by Maren Smith
The very faintest flicker of—was that guilt or doubt?—moved through Michael’s eyes. He stared at her, his eyes still narrow and hard.
“The issue of the cane and the scootabout is between me and your father. This,” she pointed at the cart, “is between you and me, and if you want to keep it like that, then you’ve got one chance and one chance only: Shape up! Got it?”
She didn’t dare take her eyes off of Michael, but from the periphery she saw Buddy and Daniel exchange wary glances.
It seemed an eternity before Michael grudgingly eased down until he was sitting in the bottom of the cart. He was really too big to be in there, but Cadence didn’t relent. She gripped the handle bar and, with rolling rocks grinding in her knees at every step, she took them all into the store.
She did her shopping, filling up the infant seat first before necessity and bulk finally forced her to start dropping items into the cart around Michael. As empty as the fridge and pantry stocks were at the Devon household, there quickly came to be a lot of items and she was beginning to regret putting Michael in the cart. The more groceries there were, the more he had to scrunch up in the basket, hugging his knees in tighter and tighter, and all the while he watched her, his young face remained as cool and expressionless as if it were chiseled from stone. It was because of that look that Cadence didn’t relent. How could she when, if she let him out now, she would lose what little sense of authority she had just gained? And if she did lose it, how could she possibly hope to get it back again?
She was not cut out for this. Her legs hurt. Her knees hurt. She was horrible with kids and the way Michael was glaring at her said plainly he was going to take the very first opportunity to inform his father about his ignored edict and then not only was her bottom going to join everything else on her list of things that hurt, but Marcus was probably going to make sure it jumped right to the number one spot.
What was she doing here? How could she have convinced herself that she could do this? She didn’t know the first thing about how to be an effective nanny, and now she was going to end the day with another spanking. Her whole bottom tensed as she thought about Marcus’s big, broad hands. She already wanted to cry. As if four swats, a stint with her nose in the corner, and a significant reduction in dignity were the end of the world. Stop being a baby about this, she told herself as she pushed the cart out of the bread aisle and into cereal. She could survive four silly swats.
He might give her more than four, a little voice whispered inside her. He might even give her a whole lot more.
Her bottom wasn’t just crawling now. It felt darn near electrified with the most awful buzzing dread. It was a horrible sensation, amplified by the minute scrape of her flesh against her own soft clothes and spreading now, down onto the backs of her prickling thighs and up the small of her back, following her spine. The urge to reach back and rub was unbelievable. She didn’t dare for fear the boys might see it, or worse, any of what few shoppers occupying these aisles alongside her might. The boys might not understand the significance of her actions, but in a town where spankings were probably dished out as a matter of course, no one else would mistake the gesture as anything other than what it was, the machinations of her guilty mind getting the best of her.
Except that she wasn’t guilty. She had nothing to be guilty about. She hadn’t done anything wrong. Marcus could make all the edicts he wanted, that didn’t mean she had to follow them. This was her body, her legs and her pain, and she’d be damned if she let him bully her into making a spectacle out of herself in front of the whole community. She wasn’t a cripple! She refused to be treated like one, not by anyone, and why the hell was there a bench parked right in the middle of this aisle?
Cadence glared at it, already offended, as if someone had known she was coming and planted it right here in the hopes that she’d make her feeble use of it. But no, she suddenly realized. She was standing right outside the pharmacy area. The bench was for those waiting for prescriptions to be filled, usually the elderly or the sick.
God, she wanted to sit down.
“It’s the toy aisle,” Buddy said, pointing to the very back corner of the store. “Please, can we go look at the trucks?”
“We won’t open anything,” Daniel promised. “Just for a few minutes.”
She could sit down while they explored among the toys and games, and that wouldn’t look at all out of place. To customers, she was just another person waiting for a prescription. To the store, she was simply waiting on her charges to look their fill in the toy aisle.
“Stay next to each other and stay where I can see you,” Cadence said, letting them go.
She remained standing, watching them go down the aisle until they found the metal cast cars and trucks. She had to crane her head to see them around a center aisle display of crackers, but she could see them from here.
“Can I go look at the puzzles?” Michael asked, soft and subdued, scrunched as he was in his tiny corner of the partially filled cart.
Grateful for the chance to relent without seeming as if she were giving in, Cadence nodded. “Stay with your brothers, okay?” She offered her hand to help him down and he even took it, hopping nimbly to the ground before he took off jogging to join Daniel and Buddy. He looked back at her once, but that look was hard to decipher too.
Sinking down to sit on that hard wooden bench was nothing short of heaven. The relief was overwhelming and for a moment, she just closed her eyes and endured.
“You look tired.”
Opening her eyes, Cadence looked up to see Lizzy Mayfield, her mentor, wheeling her own cart down the aisle.
She came right to the bench and, without being asked, plopped down to sit beside her. “Hi. How’s it going?”
“Fine,” Cadence automatically replied, edging away from her on the pretext of making room for her on the seat. As if the bench weren’t plenty big enough for the both of them to share.
“How are you settling in?”
