The Locket Page 2

  Groaning, she pushed herself to sit up, her movement sparking a flood of grasshoppers to take flight in all directions. Kylie barely noticed them. She reached under her hip to dislodge a lump and pulled an apple out of the grass. It was round and full, slightly bruised from either its fall or hers, the yellow and red of its skin only sporadically pock-marked by bugs or some past hail storm. Above her, splashes of blue sky and white clouds could be glimpsed between the full, leafy boughs of a tree, heavily laden with more sun-ripened fruit. She was in an orchard and the sweetness of the apples carried easily on the soft breeze that rustled her hair.

  “Hello?” she croaked, but the only thing she heard in return was the creak of the katydids and the whisper of wind-swept grass. Exactly how long she’d been lying here was impossible to tell, but as hot as her shoes and jeans felt, she imagined she could thank of the shade of the apple tree for the lack of sunburn on her hands and face.

  The air positively sweltered around her, and Kylie shrugged out of her winter jacket. Belatedly, she pulled her feet into the shade with the rest of her and looked around again, turning her face into the heat of the breeze as she stared left down one long, unkempt orchard row, and then right. Straight ahead, the trees and grass were too thick to make out anything beyond another aisle or two, and the same was true directly behind the trunk she leaned against. But her ears told her what her eyes could not confirm. Beyond the crickets, the katydids and the whisper of gently waving grass, there were no sounds of habitation. No planes or cars, no people talking or children playing. There wasn’t even a barking dog out there in the unseen distance, and Kylie swallowed hard as a very real and icy fear inside her began to counter the heat of the sun.

  A sudden heavy thump hit the ground not far behind her, sending her scrambling to her feet. “He-hello?”

  Ducking beneath a low branch, she waded through the knee-length grass until she reached the center of the next aisle over, then looked around again. Still nothing; still no one. Just more trees in need of picking and trimming and tall grass that hadn’t been cut down in years as far as her eyes could see in every direction she turned.

  Hugging her arms despite the sun, Kylie backed into the nearest shade. She jumped at the sudden flash of red that dropped just past her shoulder, thumping into the ground beside her. Looking down, she bent to pick up another mottled red and greenish-gold apple. It felt very solid, which was the first nail in her hope-filled coffin that all this might be just one really vivid hallucination. Slowly, she brought the fruit to her nose, breathing in not only the warm, sweet scent, but the undeniable reality of what she was seeing. As impossible as it was to believe, this was not a hallucination. Maybe…maybe it was something more. Kylie turned all the way around, her wide eyes searching the rows upon rows of trees. Maybe she’d been clocked over the head and was now lingering in a hospital somewhere, deep in a coma. Certainly that explanation was preferable to the alternative, a starkly irrational conclusion that, try though she might, refused to be dispelled in her mind: she had gone back in time.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Kylie nearly jumped out of her skin. She spun around, taking a giant step backwards when she saw the tall, angry man half-obscured by the trees two rows behind her. As he started slowly forward, recognition dropped Kylie’s jaw and stole the sturdiness right out of her legs. If she hadn’t grabbed onto the nearest tree trunk, she’d have fallen straight to her knees.

  Robert Appleby—or at least a much younger and much angrier version of the man that she had sat next to on that old park bench—was headed right for her and already not more than twenty feet away. This Robert was lean and muscular, with a full head of thick black hair and dark snapping eyes that bored into her with a furious intensity that was at the very least breathtaking and at the most more than a little frightening. This Robert was dirty, hot and sweaty. This Robert looked haggard and tired, with a bucket full of apples dangling from each hard and sinewy arm. His jeans were patched. So was his dirty, white t-shirt, the short sleeves of which did not come down anywhere near far enough to cover the eagle tattoo that began somewhere near his right shoulder and ended midway down the bunched muscle of his biceps.

  “You hear what I just said to you?” He started menacingly forward and Kylie fell back a step, but they were both standing under the shade of the same tree by the time he stopped again. “I’m talking to you!”

