Warming Emerald: The Red Petticoat Saloon

by Maren Smith

  A whisper of a moan drifted down through the floorboards. Oh God… they were at it again. Garrett slumped back in his chair, chewing and glaring at the ceiling and feeling supremely selfish because, hell, if he had a woman, she’d be moaning right now too. Moaning, sighing, arching her back and squirming her hips…

  The crisp smack of calloused hand bouncing off naked flesh rang out, eliciting a high-pitched squeak and then another moan. Oh, great. It was going to be one of those nights.

  Glaring at the patch of ceiling that doubled as his brother’s bedroom floor, Garrett left the table. The ladders that used to be the second floor’s only access were gone now. Just last week, he and Cullen had finished the final touches on the brand new staircase that bisected the formal room from the ranch office down the hall. As he climbed the steps, he resisted the urge to stomp, but irritated as he was, he could still recognize an ass-headed move when he made one. They weren’t doing it because they didn’t know he was home. They were doing it because they loved one another—another crisp smack and sharp cry—and obviously because Chin had done something she shouldn’t. Or maybe she was feeling scared again. Or flighty.

  It was probably flighty. Ever since that night a few months back, when Chin was showing them how to cheat at Three-Card Monte and they were showing her how much better lemonade was once a little whiskey was added, she slurringly confessed that she always felt better—safer—whenever Cullen put her across his knee. At the time, Cullen hadn’t said anything to that, but they had been doing a lot of—two swats now; followed by a high-pitched whine—that ever since.

  Garrett glared at their door when he passed it, but he didn’t stomp down the hallway either. He snuck. In his own house. Damn near tiptoeing past the extra rooms where little children might someday sleep to his bedroom on the other side of the house. The arrangement had been meant to give each brother the maximum amount of privacy and yet, even with the door closed he could still hear the slow, rather gentle-seeming spanking continuing down the hall. Judging by the urgency of Chin’s muffled cries, it probably didn’t feel gentle to her. But then, Cullen’s would-be bride was just a little slip of a woman with a very little bottom, and his brother had big hands.

  Pulling his shirt over his head, Garrett cast his clothes over the back of a nearby chair and threw himself down upon his bed. In the unlit blackness, he lay on his back, staring up at ceiling rafters that he could, thanks to the moonlight, only just make out while down the hall, the intimacy of Cullen and Chinny’s togetherness intensified. The spanks were growing in crispness and severity. Little Chin’s cries became abruptly less muffled. The low rumble of Cullen’s voice began to accompany the smacks, lifting this out of the realm of a fun little slap and tickle before bed. If his brother was scolding, then she must have done something. Idly counting swats, Garrett wondered what it could have been.

  Then he wondered why he cared. Knowing wouldn’t change the fact that Garrett was lying here alone, while his brother was lighting the fires of sweet marital bliss on the other side of the house.

  “Put your feet down,” Cullen said, muffled but clear enough to be heard through two closed doors. The sharp downward cracks of flesh on flesh paused. “What happens when you cover your bottom?”

  “No!” That was Chin, her normally calm voice now high-pitched and frantic. “Nonono no!” All of which culminated in a shrieky squeak of pain that perfectly accompanied the very next brisk smack. No longer skin on skin, this sounded sharper. Like wood, bringing to mind the hairbrush that lived on Cullen’s dresser.

  Which also brought to mind long brown hair and the very brief image of the domestic pleasure to be had simply sitting on one’s bedside with a certain emerald-eyed somebody perched upon his knee while he brushed out her hair before bed. He’d never brushed a woman’s hair before, but he did like to touch it. Garrett adjusted the lay of his arm behind his head, marveling at how intimate just the thought of running his fingers through the long, soft fall of a woman’s unpinned tresses would be. Soft, clean, lightly scented. Brown. A waterfall of chestnut waves rolling over his hand and down her back all the way to her waist.

