When A Cowboy Asks (A Rancher's Bride Book 2)

by Chula Stone

  Pinkie bit her lip, pounding her fists on the mattress. Even Vince was having difficulty holding his tongue.

  Even Treli was sounding impatient. “What is it you want?”

  “I want you! I want to see your face first thing in the morning and last thing at night and all the time in between. I want to hear your laugh and taste your cooking and touch your sweet lips. You make all those normal things of life special. I never thought I’d look forward to waking up every day like I do. I just jump out of bed and plan out my day so that I get to you as fast as possible. I can hardly make myself imagine what it would be like to wake up beside you!”

  “Shep! Is that any way to talk?”

  “It would be okay if we were married.”

  “There, you said it. Was that so hard?”

  “Harder than I thought it would be.” Shep gave a nervous chuckle. “But now I’ve said it, so how about it?”

  “Why should I?”

  Vince felt an almost irresistible urge to go out and advise Shep to either run a mile the other direction and be well shed of this little brat or turn her over his knee and teach her some manners. Pinkie covered her mouth with her fist and rolled back onto the bed.

  “Because I asked you, hang it all!” Shep was the impatient one, now. “And because I love you!”

  “You love me?”

  “Well, of course, I do! Would I want to marry you if I didn’t?” Another awkward pause ensued. “Unless of course you don’t love me. I would have sworn you did, but if you don’t…” Shep seemed to choke on the words.

  “I do.”

  “Well, all right then.”

  “I guess so.” Vince could hear the hesitancy in Treli’s voice.

  “That’s settled.” Shep’s comment sounded about as substantial as a ball of cotton candy.

  “Seems to be.”

  “Well, you’ve accepted my engagement ring. That means we’re getting married.” His tone invited… or even demanded a response.

  The sound of a little hand hitting a hard broad shoulder punctuated the scene. “See, you want to hear it, too. The words are important.”

  “All right, you’ve got me there. I’ll ask if you’ll answer,” Shep declared.

  “Fair enough.” Treli laughed again, making Vince wonder if maybe he should demonstrate to Shep once this was all over how a good spanking is given. He knew just whom he wanted to use as a model for the lesson.

  “Treli Pann, will you marry me?”

  “Yes, Barty Shepard, I will marry you.”

  It was Vince’s turn to lie back on the bed, exhausted. Pinkie sat up and clapped her hands.

  Outside the cottage, birds flew up out of the trees and King Solomon started his eerie shriek at the commotion that exploded inside. With Treli’s yelping, Shep’s swearing, Pinkie’s exclaiming and explaining, and Vince’s guffawing, it took several minutes for the situation to calm down long enough for anyone to hear anyone else’s comments. The situation wasn’t helped by Shep leaping into the bedroom then scrambling back out again while Treli shouted commands and warnings.

  “How long have you been there? Why didn’t you say something? Did you hear what I just…Were you there the whole time?”

  “No, we flew in through the window,” Pinkie remarked acerbically. “Of course we were here for the whole sorry mess. That has to be the worst proposal in the history of marriage!”

  “Now, Pinkie,” Vince managed to admonish between wheezes of mirth. “No need to be rude. It was us who just spent the last fifteen minutes eavesdropping, so we have no room to criticize Shep for his lack of proper social graces.”

  Pinkie gave a petulant huff. “But it’s our cottage. We have a right to be here. Treli knew we were in the area. Shep should have taken her away as soon as she told him.”

  Treli pulled Pinkie into the main room of the cottage and hugged her tight. “But I’m glad he didn’t. I don’t mind if you heard us. It was lovely to be proposed to in this beautiful cottage where we’ve worked so hard together.”

  This was news to Vince. “You’ve worked hard here together?”

  Treli sobered a bit and shrugged. “I’ve helped Shep now and again with little things.”

  Vince turned to Pinkie for confirmation. “Didn’t I say this looked like the work of a girl? I’m sure you did your best, but no woman has any business replacing all this trim and sanding these floors.” Vince hated the thought of this girl working so hard at tasks that were in his opinion best left to hands that were already rough with calluses and backs that were strong enough to bear the loads. “Shep, you know what to do about such behavior, don’t you?”

  Shep nodded. “We’re in agreement on that score, but I don’t blame you for letting Pinkie off the hook for her part in the scheme. She meant well and it’s not like she’ll have the chance to repeat the error in judgment.”

  “Pinkie?” Just the one word was all Vince could manage to say.

  “Well, sure, Pinkie handled the… wait a minute.” Shep turned disbelieving eyes on Pinkie. “Didn’t you tell him? I assumed you’d told him when you showed him the cottage.”

  “I showed her the cottage.” Vince corrected him in a low growl, addressing his obviously embarrassed friend but advancing relentlessly on his retreating wife. She almost made it to the kitchen door before he snagged her. “She just cried and acted like it was the best gift a man ever gave his wife.”

  “And it was!” Pinkie cried. “I couldn’t ruin your surprise by telling you that I…”

  “That you what? What did you do?” Vince demanded, an equal mix of annoyance, amusement and resignation tinting his tones. It sounded to Shep as if his boss was falling into a hole he was regretfully familiar with. He reached out and lifted Pinkie up by the waist before turning back to Shep. “And why didn’t you tell me about it?”

