Belonging Read online

  Patsy squeezed her arm, saying softly, "The difference is, my dear, that you still have the chance to recapture that dream."

  Fleur shook her head. "I-I don't think so."

  "Yes, you do," her friend challenged astutely. "He might have frightened you that night, and for that, he ought to be given what for. But you know—whether or not you want to admit it—that he did it out of nothing but pure love for you." She hesitated, then added, "Well, and a large dose of self-pity, which I'll allow him a bit of, considering the circumstances, but not for long."

  They walked quietly for a moment, and Patsy asked, "You've not come to a decision, then, about what you're going to do about him?"

  "I have not."

  "Well, you might want to reach your inevitable conclusion a little more quickly, before some other chicken sets her sights on your rooster."

  "Well, if she does, she's going to get an eyeful!"

  "I'm not kidding, Fleur. He's quite the eligible bachelor, despite his shortcomings. He's still got the farm, as well as the house in town that his grandparents gave him. He's got property and money. There's more than one female around here who would be more than willing to overlook his…shortcomings in order not to have to live a hand to mouth existence like the rest of us."

  She wasn't necessarily wrong. "But I have a feeling that any such approach would be rather harshly rebuffed, enough so that another attempt at attracting his attention would not be made."

  Patsy shrugged. "I'm just trying to help, telling you what you already know but don't want to think about. Just something to add into the mix of what all you're hopefully thinking about doing."

  "I wish everyone would stop trying to be so damned helpful."

  Her friend was unfazed by her sarcastic tone. "You're welcome."

  And the more Fleur thought about it, the more she knew that she had to see him again. This time, in broad daylight.

  And, she admitted to herself with a blush, she really wanted to see him in the altogether, as he had been that night. She'd been so scared that she couldn't recall seeing anything besides the deformities he was calling her attention to at the time, although, as the days and weeks passed, she had begun to spend an embarrassing amount of time lying in bed, not recalling his imperfections, but rather trying to remember if she'd seen anything else about him that might have been of particular interest—like whether that specific area had suffered any kind of damage. Unfortunately, she couldn't remember having done so.

  She became quite determined to achieve her goal of seeing him again and decided that the direct approach was the best. So, early one morning—so as to have the least likelihood of being seen and thus, hopefully, not giving anyone anything to gossip about—she arrived at his door, feeling proud of herself for ending up there, but also finding herself a bit hesitant to knock now that she was here. All the nasty things he'd said and done to her had come flooding back, making her heat pound much more than it should have.

  She just had to remember what Patsy had said to her the next day. As much as he'd tried to prove to her that he was, he was not a monster. He was still Lawson, no matter what. Perhaps a somewhat changed Lawson—and more than physically—but it was still him in there, under all of that damaged skin.

  What Patsy had said about the pain he'd had to endure to recover from whatever it was that had happened to him had tears flooding her eyes as she raised her hand to knock. Fleur waited, growing more and more nervous by the second, but no one answered. Since she highly doubted that he was gadding about town, she knocked again, more forcefully.

  Still nothing.

  She ended up practically pounding on the door, trying to restrain herself from yelling for him. But, now that she was here, she wasn't about to give up, and if that was what it took, then that was what she was going to do. Eventually, she heard his uneven steps coming down the stairs, as well as a stream of colorful expletives that questioned her ancestry, as well as her mother's faithfulness to her father.

  But he didn't open the door as she'd hoped.

  He just stood in front of it and bellowed, "Stop fucking knocking! I don't want any of whatever it is you're selling in the middle of the goddamned night, you sadistic motherfucker! Leave me the fuck alone!"

  When he'd finished what sounded like a drunken tirade and she could hear him moving away from the door, she screwed up her courage and said, "Lawson, it's me. Fleur."

  The steps stopped suddenly, then she heard him ask harshly, "What do you want, a medal for coming back when I have clearly lost interest in you? Go away, Fleur. I fucking want to see you least of anyone on the planet."

  That hurt, but she was doing her best to subscribe to the idea that he was just being mean in hopes of keeping her away from him, trying to remember that he—probably—thought he had her best interests at heart.

  "Well, I fucking want to see you, and I'm not going to go away until I do."

  "Haven't you seen enough of me, dear heart?" he answered sarcastically. "You certainly ran away from me fast enough that night."

  "Can you blame me? You were horrible to me, you bastard, but I'm not going to be that easy to get rid of." She paused and hesitated, her next words uttered much more softly than the others. "I love you."

  His outright guffaws at her heartfelt confession were harder for her to bear than anything else he'd said or done to her.

  "Well, Petal," he said. What had been a loving nickname for her sounded as sarcastic as he could make it. "I don't love you anymore. So, shove the fuck off!" he snarled.

  "Nope. I'm going to be right here, waiting for you to open the door. I'll wait all day, if I have to."

  He just laughed again. "All day? You think I'll come to my senses and let you in then? I hope you brought your camping gear, dearest. And what a sight you'll make for all of those incessantly flapping gums to talk about, parked on my porch in desperation. What's the matter, have you already found that no one else but me is willing to put up with you pestering them night and day?"

