It was a striking ring, nothing like Cass’s vintage style dainty one. It was perfect for Libby with its clean modern band and stone mounted so that it did not protrude above the band. Ideally suited for dispensing medications, gutting large game and being perfect at all the outdoorsy things that were beyond her soon to be sister-in-law. Cass kissed Torsten on the cheek. “Good for you. Too bad you don't know anyone who plans weddings.” Laughter filled the room.
They carried plates in front of the fire. “So did you guys know before Killian proposed to me?”
Hazel set down her fork. “Honey, I knew the first time I clapped eyes on you.” She jerked her head towards her eldest, rangy son. “It took him longer. I think three days.” Cass scooted closer to her husband so that their legs pressed against each other. Cass knew that the stone in her ring had originally belonged to Hazel. Now she heard the story of how Torsten and Killian had travelled to Homer to have the stone made into a ring. She held her hand up to admire it. It looked like a family heirloom, which in a way, it truly was.
She reminded herself of that later, while she walked up the stairs with Killian. He loved her. He loved her a lot. It would be okay. As she often did, she just couldn't wait to find out what would happen. She loved spoilers—sometimes looked them up on her phone while waiting in line to see a movie. Life was hard enough without knowing what was up ahead. It got her nowhere. “Hush,” Killian whispered. He shut the bedroom door behind them and gathered her into his arms. “I know you're sorry.”
“I am. I really am.”
“But…” Oh crap.
“The point is to get you thinking about what you say before you say it.” She nodded. He took two steps away from her and gathered the pillows from the head of the bed. He set them on the edge of the bed and guided her over them. He hadn't taken her pants down. That could be a good sign, or a very, very bad sign. She heard him rustle in the drawer. She gasped when she saw him withdraw the Lexan paddle. Prior to being introduced to the Lexan paddle, she had firmly believed that a bath brush was the most wicked spanking implement. Five swats with the paddle that looked like glass but was some sort of space age torture material had changed her mind. She began pressing up with her arms.
“Honey, please, no, no.”
He pressed her shoulders down and reached for her left hand. He pinned it in the small of her back. A bath brush smacked you with a sort of solid thwack. It stung the skin, but you felt like it moved you forward. It whacked a small spot with a thud. The Lexan was more like being stung by bees. It made a distinctive slapping sound and set your ass on fire. Her entire body was clenched. Killian leaned over her. “Cassandra. Relax.”
“I can’t,” she whined. “That thing hurts.” He was apparently not over committed to making her relax. He didn’t suggest it again, instead commencing her punishment.
The swat landed across the center of both cheeks. “Ack!” she yelped.
“Stop fighting me,” he commanded quietly.
“You couldn't either! It’s reflexes—survival instinct!”
The second swat landed over the first one and her eyes flooded with tears almost immediately.
“You can take this. I know you can. We both know you totally deserve it. It will be easier if you just yield.”
“Ow, ow, ow,” she wailed. “How many?”
The third swat landed where her thighs met her ass and she yelped even louder than before. His voice stayed low, “Depends on you.”
The next swat made her wrestle even harder. He easily held her still. “Stop,” he said
“No. You stop. Please, please stop,” she beseeched. He sighed and appeared to give up on the idea of getting her to cooperate. He easily held her pinned and administered three more swats. She was crying hard by the time he was finished.
“Stay there,” he said, and over her own cries she could hear him put the paddle away. He sat on the edge of the bed and maneuvered her between his legs. He paused to unbuckle her jeans and yank them down. It was then that she saw the hairbrush sitting next to him. Her enthusiastic protests fell on stubbornly deaf ears. He pulled her jeans and panties down to her feet and helped her step out of them. Without a word he pulled her over one of his legs. Her knees parted as she settled over his thigh. “You know better than to refuse to come discuss something with me.” It was not a question.
She responded anyway. “I do. Yes, I do.”
