Something Has to Give (8 page)

He started laughing again, but not because he was amused. He sat up, rolling over, his palm itching even before he saw the bump of her bottom rounding up under the blankets and thrusting back at him. She lay on her side
too, stubbornly facing the door, knees drawn up in preparation for another night spent in sleep-off battlefield. The urge to give her a smack was barely resistible.

“You have exactly two seconds to g
ive back half of those blankets,” he said instead.

She snorted. “Or what?”

“Or I’m coming in there after them.” His belly heated at the thought. Languid need like molten ribbons twined around and around in his guts, stroking at his cock from the inside until all he could feel was the steady throb growing with every second she hesitated. When she rolled over to stab him with that narrow-eyed suspicious glare, he felt such a surge of desire that it could only be described as crazy. He didn’t even like her (but she was growing on him) and she certainly didn’t like him (maybe he was growing on her too). Definitely
something
was growing between them and it couldn’t just be his cock.

“What the hell does that—”
she started, but he didn’t let her finish.

Grabbing the blankets, with
one strong yank, Quint ripped her out of her swaddling cocoon. She actually flipped over, bounced flat on the mattress, her nightshirt riding up to reveal that sexy strip of white panty rounding the curves of her bottom before flowing down between her legs.  Like a red cape flashed before a red-blooded bull, that tiny scrap of white inflamed him like nothing else could. Like nothing else had. Not in a very, very long time.

He wanted her. It wasn’t in his best interest. Hell, it could only work against him, but he wanted her.

And that kinda pissed him off, really. She had to know what she was doing to him. She had to be doing it deliberately, manipulating him every way she could just to keep this damn house. His blood burned; his cock wasn’t listening to reason. It was all he could do right now not to fall on top of her, catch her sassy lips beneath his and just consume her.

Would she wrap her arms and her legs—those long, soft legs—around him and kiss him back with all the same passion and hunger that was raging inside him now, or would she tell him to go to hell? Oh, the urge to find out.

“Hey!” she snarled, and sat up so close and so fast she almost cracked her forehead into his. In the pale glow of the moonlight, he could see the anger on her face, but damn if that didn’t make her even more kissable. He wavered, wanting so badly just to taste her.

“Someone
ought to teach you a lesson,” he growled. “Women who crawl into bed with strange men deserve what they get.”

“
Men who do the same deserve to get neutered,” she shot back, incapable of backing down. Her whole small, soft body was trembling now, just inches away from his. When she breathed in deeply, her breasts rose like a challenge and, in the pale moonlight, his eyes locked on the peak and shadow of her nipples tenting the front of her nightshirt. “You think you can scare me—!”

She yelped. It was all she had time to do. That and to throw up her fists, bracing them against his
shoulders when that last tenuous thread of self-control snapped under the sight of those come-hither peaks and Quint closed the distance between them. He kissed her so fiercely, wanting to scare her (yeah, right), send her running away from him (like hell), out of his bed and maybe even out of the house all together. She tasted so good, just like a spitfire ought to, her hot little mouth all full of sass and squeak and freshly brushed teeth that likely would have sunk into his bottom lip if he hadn’t jerked back then every bit as brusquely as he’d charged in to kiss her.

“You son of a bitch!” she gasped
, staring at him with those huge, shocked eyes. “What the hell do you thi—”

He kissed her again, noting
(in the small part of his brain that was not completely scrambled by her) not how she stiffened up like a length of lumber, but how her tightly-clenched fists flexed against his shoulders, flashing open before snapping closed again. She didn’t push him away. She didn’t even try, and she didn’t bite him either. Her soft breath was a trembling hitch that caught on her next gasp and the sound intoxicated him. He felt drunk on her kisses, his head spinning, his pulse racing, and the next thing he knew, he had her flat on her back with the plump heat of one burning breast filling up his palm and the searing brand of her panty-clad hips pressed right up against his. She didn’t just open her legs, she wrapped them around him. Her tiny, punch-capable, linebacker fists didn’t just soften, but they clutched at him, gripping at his shoulders to pull him closer. And her mouth, that sassy, mewling, gasping little taste of paradise wasn’t just meeting his kisses—it was kissing him back. Chasing him with wanton, hungry abandon and groaning, first with loss and then with renewed urgency, when he tore his lips from hers and abruptly dropped to lick and kiss and taste his way down to the bountiful feast of her breasts.

He captured
one peak right through her nightshirt, tormenting mercilessly with his teeth and tongue just to hear her groan again. And that moment when her hips began to rock up against him, twitching and rolling with escalating need, set his blood on fire. The pressure of his swollen cock was beyond need, it was unbearable.

