by April Hill
Jed gave a bitter chuckle. “I figure maybe Sitting Bull might make a pretty good neighbor, if the government would stop robbing him and his people blind. Besides, I’ve been shooting at people I don’t know for four years, and I’m tired of it.”
Hannah stopped for a moment, to massage an especially sore spot on her aching bottom. “You may feel differently when all those savages start stealing your stupid cows and eating them.”
“There’s a lot of beef out there, and I haven’t paid the Sioux any rent, so I figure they’re entitled to a few steaks at my expense. Now, what about you?”
“What about me?” she asked irritably.
“I was expecting you to be Mrs. Edward Turner by now.”
She hesitated. “Edward is…well, the truth is, Edward didn’t come home, after Shiloh.”
Canfield shook his head sadly. “I’m sorry, Hannah. I didn’t know.”
She shot him an annoyed look. “Oh for pity’s sake,” she snapped. “The fool wasn’t killed. He simply fell prey to some simpering little would-be Southern belle with no brain and far too much bosom. Named Lula Mae, no doubt, or something on that order.”
Jed grinned. “I see.”
“No, you don’t. You don’t see, at all! All men are idiots. Edward and I would have had extremely attractive children. Everyone said so.”
“Sort of like getting the right bull and heifer together,” he observed with a chuckle. “Without all the moonlight and roses, of course.”
“You’re an idiot!”
“So you always told me. I suppose this means you’re still looking for the right bull, since the one you had jumped the fence and made for the open range.”
“You’re not only an idiot,” she said smugly. “You’re a vulgar, insensitive clod.”
“Right. So, if I’m such a clod, why did you go to all this trouble to arrange all this, and to track me down?”
“I was simply curious,” she said coolly, “about what your intentions were, with the war over.”
“In a word, Wyoming.”
“You could stay here in Washington,” she said softly. “I might even find it in my heart to forgive you—after a year or so.”
He sighed. “Sorry, Hannah, but I can’t do that. It might work for a while, but then…you know, cows aren’t really so bad, once you get to know them.”
“They smell.”
“Not as bad as politics. And since you’re determined to go into politics, you could always start stirring a political pot or two up there. Wyoming’s going to be a state before long, and the talk is that it’s hoping to be the first state in the union to give women the vote. And by the time that happens, we could be turning out some new voters of our own. Besides, this new holiday will need someone to get it rolling up there.”
“And why would I want to marry a man who thinks it’s perfectly all right to spank his wife?”
“You used to know the answer to that. I love you, Hannah. I always have, and I still do. And, you’ve got my word that you’ll only get spanked when I can’t think of any other way to settle an argument.”
“So, perhaps once a week?” she suggested caustically.
“I’m not all that hard to get along with, and even you’re bound to mellow, with time. Besides that, I’m a good rancher, a fair hand around the house, and I’ve been told—here and there—that I’m a little above average in a couple of other ways that ladies appreciate.”
“And you’re modest, too,” she said sweetly.
He shrugged his shoulders. “I figured this might be a good time to blow my own horn. I’ll be leaving in less than a week.”
“Is that an ultimatum?” she asked.
“Nope, it’s just that my commission’s about to run out, and military wives and horses travel for free. No sense wasting money. You know you want to come with me, and so do I.”
“Is that really the best proposal you can manage?”
He pointed to a copse of cottonwoods a few yards ahead on the riverbank. “It’ll be dark soon, and the Potomac looks beautiful in the moonlight. I can try again, if you’d like.”
“Can I maybe slip out of this corset, and these damned pantalettes?” she asked. “They’re beginning to itch, in this heat, and after what…well, you know.”
He leaned down and kissed her. “That suits me just fine,” he said. “You may as well start doing without that kind of thing. A corset’s a plain nuisance on a ranch.”
She laughed. “Is that all?”
