Blushing Cheeks Volume Two Page 10

  “Oh wow,” she said.

  “You’re perfectly safe,” he stressed, trying to block her view of the tanks with his broad chest. “Every one of those cages is locked and, for a change, I actually know where everybody is.”

  Her leg forgotten, Mindy squeezed past him so she could get a better look into the first cage. This was no garter snake. Wound around a narrow tree branch, an emerald green tree snake looked back at her with eyes as yellow as the decorative bands that sectioned its three-foot body length.

  “Oh wow!” she said again, her tone one of reverence rather than disgust. “How cool! Look at the color. I’ve never seen a snake like this before.”

  This time when she pushed deeper into the bus, instead of blocking her, he followed. Milk snakes, corn snakes, king and rat snakes; she made her way from tank to tank, marveling at the patterns and vivid colors. She stopped for the longest time at the very back, where a massive yellow- and white-mottled python was basking under a heat lamp. The body of that snake had to be at least twelve feet in length and was thicker around the middle than her own thigh.

  “Wow,” she said yet again, softer this time. “I’m impressed. I am seriously, seriously impressed.”

  “So am I,” Colton mused, standing just behind her.

  She touched two fingers lightly to the corner of the glass where the snake’s body was currently pressed. It looked so smooth and soft, she wished she could just reach inside and touch it. Then again, considering the size of the head and, consequently, teeth, it was probably just as well that she didn’t. “Have you ever seen anything more beautiful?”

  “Not for some time.”

  Laughing, Mindy glanced back over her shoulder at him, but it wasn’t the snake Colton was looking at. Instead, he was watching her closely, a mix of pride and interest and even muted amazement on his handsome face. Right up until their eyes caught and held. Then his face hooded and, sheepishly, he looked away.

  Had he been talking about her? Mindy almost forgot to breathe, he was that handsome. And tall. Very, very tall. And swarthy, in a 5 o’clock shadow, unshaven sort of way.

  “Right, well,” he cleared his throat. “We’ve blocked the road long enough for one day. Let’s get this thing moving, shall we. Does Mrs. Caveat still live out on along the Old Holler Road?”

  “Same old house.” She followed him back to the front of the bus. While he buckled himself in behind the steering wheel, Mindy cleared her ripped bag of groceries off the seat and stashed it on the floor next to her feet. Then she shifted a short stack of his mail, along with a couple of magazines—Field and Stream and Nascar (huh, so somebody actually did read those things)—out from under her before she sat. Setting the mail down closer to the window, she twisted around to look at the tree snake slithering along the glass just behind her, lightly tapping its nose to test the resolve of the screen door that locked it safely inside its enclosure.

  “Seat belt,” Colton told her.

  Mindy faced forward again, giving first him and then her lap a blank look. “Oh you’re kidding! You outfit this clunky old thing with—” She stopped when she realized what she was saying. “Uh…” Her face colored. “Safety first, right?”

  “I’m a safety kind of guy.” He waited, watching her through the rearview mirror, his slight smile forgiving the unintentional slight, until she snapped the belt into place around her waist and tightened down the strap. When he started up the bus, the whole vehicle came vibrating to life, and as he jolted into forward motion, the short stack of mail jostled and then slid sideways, spilling from the seat onto the floor beside her.

  “Oh! Oops!” Mindy caught some of them, but ended up reaching headfirst down under the seat after the rest.

  “It’s okay,” he called. “I’ll get them later.

  “No, no! I got it!” Seat belt choking the breath out of her, she struggled to wrangle the scattered mail together with first her hands and then her feet. She put the envelopes back on the seat and then went down again for the magazines. The tips of her fingers played tickle-tag with the loose pages of Nascar before finally managing to snag and pull it out. She had to take her shoe off, using the extended length to fish blindly under the seat for several unsuccessful minutes before she heard a crinkle of paper when she lay down the heel.

  Finally!

  “Ha, ha!” she crowed. “Success!”

