by Maren Smith
Katy sat at that table for a long time, until she heard Father Yiang angrily calling her back to work. When she tried to stand up, her body hurt almost worse than when she’d first sat down. And because she was late, at the end of her third day, instead of thirty-five cents, the Yiangs only paid her twenty. Neither one of them spoke to her, not even to say goodnight. It would be days later before Katy thought to wonder if that were because they’d already known she wouldn’t be back.
She spent her last night at Miss Bailey’s sharing a bed with that snoring, old woman, and the following morning she packed up her few meager clothes and walked down the street to Abilene’s. She didn’t look back that time, either.
* * * * *
Four months later…
Cal Beckton rode into Dustwallow driving fifty-seven head of cattle ahead of him. Between himself and the four hands he’d brought with him, they got the small herd corralled at the stockyard for railway transportation, and then he breathed a sigh of relief. It was his first shipment since taking over his father’s ranch, and though he knew he had big shoes to fill, he was a man in his prime and very well groomed to take over the job. He’d spent his life following in his father’s shadow. He’d grown up in the saddle and on the range. There wasn’t anything a working ranch could throw at him—from roping and riding to branding and breeding or mending and building—that Cal couldn’t handle. He’d done just about all of it and he loved it. It wasn’t just a lifestyle; for Cal, it was a passion and he had great ambition for where he wanted his father’s ranch—his ranch now—to go. The Beckton name wasn’t much now, but someday that was going to change. He would see to that.
Cal swung down out of the saddle and stretched, bending into a couple of squats to work the stiffness out. He rubbed his back. Discretely, he even rubbed his butt, and then he headed into the station office to log his arrival and wire the buyer that his cattle were on the way. It would take two days for the herd to reach its destination by rail and then payment would be wired back to him. Until that time, Cal was determined to enjoy himself in town.
In its infancy of becoming a real civilization, half of all Dustwallow was still in tents, and everywhere he looked there was a saloon. Most of the men who called this place home were a rough and hardy bunch—cowboys, miners and mountain men, merchants, business men and a handful of well-to-do sophisticates who, collectively, probably owned damned near everything he was looking at. He saw virtually no women, something that wasn’t uncommon in towns such as this, though he could hear the telltale laughter of the fairer sex flowing down the street on waves of bawdy music. Well, there’d be plenty of time to get to know some of those ladies later on. Right now, it was business before pleasure.
He stopped by the post to pick up his mail, a letter from his aunt in Philadelphia. Judging by the postmark, it had been sitting there for about three months. At the mercantile, he provided the clerk with a long list of supplies for his hands to escort home again and finally placed a long-distance order for that fancy new stove—four burners and two small oven compartments for baking—for the remodeled kitchen he was building onto his father’s house. It was shoeing time again. He arranged with the blacksmith on a day to come out to the ranch and then, business settled, he turned his mind to pleasure. For the extravagance of a nickel, he bought a bath and a shave. He rarely found the time to make it into town these days, so he wasn’t about to waste this golden opportunity.
Freshly bathed, shaved, and with as much road dust as possible beaten out of his clothes, he shined his spurs, hitched his gun belt and headed down the street to check out the saloons. A good game of Faro, a few shots of whiskey, and maybe a pretty girl on his lap and in his bed—oh yeah, he was definitely going to make the most out of the next two nights.
He let the music and laughter pull him down off the wooden walk, across the muddy street and into a brightly lit, laughingly loud, bawdy little dancehall called The Abilene. There was no door. He simply walked inside and let the cigar smoke and scent of rot gut whiskey and sweat envelope him. He could smell perfume, too, but he didn’t need to rely on his nose to find the ladies. They were everywhere, laughing, chatting, serving drinks, sitting on laps, and a line of five were dancing a can-can on a half-moon stage just beyond the bar. Cal stood for a moment in the doorway, admiring five pairs of bloomers tied at the knees with five different colors of ribbon, five satin skirts and frilly underskirts all pulled up to five grinning ladies’ chins.
