His Little Runaway (2 page)

Then the truck was pulling up in front of a cabin, with snowy trees looming all around. Wes turned the key and looked at her, saw she had woken up. “My place,” he said. “Let’s get you inside and clean you up.”

Chapter Two

Wes Garner knew Ashley had probably lied to him. That didn’t mean he shouldn’t patch her up before he decided what to do about it, though. At least she didn’t seem to have broken anything in that crazy fall into the road. He shook his head, remembering, as he got the washcloths out of the linen closet. You never knew when trained reflexes would save someone’s life, he supposed, but he hadn’t expected to be saving a girl half jumping, half crashing into the pavement in front of his pickup at four o’clock in the morning on a deserted forest road.

He filled a basin with warm water and got the soap and bandages from the bathroom. He found Ashley sitting where he had left her on the living room couch, making a rather adorable effort not to bleed on his furniture and looking around at the furnishings of the neat little cabin. It wasn’t much, but Wes felt a good deal of pride in how well he kept it.

“Made the furniture myself,” he said, knowing that Ashley’s eyes were probably fixed not on the oak chairs but on the pictures of Wes and his buddies at camp.

“You’re in the army?” she asked.

Wes laughed despite the pang he always felt when someone pursued this line of questioning. “Was. Not army. The navy.”

He squatted in front of her.

“Turn your face to the right, honey,” he said. She obeyed, and he looked critically at the laceration over her cheekbone. “This is gonna hurt when I clean it out,” he said, “but it looks a lot worse than it is.”

“Okay,” Ashley said. “If you were in the navy, why aren’t you, you know, on a boat in the pictures?”

He laughed again, but didn’t answer until he started to clean the scrape with his washcloth. Ashley bit her lip at the pain, and her eyes watered, but she didn’t make a sound.

“Well, I started out on a boat, but then I trained as a SEAL.”

“A Navy SEAL?” Ashley said. “Really?” The awe in her voice gratified Wes as much as it distressed him. No matter how it had all ended, and no matter that he lived like a woodworking hermit in the Adirondacks: it had happened, and what he had done, he had done to uphold the values he still held dear.

“Yup,” Wes said. “So tell me what happened. Why were you running through the woods?” He dabbed Vaseline on her face. “This is going to look really bad in the mirror for a day or two, but I promise it’ll heal better with the Vaseline instead of a bandage.”

“Um,” Ashley said. “Okay.”

“Show me your hands. You were gonna tell me why you jumped into the road right in front of me and nearly got yourself run over.”

Wes didn’t feel completely sure that Ashley
had
intended to tell him that—despite his asking. But as she extended her hands, where he could see that she had taken the skin off the finger and palms in several painful-looking places, she said in much too pat a way, “My boyfriend. He hurts me. He’s a cop, so I can’t go to the cops.”

“Local or state?” Wes asked. He looked up from where he was using a fresh washcloth to clean the dirt out of a laceration on her left palm. Long, currently very dirty, chestnut hair framed a very pretty heart-shaped face, currently marred a bit by the scrape on her left cheekbone. Green eyes, currently featuring deep purple circles of exhaustion beneath them. A startled, very worried expression.

She didn’t even think to decide whether this fake boyfriend is a local cop or a state trooper.

“Local,” she finally said, blinking.

“We’ll call the district attorney,” Wes said, to see what Ashley would say in response.

It appeared she had thought of this part. She lied—if she was lying, which Wes felt upwards of 90% certain was the case—smoothly now. “He’s got, you know, friends in all those offices. I need to call my parents. They live in Westchester.”

“Oh,” Wes said, feeling his mouth crook into a little smile. “Westchester.”

Ashley nodded. The vulnerability in her face had flown away, and now despite the cut her face assumed a kind of bored, set expression that seemed to say that no guy who lived in the woods and made furniture, even if he’d once been a Navy SEAL, should get it in his head to ask questions of a girl who came from Westchester.

Wes wasn’t surprised to find that the emerging brat in Ashley brought out his instinctive desire to set her straight. He decided to keep that desire in check at least for the moment. Maybe she just needed sleep, and would be kinder when she’d had a few hours of it. He had to say that the hard expression on her face seemed a little too well-practiced for that, though.

