by Maren Smith
Growling in playful warning, Vance allowed himself to be lulled by the apology. He’d seen her crawl into her clothes earlier that morning. Her bottom was still flushed and by the way she’d winced when the scrape of the denim came up over her hips, he knew she had to be sore. “I’m going to let that slide,” he said, and tapped the ‘chessboard’ with two fingers. “Pay attention now. This is how you play.”
Listening while he explained the rules, Ettie watched him set up the board. Their pieces were bits of bark, wood, pine needles and the occasional pebble.
“The winner,” Vance explained, “is whoever takes the other person’s king. Or sneezes. One good sneeze will pretty much clear the board.”
“Which piece is the king again?”
He tapped a wedge of bark on his side and then on hers. “These guys here.”
“Okay, I got it,” Ettie said optimistically. “Rook, knight, bishop, queen and king, bishop, knight, rook. And all these guys out front are prawns.”
“Pawns,” he corrected.
“Whatever.” Glancing up at him, she waggled her eyebrows. “Wanna make this more interesting?”
“More interesting than playing with pine needle prawns? What do you have in mind?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said vaguely. “How about winner eats the loser?”
Now she had his undivided attention. “Are we talking…back to the furs type of ‘eating’ or are we all the way down to Donner Party already?”
“Let’s not box ourselves in with specifics. How about we say winner’s choice and leave it at that?”
“This day is not going to end without a spanking,” Vance said, chuckling. “I can see that already. It’s your move. You can go first.”
“Suits me. Just so you know, I’m so going to go all Donner Party on your ass once I’ve won.” She picked up a bark chip and moved it out onto the board.
“That’s your bishop, not your knight. You can’t do that.”
“I thought this was my knight.”
“Nope. Tell you what, let’s play checkers instead. It’ll be easier to keep it straight.”
She helped him clear the board and they set up the new game using all bark chips. “Do I still get to go first?” When Vance didn’t answer, she glanced up. “Vance?”
His head tilted to one side, Vance help up a silencing finger. “I thought I heard something.”
For almost a full minute, they both just sat there, listening. Apart from the occasional pop of a chair leg in the stove and their own soft breathing, Ettie couldn’t hear a thing. “What sort of something?”
He shook his head, arching both eyebrows as he returned his attention to the board. “Nothing, I guess. Cabin fever.”
“My move?” she asked, studying the board.
“Sure.”
She picked up a piece and thunked it out one space. “Jump me.”
“I like your enthusiasm, but we need to have our pieces a little closer together before we can do that.”
“You’re the one who chose to sit on the opposite side of the table.”
Vance put down the piece he’d started to pick up, chuckling as he shook his head again. “I am going to put that mouth of yours to such better—” He stopped again, his smile vanishing as he cocked an ear back toward the kitchen wall. Only this time, Ettie heard it too. A distant hum of machinery.
“That’s a chainsaw,” she said. “Oh my God, there’s somebody up here with a chainsaw!”
But Vance shook his head, his eyes widening in recognition. “That’s not a chainsaw, sweetie. That’s a snowmobile.”
They damn near knocked the table over in their mad-dash scramble for boots, coats, and the door. Ettie got there first, but two steps out on the porch, she slipped in the snow and went down on her butt. Chivalry truly was dead. Vance hopped right over her and didn’t stop until he reached the end of the porch.
“Ha!” he shouted, throwing up both arms like a snowbound quarterback after a winning kick, and two men in heavy winter clothes on the backs of twin bright red snowmobiles came riding into view around the side of the cabin.
Ettie didn’t bother to get up. She threw her hands in the air too, her laughter turning to squeals when Vance came back to pick her up, spinning her around in a bear hug so fierce it crushed the air right out of her. She didn’t care. “Please, dear God, let them have cheeseburgers,” she gasped once he’d let her go.
