by Hill, April
He was just beginning to understand something else—what life could be like, living with a complicated, determined woman.
Griff had never had to seduce a woman before, since all of the women he’d known in that way—professional and otherwise—had always seemed pleased to climb into bed with him. A few minutes of kisses and fondling of breasts, moving quickly to the undoing of corset strings and the taking down of drawers. And then, a thorough exploration with his mouth and hands between the lady’s opened thighs, until she began to sigh and tremble, and beg him to come inside her.
Somehow, Griff had never actually thought of any of that in relation to a woman with whom he was actually in love—about fucking such a woman. Yet, there it was—the one blunt, frank word that accurately described most of his experience with women. Not “making love,” but plain, hard, mutually enthusiastic fucking, until both exhausted parties were either sated, or finally too worn out to do it again without a couple of hours of much-needed sleep.
Not that all of that hadn’t been agreeable, but it wasn’t what he wanted with Elyn, and seducing the woman he loved—if that’s what it came down to—was going to be awkward.
Griff needn’t have worried. As willing as all those earlier women had been to be fondled and fucked, Elyn was just as ready and willing to be seduced and deflowered.
That evening, when her housekeeping chores were done, she didn’t come into the parlor and sit with him, as they normally did on chilly evenings. Instead, she went into his bedroom without a word and closed the door. After a few minutes in mystified silence, waiting for her to return, Griff knocked at the bedroom door, and when there was no answer, he opened the door a crack and looked in.
She was in his bed, with the quilt tucked modestly around her chest. Her shoulders and upper arms—and presumably everything underneath the covers—were bare. He could see that she was shivering slightly, possibly with the cold, and possibly not.
“I know now, that you don’t want me here,” she said quietly. “So, I’ll be leaving in the morning.”
He could see that she’d been crying, and she certainly looked sad—even a bit pitiful. Maybe genuine, Griff thought, and maybe carefully calculated to make him feel guilty. Knowing Elyn as he did, he figured the odds in this case were on the second option.
“Do you need help packing?” he asked coolly. He’d come in the bedroom ready to apologize, ready to explain himself, and more than ready to take her to bed and show her how much he loved and wanted her—now that he’d decided for sure that he did. But this clever little act of “poor, rejected me” was a bit too much for him. If there was one thing Griff had always disliked, it was being manipulated—by women, in particular. What this woman needed wasn’t help with packing her bags, it was to have her behind paddled—and he was in the mood to do just that.
Elyn sighed. “Is that what you really want?” she inquired mournfully. “To have me go away and never come back?”
“Are you naked underneath that quilt?” he asked, ignoring her question.
She nodded and smiled. “I’m afraid so. I packed everything I own.”
“Good. That’ll make this a helluva a lot easier.”
At this point, Elyn was beginning to get nervous. Her careful thought-out plan to make him seduce her wasn’t going the way she had hoped. And when he took her arm and pulled her across the bed on her stomach, she knew for certain that the lovely evening she’d planned so carefully—of being deliciously deflowered—was going downhill fast.
She was still trying to think of what to say to save what was left of the evening when Griff sat down on the edge of the bed, dragged her across his knee, and shoved her thrashing legs apart to deliver one sharp, painful smack to each of her inner thighs—an unexpected development that made it clear to her that this wasn’t some sort of manly cowboy prelude to lovemaking, but the beginning of what promised to be a very disagreeable, bare-bottomed spanking.
Griff was angry, but he was still a man—a red-bloodied man in his prime, who’d been living in the middle of nowhere with three other men and a lot of cows for far too long. Which is why his first look at Elyn’s pale ivory buttocks made it hard to keep his mind on what he had started. With her draped across his knee, with the top of her head nearly touching the floor, her hair in her eyes, and her beautiful ass squirming in his lap, perilously close to his crotch, it was all he could do not to toss her down on the bed, and take one of her full, round breasts in his mouth, and…
Instead, he raised his right hand above his head, and brought it down hard and fast on her perfectly elevated butt. Griff was hoping that the noise of his callused palm as it made contact with her ass would make the smack feel worse than it really was, but it was still enough to bring forth a shriek of outrage from Elyn, along with a stream of obscenities insulting both his mother, and his manhood. Which brought on another swat from Griff, who was actually beginning to enjoy himself. This walloping had been a long time coming, and he fully intended to make the most of it. Not ready to surrender, and even more unwilling to yell and give him the upper hand—which he already had, in any case—Elyn clenched her teeth.
“Say you’re sorry for that little act you staged for me,” he told her, adding a sharp smack to the exact center of her butt for emphasis, “and I’ll let you up.”
“Go to hell!”
Griff sighed, shook his head, and landed another scalding swat to the exquisitely sensitive spot where Elyn’s tender thighs met her even more tender ass. It was finally enough to make her unclench her teeth, open her mouth, and howl—just once, but with feeling.
By the tenth, or maybe the twelfth resounding smack, Elyn’s backside was splotched and beginning to turn from pink to red, and Griff decided he’d made his point, whatever it had been. Whether or not Elyn had gotten his point remained to be seen.