Condom. Where the hell were the condoms? He
rose only far enough to rip open the drawer of the night stand and shoved wildly through the contents until he found—thank God—one. He came up with that individually packaged, pre-lubricated, ribbed for her pleasure and cherry-flavored prize as if it were the single greatest discovery of all mankind. Then they were hip to hip and chest to chest, and he was tearing the condom wrapper open with his teeth while she pulled at him with her hands to hurry. Her small white teeth bit and chewed at her bottom lip and her dark eyes had turned dazed and smoky with desire.

“Do you want me inside you?” he asked, husky and raw. It was a wonder he could even speak at all. Everything
felt too tight right now, and every second he spent not inside her was a second spent in the most agonizing anticipation of correcting that monumental oversight.

“Yes,”
she breathed, her voice every bit as lust-filled as her eyes.

He had the condom wrapper open and, as his helicopter buddies liked to say,
all operating systems were a definite “go”, but it was then, as he lay staring down at her beautifully willing face, that something stopped him. A tiny kernel of conscience, a smidgen of doubt, a whisper of suspicion that crawled up into his throat and refused to be swallowed before he asked, “Is it me you want, or are you doing this because you think it’ll get you the house?”

A
t first, Elsie didn’t seem to hear him. She blinked twice, her gaze rising up from his chest to fix and focus on him. “Wh-what?”

That was his answer right there. She wanted him. She was totally absorbed by him and by her need for him. He grinned. Yeah, now systems were a total go.

He swooped down to capture her mouth again, to tease and lick and nibble both of them back into a state of complete mindlessness once again, but her hands suddenly braced against his chest, blocking him before his lips could reach hers.

Her eyes were no longer dazed. Somewhere in the
mahogany depths, they were still smoky with desire, but they were also flashing with anger once again. “What?” she said again, glaring now. “You think I’m going to whore myself out for your house?”

He frowned. “I didn’t say that.”

“The hell you didn’t.” Shoving at his chest and bucking upward with all her might, Elsie heaved him off her. She scrambled from the bed, swiping at her lips as if she could scrub the taste and feel of him off her.

“Now, wait a minute—”
He tried to go after her, but already she had slammed out of the bedroom and was storming off down the hall. “Elsie…Elsie, wait…”

“Keep your
damn lips to yourself!” she bellowed back. Throwing herself into the bathroom, she slammed that door too, and then locked it.

Quint swore, violently at first and then, as the full realization of what he’d done began to weave with the lust still pounding inside him, softer. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he scrubbed his fingers back through his hair. If it were possible to screw things up even worse, at the moment, he couldn’t think of how.

December 24
th
…

Elsie woke up stiff and cold. That’s what came of sleeping in a bathtub, with a few towels spread out to cushion her against the cold of the old porcelain encased cast-iron tub, and a few more draping her like overlapping blankets.

It was cold anyway. Really cold. When she finally realized she was uncomfortable enough to open her eyes, in the dim grey of pre-morning light, she could see her breath.

She felt like crap. Going to bed spitting mad never made for a great following morning. Her head hurt. She had a crick in her neck from the angle of the tub’s interior and everything from there on down felt half numb and stiff. And worst of all, Quint had successfully chased her out of her own be
d. It was over. She may as well just leave.

A faint
bleating caught her ears.

Heaving herself up into a sitting position, Elsie rubbed first her eyes and then her neck. She didn’t want to get up. Getting up meant leaving the bathroom, and leaving the bathroom meant running into Quint. Unfortunately, her clothes were in the bedroom and there were goats and chickens to tend, so just sitting here feeling sorry for
herself wasn’t an option. But she was still mad enough to rather be dead than have to look or speak to him after last night.

Another ble
at, echoed by a muffled chorus of the same, filtered through the frosty window. It didn’t sound right. It sounded almost—Elsie sat frozen, straining to listen until she heard it again—panicked.

Erupting out of the tub, E
lsie scrambled from the bathroom and down the hall. When she crashed through the bedroom door, Quint bolted straight up out of bed, “Goats in the hole, sir!”

With a jerk and a whump, he fell off the mattress and onto the floor.

Grabbing her pants, Elsie barely paused long enough to give him a withering glare, then she was running downstairs, hopping into her pants and stuffing her feet into the barnyard boots that lived under the coat rack. When she threw open the door, the sight that greeted her was one she never thought she’d ever see in the sunny desert scrublands of Utah. Not even in winter. It wasn’t just snowing anymore. It was a blizzard, and by the looks of it, it had been one for much of the night. The deep white drifts were waist deep, the snow completely burying the porch handrail and all but the uppermost step, and it was still falling.

Elsie was aghast. If she had known
this would happen, she never would have gone to bed last night without penning up the chickens and goats.

The goats!