  A low throb was blossoming in the pit of his belly, heating him through and through as the smacks grew sharper and fell faster, and Cullen’s low scolding once more softened beyond Garrett’s ability to hear clearly, and Chin broke into wailing sobs she couldn’t quite muffle in her bedding. His cock stirred, not because of what he was hearing but because of what he knew would be coming next. Nothing like a little bit of affection to help reassure a disciplined bride that she was still loved.

  Maybe that was why Emerald was so unhappy. Working where she did got a girl a lot of loving, just not the kind that counted. He could change that, if only she’d let him. Sure, maybe he was a little rough around the edges, but then so was she. A scrapper and a biter. A woman with a young Indian boy clinging to her skirts; he’d love to know the story behind that. The way their relationship was progressing, he’d probably have to borrow a page from his brother’s woman-keeping manual and spank it out of her.

  His cock wasn’t just stirring now, it was twitching. He could imagine Emerald, teary-eyed and sniffling, one hand reaching back to touch her bottom as she sat—discipline done—upon his knee. He could all but feel the warmth of her well-spanked bottom permeating through all the barriers of their clothes to seep into the flesh of his thigh. He could almost feel her in his arms, teary face buried in the side of his neck, cuddling to get as close to him as she could to soak up all the comfort he was inclined to give before rolling her down on the bed under him. Then they’d both indulge themselves in that other kind of sweet marital bliss.

  The spanking down the hall had stopped. He could hear nothing more, not from Chin or Cullen and his imagination ran wild. Not that he cared all that much about what Cullen and his soon-to-be bride were doing. It was just that he knew what he would be doing in this entirely too suggestive silence. With his left arm tucked behind his head, his right hand strayed down along his stomach and crept over the angle of his hip. He gripped his cock. A light touch at first, because he imagined even a sexually experienced woman like Emerald would be uncertain, with her feelings as bruised as her hotly chastened bottom.

  He let his fingers grip a little tighter, increasing the heady pleasure. If he closed his eyes, he could almost pretend it was Emerald gripping him like this. Her normally unsmiling face soft with submission as she lowered herself to kneel between his legs and opened her mouth to take him in.

  Down the hall, Cullen’s bed began its now quite familiar knock against the wall.

  Sighing, Garrett opened his eyes. Staring blindly once more up at the ceiling, he couldn’t help but wonder where Emerald was right now. And who she was doing.

  * * * * *

  The sunrise was little more than a stripe of orange along an otherwise gray horizon when Lydia startled awake. Everything was so quiet. Quiet like this always struck Lydia as something unnatural and frightening. Bad things happened when it was quiet.

  Maybe that was why she always awoke with her heart racing and her ears straining for hints of either danger or normalcy. From the comfort of her bed above the bar, none of the sounds that used to soothe her—the pop and crackle of a warm fire and the heavy slumbering breaths of her adopted family, the Muwekma, sleeping beside her. Of the family that had birthed her, Lydia had no memories. When she thought of her mother, she thought of Sihu with her gentle eyes and even gentler hands. When she spoke of her father, it was Kwahu’s broad face and ready smile that she talked about. The Muwekma were her people, no matter what the U.S. government and its harsh military said, not that telling them so had stopped anything the day the men in blue came riding through her village with that devilish proclamation, offering safe passage to the reservation… so long as they gave up their white “captives” first. Had Maska been alive, he never would have let her go. But then, no one had wanted to let her go. Her father had tried to stop it. Had her husband not already been
dead, the U.S. army would have killed him alongside Kwahu the minute she had grabbed her son and the soldiers grabbed her.

  The well-used mattress was soft beneath her; the swaddling blankets, warm, but Lydia’s hand shook when she covered her eyes. She drew a deep breath, fighting to keep control of her weeping. Tears were a weakness, and they never solved anything.

  That was when she heard it—the same soft whimpering cries that still woke her three nights out of five since the soldiers had stolen them from her tribe and dragged them both away. All the way across the mountains, in fact, before abandoning her and her son in a horrible little place called Shady Springs. The military had left her in the “safe keeping” of a foster family, one supposedly intent on re-civilizing her wild, Indian ways. Millicent and Myron Crankshaw. Decent. Upstanding. Model citizens.