They were rouged up, their laughing faces painted to really accentuate the beauty on that rainbow array of blondes, brunettes and one carrot-topped red-head, all kicking their heels up high before letting out mirror whoops and snapping around to bare their bloomer-clad bottoms for the enjoyment of the room. And Cal was not immune. Those were some lovely little ladies up there. The redhead was cherubically plump, and when they snapped back around to resume the can-can, her cheeks were as rosy as the nipples peeking above her tight bodice. The two brunettes were lean and lithesome, small breasted, small waisted, and so close in appearance that they could have been sisters if not twins. And the blondes…oh, he had a special place in his palate preference for blondes. One was Viking tall and the other, slender and small, voluptuous in all the right places, with a mountain of cascading curls bouncing on her shoulders and spilling down her back, and…
Recognition suddenly struck. Cal knew that short, little blonde. He knew her face. Where had he seen her? Not out at his ranch, surely, and this was the first time he’d ever set foot in the Abilene. Although not a newcomer to the pleasures of a bawdy house (or dancehall, for that matter), he was relatively sure she wasn’t one of the girls he’d frequented in the past. Admittedly, when he came to town for that, it wasn’t their faces he was most interested in seeing, but she just didn’t look familiar in that way. Rather, she looked…
Recognition hit him again, hard enough this time to turn him cold and then madder-than-a-boiled-owl hot all over. That little blonde gal kicking up her heels on that stage, snapping back around and showing a room full of hooting cowboys and miners the plump alluring heart of her bloomer-clad bottom wore the face of a man he had once considered a second father. Sam Furlow, the man who had once employed both Cal and his father on his sprawling ranch up in Wyoming. Who had not only taught Cal half of everything he knew of ranching, but who had taught him how to swim and fish, who had taken him hunting, who had brought in a doctor from Idaho when his father had taken so sick everyone thought for sure he would die, and who had sold Cal and his father their first hundred head of cattle and at a price so low they might just as well have been free.
That was little Katy Furlow up there on that stage. Tagalong Katy. Little Brat Katy. Katy who had followed him around the ranch while he’d worked, getting in the way, asking little girl questions, being obnoxious at times but fun at others. Katy, the little sister he’d never had, the absolute light of her Sam’s eyes and the only person he could not stop thinking about on that day when he’d learned that old Sam had died. That had been the first and the last time since coming to manhood that Cal had cried.
Little Katy Furlow.
Her daddy had to be rolling over in his grave with shame.
Cal had absolutely no memory of crossing the room. The next thing he knew, five shocked young women had stopped dancing and he was hopping up onto the stage. He didn’t care about four of them. The full brunt of his incredulous fury was focused solely on the shorter blonde. “You rotten little brat!”
Katy’s blue eyes were huge and she stumbled backwards, but not fast enough to evade his grabbing hands. She yelped when he jerked her around, catching her shoulders in both hands and giving her a single hard shake. Shrieks erupted from the other ladies; objecting shouts rippled through the audience.
“Benny!” One of the brunettes tried to grab his arm. “Hey! You let my baby girl go!”
Cal shook her off. From the corner of his eye, he thought he saw the tall and massively formed bartender comin
g out from behind the bar, cocking and loading a long-barreled rifle. He was slightly less aware of someone else calling out for someone to fetch the sheriff. At the moment, Cal was much too angry to pay any attention to either threat. His gaze remained locked solely on Katy’s startled face and the sudden light of recognition that sparked in her sky blue eyes just before her cheeks turned a brilliant shade of red.
Damn straight, she ought to be ashamed. More than that, she ought to be sorry. And if he had anything to say about it, by golly, she was about to be very, very sorry indeed!
Cal ducked and Katy let out a shriek when he suddenly tossed her over his shoulder and hefted her kicking feet off the ground. She began to struggle in earnest now, her small fists thumping against his back right up until the flat of his hand caught the curve of her rump. Satin and ruffled petticoats did little to mitigate the impact. Katy yelped again, her whole body going stiff as a board over his shoulder. Chuckling laughter from the audience followed Cal as he carried her off the stage.