“Is this an official conversation? Did you just happen to see me here and think, the middle of the store is the perfect place to have our first meeting? Just the two of us, mentor and…what? What’s the opposite of a mentor? Mentoree? Apprentice?”
“Padowan?” Lizzy suggested, playfully bumping her shoulder into Cadence’s.
“Oh God,” Cadence groaned and shook her head. In spite of herself, she actually laughed at that.
“Hey, you do know how to smile,” her mentor joked. “It’s okay. I’m not stalking you through the community, if that’s what you think. I just saw you sitting here and thought you might want to see a friendly face. Maybe even talk. How about them Mets, huh?”
“Oh God!” Cadence said, laughing all over again. It was starting to sound a little desperate. Maybe that was just her ears, though.
Lizzy’s smile turned faintly sympathetic. “It’s going that well, is it?”
It had to be the ache in her knees. One minute Cadence was just fine. Tired and sore, but fine. In the next, she was in tears. It happened so suddenly and so fast, there was no chance to swallow it back or hide it, though Cadence did try. She bent over, elbows on her knees, and covered her eyes, sucking for air until she could get her traitorous shoulders to stop shaking.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“For what?” Lizzy softly countered. “Having emotions? Being human? Cracking just a little under pressure? This isn’t easy, you know. No one who moves here finds it easy right off the bat. Even those who have been in the lifestyle for years and years don’t find it easy. I can’t imagine trying to make the adjustment when you aren’t even into this sort of thing. And on top of all that, you have the challenge of a new job, and the boys—”
“They’re good boys,” Cadence said automatically.
“They could be pope-flippin’ perfect,” Lizzy agreed, “it still wouldn’t make this any less stressful. Especially once you take the accident into account.”
Sitting upright, Cadence straightened he
r back. “I’m fine.”
“Would anyone ever know it if you weren’t?”
Cadence could see no hint of accusation anywhere about the other woman, but that comment still struck like one. It helped to harden her. To dry the last of her tears and put the steel back in her broken spine. “Never.”
“You don’t think that could be a problem?”
“I don’t choose to talk about this anymore.”
“Okay,” Lizzy said brightly, just a hair too brightly for it to be genuine. “Are you enjoying working for Dr. Devon?”
Out of the frying pan and into a completely different kind of fire.
Cadence turned her head, staring blindly down the aisle. By sheer accident, she found herself staring at the toy aisle, but there was no sign of the boys near the cars and trucks. She didn’t worry. She could hear Buddy’s high-pitched laugh and squeal, “Let me see, Michael! Let me see!”
She drew a shaky breath, not at all knowing how to answer that. She had every intention of falling back on her standard answer, that everything was fine. But, what came pouring out of her mouth instead was soft and hesitant and completely unlike her. “Is…is there any appeal…or something? Do I always have to just…take it?”
It was uncomfortable, the way her mentor looked at her. No. Not just at her, but into her, through her even, as if she could see things Cadence wasn’t ready to have exposed. “Are you in trouble?”
Wishing she hadn’t said anything at all, Cadence sat up stiffly straight all over again. “Nothing I can’t handle.”
“I imagine not a lot falls into the category of things you can’t handle. What happened?”
Turning, Cadence stared off down the store aisle again. There was no way to answer that without sounding like a whiner. “I shouldn’t have said anything,” she muttered. “Pretend I didn’t. Just…just forget it.”
“Okay.” Again, much too brightly said to be genuine. “Let’s talk about something else then.”
“Please.” Cadence drew a breath of relief that did not last long enough to even be exhaled.
“When my wife and I first came to Corbin’s Bend, we had it fairly easy. The community was just starting to shape itself together, but we could already see it was such a different place from the rest of the world. We also already knew a few people. Brent, for one. The good doctor, for another.” Lizzy smiled faintly. “I’ve known Dr. Devon a long time now. I didn’t know his wife and he hasn’t, to the best of my knowledge, offered the gift of his dominance to anyone, not in all the time Marilyn and I have been here. I know how strange that must sound to you, but his dominance is exactly that: It’s a gift. That he’s willing to give it to you tells me that there must be something special about you, Cadence. Now, I don’t know what that thing must be, and judging by the look on your face right now, maybe you don’t know either, but it’s there.
“Is there an appeal?” she asked, repeating Cadence’s question before answering it with a nod. “Yes. Yes, there is. You have three courses of action that you can take. You can talk to Dr. Devon and see if you can make him see your side. That is no guarantee that he won’t proceed however he deems necessary, but you can always try. Your second option is to tell me what’s going on. If he is doing something dangerous or damaging to you, then I will intercede on your behalf. Knowing him as I do, however, I find it difficult to believe that he is acting that irresponsibly.”
“He’s not,” Cadence admitted. Try as she did to hold onto some sense of injustice, the idea of being put across his knee was neither dangerous nor damaging to anything except her pride and, perhaps, her bottom. Even she knew that.
“Then your last course of action would be to take this before someone on the Discipline Board, but I don’t know if the words to adequately express how strongly I believe that to be a mistake exist in the English language. Still, it’s an option, albeit a damaging one.”