  And dragged back into the open light of day not just Field and Stream but three others as well. One was still wrapped in its prying-eyes obscuring plastic. The other two had not only been removed from theirs, but were obviously well-thumbed. It was a good thing Mindy was bent down under the seat, because her face went a deep, brilliant shade of red the instant she saw the cover: two young ladies bent over a desk, skirts up and white cotton panties dropped to half-mast around their knees. Both of their bottoms as red and hot as Mindy’s face was quickly starting to feel.

  “Did you get them?” Colton asked.

  Mindy opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Instead she stared, taking in every detail of that first cover, from the man standing behind them, ruler in hand while his other sternly rolled his long white sleeve up past his elbow; to the girls, both gripping the far edge of the desk and wincing expressively. One looked near onto tears; if Mindy’s bottom were already that red with the threat of another spanking looming that ominously in her very near future, she’d have probably been on the verge of tears too.

  The skin of her bottom was crawling, she suddenly realized with a start. And between her legs, a very real, timid tingling was moving across her sex, as soft as a caress, as warm as the blush burning into her face.

  “Did you get it?” Colton asked again. He was starting to sound a little concerned. As if perhaps he’d suddenly remembered what he’d stuffed under this particular seat just before she came onto the bus.

  In one fell swoop, Mindy scooped all three magazines, both the two already opened and the one still sealed, into her grocery bag. “Got it!” she cried, grinning broadly and waving the Field and Stream once over her head to show him. She also made a great production out of trying to keep herself modestly tucked inside her torn dress and hoped that he would attribute her furiously blushing cheeks—the northern pair, rather than the southern—to her malfunctioning wardrobe.

  It must have worked because in the rearview mirror, the direction of his gaze obediently fell from the magazine in her right hand to the tattered scraps of dress she was clutching in her left. They lingered at boob-level for a long time before, clearing his throat, he turned his attention back to the road. He was flushed now, too. If she weren’t already so thoroughly flustered (albeit for a very different reason), she might have thought that sweet.

  “That’s…” Colton cleared his throat. “That’s good.” He bobbed his head into a nod. “Yup. Right wonderful.”

  He probably couldn’t get her home fast enough at this point. Right now, she couldn’t get home fast enough, either. She picked up her bag of groceries and—

  Bright red blushing bottoms...

  —hugged it on her lap. Her chest felt tight, and for some reason it felt so strangely hot in here that she could barely breathe. Fortunately, that single remaining mile went back awfully fast when traveling in a bus. Even in a bus full of snakes. In no time at all, they were turning off the main road onto the familiar, unpaved driveway of home. Colton took her right up to her front porch before he levered the sliding door open.

  “Thank you so much,” she said, hurriedly unclipping her belt and struggling to get up without letting go of her bag or, even worse, allowing it to fall open in any way that might expose her pilfered treasures.

  He smiled and nodded, his gaze sliding back to the magazines and mail that she’d left behind her on the seat. “Not at all. I hope your leg’s all right.”

  He started to get up, no doubt to help her disembark, but Mindy quickly hurried past him, jogging down the steps onto the crisp gravel outside.

  “All right,” he said with a nod
. The sight of a woman scurrying to get off his bus was probably not an unfamiliar one. Or maybe his deflating expression was due to his realizing she’d found his secret spanking stash and now couldn’t get away fast enough because of it. Either way, he still muttered, “Nice meeting you.”

  Her feet itched to immediately run her straight into the house (before he realized what she’d taken) all the way up to her room (without running into Nana who might nose her way into the grocery bag and see them) where she could shut and lock her door and safely explore what she’d taken in wide-eyed, red-faced, open-mouthed, tummy-tightened, pussy-tingling astonishment.

  But she didn’t. She made herself stop. She made herself turn back around and look at him, right into his handsome as sin eyes. She meant to thank again for his help, and for the ride, and for just being in the right place at the right moment in time to help her. But she had visions of white-knuckled women bent over desks and ready to take their licks in her mind, and what she ended up blurting out was a nearly indecipherably garbled, “You wouldn’t want to have dinner with me, Mr. Waters, would you?”

  He visibly started, his hand paused on the door handle. “I’m sorry?”

  Bright red bottoms flinching from Teacher’s ruler...

