by Maren Smith
Katy Run Away
by
Maren Smith
A Blushing Books Edition
ISBN: 978-1-62750-1187
Katy Run Away
Maren Smith
A Red Hot Romance Spanking Novel
Originally published through Newsite Web Services
All rights reserved.
Copyright 2006 © by Maren Smith
This book may not be reproduced in
whole or part, by mimeograph or any other
means, without permission of the author.
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This book is a work of fiction.
Any resemblance to actual persons, places,
and events are purely coincidental.
Cover design by Melody Simmons
Other books by Maren Smith
Angel of Hawkhaven
B-Flick
Bippity-Boppity-Boo
Black Sheep
Daughter of the Strong
The Diva
Enemies
The Great Prank
Jinxie’s Orchids
Kindred Spirits
Life After Rachel
The Locket
The Miner’s Wife
Mistress
Morogh the Demon
Mountain Man
My Lady Robin Hood
The Next Ex
Saga: Constance’s Story
Spanking Tails I thru X
The Suffragettes
Treasure
Varden’s Lady
Coming Soon!
Masters of the Castle Series:
Holding Hannah
Kaylee’s Keeper
Table of Contents:
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Epilogue
Kaylee's Keeper
CHAPTER ONE
For years, Katy had dreamed of the night when she finally ran away. She knew exactly how it was supposed to go. She’d planned it flawlessly, right on down to the clothes she’d wear and the horse she’d take. Unfortunately, none of this was happening as she’d imagined. For one thing, it wasn’t night at all. It was mid-afternoon. Every hand on the ranch was hard at work mending fences, mucking stalls, baling hay, and branding the early spring calves. Late in from the range, nine men sat at a long table in the yard, wolfing down their food. Downstairs, Cook and Nana Sue were chatting in the kitchen, cleaning up the remnants of the last meal and preparing to start on the next. Katy knew her mother was with them. She could hear the angry clatter of dish on dish all the way upstairs. And from across the yard, here came Clifton Sullivan, the man her mother had married only four short years ago. He had a fresh cut willow switch in one hand and already he was rolling up his sleeve.
Katy stood at her bedroom window, watching him come, bubbling with a frustration she couldn’t put words or voice to, and already halfway to tears. She was eighteen, but even she had to admit she deserved the whipping that was coming. She just couldn’t make herself stop. Not where Clifton was concerned and, apparently, not where her mother was concerned either. How had one silly disagreement turned so fast into screaming, slamming doors, and an explosive culmination in the kind of foul-mouthed name-calling that Katy had only ever heard the ranch hands utter, and then only when no one thought she was around to hear it!
Her mother had not deserved that. In truth, Katy had stood in shock, hardly believing she’d said it. At least until her mother fled the house in tears and then, sending herself to her room, Katy simply went upstairs to await the inevitable outcome. And here it came: Clifton—the object of that argument (and every distance-driving fight that had preceded it since she was fourteen)—bearing yet another switch. No, she knew she deserved what he was bringing, but as she watched her stepfather cross the yard, she also knew she wasn’t going to submit to it. Not to Clifton; not one more time.
Yes, she was sorry for what she’d said. No amount of whipping could make her feel worse, though she knew her stepfather was setting himself to try. She could see it on his face. The weariness of all the fighting. The anger rising in defense of her mother—something that should have made her happy to see—and yet she wasn’t, and she didn’t even know why. All she knew was that she couldn’t bear to live not one more day in the same house with him, a man who had done everything he could to get along with her. A man who obviously loved her mother and who ruled her father’s ranch with a firm but fair hand. A man who was about to come charging up the back steps to her bedroom and lay that switch into her until he’d worn both it and her to a nub.
If Katy let him, but she couldn’t.
She wouldn’t.
Her feet began to move, and before Katy had realized she’d taken a single step, she had her valise out from under her bed and she was stuffing it with a frantic hodge-podge of mismatched dresses, stockings, bloomers and shawls. By the time Clifton’s heavy footsteps came tromping across the back porch, she had her valise in her hand and her bedroom windowsill thrown all the way up. Her stepfather was coming through the kitchen when she crawled out onto the porch roof and, something she hadn’t done since she was a little girl in braids, she hiked her skirts all the way up to her knees—never mind the farm hands—and shimmied right on down the corner post. While her stepfather was climbing the stairs to her room, she was hightailing it all the way down to the barn.
Nine fresh horses were saddled and waiting for the hands just now finishing their meal. Katy didn’t think twice, she just took one. By the time her stepfather realized she was gone, she was riding, the wind whipping through her long, golden hair, hell bent for freedom.
Clifton yelled after her, but Katy had no intention of stopping.
Knowing she would be expected to flee to Stillwater where she had friends and maybe even sympathy waiting for her, Katy rode all through the day and went to Culver instead. She stabled the horse at the livery with pay and instructions that it should be returned to the ranch. At the bank, she withdrew a little money from her family’s account. Not a lot; she wasn’t a thief. Just enough to buy passage far away from here. She was thinking stagecoach, but the train was in town and just gearing up to pull out of the station again. It took nearly every penny she had, but she bought a one-way ticket from Culver, Wyoming, all the way to Dustwallow, Utah, where rails on to California were still being hammered down.
