“I beg your pardon?” His fingers on her arm had stilled and he had craned his neck to see her better in the dim firelight. “What did you just call me?”
She lifted her chin out from his side. “Have Paddle, Will Travel. Everyone calls you that. You’re like the Fuller Brush Man only with cooler implements…or so they tell me. You didn’t know?”
“Is this ‘they’ as in friends and neighbors around the community, or is this ‘they’ as in the people quoted in your newspaper?”
“What’s the difference?”
He scoffed. “Well, one represents real people, and the other is made up entirely out of your imagination. Who do I have to thank for such an interesting moniker?”
Cheeks beginning to heat, she tucked her chin back up against him. “If forced to be honest…”
“Honesty is the best policy.” He sounded amused. That helped make the confession come out easier.
“It’s probably about fifty-fifty.”
His chest under her cheek bounced when he chuckled, then he drew in a deep breath. It sounded a lot like a sigh. “Ettie honey, now I’m saying it. You need spanking. Lots and lots of spanking. Bare bottom. Legs pinned.” His tone deepened, turning damn-near seductive. “Hands clasped behind your back to keep you from interfering until I’m done—either that or a really good kiss.”
And just like that, suddenly all Ettie could think about was how naked she was, and how naked he was, and how they were cuddled up together between two bearskin rugs…in a remote cabin…in the middle of nowhere…with a blizzard raging outside and a fire dying inside. Up until this moment, Ettie had been able to partition the uncomfortable particulars off in her mind. This was a desperate situation, after all. Everybody knew how desperate situations often led to people doing crazy things. Like crawling naked into bed with one’s nearest and dearest enemy just to keep warm through a bitterly cold night. Nothing seemed cold right now, though. Not any part of her pressed up against all the parts of him, including that one part that she’d tried so hard not to look at. He was warming up. The shrinkage was reversing. Vance wasn’t a eunuch anymore.
“Don’t say that,” she said, trying to pretend she couldn’t feel him—the thump of his heart beneath her hand, all that lean muscle that travelled down his side, and the sinewy stretch of his leg where it pressed against hers.
“Which part?” he asked. “The spanking, or the kissing?”
“You’re sick.”
“What could possibly be sick about spanking or kissing?”
Her nipples were as taught and tight as mountain peaks. He had to know it, too. They were poking right into his ribs. “Any part of either if you’re involved in it.”
Vance chuckled, a low throaty sound that travelled up her spine like the Devil’s own fingertips. “In that case, baby, I’m not just sick. I’m the most twisted son of a bitch you’ll ever love to hate.”
Heaven help her, a low pulse began down between her thighs, heralding the arrival of musky beads of moisture. She tried to hide it, pressing her legs tight together, and then tried to hide that tell-tale movement by pretending she needed to switch positions.
“Uncomfortable?” he asked, but he knew what was wrong. By his very tone, she could tell he knew.
“The floor is very hard,” she lied, refusing to look at him.
“Among other things.” He chuckled again, and his fingers went from tracing to walking. “If it bothers you that much, you could sleep on top of me.”
A startled bark of laughter escaped her. “Oh, hell no.”
“You don’t think a little ‘pillowing’ might help us both get to sleep?”
She smacked his stomach, fighting back giggles. Damn it! She really didn’t want to find him this fun or this likeable. “Just close your eyes.” Determined to follow her own advice, Ettie closed hers first. “We’ll both get to sleep faster if we close our eyes.”
“Right.” His hand settled back on her shoulder and finally fell still just as her stomach rumbled. “Was that you or me?”
“I haven’t eaten since breakfast.” She snuggled closer, folding her arm over her stomach in the hopes the added pressure might keep it quiet. “Not that there’s anything we can do about it now.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Vance said, and in the darkness his profile grinned. “I’ve got beef jerky and a roast beef sandwich in the glove box.”
She couldn’t help it. She laughed.