  Supposedly.

  Millicent Crankshaw. That woman had been pure cruelty wrapped in the garb of a good Christian. A good Christian who berated her adopted tribe. Who reviled her “savage” ways. Who condemned the love she still bore her departed husband and who, had Lydia not put herself between them, would have struck her son for no sin beyond that of his heritage. Leaving had been the best decision she had ever made, even if she had done it “like a thief in the night” as Millicent still liked to recount. “And with my best silver tucked into her pockets! Turn the other cheek, says the Good Book, and so I will. But don’t expect me to invite that wretched ingrate back into my home!”

  That she hadn’t taken anything beyond the clothes she and her son were wearing, didn’t matter. Just like it hadn’t mattered that she had no place else to go. She couldn’t stay with Millicent, for fear of what she would do to Paquah. She couldn’t go home for fear of what the army would do, and within twenty-four hours, the situation in Shady Springs had become so intolerable that she didn’t even question the traveling salesman who offered her a ride as far as the next town. Nor did she question it when he brought her right to the side door of the Red Petticoat, calling Jewel out onto the porch as if he were making a delivery of goods. Lydia would never forget the way Jewel’s blue eyes had flashed when the salesman held out his hand in bold suggestion of payment, or the incredibly unladylike bellow that had brought Mr. Gabriel out onto the porch—a dark-skinned, dark-eyed Mexican who had listened calmly and quietly to the salesman’s pitch before, still calm and still quiet, seizing him by the scruff of his shirt and the back of his pants and, quite literally, throwing him back into his wagon.

  They also took her in. It hadn’t mattered that her clothes were buckskins and beads, and it hadn’t mattered that her son was a half-breed, Jewel had still made her a gem. More than that, though, she had been kind. Unexpectedly kind to the bitterly angry young woman whom she had renamed Emerald.

  Rubbing her eyes, Lydia scrubbed away the tears she was too disgusted to cry and when she heard that whimper again, she gave up on sleep, banished the bad memories, and rolled out of bed.

  In the far corner of the room, Paquah’s bed was little more than a trundle mattress on the floor—easily rolled away and hidden during working hours. She bent over it, finding Paquah’s small shoulder. He rolled over, already reaching for her and she scooped him up to walk the floor, just as she had when he’d been little. He was four now. His legs dangled off her hips, his arms wrapped her neck, and he was twice the weight he used to be, but none of that mattered.

  “It’s all right,” she whispered, the way she did every time the nightmares woke him. Being ripped from all he’d known… it was too much for anyone. Too bad governments didn’t seem to know that.

  She rubbed his small back, her fingers toying in the softness of his black hair. It was getting long again, but she loathed to cut it just because the white folk—she ought to stop thinking of them that way since, technically, she was one of them—were prejudiced. No, that wasn’t quite true. Culpepper Cove wasn’t quite as bad as Shady Springs had been, but Lydia still cut his hair because the last thing she wanted was for people (like Millicent, who might live elsewhere, but who still came to Culpepper to shop and partake of weekly church services) to constantly see him as an Indian.

  Ugly and savage.

  Thieving.

  She was fortunate that Jewel and Gabe had still been willing to take her and Paquah in once Millicent realized where she was and opened her mouth.

  “Thief my ass,” Nettie had scoffed. “They been here four days and nothing’s gone missing yet.”

  “So long as nothing does, you’re more than welcome to stay,” Jewel added, and the warning had not been lost on Lydia. “We just need to find a place to put you.”

  “What makes the most money?” Lydia had coolly replied.

  “The upstairs,” Jewel answered without hesitation. “And I sure could use another girl there. However…”

  When her gaze flicked meaningfully to Paquah, it was Nettie who stepped in. “Oh, he won’t be one lick of trouble. He can stay in the kitchen with me during working hours and if things get too busy there, any gems not working, well, they can give me a hand. He’s not the first young’un to be brought up in a house like this.”

