for our ranch hand.”

  “So this is really just the icing on the suck cake.” The sheriff tsked and gave him a brusque ‘keep your chin up’ pat on the shoulder. “Sorry, son.”

  “Sorry?” Quint echoed. “Sorry? What am I supposed to do? Where am I supposed to go?”

  The lawman looked up at the house, then back at Quint, and finally shrugged with a lift of one eyebrow and an I-don’t-know tip of his head. “Like I said, it’s a civil matter, not a criminal one. I will say this though: Maybe I can’t drag her out of there for you, but I can’t drag you out of there either.”

  With another bolstering pat on Quint’s shoulder, the sheriff got back in his car and drove away, leaving Quint helpless to do anything but watch as the dust from the officer’s vehicle clouded up in the air and then softly blew away on the cold winter breeze. What the hell was that supposed to mean? He couldn’t honestly expect Quint to live in this house with that … that woman, could he?

  He glanced back over his shoulder. Elsie Redding was standing at the far right window, sandwiched behind the dining table which buffered the living area from the kitchen. There was a rebellious look on what might otherwise have been described as her cherubic face. As he watched, her eyes narrowed. With a jerk of the curtains, she dashed from the window and suddenly, all Quint could feel was the dull pulse of anger rising above his shock. She was going to lock him out of his own house!

  “The hell you say!” Quint ran for the porch.

  She won the race for the door, reaching it only a handful of steps before he did, but she lost the advantage, wasting the precious seconds it took him to bolt up the steps when she tried heaving his army bag out at him. Quint punched it out of the way, tangled with the strap and nearly went down on his chin. Fortunately, he caught himself on the door. Unfortunately, she was in the midst of slamming it shut, and his fingers became the first casualties of the war.

  The pain that shot through his hands was so intense it was blinding. He shouted—it might have been a blue word or two … or more, or it might have just been a roaring bellow; he had no clear memory of what came pouring out of his mouth. What he did remember very clearly (right before sheer, unadulterated rage turned the entire world into a pulsing, throbbing shade of red, just the way his fingers were pulsing and throbbing, was the look on her face right before she tried to slam the door again, pinched fingers still caught on the wrong side of the threshold and all. It had been an angry, vengeful, victorious look and it had come, for just a few seconds, with the hint of a smirk pulling at the corners of her pretty little mouth.

  It was that smirk that did them both in.

  Captain Quint Rydecker hit the door with his shoulder and all the force his pain, fury and frustration could muster. Knocked backwards onto his grandmother’s rag-tied rug, Elsie landed on both her butt and her hands and quickly scrambled over onto her knees. Her feet were still fighting to get the rest of her moving when he grabbed her. “You. Little. Brat! You think that’s funny?”

  “Let go of me!” She kicked and screamed and they both fell sideways. Quint flopped onto the couch with Elsie spilling halfway across his lap, her feet kicking and flailing. If he could have got his hands on her neck, he might have throttled her. As it was, he had to make do with what fate saw fit to give him.

  Elsie let out another scream, one based not out of fear, but anger, and it wasn’t until he locked his arm around her waist and hauled her fully across his lap that she seemed to realize the trouble she was in. That was one step beyond him actually, since Quint had no idea he was going to spank her until he had her legs locked in the vise-grip of his, with his open hand beating a wild and rapid cadence all over the seat of her jeans. He put his whole arm and practically no thought at all into making this the most memorable spanking of her entire life. Even though his aching fingers screamed out at every hit, Elsie didn’t. She yelped once, and then fell silent. One arm reached back, clawing with her sharp little nails to grab his arm and stay the next swat, but that brief reprieve lasted only until he caught her wayward wrist. That, too, was pinned down and then Quint went right back to paddling those jean-clad curves until the whole of her body lay as stiff as a plank of two-by-four across his knees.

  What was he doing?

  Quint froze, every muscle locked to keep her pinned across his lap, though she wasn’t fighting him anymore. He held one trembling hand raised high above her cringing bottom. You are so going to jail, his conscience whispered. And like a little devil sitting on his other shoulder, with equal clarity he heard, Better make it worth the sentence. She’s not feeling a thing through those jeans.

  His hand shot down, but not to spank. Lifting her off his knee far enough to get under her stomach, he found the top button on her pants just in time to bring her kicking and shrieking back to life.

  “No! No!” She tried to wriggle her free hand down between them. Clawing him was probably an accident, but it didn’t help his temper any, and in the slapping, smacking, kicking, grunting battle that ensued, he wasn’t sure which of them came out the winner in the end, except that she was still pinned across his lap with both hands now clasped wrist to wrist behind her back and he still had one hand free to spank her with. He was bleeding where her sharp little nails had nicked his forearm. He looked at that, but the injury was nowhere near as serious as the one he intended to deliver upon her backside.

