“I’ve missed you too,” Grant murmured. He would’ve like to taken the kiss deeper, but Lainie pulled away.
“I’ve got tests that have to be graded,” she said and for the first time in a long time, he could hear the reluctance in her voice.
Grant nodded. Neither of them worked normal 9-to-5 jobs. They might be on duty from 8 to 4, but work continued regardless of whether or not they were currently on the clock. Papers had to be graded. Lesson plans have to be written. Emergency calls came in at the drop of a hat, sometimes in the wee hours. She had never complained when he had to get up and go. He couldn’t very well complain when she had work to do either, however much he might’ve wished to shove those tests down the garbage disposal and get on with more pleasant business. “Two hours,” he said as she turned to leave.
“What?” she asked, giving him a puzzled look.
“You can work for two hours, and then you’re coming to bed,” he said placidly.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “I’ve got to get these done. It takes as long as it takes.”
“Tonight it takes no longer than two hours,” he countered. “Anything that isn’t done by then can wait until tomorrow. You just said earlier that your students don’t care enough to do well on the test, and if that’s the case, they are certainly not going to care about having to wait another day to get back a dismal grade. Two hours.”
“But I always hand tests back the following day,” she protested.
“Is that a school rule?” he asked.
“Well, no,” Lainie stammered, “but...”
“If it’s not a school rule, it can wait,” Grant insisted. “It’s more important that you get to sleep at a decent hour.”
“I don’t need a bedtime,” Lainie huffed. “I’ve been managing for years.”
Grant raised his eyebrows. “I thought you just agreed to try letting me be in charge. Did you mean that or not?”
Lainie blew out an exasperated breath. “Of course I did, but –”
“Then you had better get a move on,” Grant broke in. “You’re down to an hour and 45 minutes.”
The glare Lainie shot him could have shattered glass, but she scurried away. A moment later he heard her gathering her things and settling at the dining room table.
He made his way into their bedroom. He may have talked to Lainie into trying domestic discipline and letting him be head of household, but that didn’t mean he had a clue of how to actually go about it. Theory was quite different than practice. He needed to do some research. Glancing at the phone on the bedside table, he was overcome with a familiar biting longing to pick up the phone and dial his dad. Dad would have known exactly what to do.
Since he no longer had that option, he went to the Internet, powering up the computer that lived on a desk in the corner of the bedroom. To his great surprise, he found a veritable cornucopia of information. Apparently, domestic discipline was more common than he had ever imagined it might be. He clicked through several documents and websites, reading as he went. As a police officer, Grant was long used to taking in information, making connections, and drawing conclusions. What he found there though inevitably lead to more questions than answers. How in the world was he ever supposed to figure out how to do this? There seemed to be as many different variations to the lifestyle as there were people involved in it. How was he to know which way was the right one? He gave thought to posting some of these questions on one of the many discussion boards, but he was reluctant to reach out to strangers. He knew as well as anyone that anonymity on the Internet was little more than an illusion. What if somehow his post managed to get traced back to him? He was a cop. That’s all he needed was for somebody to decide he was abusing his wife. However untrue it might be, it would likely cost him his job. That was too big a chance to take. Just when he was about to give the research up as a lost cause, he ran across the website for the Corbin’s Bend housing community near Denver, Colorado and stopped dead. Could it possibly be true, an entire community of people who practiced exactly the kind of lifestyle he wanted to get back to? The more he read, the more intrigued he became. What if they didn’t have to figure this out alone? What would it be like to live in a community where they could talk about and explore things openly? It seemed too good to be true.
It would be a huge change. All four of them had lived in North Carolina their entire lives, but, in reality, there wasn’t a great deal holding them here anymore. His mom had retired to Florida six years ago and was, by all accounts, thoroughly enjoying her life in a retirement community there. Lainie had no real family to speak of, and the good thing about both of their jobs was that they were fairly easily transferable. No matter where you went, communities needed police officers and teachers. There was a fairly lengthy approval process and the buy in to the community wasn’t cheap, but if they sold their house here and handled most of moving themselves, they could swing it.