  Or her the first mother to condemn her child to seeing things no decent parent would allow. Nettie didn’t say that, of course. But that was what Lydia heard, and she felt the shame of it so deeply in her burning soul that some days it was all she could do to make herself get out of bed. But regrets didn’t put food in her baby’s belly, and pious civility sure hadn’t put a roof over his head. Whoring did both. Unlike starvation and exposure, no one had ever died of shame.

  Sometime during all her pacing, Paquah must have fallen back to sleep. She didn’t realize it until his small hand slipped from her shoulder. Combing her fingers through his black hair, she pressed a kiss to that special place near his temple where his sweet baby’s scent was still the strongest. If she lived to be a hundred, she’d never forget that smell. She hoped she never had reason to.

  A good mother, she supposed, would have put him back in his own bed, but Lydia hadn’t been one for months. She lay him in her own and then lay beside him to wrap him in the comfort of her one-armed embrace. He looked so much like his father—around the eyes, nose and chin. He had her mouth though and a faint lightness to his skin that was only obvious when he was with other Indians. He could almost pass for Mexican. In some places that could be considered a blessing. In no place she could think of was it ever a blessing to be Muwekma.

  She should have left him with his grandmother. He’d be on a reservation now, where she was forbidden to go, but at least he would grow up in love and tolerance with his own people. Not surrounded by people like Millicent.

  If Maska were alive, he’d have come for her no matter where she was or who stood between them. She’d have gone with him too. In a heartbeat.

  Lydia closed her eyes, fighting once more to keep her tears at bay and her breathing slow and even. She tried to match Paquah’s deep and relaxed breaths. She missed Maska so much—his companionship, the way he used to talk to her, the way he used to touch her.

  Her body warmed. Against her will, as if she only needed the thought of him in her head to once more feel the caress of his hand gliding up the outside of her thigh to cup her hip. Gliding up the inside her thigh, to cup her there as well.

  I’ll never hurt you, I swear.

  Lydia’s eyes snapped open even as her body thumped, a solid pulse of such wanting that it was at once breathtaking and unwelcome. She tried to keep Maska’s face in her mind, but he had been gone so long it was hard to remember it. She was as horrible a wife as she was a mother. She couldn’t bring him to mind. The exact shade of his eyes. The exact pitch of his voice.

  Wauna, that was what he used to call her. Singing bird. For the sounds that she made, he often teased, when he rose to cover her with the dark beauty of his body. The night they married had solidified that name for their neighbors, too. Lydia blushed, flushing so hot that she abruptly let go of her sleeping son and rolled away. Lying on
her back, she combed her fingers through her bangs, staring straight up at a ceiling that was now easy to see. The morning sun had crested. Amber light infiltrated the room, chasing the shadows back beneath the sparse furniture.

  She could almost feel the light like a tangible caress upon her skin. Every fine hair was prickling, until she imagined fingertips crawling up her side, crossing her belly and her ribs, tickling just beneath the round cup of her breasts. She touched that spot, rubbing the sensation through her nightdress, but those ghostly fingertips refused to be dispelled.

  Sing for me, Wauna, Maska whispered, and with her eyes closed—oh!—how easy it was to remember how his lips had once felt as they engulfed the sensitive lobe of her ear. Sing for me. Now.

  Heat flushed her. It had been such a strange mixture of shame and excitement every time he’d given that command, back when he’d been alive. With nothing but his memory to comfort her now, Lydia felt none of the shame, only the empty ache for an obedience she dared not give with Paquah lying right next to her.

  Now.

  She squeezed her thighs together and locked her fists in the folds of her shift. Her nipples stiffened, scraping on fabric. The soft cotton of her shift felt more like rough sailcloth and every breath she took only made the scraping feel more… heady.

  Sing, little Wauna.

  His voice in her head didn’t sound right. It was pitched too deep, with subtle inflections on all the wrong words.

  Lydia turned her face away, trying hard to bring the memory of Maska’s voice back to where it truly had been. Not like this too-deep echo in her mind.