“Damaging?”
“As much as you need to trust him, he needs to trust you too. How can there be trust when instead of taking your concerns to him, you go above his head? May I ask you something?”
Subconsciously, Cadence rubbed at her knees, unsure if she really wanted to know. “Sure.”
“Do you deserve whatever it is he’s going to do?”
Incredulously, Cadence began to laugh again. In that instant, she was immediately once more on the verge of tears. This time she was able to blink them back. “No,” she quavered. “Of course not.”
Lizzy just looked at her. After a moment, she smiled again, reached over and patted Cadence on the thigh, just above where she was rubbing at her knee. “You don’t have to be honest with me, Cadence. But at the very least, you should be honest with yourself.” She patted her leg again, then stood up, retrieved her cart and walked away.
Cadence remained on the bench, staring at the off-white speckled grocery story linoleum and rubbing at her knee. Of course she didn’t deserve to get spanked. No one actually deserved that kind of treatment, especially not fully grown, independent women accustomed to taking care of themselves.
She wasn’t getting any shopping done just sitting here. She couldn’t see or hear the boys anymore either. Some nanny she was. If she still had this job at the end of the week, it wasn’t going to be because she was any good at it. If she wasn’t very careful, it just might be because she was sleeping with the boss.
The pit of her stomach warmed, sending tickling drops of moisture dripping down to saturate the gusset of her panties. As if it were the most normal and natural thing in the world to be sexually attracted to a man who probably would, by the end of the day, be spanking her and putting her nose back in the corner. What was wrong with her?
She grabbed her cart, limping heavily toward the toy aisle. She went from trucks to dolls, to books and puzzles and finally spotted them, all the way down at the far end of the cards and games aisle. They were huddled around a woman Cadence didn’t know. She was hugging them, her long arms wrapped around all three boys. At the very center of this group hug stood Michael, his face buried against her stomach. Buddy let go first, followed by Daniel. Michael still clung on.
“But why can’t you?” he was begging as Cadence came down the aisle.
“I have a brand new baby now, Michael,” she said, softly rubbing his back. “I have to take care of him and he needs me more than you do.”
“No, he doesn’t!”
The woman took a deep breath, glancing helplessly up at Cadence when she noticed her coming. The two women looked at one another. The younger one smiled first, somewhat sadly.
“You must be Cadence.” She reached over Michael, extending her hand and Cadence took it. “I’m Libby.”
She barely looked old enough to be out of high school, much less to be married and with a brand new baby. Clearly the boys loved her.
“Cadence has her own car,” Buddy announced. “It wouldn’t start this morning, so Dad made us take his.”
“Don’t be embarrassed,” Libby told her. “My car started every morning like clockwork, but Dr. Devon still made me take his. Hey, Michael.” The young woman gently set him back from her. “I have to get my shopping done and get home. My little peanut doesn’t feel very good, so I can’t be gone too long, okay?”
Michael was crying. He kept his face averted and didn’t let anyone see it, but Cadence knew exactly what that motion was when he suddenly scrubbed his arm across his eyes. “Okay,” he said thickly. When he walked away, he went the long way around so he wouldn’t have to look at anyone.
So no one would see his tears, Cadence knew. Because she was the exact same way.
Shoulders sagging, Libby watched him go before turning her helpless gaze to Cadence. “I’m sorry,” she mouthed.
Suddenly, now it was Cadence’s turn to be comforting.
“It’s okay,” Cadence assured her. “He’ll be fine.” She stammered over the word, in an instant hating it. She knew what that word felt like and it wasn’t anything she would have wished on any
one, especially not a child.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Marcus was just waving goodbye to his last client of the morning when his car turned down the street. His client backed carefully out of the driveway and Cadence just as carefully eased into it. He saw her minute search of the dashboard before, from the front passenger seat, Daniel helpfully pointed to the visor and she finally located his garage door opener. Closing the front door, he wandered back through the house to meet them in the garage. The boys filed past him, arms laden with grocery sacks. Cadence brought up the rear, limping heavily, her cane in her hand and her arms so full of bags that it was a wonder she could see over the top of them all.
“Need some help?” he asked, moving automatically to intercept and relieve her of as many as he could carry. He managed to rob her of all but one of those bags before she realized what he was trying to do. Instead of pricking at her pride and sparking another ‘Don’t baby me’ argument, Cadence dumped that last bag into his arms as well and headed straight back out to the car to load up again. She used the cane to hook the car door and swing it shut.
Marcus shook his head. Stubbornness and pride. “How was the trip?”
He propped open the garage door with his foot, waiting for her to come limping back.
“Meh. It was grocery shopping.”
“Did you get everything you needed?”
“I guess we’ll find out at dinner time. Are you ready for lunch?”
“I could eat.”
“I’ll make some sandwiches.”
“Peanut butter!” Buddy crowed from the formal living room, which was where they had relocated to after having dropped their grocery bags on the floor.
“Make mine grilled cheese,” Daniel called.