Warming Emerald: The Red Petticoat Saloon

by Maren Smith

  “Don’t do that again,” he warned. “I can take a lot, Lydia. I know in my heart, if ever I were to marry someone that someone would be you. I knew it the first time you sank your teeth into me. But, while there’s a lot I will tolerate, disrespect isn’t one of them.”

  “Marry?” Lydia’s jaw dropped all over again. “Have you lost your ever-lovin’ mind? My four-year-old baby is about to be arrested for nothing he can help, and here you stand, telling me… what? You love me? You want to marry me? You don’t even know me!”

  He shrugged, both with shoulders and eyebrows. “I know enough.”

  “You know enough?” Her green eyes narrowed, first on him and then on his grip on her wrist. She tugged, but he wasn’t about to let go. Maneuvering in front of the chair, he sat down instead.

  “I can see you’re building up for another explosion.”

  He was right too. The pressure was bubbling up inside her, like home-brew bottled too soon. Any minute now she was going to pop her cork and splatter everything within reach, including Garrett.

  “Let it not be said I can’t take lessons from my brother’s page,” he said, drawing her to his right side. He winked at her. “Just don’t tell him that.”

  It was a tossup whether it was the wink that unraveled her or the flat of his lap, presented in front of her in a threat no gem who ever worked at the Red Petticoat could begin to ignore. Lydia had worked here longer than most and she had taken more than one tumble across the foot of the bed for a dose of Gabe’s belt—mostly for losing her temper. Or biting a customer. She’d done both with Garrett. A tickle of dread moved up the backs of her legs. It crawled across the surface of her bottom, as if her prickling skin somehow knew she deserved to be standing here, one wrist trapped in a man’s firm hand, staring down at a lap more than capable of holding her in position until the rise and fall of his strong right arm was done.

  “You’re not spanking me,” she breathed, hating how it came out of her low and trembling. As if she were afraid. She wasn’t. She wasn’t afraid of anyone, much less Garrett.

  Garrett both nodded and winced. “I am hoping I won’t have to, but you’re kind of backing me into a corner. Let’s see if we can avoid it.” He patted his knee. “Sit.”

  She’d sooner sit on a cactus. Her look must have said as much, because his look also changed. Only his eyebrows moved, and yet that feeling of ominous warning began to grow heavy all throughout the room.

  “One,” he said, in a tone that was no less menacing for all that it held notes of amusement.

  “One, what?” she countered, honestly unsure what she was more: confused over why he should think counting numbers worse than simply spanking her, or annoyed that he had to sound so damned paternal while he did it. She had a father. Hell, she’d had two. They were both dead now, and she wasn’t in any mood to be adopted by a third.

  He pointed to his knee and with even softer authority said, “Sit down, Lydia. Right here.”

  Sit, not bend over? If not for his grip on her arm, she would have recoiled. It was a trap, it had to be. Lydia shook her head. “You don’t have any right to—”

  “Two,” Garrett said, cutting off her protest mid-sputter.

  She floundered, blinking rapidly, at a total loss for how to proceed. “H-how many do I have?”

  “Not nearly enough, I promise. Your hairbrush fell out of your bag when you threw it at me. It’s there on the floor behind you. Would you mind handing it to me?”

  Startled, Lydia twisted far enough to—sure enough—see the hairbrush lying bristles-down on the floor practically under her skirts. Just as startled, she looked back at him. “Yes, I do. I think I mind very much. If I hand you that hairbrush, you’ll use it on me!”

  “Would you like to sit on my knee instead?”

  Indignation, embarrassment, anger—the heated flames of all licked up behind her cheeks, flushing them hot as a sunburn. “If you think I’m just going to let you spank me like—like—like some errant farm girl dancing to the tune of your hickory switch—”

  “Nice imagery,” he complimented, a spark of interest in his eyes even suggesting that compliment was sincere. “Hairbrush, though. There aren’t any good switches here in town.” He brightened. “All the best ones grow out behind my house. Don’t ask me how I know. A man should never reveal the secrets behind his brother’s harmonious household.”

  “—you can think again!” Lydia stubbornly continued, her voice rising in volume and shrillness. “I do not accept your authority over me!”

  His smile turned wry. “I’ve noticed.”