Chapter 9
The morning dawned softly, the storm having passed sometime in the night while they’d been sleeping. Vance awoke first, and thank God for that. Because when he awoke, swaddled in warm folds of the bearskin rugs, he wasn’t on his back any more. He was on his side with Ettie’s heated back against his chest, her soft breast cupped in his hand and her furnace of a bottom nestled right up against his groin. His groin noticed. In fact, while the rest of his sleepy brain was still trying to figure out where the tangle of his limbs stopped and hers started, his cock stood up straight and took immediate stock of the situation. It was a hellish mystery how she managed to stay asleep through so liberal a prodding. He was, to mutilate a football term, in total touchdown land right between her legs.
He could feel her heady wetness. Every time they breathed, he brushed ever so minutely up along the welcome heat of her sex. Her tussle of blonde hair kept tickling his chin and cheek, and her nipple in his palm was a peak of mouth-watering temptation his lips ached to taste. It was wrong to even want to. She might look alluring and hospitable while she was sleeping, but he knew the minute he moved he’d wake her and then he’d have to explain this in words other than ‘Oops’. He honestly didn’t think he could, and still the desire to let his fingers squeeze, to wander a caressing path from her breast to her belly to the hot mounds of her bottom and the sensual prison he’d made for himself between her thighs, haunted him with what he couldn’t and shouldn’t do.
She was so soft. She smelled good too. Give them both another day or two in this cabin without a shower and that would change, but for now, it was all he could do not to lift the edge of the rug and look down at her. To see all the pillowing parts of her that he could feel pressed against him, the perfect complement to all the hardest parts of him. He wondered, as hot as her little bottom felt, if he’d find traces of blushing red where he’d spanked her last night. In the state he was in, he could easily cum just at the sight of his fingerprints marking her skin. He didn’t lift the rug. He didn’t dare look, but it was an appalling realization to know that his moral character was so lacking as to be so tempted by a sleeping woman.
She couldn’t stand him. That didn’t stop him from wanting so dearly to graze the curve of her bare shoulder with the slightest of kisses. She was so beautiful, so spirited. So…incredibly here. It had been years since he’d last held a woman like this.
He wished she’d wake up. Who knew? He might get lucky. She might roll over in his arms and reach for him in sleepy need. Of course, she could also take one look at him and then at the jutting erection reaching for her and punch him square in the nose. Considering what he knew of her prickly personality so far, his guess as to how she truly would react was leaning strongly toward the latter fantasy.
He had to get out of this makeshift bed before he did something that couldn’t be atoned for without a sexual assault trial or outside of a prison cell.
It was a masochistic game of twister, trying to extricate himself from her sleeping body without waking her. He crawled out of the rug in sections, taking care to tug the bearskin back in around her to keep her warm, and then he imposed the harshest punishment he could for the morning’s unintended molestation. He went outside.
The porch was buried under two feet of snow at the shallow end and where a massive pine at one corner had caught the worst of the wind and the weather, the drifts went all the way up to the rafters. The wind was still blowing, though nowhere near as hard as the night before. It was still spitting snowflakes too, and what he could see of the sky
promised more to come. White blanketed everything, creating the illusion that the ground and the porch were all the same level. It could be knee-deep or it could be chest-deep, without wading down into it he simply couldn’t tell. What he could tell by standing on the porch, however, was there wasn’t a single sign of human habitation anywhere that he could see. The forest was so dense, all he could see were trees buried in white. He could smell smoke, but only what came from their own woodstove. Listening, he could hear nothing but the wind and the eerie creaking of snow-laden branches struggling to bear up under the weight.
Perhaps only twenty yards from the far edge of the porch, Potato Creek was completely buried. He could only guess where its borders were based on the vague line where the trees flanked either bank. He didn’t go hunting often enough to know the area as well as he currently wished he did, but if he was right and this was Potato Creek, then that put them almost exactly half way between Corbin’s Bend and Brenton. No matter what direction he chose, trying to walk out of here would mean conquering roughly twenty miles of mountainous terrain. On a good day, it wouldn’t be fun, but he could do it. On a day like this, as cold as it was and with this much snow on the ground…Vance shook his head. Right now they had shelter and they had warmth. The risks of leaving as opposed to sitting and waiting for help were too unevenly balanced.