“You woke up in a bad ass mood today and all I did was try to help you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You will be.” He lit into her with the hairbrush, paying particular attention to spots he had not smacked with the paddle. The brush landed between her thighs and over and over again across the crest of her bottom. She tensed and twisted, bucking like a wild animal. He gripped her tightly to him and forcefully kept up spanking her. He took her to the edge of her resistance and firmly insisted that she cross over it. Her sobs reached a peak and the struggle went out of her. She wilted over his leg, crying but no longer fighting. “Oh thank God,” Killian muttered. He set the brush in the small of her back and moved his hand over her scarlet, burning bottom. He gave her a firm set of swats with his hand, the most intimate thing Cass could imagine. He reiterated what seemed to be his main point. “When I ask you to talk about something, you do not yell ‘No’ at me.”
“Okay,” she cried, grateful that he didn't insist that she answer him in sentences or call him sir.
He accepted her acquiescence. “That's my girl,” he said, his spanks turning to gentle caresses. “That's my good girl.” Cass whimpered and continued to cry for a few moments, she couldn't turn the deluge off easily. She had always wanted this. She had imagined this when she was still in grade school. Submitting to it was not easy though. He reached across her and turned on the bedside light. He helped her stand and turned her so that her back was in the light. She did not like this part, she had never liked her body and she particularly did not like her ass. She had never ever heard of a spanked wife whose husband would insist on putting ice on her spanked posterior if he thought it was in danger of bad bruising. Her husband did, though. He admired his handiwork with a low whistle of approval. “Boy that Lexan does the job—”
“I hate that fucking thing,” she said.
He laughed. “I know, and you are really, really red. But I don't think you will get bruised.” She shrugged her shoulders, it seemed to her that bruises didn't matter much compared to the pain of a hard spanking. If she had lived through it, who cared if she was bruised? But it mattered to him.
She felt a draft and shivered. Killian stood and lifted her sweatshirt over her head. He expertly unhooked her bra and yanked the covers down. “Here, baby doll, stay warm.” She snuggled in. He gathered up her dirty clothes and tossed them into the hamper along with his jeans and tee shirt. She was much warmer once he slid in beside her. He rolled on top of her and she clasped his shoulders. He slid his hands down her back and squeezed her bottom, kneading and rubbing. She parted her legs and wrapped them around his middle. With no preamble he entered her and she arched her back from the joy of it. He was slow but insistent, filling every centimeter of her with his large cock. He withdrew almost to the tip and then earned a gasp from her when he thrust deeply inside of her again. And again. And again. She came first, the ache in her bottom somehow making it even better. She had a half-baked thought that it was like Reese’s peanut butter cups, the salty made the sweet even better, but she couldn't follow that train of thought because she almost immediately came again. She was grateful when she felt him come deep inside of her, she was already overwhelmed by sensation and didn't think she could take more. He pulled the comforter up around their shoulders and snuggled her close to him. “Go to sleep, princess.” For once, obeying him was easy.
The Pinnacle of Pine
They set out the next morning, hauling four large sleds. Killian carried his chainsaw and Cass had brought along an assortment of garden loppers. Hazel bustled along beside them. Lloyd was fascinated by ever
ything about Christmas. He had been raised as a Jehovah’s Witness and had never celebrated Christmas like the Nelson family did. The women snipped branches and gathered up greenery from the forest floor. It was a beautiful day, clear and cold. Killian froze and pointed out tracks to her. She was fairly certain they were deer, but on the off chance that they were something else, like a moose or a rhinoceros, she didn't specifically say that, merely confining her reaction to a breathy, “Wow, those are great.”
He wrapped an arm around her, and pointed off the path. “See those?”
“Yeah—are they wolves?”
He nodded. “That's my girl.”
“Are you sure that Travis didn't plant them?” They laughed together remembering that when she had first come to Slick Trench the mayor had been planting fake wolf tracks to attract tourists. “What sort of an idiot would fall for fake tracks?” she whispered. They both laughed, because if anyone would, it might be her. Killian, however, could identify the wolves in the area by their paw prints alone. “Which one is that?” she asked.
He stepped closer. “It's the big guy—what we’d call the alpha if wolves actually had alphas”
“How do you know?”