Coming around the trees to ease to a stop by the porch, Brent pulled his ski mask up over his face and grinned. He took his cellphone from his pocket, he tucked it up to his ear and said the three most beautiful words Ettie had ever heard in her life. “We found them.”
They were going home.
Ettie threw her arms around Vance. Her feet left the porch when, laughing, he spun her around in another exuberant hug.
“You guys want a lift?” Calbert, the man on the other mobile asked, already making room on the seat behind him.
“Oh, hell yes!” Vance said. “Give me a minute.” He ducked back into the cabin to bank the fire in the stove.
That’s when it hit Ettie. They were going home. Back to Corbin’s Bend. Back to life as they knew it. Her house on one side of the street, and his house on the other. Where her paper was waiting for her, and his phone calls were waiting for him. Back to normal, in other words.
“Ettie?” Brent asked, pulling parkas out of the carrying compartment from under the seat. “Are you guys okay?”
“Sure,” she said, but she didn’t feel okay. She reached for one of the parkas, but Brent didn’t hand it to her. He helped to bundle her into it, his gaze filling with concern the longer he watched her. “I’m fine. Really.”
He didn’t look like he believed her. When Vance emerged back out of the cabin, he tossed the second parka up to him.
Vance wasn’t smiling now either, and she knew why the minute he looked at her. Friendships forge in situations like this, they were never really friendships that lasted. He knew it, just like she knew it. When Vance closed the cabin door and threw that latch to seal out the weather, to Ettie it felt as if he were locking up everything they had been through these last two days. Keeping it in the cabin where it belonged, so it couldn’t follow them home. So it couldn’t make things awkward once they resumed the lives they’d left behind.
And that was probably for the best since, really, she didn’t like him. The minute she got home, she was going to have to remember that. Right now though, it was a just a trick of the snow, the stress, and the hunger that made it feel so much like her heart was breaking. After only two days? Cooped up with a man she’d once considered—did consider—an enemy of the community? Please. She knew better than that. Stuff like that was for romance novels and Hollywood movies. It wasn’t real life.
“Ettie?” Brent asked, his grin beginning to falter.
“Yeah, I’m ready.” Ettie made herself smile. She also made herself turn completely away from Vance. She climbed onto the snowmobile behind Brent, pulling her hands into her coat sleeves and wrapping her arms tight around his waist, fully intending to use his bigger body as a shield against what was going to become frigid coldness the moment they started moving. “Take me home.”
She had to bite the inside of her cheek, but she managed to keep most of her tears from falling. Those few she couldn’t…well, by the time they got back to Corbin’s Bend, like any other tiny piece of ice, she just brushed them off her skin.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The entire community turned out to welcome them safely home again, but the moment Brent rode down the main thoroughfare that was Spanking Loop, turning onto Birch Switch Drive where her house (and Vance’s) sat dead center in the middle, no sooner had they pulled into her driveway than did Doctor Marcus Devon arrive to meet her. She was freezing. Since her keys were in Vance’s truck at the bottom of Potato Creek, he had to help her get the spare key out from under the garden rock and open her door for her.
“We’ve got the puppies at ou
r house,” he told her. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” she stammered, huddling next to him in the foyer while he helped take her out of her coat. “Thanks for taking care of them.”
“Kitchen,” Marcus told her, his medical opinion involving first hot coffee and a sandwich. Then he looked at her fingers and toes, and made a full body check of the rest of her. “No fever. No frostbite.” He never said one word about the condition of her butt, though apart from a little redness and one very tender place that peeked out from under the elastic of her underwear and which bore only the faintest likeness of a finger and thumb—one could hardly even call it a bruise—there was nothing to see. “Bed,” became his professional conclusion. “I’ll bring the puppies back when you’re ready. Perhaps minus one if you’re still looking to adopt them out. The boys have fallen in love.”
“Only one?” she teased, though she didn’t much feel like it. “You’ve got three boys. Don’t you want three dogs to round it out?”
He laughed. “Thank you. No.”
She tsked, but that sound belonged to Vance. She shut her mouth and didn’t make it again.