Valise firmly in hand, Katy set out for a new life and she never once looked back.
* * * * *
Dustwallow was a boomtown, flush with silver and miners and all the varied amenities that just naturally sprang up around large congregations of hard-working men and the companies that employed them. There were six saloons, eight bawdy houses, two churches, one schoolhouse (albeit still being built) and one dancehall that even at ten on a Thursday morning was spitting out the sort of raucous piano music that young women of Katy’s secluded upbringing didn’t often come in contact with. From across the muddy street, it kind of made her ears hurt, truth be told. And so, across the street became about as close as Katy decided she need come to such an establishment.
She took a room at a boarding house, sharing a cramped attic bedroom and its only bed with a sweet old woman, who wore the wrinkles of no less than sixty hard-won years and who came to bed that first night smelling of liniment and too much cooking sherry. She also snored, but neither beggars nor runaways could afford to be selective, so she closed her eyes and did her best to sleep. The next morning, Katy paid all but her last three pennies for a simple biscuit breakfast in the diner n
ext door. Then she got down to business.
Neither the mercantile nor the market were hiring women. Two well-to-do ladies had advertised for a maid, but unable to provide references, Katy was not interviewed long by either household. She glanced at a saloon once, but only once, and then she got a job.
Father Yiang Hui spoke broken English, but when he smiled, laugh lines crinkled the corners of his eyes. He and Mother Yiang Yunhe ran their laundry service out of a building on the very edge of town, not far from the train station where those miners unlucky enough to outnumber available beds in the bunkhouses pitched their tents. It was a muddy, smelly, miserable place to be, but there was no shortage of dirty laundry or men willing to pay to have someone else do it for them.
The Yiangs hired Katy the moment she asked for work, and then they took her to hell. There was simply no other word Katy could think of to describe the misery of that back laundry room. With two cauldrons of bubbling clothes going at all times, even with doors and windows thrown wide open, it had to be at least ten degrees hotter in the building than the baking weather outside. Katy broke a sweat just walking into the room. Then she broke her back and every one of her fingernails, hunched over the washboard next to Mother Yiang, scrubbing shirt after shirt, after pants, after underjohn all day long. She washed, she rinsed, she nearly caught her skirt on fire stirring clothes in the cauldron, and she washed some more. When the sun went down, Father Yiang lit the lamps and they kept right on working. She lost track of how many loads she ran through the wringer and hung up on the crisscrossing lines outside.
By ten o’clock that night, when the last shirt was hung and the cauldron fires extinguished, Katy could barely lift her arms and she was so tired, she was almost on the verge of tears. She walked back to the boarding house, her daily wage—a hard-earned thirty-five cents—in her pocket, so stiff and sore that it hurt just to crawl into bed. She cried a little, but the minute her head sank into the pillow, she was asleep, and the following morning at six o’clock, she got up and went back to work. After a full day spent hunched over cooking cauldrons, alternately stirring laundry and scrubbing her knuckles raw against the washboard, she could barely stand up straight.
On the third day, her fingers cracked and bled, and Katy felt broken. When Father Yiang called a stop for lunch, Katy sat gratefully in the shade behind the building, her back leaned up against the wall not far from the open rear doors, where she could keep a weary eye on the lines of flapping laundry and the gathering clouds that suggested it might rain.
From here, she could see a chow tent set up in the midst of the miner’s impromptu town addition. She could smell the food cooking, too, and it smelled wonderful. Her stomach growled, but she had left all the money earned yesterday carefully tucked into her luggage. She was going to need every penny at the end of the week when it came time to renew her room at the boarding house. And she was tired, so bone wearily exhausted that even what few steps it would take to carry her the two-buildings’ distance from here to there was more than she wanted to try. Already she didn’t know how she was going to get through the rest of today.
Blinking back tears, she sat where she was, content to rest and to watch as people moved through the slop line and found places to sit at one of three long wooden tables. The food must have been good. It wasn’t just miners finding seats at those tables. Several well-dressed town folks were gathered in loose groups among them, and there was someone else, a flamboyantly dressed young lady sitting by herself at the end of a secluded table. Her lace and blue satin dress barely covered her knees. Her black-net stocking-clad legs were crossed, one foot lightly kicking out of shade into the sunlight. Her arms were scandalously bare, all the way up to her shoulders, and her cleavage was shockingly exposed, the pale swells trimmed in black lace. Her dark hair was done up in fat curls, pinned back at her neck and decorated with two fat, fluffy feathers, and Katy had never in her life seen anything like her before.
She was also staring across the yard and straight at Katy. When she saw that Katy had noticed, she smiled and beckoned with two fingers.
Tired as Katy was, her stomach rumbled again. Her mouth watered. Every part of her body cried out as Katy climbed to her feet and limped toward the chow tent. It felt at least ten degrees cooler when she passed under the flapping edge of off-white canvas and into the shade beneath.
