Something Has to Give (2 page)

Then she
just started walking.

To this day, s
he had no idea how far she must have gone or how many of those overgrown dirt roads she’d passed before she realized the sun was going down, that she hadn’t seen another car all day long, and that it was starting to get cold. Absolutely no thought went into her decision to veer off the road and keep walking out into the desert brush. By the time she saw the house, the sun was almost gone. No lights were on in any windows. No one looked to be at home. By the time she was close enough to climb the front porch steps, she’d known no one had been home for quite some time. There was too much dust on the windows for anyone to be living here. At least, that’s what she’d thought, right up until she touched the door and it simply opened up.

Who would leave a house and not l
ock up? She remembered thinking that very clearly as she’d pushed the door open and taken her first hesitant step inside. What’s more, why would someone leave it fully furnished, with canned foods still on the pantry shelves, clothes hanging in the closets, and the power and water still working?

Elsie remembered walking back outside in a strange state. She’d sat dow
n on the front porch and waited, and waited, until long after the sun went down and the absolute darkness of country life settled over the juniper and scrub. She’d waited, expecting at any second to see headlights coming up the long driveway, but none ever had. It got very cold that night. She’d held out, shivering, for as long as she could, before walking back inside and closing the door. For several days, she’d pretty much lived on the center cushion of the couch, waiting for someone to come home, but no one ever had. Eventually, she’d stopped waiting. Eventually, she made herself at home.

For eight months.

And now, Captain Quint Rydecker was home and she was just supposed to walk away? Leave everything she had built up for herself? Quietly accept the fact that she had nothing—no money, no home, no future—all over again?

Arms folded across her chest, Elsie stared out the window, hating the man now pacing
up and down in front of the sheriff, casting angry glares back at the house. Through the window she couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, but that didn’t matter. Captain Rydecker had abandoned this house. It was hers now, and she wasn’t leaving. Wherever he’d been these last eight months, he could just take himself right back. And if he refused to leave voluntarily … well, her eyes narrowed to stubborn slits, it might take a day—two at most—but she was good at getting rid of pests. Like the bats she’d found roosting in the attic and pantry, Elsie was going to get rid of him, too.

“But this is my house!” Quint shouted, thumping at his chest with both hands. “Mine!” By all accounts, such power displays worked well for apes; humans, not so much. Sheriff Buster Harlowe stood stoically chewing his gum and didn’t seem much impressed. “I’m giving you permission, for God’s sake! Why can’t you drag her ass out of there? Arrest her for trespassing—or something! Do your damn job, man!”

Sliding h
is gaze back to the house, the sheriff continued to chew his gum. “Those look like new curtains,” he finally said.

Quint could feel his temper slip a little at that. He struggled to rein it back in. “Yeah, those are new curtains. Those are new goats out in my field. I’m pretty sure she’s got new chickens around back somewhere because there’s also a new fucking sign at the front of my driveway and posted on the porch! She’s selli
ng eggs and cheese out of my—” he thumped his chest again. “—
my
house!”

“Looks like she’s ma
de 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 s
heriff 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 s
heriff 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 th
e 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 th
at 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!” S
he 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 them pinned, her feet drumming fitfully a
gainst 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.

Th
is was a job well-done.

Th
is 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 m
ocked, 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!”