Something Has to Give Page 4

  Fifteen hens and two roosters came running the minute they saw her at the door. Spreading the grain mix in a wide arch so everyone would get fed, she gathered the early morning eggs and then headed back to the house.

  Rydecker had the tiny second-story bathroom window open and he was glaring down at her through the screen. “You have to the count of three to let me out of here. One…”

  “Two,” she sang out with him as she mounted the porch steps. “Three.” And then in her best Sesame Street Count impersonation, she added, “Three I don’t give a craps! Ha ah ah ah!” Then she went into the house.

  She heard him bang his fist against the windowsill and laughed all the way to the kitchen. She didn’t really feel like laughing, but it was important when sharing a house to establish one’s dominance and show who was boss early on, and it sure wasn’t going to be him.

  After giving the eggs a gentle rinse in the sink, she packaged them in cardboard cartons and put them in the fridge. The rest of the morning she spent making cheese—heating the goat’s milk on the stove and adding vinegar to allow it to separate. She had just enough to make two batches. One she left plain and the other she spruced up with garlic and herbs before pressing into molds and taking them down into the basement to age hanging from the rafters.

  No sooner had she emerged from the basement than she heard a knock at the door. It was Ben Johnson, who ran the little breakfast café in a tiny hole in the wall called simply Benny’s. He bought all the eggs she had, plus two 8-ounce tubs of cream cheese and one round of aged cheese from the basement for himself.

  “Goat cheese is an acquired taste,” he said. “Much too fine for most of the folk who patron my place.”

  “You and Darby are about my only cheese customers,” Elsie acknowledged. “But between you, my poor goats can barely keep up.”

  Ben winked at her. “Well then, tell Darby you’re sold out. Cheese, crackers and pepper jelly on top; that there is my idea of heaven.”

  Throughout the visit, there wasn’t one sound from Rydecker upstairs, but as Ben was heading back to his car with two recycled Walmart bags full of eggs and cheese, he turned and offered a wave up toward her roof.

  “Welcome home, Quint!” he called and then tossed Elsie a wink and a grin. “Didn’t know you two were an item.”

  God forbid.

  Faking a smile, Elsie waved goodbye like her insides weren’t curdling with dread, but just as soon as his car had vanished down the winding driveway and that curtain of his retreating dust had dispersed in the wind, reluctantly her gaze tracked up to the rafters of the porch ceiling. She was going to have to do something about Rydecker, especially now that Ben had seen him. What if Ben talked and suddenly Rydecker started getting visitors? The sheriff might not arrest her for squatting, but she was pretty sure she could and would be arrested for holding someone imprisoned in a bathroom.

  How did things get so screwed up so fast? Elsie rubbed her face and, stifling a groan, went back into the house. Leaning against the kitchen sink, she thought through her options.

  “Crap,” she said, because no matter what plan she thought of, they all included at some point that one significant step: let Rydecker go free. She made a face, but there was no point in putting it off any further.

  She made a peace offering: two pieces of toast, a little strawberry jam and some of the cream cheese she’d made the day before. Knowing it might take several feedings before he would sweeten up enough not to prove difficult once he was out, she placed his breakfast into the lids of two store-bought potato salad containers so they could be slid easily under the bathroom door.

  As if she needed a reminder as to in which direction his “difficulty” might lean, her bottom began to tingle. Elsie hiked up her pants, because rubbing was infantile and she wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction, whether he was here to see it or not.

  The big jerk.

  Scowling, Elsie took her peace offering upstairs. As she approached the bathroom door, she fished the compact she’d snatched from him earlier out of her jeans pocket. She could hear him moving around inside. He could probably hear her too, since he came to the door.

  Say something nice, she told herself. Something to help sweeten him into being harmless once he comes back out. “If I slip the mirror under the door, am I going to catch you doing something nasty?”

  In retrospect, that probably wasn’t the best thing she could have said.

  “No worries, honey,” he drawled through the door. “I finished that hours ago.”

  “That’s disgusting!” She shoved the mirror of the compact into the space under the door so he could see her glaring at him. “Real men would never admit doing something so base and gross.”

  “No?” He squatted, smirking down at her through the mirror. With his forearms braced across his knees and his big hands hanging limply down between them, for some reason that only added emphasis to the already conspicuous bulge clad in white cotton between his legs. “How often do you go around asking?”

  Elsie gaped, her face flushing hot in an instant. “Do you want to get out of there or not? Because I am just fine with leaving you in there until you rot!”

  “No, you’re not,” he said with maddening confidence. “You wouldn’t have those in your hands if you didn’t care at least a little bit about the consequences of your actions. And there will be consequences, Elsie. I’ve had nothing to do all morning long but think about what I’m going to do when I finally get out of here.”

  “When I let you out, you mean.”

  “I mean when I get out.” His faint, smirking smile thinned. “Because I will get out, and when I do, I’m going to put you back over my knee. Before I’m through with you, you’re going to wish you’d been born without a bottom. And that’s only if you untie the rope right now and let me out. Because if you don’t…well—” That faint smile of his thinned even more. “—guess what I found in the linen closet.”