“Size and the distance between the front and back paws.”
Lloyd asked the question that Cass had been periodically thinking since she had first arrived in Alaska. “How many people get eaten by wolves every year?”
Killian let his breath out in an angry hiss. “There have been maybe five cases of wolves attacking humans in the wild.”
“Already this year?” Cass was shocked.
“Nope—in the last 150 years.”
Hazel didn't even look up, but kept gathering bunches of fir. Cass and Lloyd eyed each other, having been raised on fairy tales and horror movies, they knew that could not be right.
“Of course, rabies affects predation rates,” Killian continued.
“Of course,” replied Lloyd with mock seriousness.
“But in terms of healthy wolves attacking a human without provocation? Incredibly rare.”
Cass thought about that a minute. “So are we safe out here?”
Hazel stopped where she was and gave her son a look that said, “We both married morons.”
“What? Now?” asked Hazel.
“It’s December,” said Killian.
They returned to gathering. “I assume rabies is a summer thing,” Cass whispered to her father-in-law. He nodded and they both decided to let the matter drop. There was a limit to how stupid they wanted to look.
It was cold and so they got busy selecting the trees. They chose one lovely blue spruce, it was maybe eight feet tall and would go in the family room. They chose two very tall firs that were as close to identical as they could find to go at either end of the reception hall. With each of them pulling a sled, they headed home. Cass and Lloyd kept their eyes peeled for wolves, rabid or otherwise.
Bill Nye the Christmas Guy
The tree occupied the corner of the family room. Killian wrapped the large colored Christmas lights around each branch. Cass missed the tiny white twinkling lights of her family’s tree. These suited Hazel though, bright and impossible to miss. Lloyd had brought the boxes of ornaments down and Hazel had a story for each one. “Johann bought me that one on our honeymoon.”
There were the ones made by “the boys” in school. Lots of curling construction paper surrounding school pictures. There were ornaments of football players, hockey players, baseball players Hazel had bought these when her sons were pursuing those sports in school. There were an awful lot of ornaments that featured fishing, something that was an essential part of the family’s life. The ornaments on her parents’ tree featured a lot less wilderness. Now that this was “her” Christmas tree too, she suddenly felt sort of left out of it. She was glad that all of Killian’s life was represented in the tree. But none of hers was. An unusual ornament caught her eye. Cass held aloft a star made of popsicle sticks covered in glitter, which framed a picture of… who was that?
She looked questioningly at her mother-in-law. “Oh Killian made that, they were supposed to do someone they were grateful for—this was in Sunday school mind you, so everyone else did baby Jesus. Killian Anders Nelson picked Bill Nye the science guy.”
Cass was laughing so hard that she could barely breathe. She could well imagine, her literal thinking, wildlife biologist of a husband doing that. She hung it in a place of honor. Hazel continued, “That pretty much ended them ever asking me to teach Sunday school.”
“Were you upset?” Cass hung a bright green bauble.
“Heavens no, if I’d known it would have that effect, I would have bribed the little nipper to do it years earlier.”
“I have no idea what to get him for Christmas.”
“You’ll think of something.”
They finished decorating the tree and headed to the reception hall to do the others. They were not decorated with ornaments that held special meaning for the family. They covered them with large silver and gold balls, millions of little white lights and blown glass versions of arctic animals. Cass draped yards of white ribbon and something like eleven million strands of tinsel. Looking at the stately trees, Cass felt a sudden tug of affection for the tree covered in pipe cleaners, mismatched ornaments and colored lights. With the mantle draped in greenery, they placed large apothecary jars full of white candy at either end. The wood floors were gleaming. Cass could imagine what it would like with the fires burning and the candles lit.
Cass double-checked the pantry and the walk-in fridge. She had everything she needed. Baking sheets of appetizers, ready to go under the broiler rested in the freezer. The beef tenderloin coiled around itself in its gossamer shroud of cling film. Cass always felt that the walk-in and the pantry were like the backstage area before a play. She had been in a few, very terrible plays in school and still remembered that feeling right before, when the stage quivered with possibilities. Unlike when she was in school, she could pour herself a cocktail to alleviate her pre-performance nerves. She limited herself to one, however. In the morning they would be meeting the ferry and the last thing she needed was to be hung over. “Come on, Mr. Nelson,” she said to her husband joyfully imagining saying that some fifty years in the future.