“You can call your folks when you’ve had some sleep,” he said, wrapping a bandage around her hand.

“Why not now?” Ashley asked sharply.
Definitely bratty.

“No phone. I’ll have to walk you up to the top of the driveway to get cell reception, and then you can use my cell.”

She looked at him suspiciously. “I want to call now. I… want them to know I’m alright.”

Her lies seemed to be coming less smoothly. Wasn’t there a juvenile facility around that place where he had picked her up?

“You can barely keep your eyes open, honey,” Wes said in a reassuring voice. “You won’t be able to make it up the driveway.”

“Can’t you drive me?”

“You need sleep, Ashley. A couple of hours won’t make a difference.” Now he spoke in a more authoritative way, even letting some of his daddy side come out in his tone and the way he looked at her.

Ashley’s brow furrowed, but the hard expression also seemed to leave her face. “Okay,” she said. “But… please wake me up in an hour? And take me up there, so I can call?”

“Two hours,” Wes said firmly. “One hour won’t do you any good at all. Trust me. I know sleep deprivation.”

Ashley’s eyes widened. “Why did you leave the navy?”

“Long story,” Wes said, starting to help her to her feet to walk her into the bedroom. When he got her there, he turned down the comforter and the sheet, fighting a sudden urge to offer to help Ashley undress. Instead he got a t-shirt from his dresser and handed it to her.

“Lay your clothes out on the bed once you’ve gotten out of them and into this. I’ll wash them while you’re sleeping.”

“Okay,” Ashley said, looking down at the t-shirt. Was she thinking, as Wes couldn’t help thinking, about how cute and little-girlish she would look in it, with only her panties underneath? She looked up at him. “Thank you for picking me up on the road.”

“You’re welcome. Now you get into bed as soon as I go, alright?” He couldn’t help it: the daddy definitely came out in the way he said that. To his surprise, Ashley’s face broke into a little instinctive smile as if at the sound of the paternal admonition.

“Alright,” she said with a yawn.

Wes went to his truck to get the hardware he’d been hauling back from Ohio: antique nails he could have had them ship to him, but Wes liked to handle everything he put into his furniture, and he felt like it made a difference in the quality. By the time he’d put the box in his workshop, a roomy shed detached from the cabin, and gone to check on Ashley, she had fallen asleep. He picked up her jeans, long-sleeved t-shirt, and underwear, noticing to his surprise that she had taken off everything, including a pair of light blue nylon panties that he tried to hide under the shirt so he wouldn’t think about her being naked under his t-shirt.

He put the clothes in the washing machine, turned it on. He got his cell phone and started out into the chilly dawn.

Once he got to the top of the driveway it didn’t take him long to figure out who she was: the news was plastered across the website of the local newspaper.

The escapee, identified as Ashley Lewis, 18, originally of Pelham, is not considered dangerous, but citizens are advised not to attempt to apprehend her but to report any sighting to the police at the following number.

Reached for a statement in Albany, the head of the department of corrections said she would call for an inquiry into the circumstances of Lewis’ escape. “It’s too early to know anything, but of course we need to determine the causes and assign responsibility for this unfortunate occurrence.”

Wes shook his head as he turned off the phone. From the top of the driveway, he could look east across the whole of the little valley where he had built himself a new life after the navy, into the perfect pink ball of the rising sun.

This unfortunate occurrence.
Had they used words like that when they’d decided his fate? No,
violation of the rules of engagement
had been more the speed of the court-martial.

He had saved Marmara, though. In Wes’ blackest moments, he wondered whether he had done the wrong thing. He didn’t care about the rules of engagement—he hadn’t cared about them since the moment Marmara told him, weeping hysterically, that her uncle had sold her virginity to the warlord, and the warlord had decided she would marry his cousin.

Marmara: just eighteen, like Ashley Lewis. A sweet tooth like nothing Wes had ever seen, and a smile that said
princess
and
brat
but also
sweetheart
and
baby doll.
Teaching her to pronounce
Wesley
in her musical accent.

