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  He went and helped her, and she didn't seem to mind him being so close to her in the small kitchen as long as they were doing something.

  But when they were done, he put his hands on his hips while she tried to busy herself with stupid stuff, just to keep herself busy.

  "What did I say would happen if you brought those things back to me, Arianne?" he asked, his tone level.

  Her face flushed a becoming shade of red. "I can't say that!"

  He grinned back at her. "You most certainly can, missy."

  "It's too embarrassing!"

  Hoyt took a step toward her, noting that she didn't take any back from him. "Then you should have thought of that before you disobeyed me, hmm?"

  Ari shook her head slowly back and forth. "But it was too much, Hoyt!"

  He loved the sound of his name on her lips.

  "What was, Arianne?" he asked softly.

  Another step that she didn't seem to notice.

  "All of the things you gave us." Her eyes found his, and he saw that hers were wet, although she wasn't crying. "I want to stand on my own two feet. I don't want to be a charity case."

  "You're not, honey. But sometimes, everyone needs a little help from their friends." She brushed her tears away as if they annoyed her, when he would gladly have done so for her much more gently.

  "What did I tell you would happen?" he coaxed, standing quite close to her.

  He literally watched her realize how close he was, and then that she was caught with nowhere to go to get away from him, and Hoyt immediately moved away from her while remaining in front of her.

  He couldn't possibly expect her to answer him, could he?

  One flitted look to his face, and she knew that he absolutely did.

  Arianne sighed, almost whispering, "You said that I wouldn't be sitting comfortably for a while."

  "Very good."

  As much as she didn't want to, she looked up at him, and he was positively beaming down at her.

  That was when he extended his hand to her. Not imperiously, not even all that commandingly. But expectantly.

  Her body began to shake at that point, and there didn't seem to be anything she could do to stop it or control it in the least.

  Hoyt wondered how long he could manage to stand to watch her being so afraid, but he knew it wasn't going to be long. And it wasn't.

  Within much less than a minute, he swooped in, lifted her into his arms and bore her to the biggest easy chair in the little living room.

  She protested as he had expected, but not for the reason he thought she would.

  "Hoyt! Put me down! I'm too heavy for you! You'll hurt yourself!"

  When she was safely—as far as he was concerned—ensconced on his lap, with his arms loosely around her, he informed her firmly, "No, you are not, and, no, you did not."

  To her surprise, he didn't try to hug her to him or force her to cuddle with him in any way. She had a feeling that, if she wanted to get down, he would let her, too.

  But he was rubbing her back in soothing circles that felt amazing, and even though she knew she should have taken advantage of the opportunity to get away, she couldn't quite convince herself to do it.

  He could still feel her trembling beneath his touch, but Hoyt resolved to be patient. As much as he'd promised her that she was going to be spanked if she did what she'd done, he wasn't about to do so while she was so obviously terrified.

  So, he set about acquainting her with his touch as she would experience it if he was going to be able to have an actual relationship with her. And as much as he was quite sure that he would adore disciplining her, he didn't intend that that would be the majority of how he spent his time with her, in this fantasy relationship in his head.

  Before he'd been injured, he'd been a very tactile man with a few select women. He liked holding hands, he loved walking with his woman on his arm, and he enjoyed being the "big spoon". On lazy Sunday mornings, he just liked to know that he could reach out and touch the woman he was with, whether that be sexually or not.

  So, he simply touched her in a very undemanding, affectionate, non-sexual way—massaging here, rubbing there, brushing his good hand over her hair, and doing all of it very slowly and carefully rather than in an abrupt or grabby manner.

  And she responded well to it—better than he had thought she would, frankly. Her shaking stopped first, and then, eventually, she even began to press herself against his hand, like a cat, moaning softly or dragging her breath in through her teeth when something felt good.

  "Feel better? More relaxed?" he asked.

  "Oh, yes. I haven't been this relaxed in longer than I want to think."

  "I'm truly sorry about that, Arianne. You deserve to feel like this all the time."

  Because it was feeling so good to the both of them, he allowed it to go on for a while longer, until she actually leaned back against him, and he did a mental fist pump.

  Then he kissed the top of her head tenderly and said what he knew he had to, even though he knew it was probably going to make her try to jump off his lap.

  "But you know what I have to do now, don't you?" he asked, and before she could get away from him, he had carefully maneuvered her over his lap.

  "What—what are you doing?" she asked, regretting the terminally stupid question the moment it was out of her mouth.

  "What do you think I'm doing, Arianne? I'm proving to you that I don't make idle threats and that you're ultimately very safe with me."

  Oh, holy crap—he was really going to go through with it!

  "I don't feel very safe at the moment! Hoyt, you have to let me up!" She arched her back, pushing herself up with a hand on either leg, and she heard him groan slightly—the breath hissing violently into his lungs. Ari lay back down immediately, horrified at the idea that she might have hurt him.

  And she had—his leg was in the exact wrong position for her to have been pushing down on his knee, and he wasn't fast enough to suppress the vocalizations of his pain.

