by Renee Rose
He grinned up at her, a shock of excitement running through him when their gazes met and held. She blinked her long lashes, the coffee-colored depths of her eyes warm and inviting.
“No lasting harm, right?” he teased. “I probably have more of a mark from where you bit me,” he said, twisting to pull up his shirt.
“Whoa, whoa! Leave your shirt on, mister,” she exclaimed, waving her hands as if to ward off the sight.
He chuckled. “What? Afraid you might like what you see?”
She made a scoffing sound. “In your dreams!”
He refrained from telling her just exactly how she might appear in his dreams and worked on pushing a few twigs into the stripped hole in the door before screwing the hinge back on. Looking up again, he saw her staring at his chest, as if she were imagining him with his shirt off.
She blinked and stepped back when she realized he had caught her looking. “Are you finished?” she said, obviously hoping to head off any teasing.
“Won’t know until I get it hung back up there,” he said.
“Thank you for doing this.” She plucked at her skirt.
He gave her a wink. “My pleasure, Mabelle. It is the least I can do, considering.”
“Considering what?” she asked, her hands on her hips. “You spanked me like a child?”
He laughed. “No, I would say you earned that by the time we were through. I meant for allowing us to impose on your hospitality.”
“I didn’t think I had a choice.”
“You were right,” he said, his humor fading as concern over keeping her safe yet another night rushed in.
After lunch he walked out in the rain to look over the cattle herd. The calves looked healthy, and he marveled how she had handled the calving season all on her own.
When he returned, Mabelle stood churning butter on the porch looking furious. It took him a moment to realize why: Curly slouched on the other side of her, peeing off the edge of the steps.
“Outhouse is right over there,” he remarked as he climbed the steps.
“Didn’t wanna get wet,” Curly replied, a challenge in his tone.
He did not take the bait and gave Mabelle a quelling look, hoping she would not start trouble with the mad outlaw, either.
She pursed her lips and gave them both a glare as they passed by her to go inside.
As the afternoon wore on, the Curly James gang remained holed up in the house, as if they feared going out in the rain would cause them to melt. Though he wanted to leave the house, preferring inclement weather to the company, he did not dare leave them with Mabelle unattended.
After dinner, the three men began a game of poker.
“I’ll see your ten, and I’ll raise you fifty,” Curly said, tossing a crumpled bill into the center of the table.
He had seen them play before. Curly inevitably won—often through cheating, but he always magnanimously returned much of the gained money back to his two cronies.
“Fold,” Jim said, glumly.
“Two aces,” Scotty said.
“Three jacks,” Curly said, throwing down his cards, snatching up the money and tipping back in his chair to gloat.
“You know, this game just ain’t entertaining enough without whiskey,” Curly observed. He had drunk the remaining spirits from his flask during the day and now seemed restless after being cooped up.
“I thought it was the women we were missing,” Scotty said, looking over his shoulder at where Mabelle sat stitching a torn dishcloth.
“Hey, Mabel,” Curly drawled, mispronouncing her name, “come on over here and give us a little entertainment.”
“Go to hell!” she snapped.
Sam twitched in his position standing against the wall. He should tell her to mind her mouth, to continue playing the game he had begun last night in which he served as her disciplinarian. But his protective instincts had surged, and he wanted only to defend her.
Curly stood up from his chair and made a tsking sound. “Sounds like someone needs another whuppin’,” he jeered and his two men laughed, looking eager. “Bend her over this here table and we’ll take turns teaching her a lesson,” he said to Scotty.
Sam jumped to his feet and he put himself between her and her would-be spanker. “No one’s touching her,” he warned.
Curly stood, too, his hands out, hovering above the pistols at his waist. “Oh yeah? You think you get to keep her for yourself? That ain’t what I’d call fair.”
“I said, no one’s touching her.”
Jim slowly rose to his feet, his fingertips dancing above his holsters, too.
He did not move. He waited for reason to kick in and tell him how to talk them down, knowing he could not take all three gunslingers. Unfortunately, nothing conciliatory rose to his lips.
Silence thickened in the small room.
“I’ve about had it with your interfering, Sam Pride,” Curly said.
“I’m sorry,” Mabelle spoke from behind his back, her frayed nerves evident in the timber of her voice. “I shouldn’t have said that. I apologize.”
“There,” he said. “You see? She apologized. Now sit back down and play your game.”
Curly shook his head slowly. “Nope. It’s too late for that. Little girl has a whipping coming and I’m going to give it to her.”
“Not going to happen.”
“Get the girl.”
Scotty moved to obey and Sam stepped in front of him, chest to chest. Scotty gave him a shove and at the same moment, he caught the motion of Curly drawing his gun out of the corner of his eye. He whipped out his own pistols as Scotty and Jim also drew theirs.
With no time for thought, he shot Curly and Scotty at the same instant. Curly had fired first and Jim fired a second later, but Scotty’s falling body blocked the shot and he got his own retort in before Jim fired his second pistol.
