Page 9 of Something Has To Give

“Drink from the tap, you…you animal!” she spat and fled for the stairs.

She could hear him laughing, a hard and bitter sound, all the way back to the kitchen. God, her heart was beating a mile a minute. She bellied up to the sink, falling down to rest her elbows on the thin ledge of counter between the old porcelain and the laminate edge. Covering her scalding hot face with both hands, she tried to think. This was awful, this was impossible. How was she expected to co-exist—even for just a short amount of time—with someone who dealt with women by spanking them? This was the twentieth century, damn it! Who did that anymore?

Well, there was no way she was going to let him out when he was still in that abusive frame of mind. No way at all. Maybe after he’d spent a night or two trying to bed down in the tub he’d be more amenable.

A shadow crossed the window, startling her upright. Her jaw gaped and she stared as two bare feet dropped down from the second floor to become naked calves (very manly, but naked calves), and then knees and thighs (hard, thick, muscular thighs that bulged as his feet scrambled to find something to brace against) followed by hips that were clad in nothing but a pair of white briefs (holy Hannah, that bulge). The wooden-backed brush was slung gun-slinger-style in the waist of his underwear, with the bristled head poking up and the tip of that long handle protruding from under the elastic of his right leg. Feet finally finding something other than the glass of the kitchen window to push against, he gave a hop and dropped the rest of the way to the ground.

Eyes huge and mouth hanging open, Elsie stared as Rydecker stood up. He was just tall enough for his head and the top of his naked shoulders to peek up above the windowsill. His dark eyes narrowed. His breath steamed the air, looking for all the world like a dragon seething smoke.

“Oh…shit…” Elsie said.

Moving very slowly, Rydecker took the hairbrush out of his underwear and pointed at her with it through the glass. “You,” he growled. “Your ass is mine.”

Chapter Four

Quint saw her mouth move and heard her second—starting to sound a little panicked—“Oh…shit!”

Yeah. He smiled grimly. He was a little surprised to find he could still fit through that narrow bathroom window too.

Enough gaping. Time to get this party started.

He feinted right, as if running for the front door and Elsie raced to beat him there. But Quint ran left instead. The grass felt stiff with frost and by the time he reached the rear porch, his feet were screaming for relief from the cold. Unfortunately, the back door was locked, but around the other side of the house, the double cellar doors lifted on his first strong yank and he heaved one side open far enough to access the rickety wooden steps. It was dark in the windowless cellar. The only light was what daylight filtered in behind him and once he got halfway across the floor, that didn’t help him much.

He crashed into what felt like his dad’s old army tent (kind of musty smelling now), fell into a couple cardboard boxes (Christmas decorations, he thought, something broke) and whacked his head into what felt like an obstacle course of hardballs dangling from the ceiling rafters. He batted at them as he ran, but the last one caught him square on the nose and, to add insult to injury, he whacked his toes on the lip of the bottommost step and went down hard and cursing on one knee.

Above him, Elsie’s panicked footsteps beat across the floorboards for the back door and, swearing and hopping, Quint ran up the cellar stairs. He threw his shoulder against it, but the cellar door, which always used to stick, opened easily, spilling him clumsily into the narrow hallway behind her.

Elsie spun with a shriek; Quint peeled himself off the wall and limped two steps forward, trapping her in the laundry room. The only way she had to go now was out the back door. The only thing he wasn’t sure of was whether he could move fast enough to catch her while she was still fumbling to get the lock open, or if she’d be in his hands and then over his knee before she could leap off the back porch and run screaming through the field.

Quint smirked and stalked her down the short hallway, reaching for the hairbrush at his hip. “Like I said, your ass is…”

He felt all around his waist, but his grandmother’s old favorite go-to disciplinary device, the hairbrush, was gone. He’d dropped it somewhere in the mad scramble to get back in the house. Well, hell…

He scowled at Elsie, but with her back against the locked door, she was all through running. She grabbed a broken broom from beside the washing machine, snapped the handle in half right along the duct-taped seam and held it like a samurai warrior wielding his sword.

Quint had spent the last twelve years of his life in the military and while not all of that time had been spent in combat situations, he was a man who had experience evading knives, bullets, shrapnel and bombs. There was no way he was going to back down from a woman armed with a broken broom handle.

He moved in sideways, grabbing when she swung at him and cursing loudly when it hit his shoulder before he could catch it. She might have been only one woman, and a small one at that, but she was stronger than she looked. She was also wily—while he fumbled to grab the broom handle, she snatched a bucket full of cleaning supplies off a nearby shelf and flung that at his head. When he threw up his hands to avoid a mouthful of powdered cleanser, she body-slammed him into the dryer with all the fury of a defensive linebacker and ran right over the top of him. He grabbed after her, missed and was nearly kicked in the head as she escaped.

He scrambled to give chase, cornering her in the kitchen, where Elsie became the dervish from hell.

He ducked a pot—damn, she was fast! And fierce, so unbelievably, beautifully fiery and fierce—and in retrospect, laughing at that point probably wasn’t the wisest thing he could have done, but he couldn’t help it. This was unlike any fight with any woman he had ever had. Even the worst marital argument he and Maydeen had endured was nothing compared to this. Those had been a lot of yelling and swearing and name calling, for the most part. Those had been unpleasant. For some reason, this felt invigorating. It felt…fun, though he couldn’t say why and he didn’t know how to explain it apart from the unwilling chuckle that rumbled out of him.

Elsie threw a bucket of milk remnants at him. “Now you’re making fun of me?!”

He managed to slap the bucket aside, but was immediately pegged by a shower of every plastic drinking glass that she could get her hands on. She made a desperate grab for the knife drawer by the stove, but Quint got there first. More by accident than skill, he latched onto her arm when she quickly dashed the other way. With rattlesnake reflexes, she turned on him, jerking and yanking, kicking and punching in a mad, screaming, swearingbid to get free, and they both fell. He rolled mid-air, hugging her to his chest and trying his best to take the brunt of the impact when they hit the floor. He landed on his back. So did she, although most of her was lying flat on him as well, and she didn’t stop fighting once. Her elbow hit him just right and he lost all the air he might otherwise have laughed with.

“Hey! Settle down! Enough!”

She didn’t listen—surprise, surprise—but kicked and thrashed until she had wriggled around far enough in his constricting embrace to grab onto his shoulders with both hands. He saw the intent in her blazing eyes even as she reared up to get as much space between them as she could.

Quint snapped his legs shut, defensively jerking one up between them so her knee connected harmlessly with his hip.

His eyes narrowed. So did hers. With deliberate hostility, she let her gaze drop down between them. Despite its near miss of only a moment before, his cock felt her notice like a caress. It swelled, stirring behind the thin white cotton of his underwear.

With equal coldness, her eyes returned to his. Her mouth twisted into a smirk. “I expected so much more from a big man like you.”

“It was cold outside,” he said defensively.

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