The cold had neatly killed his erection. Shivering, he went back inside. Ettie was still sleeping, though she must have awakened long enough to note his absence. She’d completely rolled herself into both rugs. All he could see of her now was the fluffy wisps blonde hair sticking up out of the top between one bear’s gaping jaws and a claw-studded paw.
After standing so long outside, the warmth in here was the next best thing to Heaven, but a quick glance into the woodbin showed only a single branch and there was nothing left of last night’s fire apart from a lot of ash flecked with bright orange coals. They needed wood. If worse came to worst, he could burn the chairs, but he remembered Ettie bringing in logs from the outside. Before he destroyed furniture, it was worth it to take a look around.
Trying to be as quiet as possible, Vance gathered his clothes from around the stove. They were stiff, but dry. Even his boots, although they didn’t do him much good with the laces cut all the way down from the tongue to the steel-toed tips. That took walking out of here from difficult to impossible. He was also halfway dressed before he realized his wallet was still in his coat pocket, but his cellphone wasn’t. It was still resting in the cup holder between the seats of his truck, which now resided under a layer of ice on the bottom of Potato Creek. He had no idea where his belt had gone.
He turned in a full circle, lifting to check beneath her clothes, glancing all around the small room.
“Would you please either light somewhere or be quieter?” Ettie mumbled from her rug burrito.
“Sorry.” He shrugged into both sets of shirts, his long-sleeved thermal and blue and black checkered flannel, and then his coat. That neatly removed half of his belt’s hiding places. He checked again under each item of clothing that remained over the backs of the chairs. “Ettie, sweetie?”
Groaning, she tried to pull the rug up over her head. “Please…ten more minutes, I’m begging you.”
“Are you lying on my belt?”
After a few seconds, Ettie lifted her head, crawling out of the burrito far enough to give him a sour look. “You dropped it in the water when you fell through the ice. Seriously, what is it with you and that belt?” Tugging the rugs in tighter around her, she tried to go back to sleep. “Did the fire go out? It’s flipping freezing in here.”
“I dropped it in the creek?” His shoulders sagged. “Damn. That was my favorite belt.”
“So I gathered. About the fire…”
“I made that belt, you know.” Pulling his coat off the back of another chair, Vance shrugged into it and began fastening up the front. “It was my first.”
Ettie sighed. “Just shoot me now…please…”
“Actually, it was the first I ever made that I was really proud of. It had the perfect weight, perfect thickness.” Tsking, Vance shook his head. “Bad girls really love the sight and sound of a belt clearing belt loops.”
Slapping the floor, Ettie threw back the rug far enough to raise her head again. “Can you not be a horn dog for just one minute, please?”
“Can you not be prickly for one minute?” he shot back, more amused than irritated. She didn’t know it yet, but her bed-head hair was sticking out literally at all angles. She looked like a fluffy-headed dandelion.
“Yes, I can,” she snapped. “Get me a pot of coffee and I’ll think about it.”
“I’m here to serve, o majesty. Let me get right on that.” He laughed and left the cabin. He couldn’t help the fact that it was so cold outside, but it was probably a little on the cruel side of him that he kept the door open just long enough to send her scrambling back into her bearskin burrito.
“Oh. My. God!” she squealed, burrowing deeper, then shouted, “Jerk!” loud enough to be heard through the closed door. “I’m starving! Bring back McDonalds!”
