“But I don’t want to go home,” Stacey whined in the shrill high-pitched tones of an overtired toddler.
Cade ignored her, gripping her elbow and guiding her off the stool. “Let’s go.”
Stacey jerked away, stumbling and nearly crashing into the guy on the next stool in the process. “No! Not going’ anywhere an’ you can’t make me!”
Cade resisted the urge to roll his eyes, grabbing Stacey by the arm and hauling her toward the door. “You’re making a fool of yourself, little girl,” he said into her ear. “Move it. Now.”
“Or what?” Stacey said, loud enough to draw the attention of several people around them. “What're you going to do? Spank me?”
“Don’t tempt me,” Cade growled. It was already taking everything he could do not to haul her over his knee right here and now. Stacey, to his complete astonishment, giggled. Then, while that silly little giggle had the breath knocked out of him, squirmed away to drape herself over the bouncer.
“Hey, Cy!” she blared, rubbing the top of the burly man’s bald head. “I’m drunk.”
“Yeah, Stace,” Cy said mildly, plucking her off his chest and steering her back toward Cade, “looks like you are.”
“I gotta go home,” she said, pouting. “I’ve been a bad girl.”
Cy shook his head, laughing. “Sleep it off, Stace. I’ll see you later.”
Cade flashed him a grateful look and shepherded Stacey, who was now singing, loudly and off-key, into the parking lot. Cade released her for a split-second; just long enough to open the door, and Stacey tripped over her own feet and went sprawling to the ground then curled into a ball and tried to roll under the truck.
“Oh, no, you don’t” Cade said, reaching down to pull her out.
“Leave me ‘lone,” Stacey mumbled, slurring thickly. “Tryin’ ta sleep.”
Cade gave up the battle and just bent down and scooped her up. “Sleep in the truck,” he said, depositing her in the passenger seat and buckling her in. For once, Stacey didn’t argue. By the time he could walk around the truck and climb in, she was slumped against the door, passed out cold.
***
Cade startled awake at the sound of a loud crash followed by a string of curses that was broken abruptly by violent retching. Cade scrubbed a hand over his face, blinking rapidly to clear away the vestiges of sleep, and rolled off of Stacey’s tiny couch. ‘Oh, great,’ he thought as he started down the hall toward the bathroom, ‘now the real fun begins.’
He found Stacey sprawling on the floor of the trailer’s single tiny bathroom, hunched over the toilet, heaving. Her hair hung limply around her, curls tangled into ratty knots. Cade sighed, then stepped over and gently drew her hair back out of the way. Capturing it in a messy tail with one hand, he reached over with the other and turned on the water in the sink, letting it run and warm. When the heaving seemed to be coming to an end, he grabbed a clean washcloth from the shelf above the toilet and wet it in the warm water before handing it to Stacey.
She sat back on her haunches and took it gratefully. While she mopped her face, Cade stepped out and returned with a glass of water. Reaching up into her medicine cabinet, he took out two aspirin and handed them to her with the water. She hesitated. “Take them,” he told her, pressing the glass into her hand.
She sent him a mutinous glare but plucked the pills from his hand and downed both them and the water.
“Shower or bed?” he asked.
Stacey made no move to answer but pushed past him, limped into her bedroom, and fell face down, still fully clothed, onto the bed.
Sometime later, Cade woke again to the sound of Stacey puttering around the trailer’s tiny kitchen. He sat up, rolling his head around to alleviate the crick in his neck and stretching his arms up until his back cracked. He stood slowly and ambled into the kitchen, leaning against the counter. “Feeling better?”
She glanced up, with an eloquently arched eyebrow that spoke volumes. Cade waited, arms crossed, saying nothing. “I feel like shit,” she said finally, “but I’ll live.” She’d showered and shed the previous night’s clothes. Her still-damp curls were pulled back into a messy tail at the base of her neck, and she was wearing an oversized man’s work shirt that hung nearly to her knees.
To Cade’s mind, she looked like nothing so much as a little girl. Sure, she was sexy as hell, but at that moment, he wanted nothing more than to draw her into his lap like a child and reassure her that everything would be ok. She was spitting like a scalded cat and damned if she wasn’t bringing out every protective instinct he had.
