Something Has to Give (3 page)

“You can’t do th
is!” 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 firm
ly 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 wo
n’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 i
nto 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.

“Where are you going?” she asked, suspicion
yielding to the beginning rise of panic. He couldn’t go upstairs. Her bedroom was upstairs!

“To bed,” he said shortly. His footsteps heavy on the stairs, he cast her another dark look before the first floor ceiling block
ed him from view. “I’ve had a long and aggravating day.”

“
Wait! You—you can’t go up there!” With her underwear and pants tangled around her feet, she chased after him. She almost fell on the stairs, but got them yanked up over her hips and was zipping and buttoning herself back into her shield of clothing when she reached the second floor. “Wait! Wait right there!”

He headed straight for her bedroom, nudging open the door with his duffel before tossing it onto the floor in one corner.

“Hey!” she shouted.

He caught the edge of the door and would have swung it shut on her, except that she quickened her pace to catch it and barreled into the
bedroom after him.

“Hey!” she shouted, even louder.

He sat down on the end of the bed, putting his back to her while he took off his boots and dropped each with a heavy thunk on the floor. “Do you mind? I’d like to go to bed now.”

“
You can’t do that here! This is my room now!”

“The hell it is.” He stood up to take off his belt
. She couldn’t quite stop herself from jumping when he whipped it from his belt loops. She hated the involuntary backwards step her trembling legs made her take before anger—he’d done that just to get this reaction out of her—helped to bolster her courage. He glared at her, obviously tempted, before dropping the belt on top of his boots. “This is my room and has been since my parents died. This is my bed, too. I bought it two weeks before I married my ex-wife.”

“Go somewhere else,” she said
through gritted teeth, her chest heaving with the frustration and the sheer helplessness of this situation.

Still glaring, he pulled his t-shirt off
over his dark head, revealing muscle after muscle, after ripped core-muscle. God, he was built like a brick wall. Her face flushed, burning hotter the more she tried not to look—or at the very least—to not
look
like she was looking at him. Dark hair, dark eyes, a tribal tattoo that wrapped the bicep of one arm in stark black half-curves and sharp points. She had never met a man so … so chiseled that he could just as well have been cut from stone. But that’s what Rydecker looked like, standing in front of her in nothing but a worn pair of jeans and with nothing but a bed between them. She hadn’t meant to stare, but his hard mouth twisted into a knowing smirk, and Elsie knew she’d been caught doing just that: staring.

“Good night,” he said and dropped his shirt on top of his shoes.

“You can’t sleep here.” Her voice might be trembling, but Elsie wasn’t about to back down. She squared off against him. “You might have bought this bed, but it’s been mine for the last eight months! I’ve been the one washing the sheets. I beat the dust out of the pillow and mended the holes in the blankets.”

“Oh yeah?” His brown eyes turned steely; his muscles flexed
, making that tribal tattoo dance. “I was born in this house.”

“
Then you never should have left!”

“You never should have arrived,” he replied
, and began to unbutton his pants.

Her face flushed even hotter. Don’t look, she told herself
, but her eyes developed a wayward life of their own. She looked. “Stop that,” she said, sounding strangely breathless.

H
is smirk broadened. “Stop what?”

He unzipped his jeans.

“Stop that!” She pointed, but quickly snatched her hand back when she realized how badly it was shaking.

He shucked his
jeans all the way down his muscular legs and stepped out of them. Standing nonchalantly before her in nothing but a well-fitting pair of tightie-whities, he folded and dropped his pants on top of his boots without ever taking his dark eyes off her. “Good night, Elsie.”

Except that he didn’t mean
“good night” at all. Rather, he meant “go to hell”. She could hear the words hanging like icicles in the air between them.

“Not in this bed,” she said hoarsely, so impotently helpless to stop him that she didn’t know what to do. Obviously, she couldn’t call the police. She couldn’t physically stop him
; it was laughable even to try. There were no guns anywhere in the house that she knew of, and although there were weapon-able knives in the kitchen, exactly what was she supposed to do once she’d retrieved one? Attack him? Yeah—she looked him up and down—yeah, right. He was a trained soldier. He was bigger, tougher—one hand crept back behind her to touch her still burning, throbbing backside—and definitely meaner. She had absolutely no illusions about how such a confrontation would end.

“Anywhere else,” she said, waving her hands over the bed, blustering in the hopes he
might listen, because bluster was literally all she could do. “Anywhere else in this house, but not in my bed!”

Taking hold of the quilt, he whipped back the bedding
. “Get the door on your way out.” He got in and jerked the blankets back up over him. Casting her one final look, he punched his pillow twice and lay down on his side, with arms folded hard across his chest and his back to her. “Get the light, too.”

And just like that, her bedroom was no longer hers. Elsie stumbled backwards out into the hall. Shaking, she grabbed at the door handle, missed, grabbed again and finally managed to slam it shut between them. Then she stood there, shaking with anger
and helpless fear. After eight months of false security, now she was going to lose everything all over again.

Except that “everything” in this case
hadn’t really been hers in the first place, had it?

Yes
, because she’d made it hers! She’d taken this dilapidated, abandoned house and she’d patched it up, fixed it up, and turned it back into a home. She wasn’t going to leave! Where would she go if she did?

There was no place. She had nothing.

Elsie covered her mouth with her hand, and momentarily bowed by the sudden weight that hit her in the back along with that realization. She had nothing. She was once more exactly where she’d been last spring. She could taste the desperation in the back of her mouth, that sickly taint that made her feel as if she were going to throw up.