He would have cheerfully killed for an Egg McMuffin too. Shaking his head, he stepped off the end of the porch into deep, deep snow. From that point on, the joke was pretty much on him. He sank in up to his waist and had snow inside his boots right from the start. The path Ettie had created in her search for wood last night had been snowed in, but was still evident enough to follow. He found the lean-to, two of the three sides buried up to the roof and an open front that faced the cabin, which had protected it from the worst of the wind. Once he got in past the snow spilling in from the surrounding drifts, the interior seemed well-protected from the elements. There wasn’t a lot of wood though. Maybe not even enough to get them through the day, definitely not enough to get them through another night.
Usually when he went camping, he foraged his firewood from what nature and previous storms had provided. As deep in the forest as they were, he knew they had to be surrounded by a treasure trove of burnable wood. The problem was, it was buried under more snow than he could shift to look for it. And that would likely make it too wet to burn. He looked at the lean-to itself. He could disassemble it, but without an axe he doubted he could break enough pieces small enough to put in the stove.
Grimly, he loaded up his arms with what few logs were stacked up in the very back. Discarding what was too rotten to burn, he was just picking up his third log when the meager woodpile burst with frantic movement. Sticks went everywhere. To say who was startled more—Vance or the fat grey squirrel he’d accidentally unhoused from its winter nest—was a matter for debate. The only thing Vance did know for certain was, it wasn’t the squirrel who screamed like a little girl.
Reflex kicked in and he clubbed his opponent with a thick piece of kindling. It wasn’t his finest moment, but thankfully no one was there to see him dancing around the inside of that woodshed like a boxer on primetime before he realized the threat to his manhood was dead now and, more importantly, he looked ridiculous.
Club held high and at the ready, he checked the rest of the woodpile, but there were no more squirrels lurking in the shadows. His adrenaline spike faded, leaving him feeling silly and cold. And getting colder by the minute. Giving the dead squirrel plenty of room, he filled his arms with as much of the wood as he could carry. With only another armful left in the lean-to when he was done, he gave the rodent one last look and then started back inside. He only made it a few steps, however, before he stopped. Ettie’s stomach had grumbled all night long. His was just as empty, and that squirrel was just lying there.
Waste not, want not.
Oh, this was going to suck.
He picked up the carcass by its bushy tail and waded back along the path to the front porch of the cabin. He had a moment to pause and wonder if Ettie was up yet. Maybe, standing naked by the stove, with all that soft skin of hers warming by the dying light of the coals while she dressed. It ought to be a c
rime, concealing a body like that in heavy winter clothes.
Resting his hand on the door latch, he suffered an awful war with his conscious. Ettie was right. He was a horn dog. But he was a horn dog with morals, and in the end, he knocked. When no answer was forthcoming—he thought he might have heard a grunt—he juggled the wood and the squirrel and opened the door.
Ettie was still in bed, dozing.
“Wake up, baby. Daddy’s brought home the bacon.” Kicking the door shut behind him, he dumped the wood in the woodbin before feeding a few precious pieces into the stove to get the fire going again. “Where’s the knife you used to cut my bootlaces?”
“Scissors. On the table.” Lifting her head, Ettie glanced at him. “You found some bacon?” She took one look at the squirrel and abruptly sat up all the way. “That’s not bacon.”
“Nope. It’s squirrel.” He found the scissors. “Better known as ‘breakfast’.”
Rather than thrilled at his hunting prowess, she looked aghast. “Oh, poor thing!”
“Poor thing?” Vance put a hand on his wounded chest. “Ettie, this is not some poor thing! He came at me.” When she gave him a look, he had to salvage the situation with the smallest exaggeration. “With a knife.” That look became anything but impressed. “And about fifty of his dearest friends. Fortunately for me, I know a little something about mountain squirrels. If you can kill the leader, the rest get demoralized and run away.”
She had to work at not smiling. “You are so full of it!”
“You said you were hungry.”
“I also said I wanted McDonalds.”
“Well, you’re getting McSquirrel.” He snagged the first-aid scissors off the table. “I’ll McSkin and McGut it, while you get the fire going and melt some snow in the percolator. Food is food at this point. Get up.”
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