Grant clicked the link and printed off the application packet, vibrating with excitement. A new start in Colorado was just what they all needed. This was going to be just the right thing for their family. He just knew it.
Chapter 1
Lainie Taylor knelt in a sea of boxes covering her new living room and wondered, not for the first time, just what in the world she’d gotten herself into. She, her husband, and two teenage daughters had spent the past four days driving across the country from North Carolina to Colorado, where her husband was convinced their future lay. Lainie herself wasn’t quite so certain about that, although she supposed it was a little too late to be doubting herself now. There wasn’t anything left to go back to in North Carolina. They’d sold their house, and both she and Grant had quit their jobs. They’d both taken jobs here in Colorado, he as a campus police officer, and she as a middle school teacher. Whatever doubts she might have, for the foreseeable future, her future, and her family’s future, was here.
“Lainie! Can you come here please?” Grant called, breaking her out of her thoughts.
She stood, wiping her hands reflexively on the sides of her shorts, and moved in the direction of her husband’s voice. She found him, along with Matt Renton, who was Grant’s mentor and had met them when they got here late last night, and two other men she vaguely remembered meeting when they had flown out here in March, on spring break, to meet with the housing board and tour the property, manhandling Kathleen’s dresser in the door. She thought she remembered that the younger blond guy – what was his name? Brent, Trent, something like that – was in charge. He certainly looked like he was in charge, but then, most of the men around here did. Never in her life had she ever seen so many alpha males in one place. Grant was no slouch himself. He was a career police officer and self-defense instructor, not exactly a wimp, but next to these guys, he seemed positively timid.
“Where does this go?” Grant asked.
Seriously? He called her out here to ask her that. That dresser had been in Kathleen’s room for the last three years and Grant didn’t recognize it. Then again, with the way he had been working back home, she doubted he had been in Kathleen’s room more than a dozen times in that same span of years. Still, she couldn’t help the sigh that escaped. Honestly, how could he seriously believe he was going to be head of the household when he barely knew what went on in the household? “That’s Kathleen’s dresser,” she replied. “Her room is the one to the right at the top of the stairs.”
Grant, Matt, and the younger blond guy moved with alacrity in the direction she had indicated. The fourth man had no choice but to move along with them, but that didn’t stop him from shooting her a sharp and thoroughly disapproving look as he did.
Lainie should have been offended. He was a perfect stranger and had no right approving or disapproving of anything she might do or say, but instead, she found herself wincing internally. Great, if sighs weren’t allowed around here, she was in deep trouble. She knew everyone in the community practiced some form of spanking, of course. That was the whole thing the c
ommunity of Corbin’s Bend was structured around, and it had been the thing that had drawn Grant to the community in the first place. They had never really practiced domestic discipline themselves, but Grant had grown up with it. Both his parents and his grandparents had practiced it, but it had been somewhat normal in those days. They had talked about it early on. Lainie had never been too sure of it, but she had understood that Grant expected their relationship to run that way. At the time, she had been young and in love, and frankly, if Grant had expected her to stand on her head on the street corner and spin around five times on Fridays, she would have probably done it. They had never gotten around to working out any particulars though. Life and kids had gotten in the way Their world had spun into a frenzied rat race of chaos with both of them working all the time and her doing the best she could to raise the girls and Grant growing increasingly busy and increasingly distant with multiple jobs, and they had never managed to climb out at any point during the intervening fifteen years.
Now, Grant was certain that going back to the traditional structure he had grown up with was going to save them. That’s why he had packed them all up and moved them here, to get them out of the fast-paced, modern culture they had been living in and back to a traditional community that embraced the kind of values he had grown up with.
