“Ugh!” Flopping over on her stomach, she tried to pull the rug up over her head. “It’s too cold!”
“Up, I said.” On his way out the door, he bent to deliver a swat to the round hump of her upturned bottom. The rug was too thick. It protected her from the sting—more’s the pity—though apparently not from the indignation. He heard her scramble to grab something, but he made it out the door before the shoe she threw hit the wall and bounced back into the room.
Wading out among the trees a good thirty feet from the cabin, Vance dug a pit in the snow. He couldn’t stop smiling. The whole time he skinned and gutted their breakfast, the palm of his hand tingled from that half-second smack he’d landed on Ettie’s lovely bottom.
Chapter 10
Myth Number One: Cook something long enough, and it tastes like chicken. False. Squirrel had a taste all its own, strongly reminiscent of the pine seeds that made up its diet, and although Ettie ate every bite that was her share, by the time they reached only water and bones, she knew she was in no danger of giving up McNuggets for McSquirrel.
On an unrelated topic, Myth Number Two was somewhat harder to swallow: The man-slut wasn’t anywhere near as unlikeable as she wanted him to be. He gave her the lion’s share of the food. A mixed blessing. He also brought in the last of the firewood and stacked it up in the woodbin. He stole the shoelaces out of her boots and used them to lace up his own. Okay, that one kind of knocked him down a notch on the Hunka-Hunk scale, it also made her miss her puppies. She hoped someone was taking care of them. If not, by now it was entirely likely they would have eaten every shoe in the house and piddled on every carpet. It said something about her masochistic tendencies that that should make her miss them even more.
“Okay,” Vance said, tossing down the last bone and wiping his mouth. “No point putting it off any longer than this. You stay here. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Ettie sat up a little straighter when he stood up. “What do you mean, stay here? Where are you going?”
“To see if I can find the other cabins. We need more wood than this or it’s going to be a chilly night with only body heat to keep us warm.” Shrugging into his coat, he deliberately did not look at her. “Not that I mind keeping warm that way, but I find I am nowhere near as gentlemanly as I ought to be under the circumstances.”
An insidious flush of heat burned its way up through Ettie as she remembered waking up that morning, with the feel of Vance hard at her back and another part of him even harder between her legs. She was glad he’d been the one to get up first. She didn’t know how much longer she’d have been able to lie there, feigning sleep when all she really wanted to do was reach down between her thighs and touch him. She didn’t know what he would have done if she had. A part of her liked to think he might have rolled her onto her back—or maybe even her stomach—and with only the slightest adjustment of his hips and long, deep slide, let her feel just how hard he could be in a completely different way.
Another part of her was a little more practical. It kept saying, “Get it together, Ettie. You know better than this.”
She did too. Getting up from the table, she collected her shoes and put them on. “I’ll go with you.”
“That’s okay. You can stay here.”
“I’ll go. What if you find so much wood you have to make multiple trips? With me along, that’s fewer trips and fuller woodbin over here that much faster.”
“That’s okay,” Vance said again, zipping into the inside layer of his coat before buttoning the outer.
Knuckling her fists to her hips, she glared at him. “What? You can’t wait to get out of sight so you can spank the weasel, or something?”
Stopping, Vance gave her a look. “Spank the weasel?”
“You heard me!” Ettie retorted, and then because he obviously needed help with the euphemism, elaborated, “Spank the weasel. Choke the chicken. Stroke the one-eyed snake—”
“I know what it means,” he growled.
“—Wax on, whack off!”
“Either find an off-switch for your mouth or I will,” Vance snapped. “I am trying to be nice here, Ettie. We survived yesterday because of you. Today, it’s my turn.”
“Don’t treat me like I’m helpless.”
He sighed. “I’m not.”
Shaking his head, he all but rolled his eyes, and the sudden ricochet of anger that shot up through her when she saw that, vaulted her onto her feet. “Yes, you are! And I’m not helpless.”