The spanking had been short, and not particularly painful, but definitely embarrassing.
But if Griff’s “point” had been to convince Elyn that she didn’t love him, he had just wasted his time.
* * *
Elyn was clearing away the hasty, last-minute evening meal she’d made, and that they’d barely touched, when he returned from the barn with the grim news that what had begun as a light snow was building to a major storm. By morning, he warned, they’d probably be snowed in.
It had been an uneasy supper, with virtually no conversation. With neither Elyn nor Griff able to get beyond the events of the last few days, the gulf between them seemed enormous, and impossible to bridge. The only thing that had been settled, in a few brief, cool exchanges, was that Elyn would be leaving as soon as possible, and returning to Rainbow Water.
Elyn, never a believer in leaving well enough alone, and always ready to speak her mind—to “clear the air,” as she put it—was usually the one to try to break through such awkward moments. Tonight, though, she was simply too tired and unhappy to make the effort, and Griff had retreated into that safe male cave of glum, stoic silence that to her, as it did to most women, implied indifference.
But Griff was a long way from being indifferent to what was happening. He simply didn’t know how to fix a situation where anything he said or did was more likely to make things worse, rather than better. And now, with the early blizzard threatening to prevent Elyn from leaving, possibly for weeks, he knew that they might well be facing a long, hard winter—together, yet alone.
“Are you sure?” Elyn asked wearily. “Maybe it’ll stop by morning, and I can get in on…”
Griff shrugged. “Maybe, but I’m not going to count on it, and neither should you. The temperature out there must have dropped by twenty degrees since I came in to supper. Will and Jim are going out to pull the younger stock in closer, and corral the ones they can. If the snow gets much deeper, we won’t be able to get feed to them.”
She glanced out the front window, which was already becoming obscured by the sleet and drifting snow.
“Are you going with Will and Jim?” she asked
nervously.
“No. I’ve got a mare down ready to foal, and in trouble. The lady’s timing couldn’t have been worse. She’s young and scared, and at this point, it looks like we may lose her, and the foal.”
Elyn grabbed her coat and shawl from the hall tree. “You’ll need help. I’ll come with you, and…”
“No, you won’t, damn it,” Griff growled. “Just stay inside and keep the fire going. If there’s one thing I don’t need tonight, it’s another adolescent female to worry about.”
Startled by the anger and impatience in his voice, Elyn made no reply, and returned her coat to the hook. Griff paused briefly, as if he wanted to say something else, but turned instead, and walked out the door into a howling gale.
She waited for an hour, then went quickly to the bedroom and gathered up several quilts—including the hand-sewn and embroidered coverlet that Amelia had made for Griff’s bed. Another brief stop in the kitchen for dishtowels, and she was out the door, trudging through knee-deep drifts of snow that blanketed her arms and legs in heavy, wet sheets, making every step forward exhausting, and sometimes impossible. She sank up to her thighs several times, and had to kick her way free in order to crawl out of the impression in the snow made by her own body. The force of the shrieking wind stung her eyes and face with wind-driven ice crystals that felt like slivers of shattered glass on any small area of exposed skin, and within minutes, her vision had become so bleary, and her eyelids crusted with ice, that she was forced to squint.
She had walked the short distance from the house to the corrals hundreds of times, but now, in the blinding snow, it was almost impossible to make out the dim gray shape of the barn, and she was forced to feel her way from the porch to the gate by holding on to the picket fencing that Griff had built for Amelia, to keep the livestock out of the small front yard. From the gate onward, though, there was nothing to use as a landmark. The world beyond the yard had gone flat and white. It was only a hundred yards or so to the relative safety of the barn, but once the fence was behind her, she had turned around to try to get her bearings, and found herself disoriented.
Suddenly, the old joke about being as wide as a barn door was no longer funny. To blunder past the barn without finding it could mean wandering off into the empty white landscape of rapidly deepening snow banks. Winters here could last for months, and Elyn tried not to think about the stories she had heard since she came to Wyoming, about men being lost in the snow, and not being found until the spring thaw.
She was about to turn back when the wind dropped off for just a moment, and she saw a dim light flickering somewhere off to her left—a kerosene lamp, she hoped, in the single barn window. Had she been looking elsewhere, she would have missed it. And had she continued in the direction she’d been going, she would have passed by the barn and attached horse corral entirely, trudging deeper and deeper into the barren, open field, until she dropped from exhaustion.
* * *
When she finally kicked her way through the deep snow blocking the barn door, it took most of her remaining strength to shove the cumbersome door wide enough to get through—and then collapse gratefully onto the heap of wet blankets.
She was too tired to feel grateful when Griff didn’t seem angry with her, though, and lay where she dropped for several minutes, while he knelt down and wrapped her in two of the quilts.
“I told you not to—” he began, but Elyn waved her hand weakly to stop him.
“No lectures, please. You can wallop the daylights out of me later, but right now, since you seem to think I’m an uneducated adolescent about all things sexual, I want you to teach me how horses have babies. It’s probably not that different from what a woman goes through, so I’m thinking it’s the kind of information I might need—one day soon.”