  Shep put both his palms up and out towards Vince. “She had finished with the insides before she called me in. I just added the pillar and the floor joists later when I saw they were needed. To her credit, she knew better than to try to do the roof on her own.”

  “The roof!” Vince exploded, nearly blasting said object off the walls in his anger.

  “I assumed she’d tell you in her own time, boss. I never lied for her, but you agreed that day in the café that she could keep her secret. And Pinkie, I wouldn’t have said anything if I hadn’t found you both here. How was I to know you hadn’t told him?”

  “Oh, this isn’t your fault,” Vince assured Shep as he carried a struggling, pleading Pinkie towards the bedroom. “I know who’s at the bottom of all this!”

  “And now it’s her bottom that’s going to be on the receiving end of a lesson only a husband can impart.” Shep took Treli by the hand and hustled her out of the cottage. “Since we know how it feels to have private moments overheard, we’d best skedaddle before he pulls out the paddle.”

  Chapter 11

  “Wait, wait,” Pinkie cried as she pulled against Vince’s hands. “They haven’t left yet! They can hear you!”

  “We heard them. Turnabout is fair play.” He whacked her across the backside twice then once more for good measure. This was positively the most ridiculous situation he had ever found himself in, and having been married to Pinkie for ten years, that was saying something. Truth be told, he had been expecting something like this. It was about time for Pinkie to pull one of her famous stunts. The problem with this one was that it involved much more physical wear and tear on the most precious treasure in his life, who was, much as she hated to admit it, not capable of doing the work of three grown men without it taking its toll on her body. That body that was all too lovely, all too tiny, and all too precious to him. The buggy harness jangled and Vince could tell that Shep was letting the horse show his speed as he pulled away.

  “Sounds like they’re gone.” Pinkie relaxed just enough for Vince to quickly pull her through the door and over to the bed where he sat down.

  “I can always call them back,” Vince threate
ned.

  “No, you wouldn’t!”

  “I will if you don’t start telling me the whole truth and right now! Out with it!”

  “Well, you see, it all began with…”

  Vince popped her bottom hard. “None of your long-winded tales tonight, Pinkie. I’m not in the mood. I want the short version, starting with a list of what you did in this cottage. I don’t even know how bad it was to start off with.” As he spoke, he pulled her skirt up over her waist. She hadn’t dressed fully, so there were no troublesome layers to deal with.

  “It’s hard to think with my heiny in the air like this,” Pinkie grumbled.

  “Is it cold? Here, I’ll warm it up for you!” He proceeded to do as he promised, peppering her backside with hard hot swats, holding her legs down by clamping them in place with one of his thighs. She knew better than to reach back with her hands but he was ready in case she did. He knew from the way she gasped and yelped that the pain had to be increasing like a freight train pulling away from a station. He only hoped his message was getting through with the same sort of power.

  “Please, stop, Vince! You said it was fine if I worked on a surprise for you,” she wailed.

  "I did say that, but as you'll recall, I added that it was fine with me as long as you didn't put yourself in any danger. I should have known that you would only listen to the parts you wanted to hear. And thinking about it, the worst of the work was probably already done long before I told you it was okay."

  "But this is supposed to be our honeymoon!"

  He paused to reposition her. “That’s right. For our anniversary. You’ve been talking about it for months and months. And you’ve been working on this scheme for that long, too! This is why you were all worn out and ragged this summer! You were working on this cottage!” He couldn't stop a short chuckle from sneaking out before he remembered his real grievance. "It's not what you did. It's how you did it. You took risks that you know I never allow." Another salvo of spanks seemed the only comment possible. He delivered them with gusto, sacrificing placement in exchange for speed. Her bottom was turning a nice shade of pink and she was pushing at his legs as if she wanted to flee, so he figured his message must be getting through.

  When he paused for a moment with his hand cupping her nether cheek, she managed to squeak out, “We already cleared that up! It was just a misunderstanding.”

  “Well then, let me make things perfectly clear.” He renewed his assault on her posterior, his smacks landing in a staccato rhythm that even he couldn’t maintain for long without a break. He spanked first her right cheek then her left, giving each side a dozen or so stinging swats before another pause. “I will not have you carrying on like that!”

  “Like what? Whatever I did, I won’t do it again! I promise,” she wailed.

  He took a moment to examine his handiwork and rub a bit of the heat in. “You tell me. What did you do?”

  “I fixed the floors and the trim, like you said.”

  “But what kind of shape did you find this place in, Pinkie?”

  “It wasn’t that bad.”

  “Oh really? So you just replaced the floor on a whim? The boards weren’t rotten?”

  “Not all of them,” Pinkie hedged.

  Vince delivered another set of swats, covering her lovely round buttocks from the fullest part down past the tender crease where they blended into her shapely thighs. “Oh, for goodness sakes!” he cried, shaking his head. The absurdity of the situation was becoming more and more apparent to him as his ire ebbed. Still, he needed to make sure she remembered that, despite the silly manner in which their predicament had ended, its beginning had been all too serious. “From the work you had to do, I can get a pretty good idea of the dangerous condition the structure must have been in when you first started the job. You could have fallen through whatever old rotten boards that were here and really hurt yourself!”