“I have to go next door,” Marcus told her, bundling her up on the couch with her coffee, her sandwich and a blanket. “If you need anything, you let me know, okay?”
“Toner,” she said. It was the only thing she could think of.
“Email your paper to me. I’ll print it out tonight and bring it over first thing tomorrow.”
“Thanks.” She’d always liked Marcus. He was a great doctor and a really nice man. After he was gone, her house felt empty and quiet.
* * * * *
The next morning, Ettie got her paper out. For the next three days, she tried her best to write the necessary articles for the next issue. The story of her ill-fated trip to Brenton made the first page. That was one of the perks of being both editor and journalist. Creative license was another. She must have killed Vance half a dozen times prior to their rescue, but something was wrong with her. Each time she tried to write one of those scenes, her stomach clenched up and she started to feel a little sick. Inevitably, she ended up deleting them. Then she’d get up from her computer and walk over to the window, and stand there staring morosely across the street at Vance’s house.
He hadn’t worked in his garage for three days. Or, if he had, he’d done it with the door closed. Someone came by to pick him up once. She thought it was Venia. He didn’t leave with his bag, but she was pretty sure it must have been a spank-my-booty call. When he returned a few hours later, it was by himself and in a brand new truck. Extended cab. Dark blue. It looked a lot like his old one. She mentally named it Spank Mobile II, wrote it up for sale and put it in her paper. As for her serial story in the back, she just couldn’t make herself continue it. She started a new one instead, two people trapped in an isolated cabin in the middle of nowhere. A rugged mountain man and a woman who stowed away in the back of his truck one day when he went into town for supplies. She liked the storyline already, and she already knew when her mountain man spanked his stowaway, he was going to spank the way Vance did. He was going to make love the way she personally believed Vance would too. She wondered if he’d read the new story and recognize himself in it. After that, the story felt too personal to publish, so she released the next edition without any story at all and told herself no one would notice.
Venia Varner noticed. She came to pay Ettie a visit, bringing a lasagna casserole and a pumpkin spice cupcake. The visit didn’t last long. Cadence had taken a fall on the ice and was laid up in bed with both a twisted ankle and, Venia confided with a knowing wink, a hot bottom.
“I like the good doctor more and more every day,” she’d said. “He’s what she needs. A good dominant partner is always what every woman needs.” Pressing a slip of paper into Ettie’s hand, Venia brushed her cheek with a kiss, gave her fingers an understanding squeeze and then she left again, calling back over her shoulder, “Don’t be afraid to call if you need something too.”
On that slip of paper was a phone number and nothing more. Ettie recognized it instantly. She’d written it into her paper too many times not to. Have Paddle, Will Travel.
She missed Vance. She missed him so much right then that her hands holding onto that piece of paper shook. Not that she would ever call it. It had been three very long days—not that she was counting—since her last spanking, but she wasn’t anywhere near desperate enough to call.
On the fourth day, however, she did. Standing at the window in her office, staring across the street like a crazy stalker, jonesing for just a glimpse of him, she picked up the phone and she dialed his number.
The minute she heard Vance pick up, she lost her courage and quickly hung up again. She wasn’t desperate. She wasn’t crazy, and she wasn’t a stalker. She had to get over this somehow, before she lost it completely and did something stupid, like walk over there and fall down crying on his—
His front door opened and Vance stepped out. Zipping up his coat, he shouldered a familiar black duffel bag, before stepping down off his porch and walking down the driveway. He got to the end where his garbage can stood sentry not far from the mailbox. Pausing, he looked directly across the street. Not just at her house, but at her office window. At her. She’d have sworn he was looking right at her. The urge to duck behind the curtains and hide shook up the back of her legs, but Ettie couldn’t quite make herself move.
Taking the bag off his shoulder, he put it in the can with the rest of his garbage. Then, sliding his hand into his coat pockets, he started across the street.