The three members of the Curly James gang all fell to the floor.
Scotty groaned and tried to slide his six-shooter out of its holster. Sam fired a second shot to his head to quiet him and removed his weapons, looking over his shoulder. The blood had drained from Mabelle’s face and her eyes were round and wide.
He divested the other dying men of their guns and emptied the bullets, slipping them into his pocket. He tossed the six pistols on the table. Walking to Scotty’s side, he grasped under the man’s armpits and dragged him toward the door.
Mabelle did not move to open it, apparently too shocked to understand his intent.
“The door,” he grunted.
She jerked to life and threw it open, then came around to pick up Scotty’s legs. They carried the dead man to the barn, where he managed to heft him into Mabelle’s wagon.
“Wh-what are we doing with him?”
“You are going to hitch up two of their horses and drive to Cheyenne with the bodies,” he told her. “They each had a bounty of $500 on their head, and bringing them in dead will get you half that, so you will earn enough money to hire some help, or buy your supplies.”
She stared at him, her jaw slack. He strode past her back into the house to carry Jim out. She caught up at the porch, picking up the dead man’s legs and helping to carry the heavy load to the barn.
She would survive out here. She did not fear hard work and she did not seem overly squeamish. Plus she had grit.
Still, the thought of leaving her made his whole chest harden.
“What about you?” she asked, breathing heavily from exertion.
“I will take the third horse because it might come in handy for trading, and I will disappear.”
“When?”
“Come first light.”
This time she followed him back in the house and assisted from the start with the job of hauling Curly.
“Where will you go?”
He gave her a hard look. “If you’ll pardon me, ma’am, I don’t think it is in my best interest to tell you that.”
She thrust her chin forward. “You think I’ll turn you in?”
He shrugged. “Five hundred dollars is a lot of money.”
The moment they had heaved the body into the wagon she turned and stalked back to the house. When he arrived, she had retired to her sleeping quarters with the lamp extinguished.
He scrubbed up the blood from her floor as best he could, then blew out the lamp and made his bed on a woven rug on the floor, like he had the night before.
He felt grim. Killing never sat well with him, even when in self-defense. And the stabbing pain through his heart had something to do with leaving Mabelle. But he could not rescue her, just like he could not rescue himself.
#
She sat huddled on the bed. Tears closed her throat, but they seemed lodged there, as unlikely to come out now as they had been any day since her sister’s death. She felt even more alone than she had that day. For three months she had struggled and managed on her own, doing what she had to do to survive.
Then four outlaws show up on her step and…and what?
She could scarcely sort through her emotions.
Shock, certainly. Seeing three men gunned down in her ranch house had forever changed her. But she did not mourn their losses. No, her anxiety lay around the plans for the following day: Sam leaving, her trip to Cheyenne.
She had no idea how to drive a wagon, nor how to get to Cheyenne.
And Sam’s mistrust had cut her to the core.
There was the real root of it: Sam.
Anger with him swelled. How could he simply waltz in here, spank her, woo her, murder his mates for threatening her, and then walk back out without so much as a tip of his hat? Well, she did not know yet whether he would tip his hat, but he did not trust her enough to even say where he planned to go.
She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, an idea taking hold. She had to think like an outlaw.
Padding softly to the living room, she blinked in the darkness and located his large frame stretched out on the floor. She listened to the sound of his breath, deepened in sleep. Kneeling beside him, she grasped one of the guns at his side and began to slowly draw it out of the holster.
In a flash, he sat up, gun drawn and pointing in her face.
She gave a little scream of surprise, falling back. “Don’t shoot!” she begged, realizing how foolish her plan had been.
He stood up, lifting her to her feet with a firm grip on her arm. “What did you think you were doing?” he demanded, his voice icy. “You want the bounty on my head, too?”
“No,” she protested, and tried to step back, but he held her fast.
“Seven fifty is not enough for you? You want it all? Fine,” he said, turning his pistol around and handing it to her by the handle. “Go ahead and take it.”
She shook her head. “No, I—”
“Take it.”
She grasped the gun to appease him, her hands shaking so badly it wobbled in her grip.
“Go on, shoot me. I won’t draw on you. Here, take both my guns,” he said, lifting his arm to give her access to the other gun at his hip.
She shook her head. “That’s not—”
“Shoot me, Mabelle. It is not hard. You just pull the trigger and it’s done. Go on.”
Her chin trembled, the tears coming close to expulsion. “No!” she said.
He snatched the gun back with a look of disgust and holstered it. “It is hard to take a life, isn’t it?”
“I wasn’t going to—”
“Go and get me a wooden spoon.”
She obeyed without thinking, relieved to be released from his dark gaze, but when she reached the wash tub and grasped the spoon, she stopped, guessing his intentions for it.
She heard the scrape of a chair and turned to see him settling in it, looking at her expectantly.
“You could light a lamp, too, but I don’t mind spanking you in the dark.”
“You are not spanking me!” she insisted, her voice shrill.
He said nothing, simply looked at her from across the dark room.