“You didn’t have to bring me home,” she said after a long moment. She had turned away from him and was busying herself putting coffee on to brew.
“Yeah, I did,” he replied. “You were drunk out of your mind. Leaving you there would have been both dangerous and irresponsible.”
Stacey shrugged it off as though it were of no consequence. “I was at Joe’s. It’s not like anybody’s going to bother me there. They all know me.”
The sheer absurdity of that logic was enough to make Cade want to shake her–hard. She clearly had no idea just how vulnerable she had been or just how easily she could have been hurt. The rage that stirred in Cade surprised him with its intensity. Instantly, his mind conjured images of women, dozens of battered, torn, broken, shattered women, first in Iraq then on the darker, seedier sides of Alexandria–the images that still haunted his dreams. He fought back both the images and the rage, knowing he had no real right to feel that way. She owed him nothing. She’d committed to nothing.
Instead, he asked, in a tone he hoped was casual, “How’d you end up there anyway?”
Stacey shrugged. “I needed a drink.”
It sounded logical enough. It should have been believable, but it was wall-to-wall bullshit. He knew that as well as he knew his own name. She was baiting him, pure and simple. The logical part of his mind was screaming, arguing that he couldn’t possibly know that. He knew almost nothing about her; he’d barely known her a week, and yet he did know. He knew it at a gut level, instinctually, deep into the marrow of his bones.
“Bull,” Cade said bluntly, pinning her with a look. “If you’d wanted a drink you could have done that here. This was a tantrum.” Stacey shot him a withering look, but he ignored her, continuing. “You wanted my attention, and you got it. You couldn’t bring yourself to say it, to talk about the kind of relationship we talked about so you showed me. You acted out in a way guaranteed to get me to react. You knew what I’d do, and you practically dared me to do it.”
Stacey stared at him, boiling with shock and fury. The nerve of this bastard. She ought to toss him out on his ass; yet she wasn’t doing it. She wanted to, but she couldn’t. It was so painfully and unerringly true that the words wouldn’t form. She hated it, utterly despised the truth of it, but she couldn’t lie, not to herself. Oh sure, she’d lie to her own mother if it suited her purposes, but she’d sworn always to be true and honest with herself. And that meant, no matter how much she hated it, no matter how much she’d prefer to squelch that little voice in her head and stomp it cheerfully into submission, she couldn’t deny it. He was right, damn him. If she’d only wanted to get drunk, she could have easily done that here. She was, at least partly, doing it deliberately, thumbing her nose at him, trying to prove, if only to herself, that he wasn’t controlling her. Now as to the rest of it, she wasn’t prepared to go quite that far.
“That’s ridiculous,” she said, but the words held no heat, and they both knew it.
“Is it?” Cade asked, arching an eyebrow.
“Yes, it is,” she hissed. “I’m not a toddler. I don’t throw tantrums.”
He said nothing, simply settled back against the counter, arms still crossed over his chest, and looked at her. He didn’t so much as twitch an eyebrow, but Stacey could have sworn he was laughing at her.
“I don’t,” she insisted.
“Uh huh,” he drawled. “Sure you don’t.”
&n
bsp; She glared at him, resisting–barely–the urge to stamp her foot in frustration. “I don’t,” she huffed.
“Ok,” Cade said genially, “so just what do you call the show you put on at Joe’s last night?”
“I got a little drunk,” she replied, hunching her shoulders defensively. “Is that a crime?”
“Might be,” Cade said with a small, wry grin, “but I think Joe was too busy enjoying the show to be bothered with pressing charges for drunk and disorderly.”
Stacey felt the flush that burned like a flash of fire from the base of her neck to the roots of her hair. She couldn’t fault his observation. Most of last night had congealed into an alcohol-tinged blur, but the short flashes of memory she did have definitely fit the definition of humiliating. She thought she remembered draping herself all over Cy like some kind of sloppy-drunk pole dancer, and had she really curled up and tried to sleep underneath the truck?
“Yep,” Cade answered, making Stacey realize abruptly that she’d spoken the thought aloud, “you did.”