“Put me down!” Katy cried. “Cal! Cal, stop it!” She tried to grab onto the threshold of the first small room he came to, but she let go quick enough when he smacked her bottom again, harder this time. Yelping, she grabbed her bottom, rubbing fiercely, and in she went. There was a mirror in this room, scandalous, too-short dresses like the one Katy was wearing and pots of face, lip and eye paint scattered across the narrow top of a bench-like table, along with a series of straight-backed chairs tucked up under it.
Heavy footsteps were coming up the hall behind him.
This room would have to do.
Cal closed the door, grabbed the back of one chair and jammed it up under the knob, effectively blocking it from opening. The next chair he grabbed, he pulled out into the middle of the room. Katy had roughly two seconds from the moment he dropped her onto her feet and she wasted both of them; first, by trying to run, and then again by swinging on him when he quickly caught her arm. Cal blocked the blow. He also sat and, with a single hard jerk, he spilled a very grown-up Katy facedown across his knees.
“What are you doing?!” Katy struggled to get up again, her arms flailing when he tossed the volumes of satin and ruffled skirts up over her back. Her hands shot back, grabbing and slapping at his when he jerked the ties apart and skinned her bloomers far enough down the backs of her thighs to bare the milky round curves of her bottom. He caught her wrist, tucking her interfering hand up under her stomach. He captured her kicking legs, pinning them in a vise of his own. And he closed his ears to her shouts and then her shrieks as he began to put a burn in her bottom the likes of which she’d never forget.
“Your father would be appalled!” It was the only thing Cal could think to say, and after that, he let the flat of his hand do all his talking for him.
“Baby girl! Baby girl!” Somebody—that brunette from the stage, by the sounds of it, tried to break into the room.
She beat and rattled at the door, but the chair held firm and after a few seconds of escalating panic, fed by Katy’s shrieks and cries, a deeper voice from out in the hall said, “Nobody ever died from a bare ass whupping. He ain’t hurting her. Get on back to work now. Go on.”
That rattling at the door stopped; Cal’s hand did not. He paddled Katy with single-minded devotion, stripping every bit of white right on out of her skin and turning all that curvy flesh behind her a rosy shade of humility and hurt. He spanked until her shrieks and cries became gasps and wails and then pleading sobs for him to stop—please stop—please! The flat of his hand burned and hurt, but he kept right on spanking, turning the rosy hue of her bottom to a deep shade of blazing hot burgundy and taking comfort from knowing this had to be hurting her a hell of a lot more. He’d never spanked any woman in his life the way he was spanking not-so-little Katy Furlow, and the only reason he stopped when he did was because of that booming voice out in the hall.
“Calvin Anthony Beckton, that is enough!”
Cal sat stiff and angry on that chair, his aching hand held high above its cringing, writhing target, listening to the ragged sobs of Katy crying over his knee. His arm was trembling with the furious need to continue his whole body was shaking, but that voice was right. It was enough. It was maybe even a little bit past enough. Her bottom looked raw. It looked swollen. It looked like it really hurt.
Good. Because she deserved for it to hurt.
Catching her by the scruff of her neck, Cal pulled her up off his knee. He marched her into the nearest corner, squeezing her in between a crush of dresses and a bureau with open drawers that overflowed with stockings, garters, ribbons and wadded up bundles of lacy underthings. He pushed her in so close to the walls that her nose almost touched, and in a voice that sounded so much calmer than he was currently capable of feeling, he said, “You move so much as an inch, and I’ll take off my belt. You hear me?”
Holding her bottom in both hands, Katy bounced a little, fighting to hold still and not to stamp her feet or rub or give in to another round of shoulder-wracking tears. Eventually, she nodded. “Yes.”