Griff shook his head. “You real sure you want to do this?”
“I’m sure. How’s the mother?”
“She’s doing better, but it’s still going to be a long night, and a damned cold one—for you as well as her.”
She indicted the pile of blankets. “Sorry, but I couldn’t get the damned bed down here.”
He smiled. “For her?”
Elyn flushed. “Don’t be silly, Friend Harper. Horses are too smart to sleep on a horsehair mattress, and wake up with an aching back. Now, should I wash my hands, or something?”
“Nope. By tomorrow morning, you’ll need scrubbing down from the top of your head to your toes—and in all the little nooks and crannies.”
When Elyn blushed for the second time, she was surprised to feel pleasantly warm all over, including in a few of those nooks and crannies Griff had mentioned.
The young mare in the rear stall was lying on her side now, her flank and rump muscles trembling as she labored to expel a large foal with one hind leg bent under its body.
Griff knelt on one knee, placed his hand on the mare’s belly, and shook his head. “I’m going to try to get her further over, so she won’t crush the foal when it starts to come out. When I do, you’re going to need to help me by getting your arm inside, and grabbing the front hooves.”
“Inside what?” Elyn asked nervously, although she already had a fairly good idea of what he meant. She had watched Abner do the same thing with a laboring ewe, and while she wasn’t in the least squeamish, she knew that it was a move that could be dangerous for the mother, when done wrong.
“You’ll do just fine, sweetheart,” Griff said quietly. “Just keep pulling—not too hard, but keep up the pressure, and don’t let go. I’ll tell you when to reach in and try to free the rear leg.”
Elyn blanched. “What if I do something wrong and hurt him? Or her?”
“He—or she—is still strong, and it’ll be moving around, doing what it can to help. The thing to remember is that we need to straighten that leg, and get him—or her—out before the mother gets too tired to do her part.”
“Is the baby going to die?”
“Not if you and I can help it. Now, get ready to pull, and don’t stop until I tell you to. All right?”
She nodded. “Is it too late to change my mind?”
He grinned. “Yep. Now, lift the lady’s tail out of way, and when his—or her—head starts to show, get both hands around the front feet, and…”
“I know,” Elyn said in a half-grunt, “grab, and pull—and pray, maybe?”
He nodded. “It couldn’t hurt.”
* * *
Just under ten minutes later, while Ellen’s arm was still inside the mare’s birth canal, trying to maneuver the foal’s leg into the correct position, a flood of brownish water and blood gushed from between the mare’s own rear legs, drenching Elyn from head to toe, and expelling the foal—in one great, sudden push—onto a waiting pile of clean hay.
In an ecstasy of relief and joy, Elyn forgot herself, and exclaimed—at the top of her lungs, “Holy shit!”—Which turned out to be a very apt description of what had happened. The exhausted mare had lost more than just her “water.” She had also emptied her bladder, and her bowels—into Elyn’s lap.
* * *
It took close to half an hour for the weary mother to regain sufficient strength to begin nuzzling and exploring her firstborn, and for the equally tired foal to struggle to his still shaky legs and totter around her, looking for his first meal. Worried that the new mother was cold, Elyn pulled Amelia’s embroidered coverlet from the pile, and laid it gently over the mare’s body—which caused Griff to raise one questioning eyebrow.
“Is that gesture something I need to worry about?” he asked with an amused half-smile. “Or purely coincidence?”
Elyn sighed. “A coincidence, mostly. There’s not a clean blanket in the house now. We might just as well sleep here all night.” She nodded toward the mare and foal. “To look after them.”
He walked over to the window and looked out. “The wind’s died down a little. We should probably try to get back up to the house now, if we’re going to. They’ll do fine now. All they need is res
t. Being born’s not always an easy thing to watch, but nature usually has a way of taking care of things once the hard part’s over. She’s actually a very strong, healthy lady—just a little too young and inexperienced to know when to let herself be courted.”
“Are we talking about the horse here?” Elyn inquired sweetly. “Or is it more like a pointed lesson about life—for me?”
Griff didn’t answer, but pointed to the mare. She had shaken the coverlet off, and gotten to her feet now, to allow the foal to nurse.
“That’s your reward for being here tonight,” he said, smiling.
Elyn got to her feet as well and shook her skirts. “I think I already got my reward—straight from the horse’s…” She laughed. “Well, you know.”
Without another word, Griff swept her up in his arms, told her to reach down and close the barn door, and then started back to the house, carrying her through the ever-deepening snow. He’d been right earlier. Elyn wasn’t leaving anytime soon. By morning, they’d be snowed in—maybe for weeks.
* * *
It took close to half an hour to reach the house, and once they were safely inside, Griff sloshed several buckets of cold water into the bathroom tub, and put two additional buckets of water on the stove to boil. “If I ever saw a woman who needed a Saturday night bath,” he said cheerfully, “it’s you.”
“And afterward, we’ll be sleeping in our clothes,” she moaned. “I took all the blankets to the barn with me.”
He pointed to a large trunk in the corner. “You’ll find a few old quilts in there. Mostly worn out, but better than nothing. The water’ll be hot in a minute.”