  "Oh my God, I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to hurt you!" She redoubled her efforts to get off his lap, but handlessly, so it was very inefficient and easy for him to curtail.

  But then he realized that he had another arrow in his quiver, if he wanted to use it. Just as he would be with her or Emmy, she'd do anything to keep from causing him pain.

  She was still apologizing when he said calmly, "I'm fine. It's nothing to worry about. You just kind of caught me by surprise there."

  "I'm so, so sorry!" Her voice sounded as if she was inches from actual tears.

  "I know you are, honey, and I appreciate that," he replied calmly. "But it's not my leg that you should be concerned about—it's your beautiful behind."

  Arianne felt his heavy arm—however deformed it was, it still weighed a tremendous amount—being placed across her back, while he curved his fingers lightly around her hip. And suddenly, she'd been completely relieved of the ability to get off his lap, in just that easy of a move.

  "I'm not going to hold your hands this time, because I don't want to frighten you any more than you already are, but if you reach back to block a swat, I'll have to rethink that strategy."

  He used his hold at her hip to pull the fabric tight across the globes of her behind, and then, seconds later, he brought his palm down sharply onto them.

  Her surprised "Ow!" was full throated, but thereafter, she was surprisingly quiet.

  Hoyt was nothing if not methodical, cracking his hand up one side of her bottom and down the other, until every bit of it had been covered, twice. Rounds three and four were delivered more quickly, and with more "oomph", and he could hear that she was panting from them, and he even caught the occasional slight moan. But besides the first exclamation, she didn't say anything.

  She did reach back though, only once, near the end, when he was smacking down hard in the same exact place twice before moving on, but that was enough for him to capture her hand.

  "That's naughty, Arianne," he scolded.
He didn't cuff his fingers around her wrist as he might have if she was more comfortable with him. Instead, he held her hand with his.

  As far as she was concerned, though, that gesture was very nearly as intimate as the spanking itself.

  And he didn't go easy on her, as much as a part of him wanted to. He didn't want to drive her away by doing this, but then, if there was any hope at all of them getting together, he didn't want to give her a false impression of what being spanked by him was like, either. It went against his grain to mitigate the consequences of an act of disobedience anyway, so she got a full, thorough tanning. What he did when he was finished, though, surprised her to no end.

  She was prepared for him to ignore her, or continue to verbally chastise her, or even to push her to the floor.

  Instead, though, he gathered her to him, holding her against him with the utmost gentleness, literally cradling her in his arms. And that wasn't all. As he had when she was so nervous when she'd first sat on his lap, he rubbed her back and stroked her hair and whispered soft nothings to her, telling her she was all right and he was proud of her and that it was all over, occasionally pressing his mouth to her forehead or the top of her head.

  The thing that got to her the most, though, was that he kept repeating what he'd said before the spanking—that she was safe.

  He didn't ask for anything from her; he didn't demand anything. Hoyt simply provided her a warm, safe place to be, with plenty of verbal and physical reassurances after he'd disciplined her.

  Her eyes hadn't so much as gotten wet through the entire spanking.

  Instead, it was his warm kindness that broke her, and she lost it entirely.

  She hadn't cried like that since before she'd met Matt—she'd learned quickly that tears only annoyed him further and had learned to suppress them. But for some unknown reason, with Hoyt, like this, she couldn't seem to stop.

  Not that he minded in the least, except for the fact that she wasn't turning to him for comfort as she sobbed her heart out. Instead, she had crumpled in on herself while trying to lean away from him, as if she thought he was going to be angry that she was crying, which was—of course—the furthest thing from the truth.

  As he tried to encourage her to cling to him, he closed his arms a bit tighter around her than they had been, held her a bit closer, but she remained maddeningly removed from him, in her own little world of misery.

  Still, he was patient and just continued to do very much what he had been doing all along, until her sobs began to abate and she began to unwind just a little.

  But as she did so, her shirt rode up quite a bit in the back. Hoyt had been scrupulously careful about where he touched her. The only places he'd come in contact with her skin were her arms and her head.

  One long, sweeping stroke down that slight, slender back, though—that was meant to be nothing but quieting to her—became extremely disquieting to him when his hand came back up and ended up beneath her shirt. His fingers came in contact with that which he was all too familiar in his own skin—scar tissue.

  Arianne felt him tense beneath her and immediately knew the reason why, but she was too late to do anything about it. She'd allowed herself to become so relaxed in those big, muscular arms of his that she'd forgotten that she really couldn't do that.

  She reached back to try to bring her t-shirt down, but he refused to move his hand and it just ended up covering it. Indeed, he added a second one, using them to turn her over very gently.

  "No! Let me go!" she yelled, not caring if she woke up Emmy.

  It was one of the hardest things he'd ever done, but he reluctantly removed his hands from her back and she was off his lap like a scalded cat, standing well away from him and tucking her shirt belatedly into the waistband of her pants.

  But he'd seen what he was horrified to think were just a few of the marks on her back. They were raised and red—which he knew from personal experience meant that they weren't that old—and they were roughly U-shaped. He couldn't imagine what kind of thing might have left that type of mark, but then he realized that he was glad that he couldn't come up with it. It would probably make him sick if he knew.