Lainie was far less convinced. Grant seemed to think that Corbin’s Bend was some sort of modern day Mayberry and that practicing domestic discipline was somehow going to evaporate the distance that had been growing steadily for the last decade or more of their marriage. Lainie didn’t believe in miracle cures. She had spent most of her childhood watching her mother chase one thing after another. If she could have just gotten a better job, they would have been able to pay the rent and not have had to run out of yet another trailer park or apartment complex in the middle of the night. If she could have just found the right man – one that would stick around, one that had a job, one that didn’t smoke up all his and her paycheck in a haze of weed—he’d take them both out of here, and they’d live happier every after. It had never happened. The last time she had seen her mother five years ago, her mama had been still living in that same old trailer park and had been marrying yet another – her fourth or fifth by Lainie’s recollection – pothead husband in a courthouse ceremony.
She didn’t figure this move was going to miraculously cure things either, but there was not much left for them in North Carolina. She had known for a while they couldn’t keep living the way they had been. She was exhausted down to her bones, and pretty much willing to try anything that would get Grant more involved. If he wanted to take over making the decisions in the household, he could have at it. She was beyond tired of doing it by herself. If that meant accepting this community’s little rules and spanking quirks, so be it. She believed in living and letting live anyway, and there was no way Grant would actually spank her. Sure, she knew he – and everyone else in this community – believed in it, but she couldn’t see him actually doing it. For that matter, she couldn’t see herself ever giving him a reason to. She’d been living as a competent adult without supervision for a very long time now. That wasn’t about to stop just because he had decided he wanted to take a hand in matters. Besides, that would require Grant actually taking an interest in her and what she was doing. She couldn’t remember the last time he had actually taken an active interest in what was going on instead of just expecting her to know. It would be nice if he did, but she wasn’t holding her breath. He might be home more now that this new job at Sandy Ridge College was less demanding, but that wasn’t about to change more than a decade of habit.
Upstairs, Grant along with Brent Carmichael, Matt Renton, and Joe Harshaw manhandled the bulky dresser to the top of the stairs and through the bedroom door. As the oldest, Kathleen had been given the larger of the two upstairs bedrooms. Grant suspected it was meant to be the master, but he and Lainie had preferred to take the one downstairs bedroom to give themselves a modicum of privacy from their two teenage daughters.
“Where’s this going?” Brent asked from his position on the opposite end of the dresser.
Grant looked around the room blankly. He had no idea where Kathleen would prefer the furniture to go, and he certainly did not want to deal with the resulting tantrum if – God forbid – they managed to put it in the wrong place. “Kathleen!” Grant called. “Come show us where you want your dresser.” It should’ve taken her no more than seconds to appear. She was supposed to be up here helping to unpack boxes. Through her open bedroom door, Grant could see his younger daughter Natalie unpacking clothes from an open box and hanging them in her closet. Since Kathleen had yet to make an appearance, Grant called again. “Kathleen! I need you to come here. Now.” The dresser was getting uncomfortably heavy even with the four of them spreading the weight between them. If Kathleen did not appear soon, they were going to have to put it down in the first available place, and he would just have to deal with the fallout later. He tried one last time. “Kathleen! Here! Now!”
Finally, Kathleen appeared at the doorway of the family room, earbuds dangling from both ears. She was fifteen, with the lithe, leggy look of adolescence. Physically, she was the image of her mother, except that she had Grant’s own height and his hazel eyes. She scowled vehemently at him. “What?”
Grant took a deep breath and reminded himself, not for the first time, that the move had been hard on the girls. It was natural that Kathleen should be angry for a while. At least, that’s what Lainie kept telling him. “Come show us where to put your dresser,” he said calmly, “and please hurry. This thing is pretty heavy.” Shrugging nonchalantly, Kathleen eased past them and pointed to an expanse of empty wall. The men gratefully lowered the dresser where she indicated, sliding it back to be flush with the wall. “This is my eldest daughter, Kathleen,” Grant said, taking no notice of her scowl and drawing her over to the group of men. “Kathleen, these are Mr. Carmichael, Mr. Renton, and Mr. Harshaw,” he said, indicating each man in turn. Kathleen made no move to acknowledge them.