A soft lipping nuzzle at her fingertips made Elsie jump. It was Nanny Cactus, her big floppy ears bouncing as she stepped in close enough to duck her head up under Elsie’s hand for a reassuring pet. Nanny Sage was right behind her, and so was the rest of the herd. Even the Curries had found a snow-free place under the porch eaves to spend the night. The only one missing was Nanny Pita.

A frantic, distant bleating haunted that realization.

“Pita!” Eyes huge, Elsie paced the length of the porch, trying to see around first one side of the house and then the other, hoping to figure out where that sound was coming from. The snow seemed to amplify and misdirect it. The frantic nanny’s cries were coming from everywhere at once. “Pita!” She clapped her hands, trying to sound cheerful. “Come on, girl!”

Another bleating cry was her only response and Elsie knew then she couldn’t just stand here. Nanny
Pita was her namesake in every way, the biggest pain in the ass milking goat she’d ever known, but she didn’t deserve to freeze to death or suffocate under drifts of overwhelming snow.

Ducking
back into the house, Elsie grabbed her hoodie jacket off the back of the door—much too lightweight to keep her warm and that was obvious from her first step back outside, but it was better than nothing and she just didn’t have the time to go through the house hunting up something heavier.

She charged off the porch into snow so deep that on her third step she
lost contact with both porch steps and solid ground and fell face-first into the thick of it. Snow crunched under her steps, compacting down, but each fumbling footstep compacted differently and at different heights from one another. There was no stability, nothing to hold onto and the falling snow, sticking in icy kisses to her face, hair and eyelashes, was blinding.

And it was
so damned cold. Great clumps of powdery whiteness fell into the tops of her boots to melt against her shins. Each step filled her boots, stung her thighs, soaked into her jeans, especially around her waist where snow was getting up under her jacket and shirt and falling into her waistband to melt against her stomach and drizzle down the small of her back. Her shirt wicked the icy moisture up her back and every time she stumbled and dropped her arms, her hands touched the snow. They were already turning red, her fingers stinging from the cold.

“
Pita!” Elsie tried to clap again, but that made her fingers hurt even worse. She pulled them into her jacket sleeves to keep them warm, and waddle-waded through the snow, kicking her feet up high with every step because the sheer weight of trying to push her way through the waist-deep blanket of white was just too much. She was exhausted, panting hard and close on to tears before she even made it to the first outbuilding.

From the house behind her, she hear
d Quint bellow, “Elsie!”

Ignoring it, she pushed on until she reached the chicken coop. The chickens, apparently, had more sense than the goats. They were all perched in a contented line on the roosting bar, their mild cackles of alarm giving way to excitement when
she threw open the door and they recognized her. In a flutter of eagerness, they leapt down and came running to be fed.

Elsie quickly shut the door and went on to the goat pen next.
“Pita?”

The swinging stall
door which was usually left open had been blown partially closed in last night’s snowstorm. It was now trapped in the heavy drifts, cracked about a foot from truly closing and unable to open any further without first being dug out. Overcast as it was outside, it was black as pitch within the windowless shed, but as Elsie peeked around the door, she thought she heard movement.

“
Pita? Come here, girl.” Elsie quickly scraped, kicked and shoved at the snow, digging down far enough behind the door, so that when she threw her weight into making it move, it finally did. She managed to work it open far enough to spill a little daylight into the dark inner shadows and just caught a glimpse of a pale shape retreating behind a dividing half wall.

“
Pita baby, what’s the matter with you? Don’t make me have to chase—”

Purs
uing the wayward goat, Elsie was about to squeeze her body between the door and the frame when she heard the warning growl.

That was not a goat.

Frozen, she stared at the shadow-heavy stall, willing her eyes to get used to the dark. Just when she began to pick out the subtle differences between wood boards and hay and feed and water troughs, the tawny face of a cougar crept out far enough to look back at her. Crouching low behind the half-wall, its amber eyes locked on her. Every hair on Elsie’s body came prickling up on end when the cat’s low growl devolved into a hiss of malevolent intent. She forgot the cold and the snow. She tried to retreat, but hit the waist-high wall of snow behind her. Her foot skidded right out from under her, landing her in a sprawling crunch of compacting snow with her legs inside the goat pen with the mountain cat.

Spitting hisses, the cat lunged and Elsie shrieked, all four limbs scrambling to get her upright and over the barricade of deep snow
at her back. She only managed one panicked crab-crawl leap backwards before flopping into even deeper drifts, the higher walls of which promptly fell in on top of her, and the next thing Elsie saw was the shadow of dark movement that suddenly covered her. She threw up her arms, shielding her head from the claws and teeth she knew were coming…only they never landed. The sharp crack of the rifle shooting directly over her head was deafening. Three sharp reports, one right after the other, had her cringing down into the cold to cover her ringing ears. She barely opened her eyes in time to see the tawny cat dashing from the goat pen and fleeing for the hills. There were no further gunshots, but the big cat didn’t stop and it didn’t look back, and within seconds, the swirling snowstorm had swallowed the cougar from sight.