  He reached up into the sink and pulled a wooden-backed brush into view. The handle seemed a little short for a bath brush, but also a little too long for a hairbrush. Exactly what it was didn’t really matter, she supposed. When he tapped it against his palm and fixed that deadly serious look on her through the reflection of the compact again, the skin across her bottom positively crawled.

  Snatching the compact out from under the door so she couldn’t see the way he was looking at her helped, but not a lot. She shoved the two lids under the door. “I hope you choke,” she hissed, backing anxiously away from the door. She wasn’t rubbing her bottom, she told herself fiercely. She was just wiping the sensation of being anywhere near him off her hands.

  “What,” he called through the door. “No water?”

  “Drink from the tap, you…you animal!” she spat and fled for the stairs.

  She could hear him laughing, a hard and bitter sound, all the way back to the kitchen. God, her heart was beating a mile a minute. She bellied up to the sink, leaning down to rest her elbows on the thin ledge of counter between the old porcelain and the laminate edge. Covering her scalding hot face with both hands, she tried to think. This was awful, this was impossible. How was she expected to co-exist—even for just a short amount of time—with someone who dealt with women by spanking them? This was the twenty-first century, damn it! Who did that anymore?

  Well, there was no way she was going to let him out when he was still in that abusive frame of mind. No way at all. Maybe after he’d spent a night or two trying to bed down in the tub he’d be more amenable.

  A shadow crossed the window, startling her upright. Her jaw gaped and she stared as two bare feet dropped down from the second floor to become the naked calves (very manly, but naked calves), and then the knees and thighs (hard, thick, muscular thighs that bulged as his feet scrambled to find something to brace against) followed by hips that were clad in nothing but a pair of white briefs (holy Hannah, that bulge). The wooden-backed brush was slung gun-slinger-style in the waist of his underwear,
with the bristled head poking up and the tip of that long handle protruding from under the elastic of his right leg. Feet finally finding something other than the glass of the kitchen window to push against, he gave a hop and dropped the rest of the way to the ground.

  Eyes huge and mouth hanging open, Elsie stared as Rydecker stood up. He was just tall enough for his head and the top of his naked shoulders to peek up above the windowsill. His dark eyes narrowed. His breath steamed the air, looking for all the world like a dragon seething smoke.

  “Oh…shit…” Elsie said.

  Moving very slowly, Rydecker took the hairbrush out of his underwear and pointed at her with it through the glass. “You,” he growled. “Your ass is mine.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Quint saw her mouth move and heard her second—starting to sound a little panicked—“Oh…shit!”

  Yeah. He smiled grimly. He was a little surprised to find he could still fit through that narrow bathroom window too.

  Enough gaping. Time to get this party started.

  He feinted right, as if running for the front door and Elsie raced to beat him there. But Quint ran left instead. The grass felt stiff with frost and by the time he reached the rear porch, his feet were screaming for relief from the cold. Unfortunately, the back door was locked, but around the other side of the house, the double cellar doors lifted on his first strong yank and he heaved one side open far enough to access the rickety wooden steps. It was dark in the windowless cellar. The only light was what daylight filtered in behind him and once he got halfway across the floor, that didn’t help him much.

  He crashed into what felt like his dad’s old army tent (kind of musty smelling now), fell into a couple cardboard boxes (Christmas decorations, he thought, something broke) and whacked his head into what felt like an obstacle course of hard balls dangling from the ceiling rafters. He batted at them as he ran, but the last one caught him square on the nose and, to add insult to injury, he whacked his toes on the lip of the bottommost step and went down hard and cursing on one knee.

  Above him, Elsie’s panicked footsteps beat across the floorboards for the back door and, swearing and hopping, Quint ran up the cellar stairs. He threw his shoulder against it, but the cellar door, which always used to stick, opened easily, spilling him clumsily into the narrow hallway behind her.

  Elsie spun with a shriek; Quint peeled himself off the wall and limped two steps forward, trapping her in the laundry room. The only way she had to go now was out the back door. The only thing he wasn’t sure of was whether he could move fast enough to catch her while she was still fumbling to get the lock open, or if she’d be in his hands and then over his knee before she could leap off the back porch and run screaming through the field.

  Quint smirked and stalked her down the short hallway, reaching for the hairbrush at his hip. “Like I said, your ass is…”

  He felt all around his waist, but his grandmother’s old favorite go-to disciplinary device, the hairbrush, was gone. He’d dropped it somewhere in the mad scramble to get back in the house. Well, hell…

  He scowled at Elsie, but with her back against the locked door, she was all through running. She grabbed a broken broom from beside the washing machine, snapped the handle in half right along the duct-taped seam and held it against him like a samurai warrior wielding his sword.

  Quint had spent the last twelve years of his life in the military and while not all of that time had been spent in combat situations, he was a man who had experience evading knives, bullets, shrapnel and bombs. There was no way he was going to back down from a woman armed with a broken broom handle.