  “I-I—” Kylie stammered, but the only thoughts in her head were of the conversation she’d had on that distant park bench.

  Was it love at first sight?

  Oh ho! I turned her over my knee and paddled the blue blazes out of her. She was trespassing, after all. Stealing apples…

  Kylie looked down at the apple in her trembling hand, and his gaze followed suit. A good eight feet still separated them, and yet she could all but feel the jolt of anger that made his fingers clench on the handles of those wooden buckets.

  His eyes stormed and he all but seemed to swell with a surge of barely contained anger. Teeth gritted, he seethed, “Like this isn’t hard enough without you robbing me blind!”

  Kylie’s trembling intensified as two-plus-two finally became a solid, unwavering four in her mind. Somehow she had been transported sixty-some-odd years into the past. Somehow, that woman pictured inside of Robert Appleby’s beautiful antique locket was her. And that rocky first meeting that he had so flirtingly related as an old man was about to play itself out right here. In the flesh, so to speak. Even worse, into her flesh. Kylie swallowed hard; it didn’t seem quite so funny or erotic anymore.

  That same shock of fear that probably made her look guilty as hell to him, sparked through her on electric waves that centered, of all places, in the flesh of her bottom. Her skin there crawled with dread; tingled with an ominous anticipation so intense that she could swear she already felt that first stinging blow from his hard, square hand.

  Paddled the blue blazes…

  Blue blazes…

  Kylie dropped the apple, and she ran.

  Twin buckets hit the ground a half second later as he shot after her in hot pursuit. “Get back here! Hey! Hey, thief! I’m not through with you!”

  Ducking low hanging branches, she tore through that knee-high grass with absolutely no idea where she was going. She didn’t even know where she was! But in the end, it didn’t matter. She barely crossed three rows, zigzagging wildly from one orchard aisle into the sun of the next, before his strong right arm hooked around her waist. She screamed as his chest crashed into her back and down to the ground they both tumbled. They rolled once in the tall grass, and despite of all the kicking, bucking and screaming that she threw herself into, Robert still came up on top.

  “I wasn’t stealing! I wasn’t stealing!” She just couldn’t think of anything else to say, but this younger, angrier version of that smiling, laughing old man wasn’t in any mood to listen. Fight though she did to avoid it, he flipped her from her back to her stomach and pinned her in the grass.

  It was the same position she had so breathlessly envisioned back in the park; belly to the ground, helpless to stop what was about to happen. She was breathless now, too, but not for the same reason. Her sneakers dug into the weeds, kicking up clods of grass, but his weight held her down. He grabbed her right arm when she slapped back at him, and that too became pinned, tucked into his left-handed press at the small of her back.

  Her mind screamed for him to stop, but what came spilling wildly from her mouth, high-pitched and panicked though it was, didn’t form any coherent words. No one was around to hear them anyway. And though she flailed and jerked her left arm all over the place, even going so far as to try and tuck her hand underneath her, he eventually caught that wrist, too. Both her wrists were pinned together behind her back, just above the vulnerable swells of her denim-clad bottom.

  Heaven help her, she was about to get spanked. Heaven help her further, the very idea of it wasn’t as hideously appalling as it probably would have
been to just about any other woman in existence. She had dog-eared way too many spanking scenes in way too many romance novels not to (in spite of all his anger and all her fear) be just the tiniest bit curious. At least until the broad width of his work-calloused palm cracked hard against the denim seat of her jeans. It brought home to her a startling realization: there was a whole rainbow’s worth of difference between erotically-written spankings in romance books and the real thing, delivered in a moment of anger, for the sake of serious discipline.

  Robert the younger did exactly as his older counterpart had chucklingly related. He lit a fire under the pockets of her jeans the likes of which not even the sun could rival. Hard and fast, his hand beat a furious tattoo all over her unprotected backside. It wasn’t over quickly, either, no matter how she bucked and shrieked, flattening the grass all around her kicking, scrambling legs. Rather, it became rapidly and painfully—very, very painfully—clear that this was a punishment sparked not from the result of any wrong-doing, imagined or otherwise, on her part. This was a man who had been taken to the absolute limits of what he could handle, making Kylie the vessel into which he was venting months of mounting frustration.