“May I call you
daddy
? I’ve always wanted a daddy, Wesley.”

He felt a little pang in his heart for this orphan whose eyes always seemed bright nevertheless. “Call me
sugar daddy
, honey,” he had replied, grinning. “I don’t think I can ever give you as much candy as I’d like to.”

“You can try,” Marmara said, pouting.

“Do you need a spanking, young lady?” Wes asked playfully. “Where I come from, girls who pout get something to cry about.”

He hadn’t known where that had come from, really, about the spanking. He had heard of ageplay, and he had known he might want to try it someday, but Marmara seemed to bring out a side of him he had thought might lurk in his fantasies but which had never shown itself to anyone—even Wes himself—before.

And on one level, as he said it, it had felt so wrong. Marmara had lost her parents to a bomb before she was four years old. Corporal punishment of the worst kind—the kind given just to prove that the person with the cane had power and the person, especially the woman, crying as the cane fell over and over, did not—made a fundamental note in family life in Marmara’s world.

Nevertheless, he saw something light up in Marmara’s eyes. “What’s a spanking?” she asked, though Wes knew that she, a very bright girl, must know.

“Come here,” he said, “and I’ll show you.” Wes was standing in the road, and Marmara in the little garden she tended every day.

He didn’t expect her to come, but she did, first looking around to make sure no one from her family could see. She crossed the five feet or so to stand in front of him, a mischievous look on her face.

“Show me, daddy,” she said, looking up at him with a little smile.

He knew he couldn’t, as much as he wanted to. He would have loved to bare her bottom and turn her over his knee, the way discipline from a daddy should always be given, but he had seen enough of Marmara’s culture to know that the consequences of that for her could be terrible. Really, he needed to put a stop to this; he couldn’t even turn her around and give her the swat over her clothes that he wanted to give her.

“I think you know, honey,” he said, smiling warmly.

“What if I do?” A very bratty expression now.

“If you’re telling a fib, no more candy.”

“Fib?” Now Wes could tell she really didn’t know that word. He chuckled and pulled a chocolate bar out of his pocket.

“A little lie, honey. What you just did when you pretended you didn’t know what a spanking was.”

Walking down to the cabin, remembering Marmara and wondering what to do about Ashley, he stopped his mind from going back to what had happened only a week later: Marmara in tears. Not
an unfortunate occurrence
but an act of anger and of justice. A
violation
. But he had saved Marmara, and he would do it again.

Wes doubted whether saving Ashley Lewis would be anything near as straightforward.

Chapter Three

Ashley woke up to find that someone was rubbing her shoulder. No bell. No faint smell of sewage covered by the stronger, harsher smell of disinfectant. A warm comforter, not a scratchy blanket.

She opened her eyes to look into the face of a man whose name it took her a moment to remember.
Wes.
She felt like she had been asleep for days. Her whole body hurt, but she also felt like a fuzziness that had descended more and more upon her, ever since the warden had made it clear she would service him or pay the consequences of refusal, had lifted, and she could think straight.

What had she told him? The abusive boyfriend story she had concocted, she felt almost certain. And he had said that she could use his cell phone at the top of his driveway. She felt her eyes go wide as the memories came flooding back. She knew she couldn’t let down her guard, but despite what seemed a rather stern expression in Wes’ eyes Ashley felt a rush of gratitude toward him.

“Thanks,” she said. “I mean, thanks for picking me up, and…” She remembered about her hands and lifted them up to see the bandages wrapped around them. They hurt terribly, but he must have put some kind of salve on that made them feel more like a dull ache than a burning fire.

“You’re welcome,” Wes said gravely. “I’ve put your clothes on top of the dresser.”

Ashley remembered suddenly that, unsure of whether to do so or not, she had taken off her panties and put them in with the jeans and shirt and bra. Now she suddenly wished she had kept the underwear on—she could have washed them herself by hand or something, rather than feel first like Wes had handled her panties and second like she now didn’t have any on underneath the big red t-shirt he had loaned her.