  He was having a hard time dealing with what he'd found out about her. It was perfectly acceptable that he was scarred. But not her. The mere thought of it made him a little bit crazy.

  And then the murderous with rage feeling at some nameless, faceless being began to flood through him, and he had to work very hard not to let her see that, lest she misinterpret it and think that it was aimed at her.

  Hoyt walked over to her but remained a respectful distance away. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to invade your privacy like that. It was not what I intended at all. Please forgive me."

  She wasn't mad at him—although she supposed she should be, if only for him having had the audacity to spank her. But there was no anger involved in him knowing about the scars she bore. At least she was able to keep hers hidden.

  Her prevailing emotion was guilt, which she knew she didn't need to feel, but there it was. Shame and humiliation were right behind it, all vying for the top spot.

  His tone was haunted as he made a perceptive assumption about how she'd come to bear them. "No wonder you're afraid of me. I'm sorry."

  Her small hand out in front of her, she pled, "Please, don't. I can't bear pity."

  Hoyt nodded his head. "I get that. Are you all right?"

  She nodded silently.

  He opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. "I'd be glad to stay with you." He wanted to hold her again so badly, his entire body was aching with the need to do just that. But he also only wanted to do what she wanted him to.

  "You don't need to, but thank you," she whispered to the floor, looking like a pale, wan shadow of her former self.

  He moved to the door then turned and asked, "Is there anything I can do for you before I go? Anything at all?"

  "No, thank you."

  "I'll…I'll go, then. Call me if you need anything. Promise me that?"

  "I promise." It was a rote answer, and he suddenly doubted he'd ever get a call from her again, his stomach clenching painfully at the idea that he might have just ruined any chance he may have had with her, if there had ever been any in the first place.

  He knew he shouldn't have been hoping that there was, but he couldn't help himself.

  When she closed the door behind him, he paused right where he was, listening for her to set the locks, which he was glad to hear she did immediately.

  Then Hoyt made his way home, his mind and his stomach and the rest of his body churning with what he'd learned about her this evening, very much afraid that it wasn't how he looked that had proven to be an impediment to a relationship, as he'd always assumed it would be.

  It was, instead, his own need for her, the fact that he had pushed her too far too fast, and he'd learned something she hadn't been ready to tell him yet—if ever.

  It was the first time since he'd been discharged from physical rehab that he'd pulled out the bottle of Lord Calvert and drowned his myriad sorrows in cheap whiskey.

  Chapter 6

  And he was right. He didn't hear from her again. The days stretched into a week. Hoyt wondered if she had gotten a job, but then, who would have watched Mischief for her, if not him? So, he kind of doubted she had.

  It wasn't until he made a pit stop at Unka Al's that he saw her again, only her position had changed. She was the one behind the counter.

  It was about fifteen minutes before closing, and he just stopped in to get a quart of milk and some baking powder with which he was going to make biscuits.

  There was no one else in the store—most folks around town were early risers, and this was a work day, so they were likely already in bed or well on their way.

  He put his purchases on the counter, and she rang them up. "It's good to see you, Arianne."

  "You, too, Hoyt."

  "Liar," he accused with no malice. "I'm glad to see you got a job."

  Sh
e snorted at that, and he had to grin. "Such as it is."

  "Not really what you wanted, huh?"

  "Nowhere near."

  He made a snap decision, right there, right then. "Listen, I think I might be able to help along those lines. It would be generous pay and much better working conditions. Would it be okay for me to drop by tomorrow evening and talk to you about what I have in mind?"

  Ari gave him a wary look that he took no offence to. "I—"

  He held up his hands, even the damaged one. "I promise it will be nothing but that, darlin'."

  Hoyt watched her bite her lip fit to make it bleed, angry at himself that he seemed to have brought them right back to square one.

  "Have I ever lied to you, Miss Arianne?" he asked in a neutral tone.

  "No," she conceded reluctantly.

  "And I'm not now. You're still safe with me, and so is anything you trust me with or that I might accidentally discover about you. I'm a private man, and I assume my friends are, too. Small towns are hot beds of gossip. But no one will ever hear anything about you from me, honey, unless you tell me that it's okay for me to share it."

  "All right."

  She sounded about as enthusiastic as if he had suggested that she should bring a bag of tarantulas into her house, but he would take what he could get.

  "When would be the best time?"

  Arianne swallowed hard. "Well, I owe you a dinner, so why don't you come over around five thirty?"

  "You don't owe me anything. I hope you know that."

  She nodded, still not looking at him.

  "Good. But I've been dying to try your cooking, so I'm going to accept your generous offer anyway. Make me one of the things we talked about, hmm?"

  "All right." He turned away then right back again. "Aren't you just about to close up?"

  "Yes."

  "Well, why don't you go ahead and do that. I'll escort you to your car."

  She hated working at night and had been uneasy doing so since she started, but she needed money coming in, so she'd taken the job. "Thank you."

  Hoyt just smiled at her, glad that she wasn't fighting him on something he wanted to do for her, for a change.