  Her own tightened as a soft wind tugged at her skirt. She swallowed hard and made herself press on. “Tomorrow night? Around seven, maybe?”

  He was clearly surprised. He glanced back at the seat where she’d been sitting, and then even further back at the snakes, and then, blinking twice, he looked at her again. He opened his mouth, emitting a rough bark of sound that was more a breathy gasp that real laughter.

  “Okay. I’ll be here,” he finally managed.

  Her heart pounding in her chest, her blood thundering in her veins, Mindy managed one last smile before she snapped around and ran inside the house. When the screen door slammed shut behind her, in her own mind at least, it sounded just like the meaty whack of a ruler driving some misbehaving, white-pantied miss right up onto the tips of her toes. She didn’t stop to watch Colton drive away. She didn’t even stop when Nana called out from the living room, “Did you bring ice cream?”

  Mindy ran all the way up to her bedroom, where she quickly slammed and locked the door.

  Chapter Two

  With two fingers, Mindy held back the curtain to watch as the bus made a slow three-point U-turn in the driveway before jostling and bumping its way back to the road. As far as she could tell, Colton hadn’t paused long enough to get up and check his mail. He probably didn’t yet know what she’d taken. Surely he would before seven tomorrow evening, but Mindy didn’t dare think about that yet. Maybe she would after she’d looked through his magazines, after all those images of well-spanked ladies were indelibly burned into her fantasies and her mind. Her hand shook. She dropped the curtain and, still hugging that tattered bag of groceries, crept to her bed and carefully set it down.

  Rubbing her hands on her skirted thighs, she stared at the bag. It could have held the stolen crown jewels instead of spanking pornography for all the reverence she was giving it. She rubbed her hands again, her breath catching in the back of her throat.

  She jumped when Nana called up the stairs, “Mindy? You okay?”

  She quickly opened the door long enough to call back, “Fine, Nana! Give me a minute; I’ll be right down!”

  She sounded half-strangled, and even before she got the door closed again, she could already hear Nana’s cane thumping its way up the stairs. Mindy knew one moment of sheer, unadulterated panic. She hurriedly dug the magazines out of the bag, whipped aimlessly around the room in search of a Nana-proof hiding place and then dashed back to hide them under her mattress. She then sat down on top of them, crossing her legs in an effort to look nonchalant, except that the deep scratches in her leg than because alarmingly obvious. Her hand flew to her mussed hair, encountering pine needles, and she looked down at herself in dismay.

  Whipping her ruined dress off over her head, Mindy ran to the closet. She’d only just yanked out a replacement when the door suddenly flew opened. Mindy jerked the dress up in time to cover herself but she knew she looked a mess, and while Nana might be half-blind from cataracts when it suited her, today was not one of those days. Today, she didn’t miss a thing.

  Her eyes traveled the length of Mindy, narrowing on the pine needles in her hair and again when they settled for a painfully long time on her scratched-up leg. “What happened?” she finally asked.

  “I fell,” Mindy said, holding her new dress up to her chest in an effort to cover herself. As unobtrusively as possible, she kicked the torn one into the closet on the off chance that her grandmother hadn’t seen it yet.

  “Uh huh,” said Nana, her rheumy eyes narrowing slightly. A long silence then ensued, broken only by a hiss from Murphy in his cage just down the hall and a brittle crackling as Mindy reached up to pull a dead leaf and a couple pine needles out of her tangled hair. She dropped them on the floor. “Was that a truck I heard in the driveway?”

  “Colton Waters gave me a lift home.”

  “The boy with all the snakes?”

  “He’s more of a, uh…” Mindy cleared her throat. “He’s not really a boy anymore, Nana.”

  “Um hm.” Nana’s mouth pressed together, but although her hawk-sharp gaze wandered Mindy again, all she said was, “Did you get ice cream?”

  “Vanilla.”

  Nana went to the bed and retrieved the groceries. “We moving the kitchen into your bedroom?”

  “No, I…just wanted to get changed.”

  “Uh huh.” Nana gave her another hard look, but then took the groceries with her when she left. Although obviously believing there more to the story than what was being told, she wasn’t going to dig.