“I never said you were. I don’t think ‘helpless’ can be found anywhere in your personal vocabulary. Combative, yeah. Mouthy, hell yeah.”
“You forgot ‘bitch’,” Ettie snarled, and then backed up a step when he suddenly took one towards her. She caught herself before she retreated any further than that, but by then the damage was done. Now he wouldn’t just think she was useless, he’d also seen she was a coward.
“I actually wasn’t going to say that,” he told her, his tone serious and the smile he had been courting mere moments ago nowhere now in sight. “I might say ‘switch’ though. As in, you might want to watch what you say next, or I might just go outside and cut one. We are in the woods, sweetheart. We are surrounded by them.”
Was it his ‘sweetheart’ that made her knees weaken so badly they knocked together, or was it his threat? Her flesh up the backs of her thighs and all across her bottom crawled. But her chin hiked, and her mouth refused to stay closed. “We’re surrounded by pines and evergreens, and I happen to know for a fact they make for rotten switches. Try again, buster, ‘cause you’re not scaring me.”
A glimmer of amusement trickled back into his eyes, and the corners of his mouth quirked. “Did you notice the birch and walnut trees down by the creek? I’m pretty sure if I looked hard enough I might even find a willow. So go ahead. Keep talking. See how far you can push me before I put you across my knee and teach you how to dance.”
“You and what army?” Pure heat burned up through her face and down into her stomach. Though the words pouring out of her carried an angry tone, anger wasn’t what she was feeling. She’d never heard someone refer to the writhing effects of spanking as dancing before. Having felt his hand once already, she could well imagine just how easily he could bring her to a point of doing just that while pinned across his lap. It was an awful trick of the isolation and the cabin, and him, that in that moment she found herself wanting to experience it.
And damn him if he didn’t seem to know it.
Tipping his head, Vance took another step toward her, closing the distance by inches. “Do you really think I need an army to stripe your backside, Ettie?”
She was shaking, but not because she was mad and certainly not because she was afraid. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. For the first time in her life, she didn’t know what to say.
Which seemed to say everything he needed to hear. Turning on his heel, he walked out the door, shutting it softly behind him.
Ettie stood in the middle of that small cabin for almost a full minute, unable to explain just why she felt so…bereft. Sinking down on the nearest chair, she clasped her hands tight and tried to stop shaking. What was wrong with her? She didn’t want Vance to spank her. How could anyone want that? The man was…
A gigolo? Well, yes, but he was handsome too. And charming. And damn near devastating to every sensible fiber of her being. No wonder so many women in Corbin’s Bend kept his number on speed dial. She’d only been trapped with him for one day and already she was, what? Baiting him? She was, wasn’t she? Four years, seven months and fourteen—but no, she was actually back to one day now, and still all she felt was this deeply instilled neediness to be taken in hand. Apparently, anybody’s hand would do.
Vance’s heavy footsteps tromped down the length of the porch, coming back to the door. He opened it, two long switches already trimmed down to the bark leading the way.
She looked at them and then at him, that twisting—was it excitement and how could it
possibly be that—tightening in the pit of her stomach until it hurt just to breathe.
“Up,” he said, closing the door behind him.
Ettie didn’t move. Not because she was being defiant, but because her legs wouldn’t obey her. A creeping wave of heat rippled up through her, washing over her face. An even more treacherous wave of longing followed it, filling her up in other places too devastating to think about. “Those are going to suck for kindling,” she finally said, feeling numb. “They’re too green. They won’t burn.”
The corners of his mouth twitched. “Oh sweetie. I promise, you’re about to find out just how fierce the burn can be. Last chance, stand up.”
Her stomach was a roller coaster of knotting loops. “What do you mean, last chance?”
“You know what I mean.” He took two slow steps toward her. In a room this small, two steps was all he needed to bring them to within arm’s reach of one another. “You can either stand on your own or I can come over there and get you, and instead of the six licks you’ll get ten.”
Her whole chest constricted. Something must have shown on her face because his mouth twitched again, his smile becoming that much more pronounced.