Stacey dropped her head in her hands, groaning. “Not one of my brighter moments.”
“Nope,” Cade agreed, “it wasn’t, but it worked.”
“What do you mean?” Stacey asked, sliding him a wary sideways look.
“You wanted attention, and you got it,” he said simply.
“I was not looking for attention,” she protested. Even as she said the words, the small voice in the back of her mind countered them. ‘Weren’t you?’ it asked quietly, accusingly. She shook her head hard, trying to deny it, but deep down, in a small, dark part of herself that she rarely let herself acknowledge existed much less take seriously, she knew the truth of it. The bright, flashy colors, the bars, the men, the partying, it all went back to that lonely forgotten little girl she’d sworn never to be again. Nobody would ever ignore her again.
“Look me in the eye and tell me that wasn’t deliberate,” Cade said.
She wanted to deny it, to tell him to go to hell and take his demands with him, but the tone had her obeying without conscious thought. Before she realized what she was doing, she found herself dropping her hands and looking up at him, her body moving without permission from her brain. She glared at him, looking him straight in the eye and daring him to comment, but the words refused to form. She swallowed hard and tried again, furious with herself. Yes, dammit, it had been deliberate. How dare he make demands like that on her and just leave her to wallow in it? Ok, so maybe he’d been trying to give her space and time to think, like she’d asked, but screw that, it hadn’t worked. So, she’d done what she’d always done. In Stacey’s world, when the going got tough, the tough went partying. If it had the added bonus of getting her some attention and pissing him off a little, all the better. But damned if she was admitting that to him. She lifted her chin, defiant, prepared to deny it with the ease and practice of the accomplished liar she was and had been since early childhood. Cade met her gaze squarely, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and somehow still managing to have the force and presence of a wall of solid rock, and the words died in her throat.
“I thought so,” Cade said quietly, effectively cutting off any further attempt at protest. He held out a hand, engulfing her hand in his much larger one. “Let’s go.”
Again, her body responded to his tone without conscious permission from her brain. She was being ushered into the living room before her brain even registered her feet were moving. “What the hell are you doing?” she asked, when her brain finally kicked in and caught up with reality.
Cade didn’t answer. He dropped onto the couch and maneuvered her around to sit facing him on the low coffee table. “Do you remember what we talked about the other night?” he asked. “About what I believe?”
The words were soft-spoken and calm without a hint of threat, but Stacey flared nonetheless. “Of course I do, I’m not stupid. What do you think I’ve been thinking of all this time? What do you think brought on the biggest hangover I’ve had in years?” She stopped abruptly, realizing belatedly, seeing the understanding dawn in Cade’s eyes that she might have just revealed far more than she intended.
“I’d say the amount of alcohol you drank last night brought on the hangover,” Cade said mildly, “but I take your point.” He leaned forward, dangling his hands between his knees and interlacing his fingers. “I told you the other day,” he went on, “that I’m an old-fashioned man who believes in protecting women, even from themselves if necessary. Decisions like the ones you made last night, putting yourself in a dangerous situation, drunk out of your mind in a bar where anything could happen, are exactly what I was talking about.”
“It wasn’t dangerous,” Stacey protested. “They’re not strangers. The guys at Joe’s know me; they’re friends.”
“I know you think they are,” Cade said, “and I hope you’re right, but the state you were in last night, anybody in the place could have decided to have his way with you, and you couldn’t have stopped it.”
“Yes, I could,” Stacey argued. “I have mace in my purse.”
“And where is your purse?” Cade asked.
“It’s…” Stacey looked around, frantic, desperately trying to remember and coming up blank. Cade stood up, walked into the kitchen to retrieve the purse, and dropped it in her lap.
“It was on the counter,” he told her. “I found it there when I brought you home last night. You didn’t even have it with you. I doubt you could have used it even if you’d had it. You could barely walk.”
Stacey blushed, feeling suddenly very small and very stupid. “Nothing happened,” she said, but it was a token protest and they both knew it.
“It could have,” Cade insisted. “Any guy in the place could have slipped you a roofie, and you’d have never been the wiser. You didn’t even have a way home.”
“Joe would have taken me home,” Stacey put in. “He has before. I’m not stupid enough to drive.”