  “And I will not lie meek as a rag while you batter me at your leisure!”

  “I was intending to spank rather than to batter and so far, you’ve yet to say anything to convince me it’s not long overdue. Or well-deserved.”

  Too angry for caution, Lydia abruptly switched directions. Instead of leaning away, she took a sudden step toward him, looming as she glared hot into Drake grey eyes that seemed only to soften the longer he gazed back at her. “Try it,” she seethed. “See what happens, I dare you.”

  “Damn.” Clicking his tongue against his teeth, Garrett shook his head. “I never was one to look past a dare.” He tsked again. “Just remember, sweetheart, how many chances I gave you to avoid this and how you refused each and every one of them.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “I will never forgive you.”

  “Probably not.” He offered his sunniest beam, though the feigned good humor never once touched his eyes. “But I haven’t given up hope that you might yet warm to me. Hopefully sooner rather than later, since I truly do plan to marry you. Sorry to have to say this, sweetheart: Three.”

  He wasn’t the first customer to try to wrestle her into position across his lap, or even to attempt it without first paying for the privilege. For some reason, when it was paid for, it was easier for her to submit. It became a game then. An adult version of every child’s fondest let’s pretend fantasy: House. She could almost put herself into that role, that of a naughty Mommy made to stand before disapproving Daddy, first for a stern talking to and then for the even sterner comeuppance that invariably followed. She put a high price on her submission, so when a “Daddy” was willing to pay, she always took what she was given. She’d fuss, she’d pout, she’d rub her bottom when it was done and pretend to be submissive as hell once discipline was done and Daddy was randy enough to take the after-comfort to a whole different realm of sensual depravity. But for those would-be “Daddies” who dared to play House without first paying the price, the word “submission” was nowhere in Lydia’s extensive vocabulary. Not in Muwekma and certainly not in English.

  Garrett was about to find out how very un-submissive she really was. Or so she thought. The instant he counted “three” she attacked, wrenching her captured wrist and swinging her knee into his side. What she wasn’t prepared for was how quickly he countered both actions, yanking her arm in the direction she wrenched instead of resisting and turning her knee to the ribs into an off-balanced kick. He arrested her fall when he reversed direction and pulled. She didn’t sit gracefully, but landed in a sprawling heap of flailing limbs and kicked out skirts, face down across the lap she’d so stubbornly tried to avoid.

  She lashed backward, blindly clawing to grab his ear. He caught her wrist and promptly pinned it to the small of her back. Lydia shouted, a wordless caw of surprise when his arm wrapped her waist, lifting and hauling her so off-kilter across his thighs that her scrambling feet lost contact with the floor. That rather dubious privilege was very nearly usurped by her nose. Had she not slapped her free hand against the hardwood slats directly beneath her, she was certain she’d have planted face-first into floor.

  Or maybe not. In the split second it took her to recover her surprise, Lydia realized two things: One, Garrett had her in a pretty solid hold, with his sturdy lap keeping her up off the floor far enough both not to smack her forehead or her nose (despite her initial fear) and his hand pressing down
on the small of her back, pinning her in place; and two, she had lost all leverage with which to continue the fight. There was no direction in which she could pull, twist or push to escape the firmness of his grip on her wrist. The longer she tried, the more pressure he applied until it began to feel self-defeating. It wasn’t his hand alone keeping her pinned down, it was her own arm!

  She tried to roll off his knee, but that desperate fish-flop attempt ended when he grabbed her by the hips and then scissored her between his legs, using his own thighs as a vise both beneath and behind her own. Now she couldn’t kick, couldn’t move, and couldn’t defend herself. She was caught.

  And he was going to spank her now because of it.

  Lydia grit her teeth, her face burning with the humiliation of her predicament. Well, she wasn’t the first woman and certainly not the first gem to suffer this fate, and she doubted she’d be the first to die of it. Garrett, on the other hand, would be extremely lucky if he survived long enough to escape the room once he was done.

  Her whole body jostled as she felt the first undignified tug at the back of her skirts. Caught between her legs and his, it took effort for him to work the excess cloth up and out of his way. She did everything she could not to make it easy for him, but in the end, he reduced all her struggles to little more than muscle clenches and impotent wiggles. In less than a minute, he had her skirts tossed up over her back and shoulders, and now was using her own hand to pin those out of his way too.