A big hand grabbed the scruff of Elsie’s coat, hauling her roughly to her feet. “Are you hurt?” Quint demanded.

Elsie had no idea she was shaking until Quint let go of her coat and she was left to just stand there on badly wobbling knees. She stared at the rifle in his hand and then up at him, and it took Quint asking a second time before she could even make sense of the words.

“Damn it, Elsie,
are you hurt?” He grabbed her, feeling his way up and down her frozen body until she slapped at his hand.

“No,” she stammered, and his already angry face darkened like a thundercloud.

“Well, you damn sure ought to be! Get in the house!”

“I have to find
Pita!”

“She was on the back porch! Get in the God damn house!” He caught her arm, spinning her sharply around and landing an earth-shattering whack to the seat of her
snow-covered pants. The force made her hips jolt, her knees buckle and her icy bottom burst with the most unbelievable pain.

She couldn’t move fast enough after that, both the waist-deep ocean of snow and her own trembling legs worked to bog her down. There was no avoiding the two other swats he delivered to keep her moving and the one time she snapped around to tell him to knock it off, he just as fast
whipped off his belt and doubled it over in his hand. After that, Elsie slogged just as fast as she could for the house. The one time she fell, he grabbed her by the waist of her jeans and hauled her roughly back to her feet before giving her a push to get her moving again. Although he didn’t spank her, by the time she had staggered her way up the porch, her clothes were so heavy and wet and snow-encrusted, they felt as if they weighed a ton, and she was shivering so violently she couldn’t grit her teeth hard enough to keep them from rattling.

It was only
through supreme effort that she didn’t burst into tears when she saw Nanny Pita on the front porch, where Quint had no doubt put her, surrounded by the other goats and chewing on the porch railing. She greeted Elsie with a tail waggle and a bleat and completely ignored the hard look Elsie shot her in return. His hand in the small of her back, Quint forced her to keep moving. When her fingers refused to coordinate enough to work the simple doorknob, he got it open for her and pushed her inside.

The sheer heat of the house enveloped her like an oven, at once both heavenly and
suffocatingly hot. She couldn’t remember it being this hot when she’d left the house what…ten, fifteen minutes ago?...but now the heat seemed to be scalding at the back of her throat with every breath she took. It made her cough, and the racking force of that almost made her rubbery legs give out.

Shutting the door before the goats could follow them inside, Quint threw his belt on the couch and grabbed her jacket.
“Shuck,” he ordered.

“W-w-what are y-you d-d-doing?” she gasped when he stripped it right off her.

“Saving your life, God dammit. Now, shuck!”

“My h-h-hands wo-won’t work.”

Swearing, obviously still angry, Quint stripped her shirt off over her head, dropping it on the floor next to her jacket. She barely had time to regret not wearing a bra when he grabbed for her pants. She almost fell when he jerked her around, her legs unable to keep up with how fast he seemed to want her to move.

“W-wait…” she stammered, but he already had the zipper down and then he was peeling the icy fabric down her bright red legs. Her whole body was the shade of a really bad sunburn and shiny with the wetness of the melting snow. When he got her boots off, a small stream of liquid came pouring out onto the floor. Her toes like her fingers were purple. When Quint grabbed her, all she could do was throw her arms around his neck. She yelped when her feet left the ground, but then he was rushing her down the hallway toward the bathroom, kicking open the door with his foot and depositing her in the tub with her underwear still on.

It was the only strip of modesty he allowed her, but to be fair, he wasn’t taking advantage of the situation to look at her. His movements were short and angry, his mouth was a hard flat line as he slapped the water on, grabbed the shower head off the wall and the next thing Elsie knew she was being boiled alive.

She screamed, throwing up her hands to ward off the burning water and jumped to get out of the tub. Quint caught her, refusing to let her pass no matter how desperately she thrashed and writhed and screamed.

“Stop!” she wailed, but he continued to douse her in the fiery spray.

Except that it wasn’t fiery. It wasn’t even hot enough to make steam. He hadn’t subjected her to that torture even one minute before parts of her
—her stomach, her chest—began to register just how truly tepid the water was, and yet her hands and feet continue to scald. Only now, it wasn’t just burning. The shower head spray sent prickling, stabbing sensations cutting into her. It felt every bit as physical and real as if she’d thrust her hands and feet into bags of needles. How could she not be bleeding?