  “Rape!” she screamed when he grabbed the back of her—no, Maydeen’s—jeans. It took three hard yanks to get them down far enough to lay her vulnerable bottom bare.

  “Don’t flatter yourself!” he snapped back, and then he let her have it all over again. The flat of his hand made the most satisfying smack when it connected flesh to bare pink flesh, briefly flattening the blushing summits.

  Elsie sucked another hard breath, her fingers grabbing at the empty air where he held th
em pinned, her feet drumming fitfully against the floor. She stiffened all over again. For only a few seconds, she made no sound at all (apart from the kicking of her feet, a disjointed harmony that clunked in conjunction with the ‘smack-crack-whack!’ of his hand), but then her pent-in breath whooshed out of her and she began to squeak, tiny cries that escaped between tightly clenched teeth, growing louder the longer he paddled her until she was alternately cringing and bucking, throwing back her head and fighting to waggle her rump as if she could somehow evade the inescapable or throw the sizzling hurt right off her skin.

  That it was hurting her Quint knew beyond all shadow of a doubt; he could feel the same sharp level of pain deep in the palm of his spanking hand. He didn’t stop though, not until she suddenly clenched inward, her whole body trying to ball up on his knee—her fingers fisting until her knuckles whitened, her feet kicking back up against his thigh. When she broke, he felt that mental and emotional fracture every bit as keenly as if it had happened physically. She snapped straight back out again, and her breath coughed out of her on sobbing waves that she kept trying to suck back in and hide.

  “Stop!” she wailed, and Quint did. Not because she wanted him to (he really couldn’t have cared less what she wanted, at this particular juncture), but because her backside was boiled-lobster red, burning hot to the touch and swollen. He could feel the throbbing pulse of her pain radiating out of her and deep into his right hand, which was burning and throbbing and almost as red as her rear end.

  This was a job well-done.

  This was a whuppin’ worth going to jail over.

  He dumped her off his lap and onto the floor at his feet. He’d have left her there too, except there was something about that pose that didn’t sit right with him. Watching her rise onto her hands and knees, braying out wail after sobbing wail while she reached back one-handed to touch her blistered nethers … no, it just didn’t sit right at all. Looking around the living room, Quint noticed an empty corner. It wasn’t a real corner, but rather one side of his mother’s old piano tucked up next to an otherwise empty stretch of wall.

  It would do.

  He grabbed a fistful of loose shirt at Elsie’s shoulder, hauling her roughly to her feet, and ignored her subsequent shriek. She grabbed at her sagging jeans and underwear and swung around, narrowly missing slugging him on the chin (no maidenly slap, that one; he barely got his head jerked back in time) and let loose the kind of animalistic growl that said plainly her spirit wasn’t as broken, nor her temper as subdued, as she might otherwise have let on.

  “Squatter’s rights,” he mocked, and marched her into the corner to shove her nose-first up against the wall. “I’ll give you ‘squatter’s rights’.”

  Struggling to get her pants up far enough to cover all the parts of her he was still too pissed off to want to look at, she shoved right back out again almost immediately. “You have no ri—”

  She broke off with another shriek when he upended her right there, tucking her under one arm and pinning her across his hip, where her bottom became his open target. He didn’t have a good hold on her, and she fought back like the she-devil she probably was. But by the time it was over, he’d landed only a half-dozen good slaps and maybe just as many others that missed the intended mark. He stopped anyway, yanked her upright, spun her roughly to face the wall again and shoved her right up to the old pin-striping that his grandmother hand-hung way back when she’d been matriarch of this house.

  “Don’t move from this spot,” he warned.

  “My pants are falling down,” she snarled back.

  “Unless you’re dying to know what my belt will feel like whipping across your naked ass, I suggest you let them!”

  “You can’t do this!” she shouted. “You’ve got no right touching me—not with your belt or your hand! No right! None at all, and that goes double for looking at me without my clothes on!”

  Quint grabbed his belt buckle.

  Elsie flattened herself against the wall, hands and nose both pressed flat, her forehead firmly against the papering. Her whole small body was as tight as a drum. Her pants were a puddle of denim around her ankles and her bright red bottom was on blatant display. She sniffled twice, and then, with the rigid set of her shoulders dissolving into jerky shakes, she began to cry all over again. This time it was softer, more breathy.

  Letting go of his belt without drawing it, Quint moved in close behind her, letting his bitter angry words fall just behind her ear. “Those aren’t your clothes. Those are Maydeen’s clothes. And you’re … not … her.”

  Angry as he was right now, for just a tiny moment, he honestly could not tell whether that was a good or a bad thing.