  “Bastard!” she hissed.

  “That’s my girl.” He chuckled, making short work of the ribbon that kept the back halves of her drawers together. “Never apologize if you can dig yourself a deeper hole.”

  She kicked with all her might, but her legs were so deftly trapped that it was all reduced to little more than a flex of her knee and swipe of her foot and a lot of thrashing from the shoulders up, but fat lot of good that did her. She fumed, the searing fury of her stare all but burning holes in the floor as he undressed her upon his knee. He did it like a lover—plucking at her ties as if she were a Christmas present to be unwrapped and parting the halves of her drawers to lay her bottom bare.

  “Isn’t this a peach,” he mused, and even dared to let the barest tips of his hated fingers trace the curve of her right buttock, following the roundness of her flesh from hip all the way to crack.

  She was going to kill him.

  “Do it if you’re going to,” she snarled through gritted teeth. “If not, let. Me! Up!”

  The broad width of his huge hand positively flattened the entire right side of her bottom. It struck like a thunderclap and stung like she’d just pressed her butt into a nest of vengeful hornets. Lydia sucked a startled breath, eyes and mouth both rounding wide. She snapped her mouth shut again barely in time to muffle an involuntary yelp.

  Oh, shit. That was his hand? How could that possibly be his hand? It was almost worse than Gabe’s belt, and that was appalling. How could anything made of human flesh be worse than Gabe’s belt?

  “You know,” Garrett began as if they were naught but talking about the weather. “My Pa used to say: When the ears don’t listen, sometimes you can open them again by working the problem from the bottom up.”

  His hand caught her left side and this time there was no biting back that yelp. It burst out of her at the same high-speed velocity that the hornets used as they crawled the whole of her bottom now, stinging her repeatedly.

  “I used to hate it when he said that,” Garrett continued. “Because you always knew what was coming next when he did.”

  Four swats fell, hard and fast, and all of them caught her square on the right buttock, stirring up the hornets’ beyond all calming and igniting a bloom of slow throbbing fire deep in the punished flesh.

  Lydia bucked. Her toes scraped the floor, but no matter how she flexed and strained, she couldn’t break her imprisoned hand out of his hold and she could not roll over. Not even far enough to tuck her bottom out of his reach. She gasped and mewed, clamped her lips tight to stifle any further sounds, and tried to pretend she couldn’t feel a thing when he switched his attentions to the left of her bottom, peppering that side with twice as many as its smarting twin. “Ow, ow, ow!” she squeaked.

  “Not that we didn’t deserve it when we pushed him to that point. We always did.” Back and forth now, Garrett’s hand began a rapid swatting dance. No longer inciting the hornets to greater degrees of painful vengeance; now he was killing them out with pain and fire. “But my old man, he was a wiry old devil with an arm that took forever to tucker out.”

  Oh God… Lydia squeaked again.

  “I like to think I take after him.”

  Abandoning the floor, her free hand snapped back, palm up and fingers wildly splayed to protect as much of her flaming bottom as she could. In the brief pause that followed, as he took unyielding hold of that wrist too, pinning it across its twin and pressing both her hands to the small of her back, the surging hornets returned. The stings were hotter now; the throb, impossible to bear.

  “I like to think—” His iron-hard hand resumed its punishing torment as if he’d never stopped. “—that I can tackle any problem. Especially from the bottom up.”

  Lydia broke. She arched as high as she could, throwing her head back, the chestnut wave of her hair flying all around as she bucked and thrashed, and lost her composure to her first shrill wail of pain and surrender.

  “But when you need those ears to open up, I have to agree Pa’s logic was absolute. Sometimes this really is the only way.”

  “No!” Her feet snapped up, but hit his restraining thigh without ever getting high enough to protect her blistering skin. “Stop! Wait, please!”

  “I need your ears to open, Lydia.” He pushed her feet back down. In some of her struggles, the open halves of her drawers must have fallen into his way, because he paused long enough to caress each thin barrier back off her flushed and aching bottom flesh, tucking them in around her hips, tugging the lower parts wider open to give himself as much new, pale, and previously unpunished bottom flesh to work with before starting all over again.