She gasped and sniffled, and Cal let her go. He quickly moved away, getting as much distance between them as that tiny dressing room would allow. His hand was pulsing, throbbing. He flexed his fingers, pacing a short restless distance, glaring at the back of her head with each pass until a slow, steady knock at the door finally wormed its way in past the blinding force of his anger and commanded a response. He went to the door and dislodged the chair.
The bartender stood with one hand on his hip and the other on the muzzle of the rifle he’d braced against the floor. “Cal,” he said, his conversational tone at complete odds with the stern look he wore.
“Ben,” Cal answered in kind.
“You two get what you needed talked out?”
“There’ll be time enough for that on the train back to Wyoming,” Cal replied. “Tally up what I owe you for the damages, and if she owes you anything at all, you can add that to it. Katy doesn’t work here anymore. I’m taking her back home.”
CHAPTER TWO
Katy hadn’t said two words to Cal since he’d held her down over the dresser in the Abilene and scrubbed the make-up off her face. Frankly, that was all right by him. While he had a good many things he wanted to say to her, right now, Cal wasn’t sure he could say any of it without putting her back over his knee first. So he kept his mouth shut. Even harder, he kept his hands to himself.
They stood together side by side in front of the train station, two tickets burning a hole in his jacket breast pocket. Mothers being what they were and prone to worrying under the best of circumstances, he’d already sent Katy’s mother a telegram.
Found Katy. STOP Will be arriving by train on Monday. STOP Kindly have someone waiting to meet us. END
Katy’s hard, unforgiving glare was locked on the distant horizon, much the way her arm was locked in his restraining grip. She looked mad. He didn’t much care. As soon as the line dwindled, he was going to march her up onto that train, they’d find their seats and he was going to take her home. He owed her father that much for all the good the man had done for Cal and his family. He wasn’t about to look the other way while Clifton Furlow’s only daughter kicked up her heels in a bawdy house.
“You have no right,” Katy said stiffly, not looking at him.
“I got every right,” he replied, just as stiffly, and when it finally came their turn to board, he pushed her up the steps ahead of him and propelled her down the aisle between the rows of narrow benches until he found a quiet spot. She tried to take up the aisle-side seat, but he forced her over one more, giving her no choice but to accept the one nearest to the window so that he could block her in.
She glared at the bench and then at him, no doubt thinking the same thing he was. She’d have to hike her skirts and climb all the way over his lap in order to get out, and she hadn’t a prayer without his noticing. Her lips compressed into a hard, flat, rebellious line.
“Sit,” he said.
Her mouth tightened even more, but eventually she did, lowering herself quite gingerly to perch on her part of the cushion-less bench. He thought he saw hints of a pained wince flash across her features just before she turned her face to the window. Good. As tender as his hand still felt, her bottom ought to be at least twice as sore.
Shoving her valise under the bench at their feet, he sat down beside her and let his long legs stretch out, filling up the narrow space between their bench and the one in front of them. This was a lower class car. Instead of each row of seats facing one another, everybody faced the back of the person seated in front of them. Cal didn’t mind that; he wasn’t in any mood to be sociable.
“I need to use the privy,” Katy said stiffly, just as the train blared its whistle, warning of imminent departure.
“Too bad.” He wasn’t about to let her out of his sight. Not until the train was well underway, and she had no choice but to accept that she was going home. He didn’t understand why she was being so reluctant about it. “One would almost think you prefer a life of sin and degradation.”
“Hypocrite,” she snapped. “You were there too.”
“Men are allowed.”
“And women aren’t?”
“That’s right.” He tried to make himself comfortable on what was quickly proving to be an uncomfortable bench.
“If that were true, whorehouses and dancehalls would be nothing more than messy tributes to Madame Palm and her five illegitimate daughters.”
Cal snapped his head around to stare at her. He quickly shifted to face her fully, holding up his finger and dropping his voice to a low growl. “One more comment like that and not only will I blister your fanny, but I will scrub every corner of your mouth with soap.”
Her mouth compressed into a tight, hard line. Folding her arms across her chest, she turned her dark glare from him to the window. “You’re a brute.”