“What’s it going to be, Ettie? You or me, six or ten?”
She didn’t want this. Except, she really did. She tried to tell herself it was the spanking alone—after all, it had been such a very long time for her; God, she was so tired of counting—and not him making her nerves fire and her pulse race. But that just wasn’t true. It was very much Vance doing this to her. Everything about him was perfect, from his stance to his words, to his tone and his oh so dominant, authoritative attitude. She didn’t want it to be, but it was. How many years had she spent being angry at this man, and how could all her reasons for that just disappear in the span of one day. Try as she might, she couldn’t make herself remember a single one of them.
He took another step, coming right up to the edge of her chair.
On shaky legs, Ettie stood up.
Vance smiled, neither smug nor victorious. In fact, it seemed damn near gentle. “Good girl.” Something inside her melted just a bit. “Now our choices change. Turn around and face the table.”
Ettie glanced at it over her shoulder, then back at him. The last thing she wanted to do was turn her back on Vance. “Why?”
“You know why. Shall I add three more for defiance?”
She had the most incredible urge to say ‘Yes, please.’ She locked her lips to keep it back and faced the table.
“You’re doing very well.”
She locked her lips before she said something stupid, like, ‘Thank you.’ “Get bent,” she said instead, pulling that worn, familiar coat of rebelliousness in tight around her.
He moved around to her left side and every nerve inside her prickled in awareness of him. “I think that’s my next line, sweetie, but in the wake of such a spirited reply, I think we ought to boost your impending count from six to nine.”
Her first thought: Nine wasn’t so bad. She could do nine. A rush of liquid wanting trickled down along the lips of her sex, tickling her. Her breasts felt heavy and swollen. Her nipples ached.
“Would you like to take your pants down, or do you want me to do it?”
All the air in her lungs abandoned her. “What?”
She couldn’t take her pants down. If she did, he’d see the telltale wetness soaking into the crotch.
“Don’t be shy, Ettie,” he said, letting both switches caress upon the backs of her thighs. “We just spent the night twined together in nothing but a rug and our skin. Pants, take them down.” He tapped the seat of her bottom with the tips of those switches. “Panties, too. All the way down. You can keep your modesty by facing the table and hoping I’m blind.”
Ettie couldn’t move. Once upon a time, a long, long time before she came to Corbin’s Bend, back when her only intimate knowledge of spankings consisted of what rare scenes she’d discovered in old-time romance novels and erotic pictures (back when the internet was new and it took fifteen minutes to download every one)—back when she was new to the world of domestic discipline and she was in her first year of college, Ettie had a roommate. Her roommate had a boyfriend. And that boyfriend had been a spanker.
Standing in the gloom of an isolated cabin lit only by firelight, funny how Ettie would think of him now. She thought about the shock of that night when she’d come home to find her girlfriend sprawled across her boyfriend’s lap, a hairbrush dancing a crisp cadence all over her rosy bottom. It had been a shock on everyone’s side. They’d been embarrassed. She’d been horribly embarrassed, and over the next week, as their relationship eased back into something less strained, Ettie finally worked up the nerve to confess her attraction to the possibility of being spanked herself.
That had been the beginning. All she had felt was excitement when her roommate’s boyfriend took her by the hand, led her to the second-hand sofa in the living room, and brought her lie facedown across his lap. He’d bared her bottom. She’d loved that part—the blushing shame of it, the age-old sense of tradition when he’d pulled her underwear down to her knees. Back then, she’d barely considered the view she’d been presenting to that young man whose name she couldn’t begin to remember. Started with an R, maybe. She’d been so preoccupied with how it had felt first to have her bottom stroked, then squeezed, and finally smacked, that she hadn’t given modesty a second thought.
For some reason, the idea of presenting that same view to Vance Foster right here and now petrified her.
“Pants down, Ettie.” Another slow step and now Vance was directly behind her. “If you do it yourself, it’s nine strokes. If I do it for you, it’ll be sixteen.”