  Instead of helping alleviate the stinging pain, it rejuvenated it. The hornets were regrouping. The fire flared, hotter and hotter with each new heartbeat-like throb. This was worse than Gabe’s belt ever had been and for a moment, Lydia didn’t know why. But then Garrett spanked faster, the flat of his hand slapping down in a brisk rhythm of unabating hurt that not all her struggles or whimpers or teeth-gritted cries could prevent, and suddenly it hit her what was making this so bad.

  It wasn’t that Garrett’s hand hit harder, it didn’t. Truth be told, as bad as this felt, he wasn’t putting much strength behind each downward slap. He was spanking faster than Gabe did, and the unbroken closeness of the accumulating spanks made the hurt build hotter and faster than the belt, so much so that it was making it impossible for Lydia to think much less to breathe. But, she probably could have managed to grit her teeth and overcome that, were it only that alone. It wasn’t.

  It wasn’t even the length and breadth of Garrett’s hand. After so many months of riding herd on the often misbehaving gems of the Red Petticoat, Gabe had become something of a self-proclaimed master at the art of belt whippings. He could make that wide strip of well-worn leather wrap and hug the whole of a girl’s behind and, in a matter of three strokes, cover every inch of spankable surface. On the rare few occasions when he decided something “more” was required, he’d employ a four-stroke method that didn’t just whip the whole bottom, but took his discipline down onto the thighs. When a gem took a four-stroker, she knew right from the sobbing start there would be no sitting later on.

  So far, Garrett hadn’t smacked her thighs. Apparently, he didn’t know that trick and Lydia wasn’t about to educate him on how much more sensitive that flesh could be. But even without him spanking below the bum, Lydia would cheerfully have taken Gabe’s worst four-stroke whipping—a hundred of them; a thousand, even!—rather than have to do this. B
ecause Gabe was a friend. He was a fearsome protector. In many cases, he was more of a father figure to the Red Petticoat’s gems than their own paternal parent had been. But the one thing he never was, was intimate.

  When Gabe unbuckled his belt and ordered a gem to assume the position, the woman in question knew exactly what was expected of her. She faced the bed, pulled up her skirts and pulled down her unders, and then bent herself over and held onto whatever she had to in order to stay in position until it was done. Too much squirming or kicking or standing up altogether was a sure-fire way to turn a three-stroker into the much-feared four. But there was no intimacy in bending over a bed, and there was a whole mountain of it in being held pinioned across a man’s knee, with his belt buckle digging into her side and the press of his cock under her stomach and the flat of his hard, bare hand raining down again and again on her equally bare behind.

  That was what was making this worse. Being held across the knee was vulnerability, and Lydia couldn’t stand being vulnerable. It was comfort and discipline wrapped into one when the very last thing she wanted from Garrett was comfort of any kind. And worst of all, it was revealing—physically because with her drawers open and bent as she was with her legs so firmly trapped between his, she knew he couldn’t help but see every shadowy feminine part of her; and emotionally because by the time he’d swatted out the last of the angry hornets, at the same time stoking that burning throb into a raging bonfire of heat and pain, she was a teary-eyed mess. Her anger having long abandoned her, all Lydia could feel was the fear and sorrow now, and ever increasing levels of distress and regret because he just kept spanking. He wasn’t stopping. At this rate, what if he never stopped, and why couldn’t she ever learn to keep her silly mouth shut?

  How much more could she take? She didn’t know, but the hopelessness of it was growing inside her. Growing and growing until it filled every burning, fiery, hurting part of her. It broke her, just a little bit. Cracking her right down through the middle like the brittle glass of a window pane smacked too hard by heavy hail. She splintered. She could feel it. Her determination not to give Garrett the satisfaction of thinking he’d won simply because he was walloping her bottom, making her brittle inner self fracture outward in a spider-web of fine shards all barely held together by sheer force of will. She wasn’t an unruly child. She was a woman grown, and grown women didn’t fall sobbing upon any man’s knees no matter how much her bottom hurt or how many oceans’ worth of tears kept filling up her eyes. Blinding her. Overflowing her already damp lashes and she couldn’t even slap them away because her hands were being held behind her in the manacle-fast grip of his.