  The door closed quietly behind her, and Mindy quickly climbed into her dress, sunshine yellow with white squiggles. She made another attempt to shake out those foreign bits of nature that still stubbornly clung in the tresses of her hair while listening to the thump-steps of Nana retreating back down to the living room. Oprah awaited, and Mindy hoped that would be enough of a distraction to keep her grandmother busy for a good, long time.

  Her fingers were trembling as she fidgeted with the folds of her skirt. Her palms sweat; she rubbed them restlessly against her thighs, listening until she was sure she was alone in the whole upstairs of the old house. Then she went back to her bed, carefully digging the magazine back out into the unwavering light of day and lay them on the coverlet.

  Even in the privacy of her bedroom, she felt that slow flush of heat stealing up into her face as she looked at that cover. She slipped the unopened package aside and looked at the second magazine cover, her breath catching all over again. A broad, strong dark-haired man sat on the center cushion of a long sofa, a laughing blonde tumbled across his knees. Blushing red fingerprints extended out from around the elastic of her underwear. His large flat hand was raised high above her, and he was grinning down at the back of her head, so obviously enjoying giving what she was so thoroughly enjoying receiving. She held a wooden-backed hairbrush in one hand and the prospect of upgrading didn’t seem to bother her one bit.

  Her heart thumping excitedly in her chest, Mindy set that aside and went back to the first magazine. A shiver of anticipation tickling up her spine, she opened it. The stories played out before her like a dream, a long-buried fantasy that had come straight to clearly-defined and glossy-paged life. Giggling Catholic schoolgirls, each of whom had to be at least twenty, caught by a frowning, folded-arms instructor, his black-rimmed glasses riding low on the bridge of his nose as he glared over the top of them. Up to teacher’s desk they went, sulky defiance tugging at the corners of their mouth as, bending over to grip the far edge, twin short skirts of black and red plaid were turned up to reveal the rounded seats of plain white-cotton panties.

  Mindy’s thighs clenched as she sat down on the edge of her bed, and after looking her fill, she turned the page. She could almost hear the brisk s
lap!-crack!-whap! as Teacher’s broad hand went to work, first on one trim bottom and then the next. The sulky frowns were gone now and the girls were far from smiling as they struggled to hold onto the desk. One reached back, remorsefully caressing the rosy glow of one chubby nether cheek, and the teacher reached for his ruler.

  Toes curling, Mindy turned the page. Panties came down, the hot pink flush became a deeper shade of red, lined here and there by the edges of the ruler. Her breath caught and held as she contemplated how that might feel, the heat and the hurt, mingling all through the bare bottoms that wriggled in frozen suspense on those glossy pages. Motionless lips mouthed ‘Ow!’ and ‘Please!’ and there was probably at least one frantic, teary ‘Stop!’ uttered before Teacher deemed they’d had enough and each girl was dismissed to the blackboard.

  With panties down and the hems of their too-short skirts tucked up into their waistbands, each was reduced to writing lines of ‘I will not talk in class’ on individual halves of the blackboard while a satisfied Teacher leaned back against his desk, arms folded across his chest and ruler still in hand.

  Just in case. Mindy shivered, delighted.

  Next came a Naughty Secretary scenario, followed by a misbehaving wife and steamy letters to the editor, which Mindy skimmed before returning back to the beginning of the giggling schoolgirls. She went through the whole series twice more. If she listened hard enough, she could almost hear the spanks and the pleas. If she concentrated hard enough, she could almost felt the burn, the slow pulse of hot, wet arousal licking up between her legs at the very thought of being made to take one of their places. Both their places, even. She’d have loved the chance to give Teacher his ‘just in case’ reason. Then again, perhaps not. She had always been very good in school.

  Laying the first magazine aside, she reached for the second. Naughty girls, sassy girls, plump girls and skinny girls. They were bent over laps, over tables, made to kneel on hands on knees at the foot of their beds or with pillows tucked up under their hips. Hands spanked, straps slapped, willowy and whippy canes left parallel lines of burning fire and milky white bottoms blushed into hues of soft pink, deep burgundy red and every conceivable shade in between.