  And it hurt. It hurt beyond anything she’d imagined a spanking to feel like. But it was what he needed, and because Kylie had neither the strength nor the leverage to break away, she took every blistering swat he dealt her.

  Beyond wailing, beyond screaming, beyond kicking and crying, he spanked her again and again, until the heat and the throbbing, blistering pain was all she could feel. In the end, it stopped only because the strength of his arm gave out. A man broken by unrelenting strain and grief and the times in which he lived, Robert finally let go of her hands and pushed back onto his feet. He walked a few feet away, leaving Kylie lying in the grass, clutching her wounded bottom and soaking the weed with her wailing tears.

  His breathing was almost as labored as hers as he ran his hands through his hair and held them there, clutching his head as if in disbelief of what he’d done. No apology was forthcoming, however. He didn’t even look at her.

  It was a long time before either one of them spoke, although it was Kylie who, crawling back onto her knees, finally managed the first garbled words. “That wasn’t over your knee! You lied!”

  His eyes were still angry when he swung back to glare at her. “What?” His eyebrows quirked, buckling together in a semblance of irritable confusion.

  She only cried, shaking her head wordlessly, and he gave up trying to figure it out. Instead, he marched back to grab her arm and hauled her roughly to her feet.

  “The gate,” he growled, thrusting her straight-armed in the proper direction, “is that way. I ever see you in my orchard again, and I’ll have you arrested for trespassing.”

  Turning on his heel, he stalked back to his fallen buckets. Righting them impatiently, he scooped up scattered apples, throwing them back on top of one another, too mad to care if he bruised them or not. Until in a sudden explosion of limbs, he jumped back up, lashing out to kick one of the buckets across the row. The tall grass kept it from flying far. Still, apples went everywhere.

  Hands on his hips, chest heaving, Robert stared at the ground. Not moving, other than the labor of each hard breath, he turned to fix her with another dark stare. “Why are you still here?” He retrieved the abused bucket, leaving the battered apples on the ground as he waved an arm at her. “Get out of here. Go!”

  Holding her bottom in both hands, Kylie followed the direction he indicated, but there was no sign of a fence, much less a gate. There was nothing but trees and grass, bugs and the relentless summer sun. Sniffling, she scrubbed the sleeve of her long shirt across each tear-stained cheek in turn and didn’t move.

  Returning to pick up his other fallen bucket, Robert paused to glare at her and then erupted with another bellow, “I said, go!”

  Go? Go where?! Even if there was a town somewhere beyond all these trees, what then? What family or friends did she have to fall back on? Where could she go? What could she do with just her good looks and a wallet in her coat pocket, laden with two worthless credit cards, twenty-five bucks of what would no doubt be considered ‘funny’ money and a futuristically dated ID card?

  Rubbing her bottom with both hands, Kylie turned in a full circle, stopping only when she found herself staring at Robert again. According to that locket, they were going to marry and have a family together. According to that grandfatherly Robert, sitting on her favorite park bench back home, they were going to fall in love.

  Softened me around the edges. Smart as a whip. My wonderful wife.

  The prospect was enough to reduce her to tears all over again. But she could see no other choice ahead of her. Her wounded bottom pulsed and burned beneath her tender hands. Unable to touch gently enough to ease the burn and with a fresh new flood of tears pouring down her cheeks, she cried, “I can’t. I have no place else to go!”

  Leaving both buckets in the grass, Robert stood up. His hands braced against his hips as he stared at her. Despite all of Robert the Older’s assertions, this one wasn’t softening. Not around the edges, or otherwise. Not until he finally blew out an exasperated sigh, turning his back to her as he muffled a curse. For the span of several breaths, he argued with himself, shaking his head twice, then grudgingly turn to face her again. He still looked mad as hell, but now she thought she also glimpsed a glimmer of resignation in his eyes. Without a word, he shook his head again, picked up his buckets and walked away.