He grinned, and patted her backside fondly. “Nope. Those pantalettes you’re got on will need to go. Last time I looked around the ranch, I didn’t have a maid or a laundress. Besides, all those pink ribbons and lace won’t last long being scrubbed clean with lye soap, and on a washboard. I figure you’ll want to pack things like that away, and bring ‘em out again when you run for governor.”
THE END
June—Karyn in: Bailing out the Bride
Any couple knows that after many years of marriage, it’s sometimes difficult to keep the romantic memories fresh and alive—or even accurate.
My husband Mike is a good example. Mike proposed to me on a beautiful moonlit night. We were seated on a lovely little bench in a secluded, terribly romantic wooded glen in Central Park. That’s my version. Being both a man and a hard-bitten officer of the law, Mike is less given to nostalgia, and seems to remember it differently.
“Sure, I remember,” he said with a grin. “That was right after I finally blew my stack and blistered your butt for the first time. The place was crawling with snoring drunks and hookers, but the full moon sure as hell fits the picture.”
And whereas I recall our first meeting as adorably cute, and our first conversation witty and charming, Mike’s memory of that part of our first encounter is also less than romantic. “I should have hauled you out of the damned car and spanked you right then and there,” he said. “It would have saved the city the expense of issuing a warrant for your arrest.”
Mike was, and is a cop. One of New York’s finest, and at our first meeting, he was serving in his official capacity, diligently attempting to make the city a safer place to live. I, on the other hand, was driving aimlessly around Central Park in the rain, looking for the entrance to the zoo. That’s when I noticed a panel of those familiar red and blue lights flashing in my rear-view mirror.
I’d lived in New York for around two years, and my relationship with the NYPD was already strained. Most of our disagreements had been caused by my refusal to blindly accept the city’s bizarre traffic regulations. I had been driving in the Big Apple for less than five minutes when I discovered that every street I needed to turn onto had been designated by some officious moron as one-way. Confronted at every intersection by a Byzantine cluster of bewildering and contradictory signs, locals appear to survive this chaos by committing to memory a complete list of which street goes which way at what time of what day. At twenty-nine years old, I still hadn’t memorized my multiplication tables, so in self-defense, I quickly adopted my own strategy. Unless there was a police vehicle directly behind me, I simply ignored those annoying little black and white arrow signs.
Not a foolproof strategy, as it turned out, and before long I had accumulated a smallish collection of traffic citations and a stupefying number of parking tickets. There were so many tickets of one kind or another in my glove compartment that I had taped it closed. Why pay the silly tickets, I reasoned, when I might be squashed into oblivion by an oncoming garbage truck at any moment—while traveling down a one-way street?
But on this particular evening in Central Park, there were no one-way signs, and I certainly wasn’t speeding (another unfortunate tendency of mine). So, I found it extremely irritating when I was waved to the side of the road for no apparent reason. I attempted to point this out to the tall police officer who stepped from his vehicle and approached my car.
“Why are you stopping me?” I demanded, leaning my head out the window. “I didn’t do anything, for God�
��s sake!”
As he came closer, I got a better look at the officer, and had I been one of those shallow women who allow themselves to get all hot and bothered by tall, incredibly handsome men with divinely expressive slate-gray eyes and well-defined muscles rippling under crisply pressed blue uniforms, I might even have found him attractive.
“Good evening, ma’am.” He touched the brim of his hat with one respectful finger. “The reason I pulled you over was because you don’t have your headlights on.”
I’ll never know why I got hostile so quickly. Maybe it was because yet another traffic ticket was dead last on the list of things I needed. Maybe I was just tired. In any case, I geared up to do battle in record time.
“Well, why should I have my lights on when it isn’t dark yet?” I asked in all innocence.
The officer glanced quizzically up at the sky, then back at me. “Excuse me, ma’am, but with this rain and cloud cover, it’s been dark for close to an hour. I’m surprised you haven’t run into something, the way you were weaving all over the road. Have you had anything to drink tonight?”