“You’re doing it wrong. In my stories, the count always goes up in lots of six.” It was the stupidest thing she could have said, but she couldn’t help it. It was just what came pouring out of her mouth.
“I know,” Vance said, mildly amused. “I don’t want to be predictable. You’re still running your mouth and I can tell by your face that you’re hoping I’ll give up and walk away. I also know if I did that, I’ll probably destroy any future chance I might right now have of kissing you until your toes curl up tight like little pink buttons. Sweetie, I find myself wanting very, very badly to kiss you until you’re all button-toed. It’s going to be the next best thing to kissing you breathless, but then you couldn’t run your mouth and since that seems to be your only way of asking me to spank you, I’m not sure I want to take that away.”
She jumped when his hand settled on her hip, her heart stumbling inside her chest, a sensation so unexpectedly painful that she couldn’t quite breathe around it. She offered no resistance when he hooked his finger in the empty belt loop of her jeans, tugging just hard enough to coax her to turn to him. She couldn’t meet his eyes.
“I’m going to switch your bottom now, Ettie, and it’s going to be bare while I do it. So, who’s going to do the honors, you or me? Nine or sixteen?”
She looked at his mouth, but only because he’d mentioned kissing, damn it. Now the idea was stuck in her head, the tantalizing image of his lips nibbling at hers until her back began to arch and her hands reached up to cup his shoulders, pulling him closer.
His fingers left her belt loop. They wandered around her waist and down to cup her bottom, his bare palm burning right through her pants on the right cheek, those two switches caressing on the left. His touch branded her, her whole body melting into his hands until her legs wobbled and her breath caught. He squeezed her bottom again and then his hands wandered back to her belly. The next thing she felt was the loosening of her button fly, before her zipper clicked down the teeth of its track and her pants sagged.
“Sixteen it is,” he said, seducing her with his smile. The heat of his fingertips slipped in between her underwear and her skin. In stark contrast, the coolness of the switches glided over the curve of her hip to her thigh as he pushed both denim and cotton down to her shins. “Warm up?”
She quavered, breathless all over again. “Yes, please.”
“Please, no less.” His breath caressed the slope of her shoulder as he turned her back to face the table again. His hand came to rest on the back of her neck, applying gentle pressure until she bent, lowering herself until her stomach was flat upon the age-polished surface of the sturdy table. “Good girl, Ettie. Good girl.”
Every inch of her shivered, and it didn’t have a thing to do with the temperature of the room.
It wasn’t a wide table. The top of her head came nearly to the far edge. When he temporarily lay the switches down beside her, suddenly needing something to hold onto, she gripped onto that edge with both hands. It wasn’t over the knee, but there was still intimacy in the way he rested his hand upon the small of her back, encouraging compliance while his other caressed the full swells of first one buttock and then the other.
Her fingers tightened. Her nerves were firing, rapid and hot bolts of ever-building excitement. Her stomach was one giant quivering knot. No longer twisting now, but tight and tense as she waited for that first hard swat. Incredulously, the only thought she could cling to, much as her hands clung to the table’s edge, was: Please, don’t let it be too soft.
It wasn’t. When it came, the crack of his hand met the swell of her bottom with a gunshot-like pop that filled the tiny cabin the same way the shock of sensation filled her. Not too hard, not too soft. It was perfect. As was the swat that followed, and the one after that, on and on, alternating from bottom to top and cheek to cheek. It had been so, so long. Something was wrong with her. She didn’t know what it was, but the sting of tears filled her eyes long before the sting of any real discomfort overwhelmed her flesh.
She buried her face between her hands, pressing her forehead to the wood, and breathed in through her mouth in an effort to control the raggedness of the unexpected sobs rising up into the back of her throat. She didn’t mean to cry. He wasn’t spanking her anywhere near hard enough for that kind of reaction. His hand kept coming down though, peppering brisk pops of sound and bursts of warming sting all over her bottom, building the force even as he built the tempo. Try though she did to hide it, the change in her breathing must have signaled when her dam of restraint shattered and Ettie broke down.
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