  “I’m sorry! I’m sorry.”

  Again, he paused, both hands rubbing her bottom even as he positioned her so that his target area was more accessible. “So you know better than to roam around unsound, unsafe old places? You admit that you should have shown better judgment?”

  “Yes, I should have known better,” Pinkie admitted ruefully.

  “And you won’t do it again, even in the unlikely event that you do get the chance. I mean, I realize we don’t exactly have hidden cottages strewn all over this valley, but just in case…”

  “I promise,” Pinkie agreed. “I’ll never again repair any old cottages I find. I’ll leave them to rot if I have to, but I won’t go in them.”

  “Or near them?” Vince emphasized his words with a hearty swat to each side.

  “Or near them,” Pinkie agreed hastily. “I’ll give them a wide berth, don’t worry!”

  “You’d better. And this goes for old boats, derelict stores, disused mills and any other structure you can think of. Do I make myself clear?” With every building named, he drummed home his message with a set of swats to the fullest part of her derriere.

  “Yes, very clear! Once was enough. I learned my lesson the first time. It was hard work and nearly did me in. Now, you’ve made your feelings on the matter plain, I promise I’m out of the renovation business for good.”

  Vince looked down at the soft flesh underneath his hand. He loved this woman more than life itself. There were so many things he’d rather be doing with her lovely body, but her sassy, silly spirit would be his undoing as surely as it was every day his greatest joy. Vince gave her backside a good rub. “Then I think we’re done here.” She started to rise, but he put a hand on her bottom. “For the moment anyway.”

  “What do you mean?” She twisted in his lap and he allowed her to rise so they could face each other. Furiously rubbing her rump, she eyed him suspiciously. “I made a mistake and now I’ve paid for it. You don’t hold grudges. You never have, and neither have I. We’ve never been that way with each other.”

  He took her in his arms and willed the love and comfort he longed to give her to flow out of him and into her heart. “I’m not talking about hard feelings lingering, or staying mad. That’s not our way. You did what you did and I’ve had my say about the matter. That’s the end of it.”

  “That’s okay then.” Pinkie sounded satisfied.

  Vince wanted to make sure she understood him fully. “I’m talking about other matters. In all this silly, sorry mess, there’s so much wrong that went on, I’m pretty sure I’m going to figure out other things you did that I’m going to feel obliged to speak to you about.”

  Pinkie pulled away. “Now, Vince, there’s no need to go blowing this up beyond what it was. It’s only a cottage, for goodness sake.”

  “More of a cabin, really,” he repeated with her at the same time. As she started to giggle, he went on. “That’s what I kept telling Shep, as if that made it smaller and easier for him to finish.” Shaking his head, he threw up his hands and grinned.

  “When I think about what he must have thought, with me giving him orders and then you giving him the same orders…” She couldn’t continue because her chuckles got in the way.

  “We could have wound up with double thick floors and two roofs, you realize. I’m just glad we both picked someone with good sense.”

  “A good sense of humor, too, no doubt,” Pinkie added. “How did he keep a straight face once you started… say, when did you start?”

  “Just a couple of weeks or so ago.”

  “And you expected him to get all that work done in that short a time?” Pinkie tossed him an ‘I can’t believe you’ look before making her way out of the bedroom.

  By mutual consent, they moved their conversation into the kitchen where they enjoyed a quick supper consisting mainly of food leftover from lunch. Cold ham and biscuits made them thirsty, so Vince went out to the springhouse for more buttermilk. They finished off their repast with a piece of cake and the remnants of the coffee from breakfast.

  The shadows were deep in the valley wh
ile the autumn sun gave sharp outlines to the trees and outbuildings surrounding the cottage. The barns, sheds, and old-fashioned well lent a homey feel to the otherwise surreal scene. To Vince, everything looked familiar and yet oddly new, as if he were seeing it for the first time. “This house is where my grandfather lived when he first came to this valley.”

  “Really? I didn’t know that.”

  “He made his money here and built that house for my grandmother after many years of marriage.”

  “But your mother didn’t want to live there? I know you didn’t grow up in her family home.”

  “It was too big and grand for her tastes, not to mention her pocketbook. After Grandpa died, there wasn’t enough left over for my dilettante father to keep things going.”

  “I remember Mr. Branson mentioning something about your mother thinking that her inheritance had ruined her life.”

  “It did, in many ways. I was much too young to understand at the time, but apparently my father left when the pressure got too great and his expectations of easy prosperity didn’t come to pass. I know my mother thought she loved him and never got over him, but she made a wonderful life for me and Slingo anyway. That’s one reason I support you with your business interests in town. If my mother could make her own way in the world, I don’t see why you shouldn’t do the same things she did, if they make you happy.”

  “It does make me happy, Vince, but I could be happy without the café and the shop. What I couldn’t be happy without is you… and our children of course.”

  “Our sons will have plenty of choices. They can work on the ranch with me or in town with you. We’ve got them covered either way.”