“Right behind ya, Mrs. Nelson,” he said, giving her ass a light slap. She hoped that would still be happening in fifty years, too.
The Pizza Coven and Vampira’s Eyebrows
They were ready. They took several jeeps into town to meet the ferry. It had only dawned on Cass that she was an idiot. She had forgotten that the girl who was the make-up person wasn’t coming with the group on the ferry. Which meant that Cass was going to be filmed before she was near anyone who could do her make up. She threw what makeup she had into her bag and tried to put it on in the car. Killian was a good driver and skillfully maneuvered turns and hills. Even so, she didn't get it quite right. She tried to emphasize her brows and ended up looking like a vampire in a made for TV movie. “Dammit.” She dashed into Slick Trench pizza to use the ladies room to undo the damage she had just done. Maybe they could do some sort of postproduction editing and make her not look like she was in drag. Scrubbing her face with makeup wipes, she barely noticed the girl who had followed her in. There were three sisters (or maybe they were cousins—she really wasn't sure) who lived above the pizza place and worked there. They had not liked Cass initially and she had never learned their names. She thought of them as “glasses,” “pierced” and “tattooed” and tended to refer to them as the Pizza coven. “Pierced” was standing beside her looking intently at her botched face. Great, just fucking great, Cass thought.
Cass realized that the girl’s eyebrow was no longer pierced. With her typical elan she muttered, “I thought that left a scar when you took it out.”
Pierced smiled. “It does, a small one. I cover it up with make up.”
“Oh,” Cass looked closely at her for the first time. “Wow, you look great.”
“Can I help you? It’s for the TV show, right? Aunt Hazel told me to come check on you.”
Dammit, Aunt Hazel. Did she not know that the pizza girls hated Cass and would never do anything to help her?
Giving up on getting the makeup off with the pitifully dried out wipe, Cass weighed her options. On the one hand, she might be asking to be made a public spectacle. On the other, she did that to herself all the damn time. A thorough look at the younger girl's face showed perfectly smooth skin, elegant eyebrows and luscious eyelashes.
“Okay, but this is all the stuff I have.” She proffered her tiny make up bag of drugstore products.
“Come with me.” Cass had never been upstairs at the pizza shop. It was actually a very large apartment. She looked frantically around trying to find some clue to the girl's first name. She hopefully scanned the pile of mail looking for a name. No soap. There were three piles, one addressed to Sassy. Good god, someone literally named their baby Sassy, she thought. Only in a town called Slick Trench. The other names were Taylor and Virginia. So she had a less than fifty percent chance of guessing correctly. Thankfully, the bedroom that they entered had a sloppy handwritten sign on the door. “S and T—if you take my make up, PUT IT BACK—V.” So, Virginia it was. Cass was ushered into a chair by the window. Virginia handed her a brush. “Brush your hair, I’ll fix that too.”
Cass knew she should probably be offended by this, but a glance in the mirror established that Virginia was being nothing if not honest. In a trice, Cass’s face was denuded of her clumsy ministrations. While her face dried, Virginia set to work giving Cass a crown braid. She gently tugged the loops of the braid and Cass was amazed to see them go plump and full. It looked perfect. Practical and yet artsy, and very very pretty. “Wow, that’s great.”
Virginia smiled modestly and began mixing foundation on the back of her hand. She used a pink sponge to buff the perfectly matched foundation unto Cass’s face. She applied under eye concealer and didn't leave Cass looking like an albino raccoon. This was a minor miracle. Being a fair skinned redhead, under eye circles were her makeup waterloo. As Virginia applied blush she said, “I know we weren't really nice to you at first. I’m sorry about that.”
Red Velvet: A BBW Romance (The Cass Chronicles Book 5) Page 2