  His jibes hit home, but she again stiffened her back, answering calmly, "No matter what you say, Lawson, I'm not leaving. And, yes, if necessary, I'll camp out on your porch till you open that door and let me in."

  "You always were a stupid, stubborn little bitch."

  Fleur flinched at that but stood her ground.

  "Have fun being the laughing stock of the town—I should thank you for that in advance. Your pathetic display of misplaced, misguided devotion will take the heat off of me."

  She could hear his steps receding up the stairs, then heard a door slam, figuring he must've gone back to bed without a further thought to her.

  She tried the doorknob, but it was locked as she expected. For a long moment, she stood there, then something occurred to her, and she reached up on tiptoe to check along the top of the door casing, then under the mat. She remembered that his parents had always kept a spare key somewhere—although she was damned if she could remember where—but she kept looking until she found it, on a small nail on the back of one of the porch rails, painted white to blend in. You really had to know it was there to find it.

  But he'd still outsmarted her—he'd had the locks changed at some point, the bastard. The key no longer fit the lock.

  In a fit of pique, Fleur threw the offending thing into the bushes, then stood there with her hands on her hips for long moments, chewing on her lip, as was her habit when she thought, trying to come up with another way to get into the house. Then she remembered something important.

  When his family had stayed in town, he had sometimes not been allowed to leave the house for one reason or another. Occasionally, he was being punished and had to stay in his room; sometimes, they had spent all evening together, and they'd already said goodnight. It was simply past their curfews, but he absolutely had to see her again.

  That was when she'd hear rocks tapping at her window, and he'd be standing out there, climbing up the trellis as soon as she opened her window just to tell her that he loved her a
nd kiss her goodnight one last time. The first time he'd done that, he'd told her how he'd gotten out of his house, and it had just now come back to her how he'd done it.

  She flew around to where she knew his bedroom was, fingers crossed that he still slept with the window open, rain, shine, snow or wind. And, apparently, he did.

  She approached the side of the house, where there was a drainpipe that came down from the roof, right by his window, and grabbed a hold of it. She looked down at her pretty kid boots and narrow skirt and realized that this wasn't going to be easy, but nothing worthwhile was, so she kicked the boots off and hiked up her skirt practically around her waist, after glancing furtively around to make sure that no one was out mowing their lawn, but it was early enough that that was unlikely, luckily.

  The pipe was so wide that she had a hard time gripping it, even in both hands, but she did the best she could, reaching up above her to the nearest bracket that had been bolted into the wall—securely, she hoped belatedly, since she was already ten feet off the ground—shimmying herself very slowly up from one bracket to the next.

  Unfortunately for her, the house hadn't been maintained as scrupulously of late as it had been when his parents were alive, and when she reached for and grabbed onto that last bracket, it came apart in her hand, which startled her and caused her to lean back while still holding onto the drain pipe, which also came away from the wall of the house at an acute and dangerous angle, her added weight straining the fastenings below her, several of which gave way so that she was swung wildly away from the house as she clung to the pipe for dear life.

  As much as she didn't want to do it, his name came out of her mouth at the top of her lungs before she could stop it. "Lawson! Help, please!"

  She was of a mind that she could simply slide back down the pipe—however uncomfortable and embarrassing that might have been—without alerting him. But her mind apparently had other ideas—probably thinking more clearly about the fact that the pipe could snap at any moment and send her careening twenty or more feet to the ground.

  "What the—are you crazy, woman?" he yelled, throwing the window open to its furthest extent and leaning as far out of it as he could to reach for her as she swung wildly—and surprisingly swiftly—back towards the wall, into which she was likely to crash if he couldn't get to her.

  But he caught her—and steadied the pipe—on her first trip back, hauling her unceremoniously in to land on the relative safety of the floor of his room in an ignominious—and highly exposed—heap at his feet, as he slammed the window closed and locked it behind her.

  And, when Fleur, after taking several breaths and practically kissing the floor beneath her, turned over to face him, she realized that she had gotten her wish. He was, for the second time since he'd arrived home, standing in front of her in the altogether.

  Only this time, she was much more prepared for the sight, and she found herself staring, not at the flaws that had been the only thing she could see the last time, but at another part of his person entirely that satisfied her curiosity about its functionality in the most blatant fashion possible.

  "What the fuck do you think you were doing, Fleur?!" he yelled. "You could have killed yourself! Jesus Christ!" He ran his hand through his hair in an angry gesture she recognized from before.

  She forced herself to look away from it but not away from him. Instead, she let her eyes travel slowly up every other inch of him, careful to keep a neutral expression on her face, and to meet his eyes unhesitatingly when hers finally arrived there.

  "Well, I wasn't about to take your suggestion about camping out, and I wanted to see you. I remembered how you'd climb the trellis at my parents' house and how you'd gotten out of your own room to come see me. I figured I was even lighter than you are, but I hadn't counted on the latches giving way at the last—no! Let go of me!"

  She had seen the anger building as she spoke but hadn't heeded its warning and shut her mouth, the result of which was that she found her wrist encircled by the fingers of his left hand, which he used to force her to trail along behind him as he plopped down on the end of his bed, giving a final tug that sent her neatly over his lap, where she immediately found herself trapped—with her skirt already raised to her waist from her ill-fated climb, making it just that much easier for him to lower her panties to her knees, leaving her completely vulnerable to him.