“I wasn’t weaving,” I snapped. “I was merely driving slowly, looking for the entrance to the zoo, and I resent your implication. I rarely drink, and I never get drunk.”
He smiled. “I’m sorry, but we have to do that, sometimes—ask questions that people resent, I mean. The problem is, the zoo closed at five thirty, and we’ve had a lot of muggings in this area, lately. Cars without headlights tend to look suspicious.”
I sighed. “Well, then, I’m sorry. I thought I’d read somewhere that the zoo stayed open until nine in the summer. Am I free to go, now?” I inquired sweetly, batting my eyelashes charmingly.
But the handsome officer wasn’t buying my act. “Not quite.” He pulled a summons pad from his hip pocket. “I noticed when I walked up that your inspection sticker has expired. I’m afraid I’m going to have to cite you for that, and for driving without your lights on. May I see your license and registration, please?”
Okay, try a real quick guess. Whose registration had expired?
“I’m sorry about the registration,” I offered lamely. “I simply forgot. But that headlight business is ridiculous.” I pointed to a glimmer of light visible between the trees, which even I knew was a street lamp. “Besides, it isn’t completely dark, yet.”
He kept writing. “Yes, ma’am, so you keep telling me. Why don’t I just note the time of day down here on the summons, and let a judge make the decision about how dark it is. Decisions like that are what they get paid for, and they make a whole lot more money than I do.”
“Ha!” I cried. “Like a judge is likely to believe me over you! Just tell me, am I under arrest or not? “
“No, ma’am,” he said wearily. “It’s only a ticket. The NYPD tries not to jail people just because they don’t have sense enough not to drive around in the dark. Not unless they run over one of us while they’re doing it, anyway.” At this point, he handed the summons through the window. “If you’ll just sign this, you can be on your way.”
I shook my head and refused to touch the ticket. “What if I don’t take this stupid thing? Or sign for it?”
He sighed again. “Then I get annoyed, and the county ends up wasting forty one cents of the taxpayers’ money to send it to you by mail. But you’re still required to show up in court on the date written there.”
“The fact remains that I didn’t do anything illegal,” I replied huffily, “and I’m not going to sign a document that says I did.”
“It doesn’t say that.” I was beginning to detect a certain strained quality in the handsome officer’s voice. “All it says is that you’ve read the summons and promise to show up in court on the designated date and time. Nothing more.”
“But, why should I have to show up in court at all when I didn’t do anything illegal?” I persisted. (Yes, you’re right, I am probably insane. I have absolutely no idea why I was behaving like this. This man probably held my automotive future in his hands, and I was doing my level best to piss him off.)
The officer was staring at me, now, his forbearance apparently at an end. “Is there something wrong with you, lady?”
“Meaning what?” I demanded haughtily.
“Meaning you sound like you’re missing about half your…” He stopped in mid-sentence. “Look, ma’am, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…maybe I should explain again how this works.”
I waved my hand dismissively. “Thank you very much, but I don’t need another long-winded, officious explanation.”
After scribbling something on the bottom of the ticket, he stuffed the pad into his hip pocket and thrust one of the copies back through the window. “All right then, I’ve noted on the summons that you refused to sign it. The court date is listed on the bottom. Have a nice evening.”
“I don’t need to be patronized, either,” I snapped.
And that’s when I heard the man I have now been happily married to for fifteen years mutter something under his breath. Something that sounded a lot like, “Why do I always get the damned nutcases?” When he started back to his vehicle, he was still muttering—audible, now. But just barely. “What you need, lady, is five minutes over someone’s knee with a wooden hairbrush.”
I had already started the car, preparing to back out onto the road, when it occurred to me that if I tried really, really hard, I could make things much worse. “It’s very upsetting to be wrongly accused,” I said icily. “A person could get so upset that they…well, who knows? Maybe even back up and accidentally run over a policeman’s foot, or something.”
The officer turned around, one eyebrow quirked. “That person could find him or herself in a lot of very hot water for something like that.”