“Hey, baby girl,” the scandalous woman said, her voice a little high and squeaky, when Katy approached her table. “You look so tired. Hungry, too. Set, set! Set yourself on down. ‘Les, of course, you think I’ve got something catchy and wrong.”
Though her smile didn’t diminish, something turned hard and daring in the young woman’s dark eyes. Katy didn’t sit; it felt more like a collapse. Some of that hardness melting from her features, the dark-haired woman pushed her half-empty bowl of stew across the table. Katy didn’t argue. Her stomach rumbling loud enough to broaden the other woman’s smile, she pulled the bowl toward her and dug in. She knew she was hungry, she just didn’t know how much until that first savory mouthful of potato and barley and big chunks of stewed beef crossed her tongue. She stuffed her mouth—one, two, three bites—and when nothing more would fit, she chewed, hiding behind a trembling hand because her lips couldn’t quite close until she partially swallowed.
Chin propped against one fist, the woman smiled again. “Yeah, I remember being like that, too. The Yiangs is nice people. Good people. But all that warshin’ is hard, hard work. And it don’t pay for piss, much less bed and board. You roomin’ with them?”
Having just stuffed another spoonful in her mouth, Katy shot her a guilty look across the table. She was eating like a pig. She tried to slow down. She tried to sit properly upright, despite her aching back, and swallowed repeatedly until her mouth was empty enough to talk. “I’m renting at Miss Bailey’s.”
“Miss Bailey’s?” Eyebrows arching, the young woman snorted. “Baby girl, you can’t make your weekly working laundry. The Yiangs is nice, but they will dock you for scorching a shirt or being late. First time that happens, you can kiss Miss Bailey’s goodbye. And how you going to eat? You ain’t making, what? Forty cents?”
Her spoon scraping the bottom of the now empty bowl, Katy couldn’t meet her eyes. “Thirty-five.” She could cheerfully have finished off two, even three more bowls, despite feeling what she’d already eaten sitting in the pit of her stomach like an indigestible rock.
“Baby girl, ain’t you got no folks you can ask for help?”
“No.” Katy lifted her chin, stubbornly refusing to meet her eyes or to consider going home again. She didn’t think she could stomach what was waiting for her there any more now than she had the day she’d left. What had that been, only a week ago? Right now, it felt like forever. She felt a stab of guilt, wondering if her mother was worried about her.
“Well.” The woman tsked. “You ain’t gonna make it working other folks’ dirty warshin’. You need a better paying job.”
Katy shook her head, the thin set of her shoulders slumping as she admitted. “It’s the only thing I could find.”
The other woman blossomed into another grin. “You ain’t looking right! The Abilene’s always looking for dancers, and with all that pretty blonde hair and blue eyes, baby girl, there ain’t no way Big Benny’d say no to you.”
Katy recoiled. Her gaze dropped to the empty soup bowl on the table in between them, and she was instantly ashamed of that knee-jerk reaction. “I…I can’t. I’m…not like…that.”
“That?” The other woman arched an eyebrow, but didn’t lose her smile. “Honey, Abilene’s ain’t no whorehouse. We cater to the fellas, but we don’t sleep with them. We just dance for ‘em and with ‘em, give those hard-working boys something pretty to look at and soft to hold when they come rolling inta town with their pockets all full and jangly. Maybe it ain’t proper, but it ain’t spreading our legs either. And I’ll tell you something else, baby girl. It ain’t thirty-five cents a day.” Folding h
er lace-gloved hands over the table, she leaned in close to Katy. “I made sixteen dollars last night alone.”
Katy’s jaw dropped.
“Yes, ma’am. Sixteen dollars and I ain’t even whoring.” The young woman smirked, her dark eyes shining. “I got me an account down at the bank. Nine dimes out of ten, I put it straight to savings. A girl’s got to be smart about these things. I’m pretty nuff now, but looks don’t last forever. I figure, six more years of this and then I’mma retire, get me some fancy dresses, move someplace nobody’s ever heard of, find me a nice man what’s half billy goat in bed and raise us up a passel of kids on a real live ranch with mustang ponies and a white picket fence. Yes sir, that right there’s my ten-year plan and it suits me right on down to the ground. But what about you? Ten years from now, what do you want to have? A place of your own? A family? A man what knows there’s more to you than a slap and tickle ‘twixt the bedsheets?”
Katy stared at her, unable to think about anything but her bedroom back home, Nana and Cook laughing in the kitchen, the smell of hotcakes rising up through the floorboards and the low of cattle calling in the distance.
“You tell me, baby girl,” the woman across from her smiled again, a little sad and a little knowing. “How you gonna get any of that scrubbing other people’s muckups for thirty-five cents a day?” She shook her head, groaning a little as she reached for Katy’s hands. “Look at your poor fingers. How long before you think all the rest of you is gonna look just that red and raw and broken?”
The two women looked at one another; one lost and one commiserating.
“A ten-year plan; that’s the ticket to a better life.” Knocking twice on the tabletop, the satin-dressed woman stood up. “Think about it,” she said, and then she walked away.