  "Lawson! Let me go!" His left arm might have been badly damaged, but he didn't seem to have lost any of the strength in it whatsoever, because no amount of struggling or writhing moved her so much as an inch away from what she was horrified to realize was going to be her fate.

  "Oh, I don't think so, Fleur." He chuckled evilly. "You've obviously been much too long between spankings. Whomever you end up with as a husband is going to quickly learn that you need a firm hand, but in the meantime, I can't let you go without addressing your two counts of very bad behavior in order that he might have an easier time of it, although you're so fucking headstrong I highly doubt it. Still, I'd hate to let the opportunity go by to correct you for the last time."

  Outraged, she screamed at him, "No! Stop—Lawson! You can't do this! We're no longer engaged, by your own words. Wait—what? Two counts?"

  If he hadn't been so angry at her, he might have chuckled at her abrupt change of topic. "Count the first, you came back here when I thought I made it abundantly clear that you are no longer welcome, and count the second, you damned near tried to kill yourself defying me again and trying to get into the house." He paused for a second. "It should really be three counts, then, shouldn't it?"

  "No! It should not! It shouldn't even be one, if you'd just have opened the fucking door when I asked you to!"

  "Four counts!" he added gleefully, his palm descending on her bare behind with a breathtaking power, one that never wavered through the entire, interminable spanking.

  Lawson knew that she was right—that he shouldn't have been doing this—that he was, again, as he had that night, taking liberties that he was no longer supposed to, since they weren't a couple. But seeing her hanging off that pipe, clinging for dear life, and not knowing if it was going to completely give way at any moment before he could get to her, had made him crazy with concern for her. And now that she was safe, all he wanted to do was to make sure that the idea never crossed her mind to put herself in that kind of danger again, for any reason.

  Least of all for him.

  And as he felt her bottom wobble with each stinging caress, heard the oh so satisfying smack of his flesh as it forcefully kissed hers, even feeling her dwindling, more organized struggles to get away from his discipline make that unmistakable change to helpless flailing against the imposition of his discipline as he raised the level of her discomfort expertly and her moans became screams, it felt even more satisfying to him than it had ever been before.

  Even the thrill of flying paled in comparison to taming this woman, who had belonged to him for so much of his life. Nothing he'd ever experienced had ever been able to replace how he felt about her—about loving her or spanking her. They were, to his mind, very much one and the same.

  Lost, as he was in his own reverie, feeling himself coming alive in more inappropriate ways than he had felt in a very long time, as he always did around her, he punished her for much longer than he should have, probably, and might well have continued to do so.

  But then he caught sight of his left arm and remembered the ruined, shell of a man he had become, and he practically dumped her off his lap mid-swat, striding over to the window, as far away from her as he could get without jumping out of it, which was not inconsiderable, although he'd never do it in front of her, growling, "Get out. Now!"

  Fleur remained where she'd landed for the second time that morning, on the floor by his feet, sobbing pitifully as she tried to come to grips with the fire he'd so callously set in her bottom and down the backs of her thighs. It took her a minute to gather her wits about her, and by then, he'd turned back to her and was standing over
her.

  There was no kissing and cuddling afterwards, as there had always been before, with him wiping her tears away, kissing her gently and telling her how much he loved her as he rocked her in the safety of his arms. There wasn't even a hand extended to help her up, so she did so on her own, to stand bravely in front of him.

  "I'm not going to go. I'm not going to run away from you. You can't do that to me again—scare me about how you look, and it was very unfair of you to do that the first time. If I had known, if you hadn't been such a fucking asshole, I would never have run from you. I can see you—all of you—right now, and I'm right here. I'm not even looking away. They're just scars. Everyone has them, inside or out."

  "Don't waste your platitudes on me," he spat, taking another step closer to her, as if to test her resolve. "Do I need to spank you again to get you to go, Fleur? Is that what you want?"

  She lifted her chin. "Go ahead and try. I'll fight you."

  He chuckled, but there was no humor in it. "You always did, but you also always ended up with a stinging bottom, anyway, didn't you?" Lawson reached around her to pinch an ample cheek, causing her to swipe her hands futilely behind her, trying to defend her still sizzling nates against another kind of assault, where she then found them trapped as he forced her up against him, one hand holding her wrists, the other sending her skirt to her feet, where her panties already were.

  Then, he turned his attention to her blouse, which he made short work of, until she was standing, pressed up against him, wearing only her bra. And soon, that small protection was gone, too.

  She tugged at her wrists, but he would not let them go as he bent his head to do what he'd wanted to do again since that night. He kissed her, and, as it had then, it started out painful and punishing, full of anger and resentment, as if he wanted her to personally pay for his own pain.

  But Fleur didn't shrink away from him, even when he was hurting her. Instead, she pressed herself more fully against him, opening her mouth beneath his, encouraging him to take whatever he needed from her, and wishing desperately that she could cup his cheeks, but more than willing to settle for whatever he would give her of himself, however much or little that might be.