  Shoving back off the wall, he was just starting to walk away when he thought he heard her mutter, every bit as bitterly, “Thank God for small favors.”

  Tempted as he was to whip off his belt and heat up a good ol’ fashioned Round Three, Quint threw himself down on the couch instead. Exactly what he was supposed to do now, or even more importantly, what he was supposed to do with Elsie, he didn’t know. Folding his arms across his chest, he tried to satisfy himself with glaring holes in her back until long after the sun went down and the house went dark.

  * * * * *

  He was a pervert. A misogynistic, woman-beating pervert.

  With a very hard hand.

  She wanted to rub so badly, but he was just sitting there, burly arms folded across his equally burly chest, staring at her … ogling, really. Yeah, that’s exactly what he was doing. He was ogling her naked rump.

  And here she was, taking it. Just taking it. Why wasn’t she doing something to get herself out of this mess?

  Because he had a belt, that’s why! Apparently, he wasn’t afraid to use it, either.

  He couldn’t make her stand here all night, could he? Elsie shifted from one foot to the other. And what the hell was going on with this wallpaper? She’d been here eight months. How could she not have noticed how truly hideous this design was. She should have ripped it out months ago.

  Glaring, Elsie fumed in silence, while trying her best not to look like she was fuming. This was ridiculous. She was twenty-six. Twenty-six-year-olds did not get spanked, nor did they stand like recalcitrant children with their noses in unending time-outs. She sighed, and after a moment, when he said nothing, sighed again a little louder. “I’m getting out now.”

  “Not until I tell you.” He sounded bored.

  If anything, that made her fume even harder. “You can’t keep me here all night.”

  “It’s my house. I can do anything I want.”

  “I didn’t know anyone was living here,” she spat, folding her arms now too.

  “So, that makes it all right for you to move in?” he snorted. “How did you even find my house? What, were you walking up and down random driveways, checking to see whose lights came on?”

  Hugging her middle defensively, Elsie glared at the wall and said nothing.

  A full minute passed in silence, helped along by the rhythmic ticking of the wall clock.

  “Why haven’t you called the cops yet?” the soldier on the couch asked.

  She locked her lips in a hard tight line.

  After a moment, he snorted again. “It’s because the cellphone in my pocket is the only phone in the house, isn’t it? The electricity, water and gas all get paid automatically out of my bank account, but Maydeen only ever used her cell, so you had no way to turn the phones on. Isn’t that right?”

  She cast him a single dark look over her shoulder. “Don’t worry, Captain Rydecker. When I want to get rid of you, I won’t call the cops. Yours won’t be the first large body I’ve buried in the desert.” She faced the wall again and thought about her car at the bottom of that chasm. If she hadn’t shoved it into the gully between those two rocky outcrops, maybe she could have found a way to get gas to it, hid it out here in one of the outbuildings, and now she’d have a way to … to what? Run away again? Drive off into the chilly sunset
and find another house somewhere? Start over for the second time with nothing?

  Why did Rydecker have to come back now, just when things were starting to get easier? Why couldn’t he have stayed away, or better yet, died in the war?

  No sooner did that thought darken her soul than did she regret giving birth to it. What had he done wrong, really, apart from coming home to find her living here? Yes, he’d gotten angry and yes, he’d spanked her, humiliated her, was humiliating her still—but what would she have done if their shoes had been reversed?

  Elsie hugged herself tighter, digging her fingernails into her soft palms, punishing herself until it hurt. It didn’t matter what she would have done. Their situations weren’t reversed. This was her place now. She’d found it. She’d built it up, fixed it up, started a business and was just now making enough money and food to perhaps avoid starving as winter drew ever closer. She didn’t have a car. She didn’t have any way to get to town. She was totally dependent upon the things her customers brought her for barter or purchase, but this was the place she had settled herself and she wasn’t leaving. Not now, not ever.

  “How do you know my name?” the soldier on the couch asked, sounding more curious than upset now.

  She wasn’t an idiot. “I can read. Captain Q. Rydecker. It’s stenciled all over your luggage.”

  The big, army-green duffel was lying where it had fallen in the doorway just before she’d slammed his fingers in it.

  Great. Now she was starting to feel guilty about that too.

  Rydecker snorted again, and she tensed when she heard him get off the couch. He walked out the front door without a word, and for one indescribable minute, Elsie was caught in electrified indecision. She had the most intense urge to run for the door and slam and lock it before he got back, but that urge slammed almost instantly up against the invisible wall that was her reluctance to find out how much worse Rydecker’s punishments could get. In the next few seconds, however, her chance to act dissipated when he came stalking back into the house carrying bags of groceries—oh no, he was moving in!—into the kitchen. On his way back through the living room, he paused to shut and lock the door, glared at her once, then retrieved his duffel and headed for the stairs.