  For one horrible moment, Kylie thought he was going to leave her there, despite what the old man had told her. But this Robert only went as far as the next row of trees before he, half obscured by thick, apple-laden branches, paused to glare back at her over one broad shoulder.

  “Well,” he demanded. “Are you coming or not?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Don’t make more work for me,” Robert said gruffly. He set his apple buckets down next to a ramshackle fruit stand, built alongside a lone stretch of highway that ran north to south without a single other sign of human habitation not fifty feet from his front steps. The highway, if such it could be called, had only two narrow lanes and absolutely no cars that she could see in either direction. She walked out into the street, shielding her eyes from the sun as she looked first right, and then left, and then directly across the street at the copse of orange trees surrounded by a weather-beaten wooden fence.

  “Are those yours, too?” she asked, trying to judge how big of an orchard it was. Every bit as overgrown as the one they’d just come from, her guess would be it was huge, but it was impossible to tell for sure.

  “No.” Robert gave both it and her the same cursory glare over his shoulder. “Get out of the road.”

  Going through his bucket, he transferred all the good apples into the side-by-side crates that rested on top of the fruit stand. The bruised apples he tossed back the yard in the orchard’s general direction, letting them disappear into the tall grass wherever they bounced. After tossing a few, he noticed Kylie hadn’t moved and stopped what he was doing long enough to frown. “What did I just tell you?”

  Kylie looked up and down the road again. “Relax. Nobody’s coming.”

  “This is my house, my property, and my rules. That means when I tell you to do something, you don’t argue with me. You just do it.”

  Kylie got out of the road. “Grumpy jerk,” she muttered under her breath, not really caring if he heard her or not.

  He did and his scowl deepened at the corners of his mouth, but he didn’t say anything more. Once his bucket was empty, Robert reached into the jade green bowl that sat between the apple-laden crates and removed a small handful of pennies. He studied them in his palm a moment, then shifted them to his pocket and headed for the house.

  “Do you want me to watch the stand?” she called after him.

  “No.” He didn’t turn around, but clumped heavily up the front porch steps to that two-story farm house, a building that seemed in desperate
need of a good scrape and a fresh coat of paint.

  “But…” She glanced back at the stand, looking from crate to crate and then down to the faded sign beneath the green bowl which read, ‘Apples .01¢’ “How do you know people aren’t going to steal from you?”

  He opened his front door. “If they need food that badly, they can take what they need.”

  “If they need…” Her jaw dropped, and then so did her hands, darting all the way down to her back jeans’ pockets. “But…Then what was that bullshit you put me—”

  She shut her mouth with a snap when he immediately turned and came stomping back outside. Strange how the daylight seemed to amplify the anger on his face as he held the open screen door in one hand and glared pointedly back at her.

  “How’d you like a mouth full of soap?” he asked. Regardless of his expression, or maybe in spite of it, his tone was steady and calm. Unnaturally calm. That dangerous sort of calm that shot up through her legs and down through her spine until both tingling sensations converged under the skin of her bottom, where it lingered, cringing.

  Although a good twenty minutes had passed since the spanking in the orchard, Kylie could still feel the effects. Even through the denim of her pants, heat rose in waves from her throbbing flesh. Her bottom hadn’t ached this badly since she was thirteen and decided to pick up ice skating as a way to pass the long winter months. Unfortunately, she had no sense of balance.

  Later in life, after she’d discovered the erotic thrill that would accompany all those vividly imagined spankings, she would conjure up the memory of that dull ache and deep-muscle tenderness that had made sitting down so uncomfortable. Late at night, wrapped in the comforts of her bed, that distant memory had hurried her own busy fingers on toward deeper arousal. Now, however, with her hands on her back pockets, Kylie looked at Robert and decided that there really was a world of difference between fantasy and reality. Right now, her reality was that Robert had a very hard hand, and obviously he was willing to use it.