Brent stepped forward and extended a hand. “Please, call me Brent. Everyone does. I look forward to getting to know you better over the summer. I know it’s hard moving in and not knowing anybody, but we do a lot of activities now that school is out. You’ll have plenty of opportunity to get to know everybody.” Kathleen reluctantly shook Brent’s hand, but made no further effort to acknowledge what he had said. Her signals couldn’t have been clearer if she had hung a no trespassing sign around her neck. She wasn’t interested almost to the point of rudeness, but Brent didn’t seem to mind.
“What kind of activities?” Natalie asked quietly from the doorway of her bedroom. Three years younger than Kathleen. She was shorter and rounder, having not yet lost all of her childlike build or hit her adolescent growth spurt.
Grant opened an arm to her, and Natalie shyly crossed over into it. “This is my younger daughter, Natalie,” Grant said. Unlike her sister, Natalie handled the situation with much more social grace, shyly stepping up to shake each man’s hand in turn.
“There are a lot of activities,” Brent said, in answer to her earlier question. “I usually try to take the teenagers hiking or camping at least once during the summer, and some of the other adults offer things too, art classes, cooking lessons, that kind of thing. It really varies. It depends on what the kids want, and who is available to do what. There will be plenty to keep you busy, I promise.”
Natalie grinned, eyes shining with anticipation. “That sounds great!”
“It does,” Grant agreed, “but first you need to finish getting unpacked.” He turned her and gave her a gentle nudge back in the direction of her bedroom. He turned around in search of Kathleen and found that she had already disappeared, presumably back into the family room from where she had come.
“She seems like a great kid,” Brent said.
“She is,” Grant agreed. “They don’t come any sweeter or more bighearted than Natalie. She’s a little shy at first, bu
t when she warms up to you, she sticks like a rock. Kathleen, now, she’s another story. She’s my strong-willed child.”
“I can see that,” Brent said neutrally.
Joe shot a thoroughly disapproving look in the direction where Kathleen had disappeared. “Seems like she could use an attitude adjustment, if you ask me.” His tone and manner made it perfectly clear just exactly what form he thought that particular attitude adjustment should take too. “Sarah would have never been that disrespectful. She knew what it would get her if she were.” Brent sent Joe a very sharp, very pointed look, and Joe abruptly broke off.
Grant sighed. Great, he hadn’t been in the community for twenty-four hours yet, and he was already screwing up. He couldn’t fault Joe’s observation. His own father or grandfather would’ve likely done much the same. His children though, to his shame, had not been raised with those same standards. Grant had nobody to fault for that but himself. That’s what this move was about. They were starting over, and this time, he was going to get it right.
“I apologize for that,” Grant began.
Joe cut him off. “It’s not you who needs to be apologizing.”
Grant winced inwardly. He was right about that too. Grant would definitely be having a discussion with Kathleen about her behavior later.
“What are we bringing up next?” Matt asked, moving toward the stairs.
Grant followed, grateful for the shift in conversation. “We still have the majority of the bedroom furniture. I’m not so worried about boxes. Lainie and the girls can help with those later. It’s the big pieces I want to get in.” With that, the four men trooped down the stairs, discussing logistics and how best to continue unloading the truck.
By early evening, the moving truck was completely empty, not only of the furniture but also of all the boxes. Grant pulled the large loading door on the back of the truck closed for a final time, amazed at the progress they had made. He had expected it to take them days, unloading in piecemeal fashion as they got the chance. He had been stunned and grateful when Matt, Brent, and Joe had shown up this morning, announcing their intention to help him. He had tried to wave them off, insisting it wasn’t necessary, but they had shrugged and patently ignored him, saying simply that this community took care of their own. With no more explanation than that, they had jumped in and gotten to work. Someone, he wasn’t sure who, had shown up at lunch time with sandwiches and informed Lainie that the ladies would be back in the morning to help her unpack.
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