“Good,” Cade said gently. “I’m glad to hear it, but it’s still a dangerous position you never should have put yourself in, especially just because you were pissed at me. If you’re pissed at me, talk to me. Tell me so. Hell, scream and yell at me if you have to, but don’t ever put yourself in danger like that.” He stopped, running his hands through his hair and seeming to gather his thoughts. “I know I haven’t known you long, but you’re important to me Stacey.” He held up a hand to forestall the protest he saw coming. “I know that sounds like a line, but it’s not. It’s not,” he repeated at her skeptical look. “Hell, I don’t even understand it myself, but you matter to me. You do.”
Sitting there under the full force of his focused attention, Stacey found herself believing him. It made absolutely no sense, but at this moment, she felt as though she had every ounce of his considerable focus, as if she were the center of his universe, possibly the only thing in his universe at this moment in time. No one had ever looked at her like that in her life. Oh sure, she could command a man’s attention in the bedroom. Who couldn’t when you had them by the balls? But this, this was different. She hadn’t slept with him. She barely even knew him, and here he was telling her she mattered simply because she existed. It went against everything she knew or had ever experienced, but she believed him.
“And because you matter,” he went on, “I can’t let this go. I can’t just grin and shake my head like the guys at Joe’s and move on. You put yourself in danger, and it has to stop.”
“Why?” Stacey asked, in a small voice that managed to be both just a bit petulant and genuinely confused. “Nobody ever cared before.”
“I do now,” Cade said, quiet but utterly unshakeable, “and you know how I deal with things like this don’t you?”
Stacey’s mind was screaming. Hell, yes, she knew, but this wasn’t happening. This was not happening. Except she felt herself nodding. What the hell was that about?
“Answer me, Anastasia,” Cade said in that firm tone that seemed to make her body act independently
of her brain.
She swallowed hard and took a deep breath, intending to put the brakes on and tell the lawman what he could do with his caveman ways, but when she opened her mouth, what came out was a quiet, almost whispered, “yes.”
Then it was Cade’s turn to nod. Reaching over to take her hand, he pulled her to her feet, around by his side and then gently but very firmly over his knee.
Stacey’s nerves shot into overdrive, and she found herself fighting down rising panic. Everything in her was telling her to run, to do something, anything, to get away. She struggled a bit, but their size difference had her at a severe disadvantage. She dangled over his thighs like a child, and Cade simply wrapped an arm around her waist and held her still.
Stacey’s stomach flipped and she fought down another wave of nervousness. She could do this. This was a child’s punishment, not that anybody had ever punished her this way–or much of any way–as a child, but still… In fact, this was probably for the best. After all, how could she know if she could handle it if she’d never been there? That was like saying she didn’t like swimming when she’d never been in the water. She tensed again as he pushed her shirt up to the middle of her back. She could do this. She could do this.
***
Cade took a deep breath and pushed the tail of Stacey’s shirt up into the small of her back, uncovering a scant scrap of purple cloth that he supposed constituted underwear. Somewhere in the back of his mind he thought he remembered his sisters calling them bikinis, not that he’d ever paid that much attention, but with four sisters, you eventually picked up things. Besides, it distracted him for a moment from the furious argument he was having with himself. The more logical part of him was screaming that he couldn’t do this. Sure, he’d done it before, and would do it again, but before now, it had always been with women who had either grown up with it and accepted it, as his sisters did, or women who knew they needed or wanted it and readily consented. Stacey was neither. His gut, the deeper more bone-deep part of him, however, argued that she had indeed consented. She was well aware of his beliefs, and she had admitted that she knew how he would handle it. Moreover, she hadn’t fought it. She’d struggled a bit, sure, but that was instinctive and to be expected. She hadn’t fought him with anything like what she could have. She might be small, but she was a wildcat. If she truly objected she could have handed him his balls on a plate and he knew it. That, just as much has his own bone-deep certainty, told him Stacey needed this. She needed someone to set boundaries and mean them, to tell her that her behavior mattered, that she mattered, and she knew it just as much as he did, even if she couldn’t admit it to herself.
Playing With Fire Page 5