Her heart thundered in her chest. She realized she had little choice but to accept his punishment. Fighting him would be fruitless, and only make him angrier. He thought she meant to kill him and he intended to exact retribution.
Well, if his retribution for murder was a spanking with a wooden spoon, she could take it. She drew her shoulders back and marched over to stand before him, offering the spoon.
“Thank you, Mabelle,” he said, his voice even. “Do you want to light the lamp?”
Did she want him to have a brighter view of her backside splayed across his knees? Hell, no.
“No,” she mumbled, her glower focusing on the collar of his shirt.
“No, sir,” he corrected.
She met his gaze, anger flaring.
He looked back, his expression hard and implacable.
She took a few measured breaths. “No, sir,” she muttered at last.
He patted his lap. “Over. Now.”
She hesitated and found herself upended by force, her skirt and petticoats flung up her back. She gripped the legs of the chair, squeezing her eyes shut.
He pulled her pantalets open at the split seam and she cringed at the thought of him seeing her most private parts bared. The first smack of hard wood on her flesh made her squeeze her cheeks together and squeal.
The quick flurry of spanks he delivered after took her breath away. She jerked under his assault, bounding with each sharp rap. He scissored her legs between his, as he had done the first time, immobilizing her attempts to dodge the blows.
“Never wield a weapon you are unwilling to use,” he gritted, applying five smacks to the same exact place on one side, then moving to the other. “I nearly shot you before I realized who you were.” He paid special attention to the crease where her bottom met thigh, which she knew would make it difficult to sit later.
Somewhere in the confusion of managing the onslaught of stinging smacks, his words sank in and surprised her. He punished her not for trying to kill him, but for endangering herself?
“If you can’t pull the trigger, don’t even handle the weapon, do you understand me?”
“Yes!” she gasped.
“Yes, sir,” he corrected with an extra hard smack.
Yes, sir!”
He continued to pepper her entire bottom with spanks, the small surface area of the spoon traversing every inch of one cheek, then the other, then back to the first, until she panted from the burn.
He slowed down. “Do you even know how to fire a gun?”
“Not exactly,” she gasped.
He sighed and placed the spoon across the backs of her legs, running his calloused hand over her swollen buttocks. The roughness of his palm stung her sensitive skin, but even so, she relished the gesture, hoping it signaled an end to her chastisement.
“I am sorry,” she offered.
He brought his open palm down with a sharp slap. “You'd better be.” His hand rubbed a circle over her heated flesh. Her heart pounded, though not from fear. The heat from her bottom seemed to travel between her legs as well, warming her most intimate area. She squirmed on his lap.
He must have taken her squirm as discomfort, because he lifted her to stand. Even in darkness, she did not want him to see her face, too humiliated by the punishment. When he pulled her to sit on his lap, she lurched off to escape.
He pulled her back and held her between his knees, his hands gripping and kneading her punished bottom. “You can sit here on my lap and we can talk, or you can go stand in the corner before you take another round over my knee. Which is it?”
Her bottom throbbed at the threat and her face burned with embarrassment. In fact, heat pulsed through her entire core at his words.
“Will there be a second round, regardless?” she asked.
One corner of his mouth tugged upward in a smile. “Depends on how our talk goes.”
She perched on his knee, into the lee of his arm.
He wrapped it around her waist and hiked her higher
on his thigh. “Good girl,” he murmured.
His praise should not make her heart thump so happily. She should be furious the bully outlaw had tortured her in this way again. But she could not make herself believe him wrong this time. In retrospect, she did not believe him wrong the last time, either. He had shown nothing but an overriding concern for her well-being since the moment he arrived. Though his methods may be questionable, his determination to keep her safe warmed her.
“I hope you were going to have me walk to the wagon and put myself in it before you shot me, because you could not have carried my body there by yourself.”
She peered at him, unsure whether he teased or not. The twitch of lips gave him away again.
“I had no plan to kill you, nor to turn you in. I planned to demand you drive the wagon with me to Cheyenne.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Why?”
She dropped her eyes to his thigh, trying to forget the recent feel of it under her belly. “I do not know how to drive a wagon, nor how to get to Cheyenne.”
Chapter Three
He blew out his breath and brought his forehead to rest on her chest in frustration. He had fooled himself into believing she could manage on her own with the assistance of the bounty money. But hearing she needed his help melted all the resolve he had built to leave her.
But showing up in Cheyenne was a sure-fire way to get himself killed or put in jail for a later hanging.
“I can’t,” he moaned.
Her little hand at his nape shocked him, a lick of lust hardening his cock in his trousers. He wanted her to touch him all over, to bring her softness to his hard edges, to make a small space in her heart for him. “Please?” she whispered.
Oh God. How could he possibly refuse her?
“Mabelle…” He sighed. “If I go along, you must obey my every command.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, sitting up with eagerness, enthusiasm bubbling in her voice.
“What happens if you do not?” he asked, with more sternness than he intended.
“You spank me?”