“Oh, I see,” I said smugly. “So now, a perfectly innocent mistake— like barely touching some officious bastard’s little toe—will get the person a life sentence?”
“No, ma’am, but the officious bastard might just decide to give the person a spanking she’d remember for a very long time.”
Even in the darkness, I could feel myself getting red in the face. (Okay, it was dark, but I wasn’t about to admit it to this guy.) “Oh, my goodness gracious!” I cried, trying to mask my embarrassment with my usual idiocy. “Surely, you can’t be serious, officer! Wouldn’t the courts call a thing like that police brutality?”
“My guess is they’d call it was a reasonable use of force, lady. But why risk it? Why not just take the damned ticket and go about your business? Maybe find yourself another underpaid civil servant to pick on.”
I was still seething as I drove away. The man was obviously an obnoxious jerk and a bully. And what was with all those oh-so-clever little quips about spanking? I had already decided that the handsome officer was a sicko pervert who beat his wife, kicked his dog, and rousted homeless little old bag-ladies from their pitiful cardboard boxes, when I found myself trying to remember if he’d been wearing a wedding ring. And oddly, I was just a tiny bit curious about what being spanked would feel like. Dumb, huh?
An hour after I got back to my apartment, the phone rang. Guess who?
“How did you get my number?” I demanded.
“We officious bastards have our sources. Besides, you’re in the book. Karyn with a ‘Y’ Foster. Not the best idea for a single woman, though, using your name instead of your first initial.”
I won’t bore you with my nauseatingly clever chit-chat, but after pretending that I despised him for close to an hour, I finally agreed to meet Officer Michael David O’Hanlon the following afternoon, for lunch—at the café at the Central Park Zoo. And my life changed forever.
* * *
Our first date didn’t go quite as smoothly as I had hoped. Our conversation over lunch was pleasant enough, but a bit awkward, and the zoo was great fun. We stayed until closing, then walked around the area until we found a wooden bench tucked away in a small grove of trees not far from Mike’s parked patrol car. Not the sort of spot I’
d normally tarry after dark, but being in the company of a tall, fully-armed police officer provides a surprising degree of comfort. Anyway, we sat and talked for a while, and finally, Mike kissed me. It was quite a lot of kisses later that I, of the famously poor judgment, chose to bring up and rehash the events surrounding our first meeting. And at that point, the date began to go downhill fast.
“Oh, come off it,” I exclaimed, annoyed when Mike wouldn’t concede he’d been wrong to ticket me. “Everyone knows that all you guys have quotas. You prowl around the city just hoping to nail some poor slob for breaking an idiotic law that nobody gives a rat’s ass about, anyway. The city makes a few bucks, you fill your quota and keep your fabulous job benefits, and the innocent sucker pays up because he can’t afford to go to court and fight the ticket. Am I right, or not?”
When I looked at Mike, he had his head cocked at an angle, like he was studying me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I’m trying to figure out if you really believe what you just said, or whether you’re just trying really hard to be ignorant and pig-headed.”
Which is when I punched him in the shoulder. Not hard, but probably hard enough to hurt a little. More like a symbolic feminist gesture, really, but it turned out to be a very bad move. Mike shook his head, took my arm very firmly, and turned me around to face him.
“I knew I should have done this last night,” he said grimly. A second later, I found myself sprawled ignominiously across Mike’s knee, with Mike’s strong left arm around my waist and one of Mike’s long legs trapping both of mine.
It wasn’t until he flipped my skirt up that it hit me that he wasn’t joking around. The realization that he actually intended to spank me came a split second too late to allow for a successful getaway. I was pinned down, completely at his mercy, and absolutely nothing about his tone or his firm grip around my waist suggested that Mike was in a merciful frame of mind. A gorgeous full moon was just beginning to rise when I felt my panties being yanked down to my knees—which I took as yet another sign that our first date wasn’t going well.