Ettie’s stomach clenched tighter than a fist. She forgot how to breathe and didn’t remember again until she heard three soft knocks rap at her front door.
She pressed her hands over her heart, trying to still its wild thumping. Her knees lost all their solidity. She understood how Cadence must feel every day. Each step she took buckled and she almost fell, but still she went, out of her office, across the living room and into the foyer. She lost her nerve. More than once she turned to flee back the other way, but she never could quite make herself run. Even when she reached the front door, she had that moment of terrifying doubt, roaring through the back of her brain, telling her just how big a mistake opening it would be. They weren’t right for each other. They weren’t good for each other. She didn’t even like him! This…this pang in her chest was nothing more than phantom affections, like Stockholm’s Syndrome. It wasn’t real. It wouldn’t last. And if she opened this door and let him in, then she was only going to make it worse.
She opened the door anyway. The cold, crisp air wafted over her along with the scent of his cologne. Both left her shivering.
Vance leaned against the doorframe, his shoulder braced and his hands still in his pockets. “I’m afraid, Ettie Thomas, you have killed my desire to travel.” His dark eyes twinkled with humor, though his handsome mouth resisted the urge to smile. “Before this goes any further though, I feel it’s only fair to warn you. If you let me come inside, I’m going to kiss you so hard it’ll take years for your toes to uncurl.”
Heaven help her, her toes were already curling. Half of her wanted to run. Half wanted to give in. And yet, when she opened her mouth, it was neither acquiescence nor outright refusal that came pouring out. “You and what army?”
He tsked. “God, I love your mouth.”
She only retreated half a step when he pushed his shoulder off the threshold and stepped inside. Kicking the door shut, he reached for her, his fingers sliding across her cheeks and up into her hair, bringing her right back to him. When he kissed her, her toes didn’t just curl, she melted. Into his hands, into his mouth. The nibbling caresses of his lips and gentle teeth until, on the breath of a shaky sigh, she opened to him and he invaded.
Maybe it was for the best that she’d deleted her story out of her last issue, because she got it all wrong. Vance’s lovemaking wasn’t at all like she’d imagined. It was far more intense. Far more demanding.
It didn’t even happen in a bed. The minute he gained access to her mouth, his fingers abandoned her hair. They travelled down the back of her to catch her bottom in both his hands, squeezing and lifting her hips up into full contact with his. Hard to believe she once called him a eunuch, considering what she now felt pressing hard against her mons.
He took her straight down to the foyer floor and their mouths barely parted long enough for them both to tear at the fastenings of her pants. She arched up her hips while he skinned down her clothes, tossing them aside. She reached for his fly next, but already he was moving down her and all she caught was a handful of shirt. Rather than be thwarted, he shrugged right out of it, sweeping her legs apart, his burning mouth branding a trail of hungry kisses down her belly as he repositioned himself between her knees.
That first fiery taste when he touched her with his tongue nearly brought Ettie upright.
“Hands on your head,” he ordered when she reached for him.
Ettie tried to obey, but the minute he parted her with his fingers and covered her clit with his heated mouth, she reached for him again. The lashing of his tongue brought her hips bucking up against his lips.
“Restraints,” he vowed, his dark eyes laughing at her eagerness as she caught at his shoulders, struggling to drag him back up over her or to wriggle herself further down under him. “That’s the first thing I’m going to make for you. Restraints.”
“Good for you.” Her hands were like claws when she finally got them on his pants. She alternated, pulling at his button and zipper, cupping and stroking at the bulge of the cock concealed beneath.
“Then a paddle.” He helped her, shoving at his jeans until they were down just far enough to be out of the way. “Two paddles: one leather, one wood.”
“Promises, promises.” She locked her legs around him, catching his buttocks in her greedy hands and all but impaling herself the instant she felt his prodding quest for entry. She sucked air, her whole body arching up into the force of that first claiming thrust. “Oh my God,” she gasped, her arms and legs tightening all the way around him.