  He moved in sideways, grabbing when she swung at him and cursing loudly when it hit his shoulder before he could catch it. She might have been only one woman, and a small one at that, but she was stronger than she looked. She was also wily—while he fumbled to grab the broom handle, she snatched a bucket full of cleaning supplies off a nearby shelf and flung that at his head. When he threw up his hands to avoid a mouthful of powdered cleanser, she body-slammed him into the dryer with all the fury of a defensive linebacker and ran right over the top of him. He grabbed after her, missed and was nearly kicked in the head as she escaped.

  He scrambled to give chase, cornering her in the kitchen, where Elsie became the dervish from hell.

  He ducked a pot—damn, she was fast! And fierce, so unbelievably, beautifully fiery and fierce—and in retrospect, laughing at that point probably wasn’t the wisest thing he could have done, but he couldn’t help it. This was unlike any fight with any woman he had ever had. Even the worst marital argument he and Maydeen had endured was nothing compared to this. Those had been a lot of yelling and swearing and name calling, for the most part. Those had been unpleasant. For some reason, this felt invigorating. It felt…fun, though he couldn’t say why and he didn’t know how to explain it apart from the unwilling chuckle that rippled out of him.

  Elsie threw a bucket of milk remnants at him. “Now you’re making fun of me?”

  He managed to slap the bucket aside, but was immediately pegged by a shower of every plastic drinking glass that she could get her hands on. She made a desperate grab for the knife drawer by the stove, but Quint got there first. More by accident than skill, he latched onto her arm when she quickly dashed the other way. With rattlesnake reflexes, she turned on him, jerking and yanking, kicking and punching in a mad, screaming, swearing bid to get free, and they both fell. He rolled mid-air, hugging her to his chest and trying his best to take the brunt of the impact when they hit the floor. He landed on his back. So did she, although most of her was lying flat on him as well, and she didn’t stop fighting once. Her elbow hit him just right and he lost all the air he might otherwise have laughed with.

  “Hey! Settle down! Enough!”

  She didn’t listen—surprise, surprise—but kicked and thrashed until she had wriggled around far enough in his constricting embrace to grab onto his shoulders with both hands. He saw the intent in her blazing eyes even as she reared up to get as much space between them as she could.

  Quint snapped his legs shut, defensively jerking one up between them so her knee connected harmlessly with his hip.

  His eyes narrowed. So did hers. With deliberate hostility, she let her gaze drop down between them. Despite its near miss of only a moment before, his cock felt her notice like a caress. It swelled, stirring behind the thin white cotton of his underwear.

  With equal coldness, her eyes returned to his. Her mouth twisted into a smirk. “I expected so much more from a big man like you.”

  “It was cold outside,” he said defensively.

  Her smirk only grew. “Whatever makes you feel better, sweetheart.”

  He wasn’t laughing now. “Why, you little—”

  He flung her over, scrambling until he was on top and she was flat on the floor. He grabbed her arm, hooking his around her hips and before she could do more than yell, he flipped her onto her stomach. Already her hands and feet were scrambling to get moving again, but that all ended when he sat on her.

  “Umph!” she grunted.

  He caught her left ankle when she tried to kick him, and the only reason she didn’t land the rubber heel of her right sneaker across his temple was because he pinned her left leg down hard across her right thigh. Every kick thereafter was blocked by her own shin.

  “You are a piece of work,” he panted, holding her down.

  “And you’re a piece of sh—” She broke off with a shriek when he stabbed his hand under her belly and began fumbling with the fastenings of her pants.

  “No!” she bellowed, trying to grind down on his hand, but the pain of being squashed against the linoleum was nothing compared to the satisfaction he felt when he got her jeans open. She threw herself back into another kicking, screaming fit, but he only pressed down harder across the back of her other thigh and waited for her to exhaust herself. He hooked his free hand in the back of her jeans and made good use of both their awkward positions. Eve
ry time her bottom heaved up, he shoved to get her jeans down far enough to bare the seat of his target.

  “You just don’t know when to stop,” he panted, shaking his head in amazement.

  She only screamed louder and flailed harder, clawing and hitting at his shins and feet, her little bottom bouncing up and down in lewd humping motions. It was all the leverage she could manage and he let her take it, right up until he got her jeans bunched uselessly around her mid-thighs. It was then that he noticed, admiringly, what he’d been too pissed off last night to notice—she was wearing Maydeen’s underwear… the faded scarlet ones, French-cut to ride high up on her thighs and with only just enough fabric in back to cover the absolute summit of each buttock. Suddenly he spotted something amid all the plastic cups and fallen pots and utensils on the floor. It was the wooden handle of a flat spatula protruding through the mess.

  Quint had to reach, but he managed to hook it with his fingertips and drag it close enough to grab.

  “Don’t you dare!” she screeched, and then screeched again because he not only did dare, he dared with a vengeance.

  He grabbed the back of her panties, hauling them up between her buttocks to bare the pale swells of both tense nether cheeks. Amazing, for all that he had blistered her last night, there wasn’t a sign of it now. Her bottom was just as smooth and as white as it could be—the perfect canvas to paint now in all the brightest shades of repentance and regret.

  “Baby,” Quint said with a tsk of feigned dismay, “Daddy’s going to show you a whole ‘nother world.”

  Elsie cursed and screamed, but Quint saved his breath. He let the spatula do his talking for him and damn if it wasn’t a chatty little thing.

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