Blushing Cheeks Volume Two Read online

  ISBN: 978-1-60968-090-9

  Romance writer Tiffany Jackson has been advised by her agent that it's time to spice her books up a notch or two. In fact, the agent specifically mentioned adding a few spanking scenes. Problem is, Tiffany has never been spanked and she hasn't a clue about how to write about one.

  Tiffany's cousin Sydney has a perfect plan: Tiffany needs a research assistant. And she has someone in mind, Fireman Aaron Fitzgerald, a long time friend of the family. Tiffany hasn't a clue, but Sydney knows that Aaron has had the hots for Tiffany for a long time.

  A few well-placed hints, and Tiffany has her research assistant. And Aaron makes it clear that the research will be done under his terms...!

  Kindred Spirits

  by

  Maren Smith

  Chapter One

  Raking her hands back through her shoulder-length dirty-blonde hair, Mindy checked her reflection in the mirror to make sure she didn’t have any dusty smudges on her face as she tied her wavy curls into a low ponytail. Raising her voice, she called out loud enough to be heard all the way to the kitchen at the opposite end of the house. “Nana, I’ve got the upstairs bedrooms cleaned. I’m going out now!”

  From the opposite end of the house, an aged voice warbled back, “Not before you deal with Murphy! He’s throwing a fit!”

  Pausing in the act of smoothing back her too-long bangs, Mindy stifled first a sigh and then a smile. Picking up her purse on the way—she would have preferred white, which would have matched her off-the-shoulder sundress, but so far she’d only unpacked the muddy brown one—she headed for the kitchen.

  Nana met her in the hallway, leaning heavily on her walker as she hobbled towards the living room, a cup of tea balanced in the basket. “He’s on the fridge again.” The old woman tsked and shook her curly gray head, thoroughly irritated.

  “It’s the move,” Mindy said. “Everything is strange here, and he doesn’t like being locked in his room all the time.”

  “Ha!” Her grandmother paused in the living room archway to shoot Mindy a caustic glare. “He keeps throwing my cereal on the floor and we’re all going to find out how well he likes getting smacked with the broom!”

  Mindy chuckled, taking that for what it was worth. “I’ll take care of this.”

  Sure enough, when she entered the kitchen, one quick glance told the story. There was a box of crackers on the floor and Corn Flakes everywhere, the box having fallen open sometime during its lofty topple from the top of the fridge where Murphy was currently sitting, sulking.

  Cereal crunching under her feet, she reached for him. “All right, young man. You’ve misbehaved long enough.”

  One sharp slap of his tail sent the Raison Bran crashing to the floor just before her hands closed gently around him, lifting the bad-tempered iguana down. He hissed once, but settled down quickly against her chest.

  “Such a bad boy,” she crooned, carrying him upstairs to the spare room across the hall from her bedroom and the large, closet-sized cage that he called home. She turned on his basking lamp, checked to make sure he had plenty of veggies and clean water in his bowls, and then closed the cage door. A squirt of disinfectant on the fridge and quick sweep of the kitchen cleaned up the mess. A peck on Nana’s withered cheek won forgiveness for the entire unruly episode, and after turning the channel to Oprah, at last Mindy was free to go.

  “Bring back ice cream,” Nana called.

  “It’ll melt before I get back,” she replied, stepping out the front door onto the sun-lit porch.

  “We need a car,” Nana groused.

  “Or a Taxi service.”

  “In Willow Grove?” They both laughed at the equal unlikelihood of either happening any time soon. Theirs was much too small of a town and much too tight of a budget.

  Closing the door behind her, Mindy stepped lightly off the porch and headed down the long dirt driveway until she reached the road to town. It was a two mile walk in all, and one that she had made every Monday afternoon since she’d moved to Willow Grove six weeks earlier. Today was a good day for it, too. The sun was out, warm like a blanket across the bare summits of her shoulders. Crickets and birds were singing, and here and there along the road katydids drowned them both out. If she booked it, she could be home again in just over an hour, but with Nana so dependent on her care, she didn’t get out very much anymore and on Monday Shopping Day she liked to take her time. She stepped off the narrow country road only twice to allow the unobstructed passage of two vehicles. Both times she waved, recognizing Lisa the receptionist who manned the phones for Nana’s doctor, and the other one everybody in town simply called the Snake Man.

  He was easy enough to recognize and not just because he was gorgeous personified—a dark-haired, muscular cowboy poured into t-shirts and skin-tight blue jeans and never seen without his hat or snakeskin boots (homemade as the rumors went). But also because his vehicle of choice was a modified school bus, bought from the county surplus auction six years back.

  If local gossip could be believed, that bus was filled to the brim with snakes in aquarium enclosures. She’d never been one to believe in gossip, but Willow Grove was located smack-dab in Redneck Central U.S.A. Gossip here was a major form of communication. She supposed a grown man playing with garter snakes wasn’t as odd as it could be. Cow tipping, for instance, was much stranger and still pretty popular among the local yokels, particularly where the Balray brothers were concerned.

  Speak of the devils; she stepped off the road just as the Balrays’ camouflage-painted jeep barreled past her. Two of the three Balrays stood up in the back, saluting her with open beer bottles and exuberant whooping—the redneck mating call—but the jeep did not slow down. She kept walking and didn’t acknowledge that she’d heard or seen them at all. With any luck, they’d be deep in their cups at Sunny’s Bar by the time she reached the Country Store.

  Unfortunately, the Balrays never did anything for anyone’s convenience but their own. They were not only not at the bar, but they were parked in front of the Country Store, leaning against their jeep, laughing and drinking as if waiting for her to arrive.

  “Hey baby.” The oldest of the brothers, James, held out his arms, albeit with hands low down by his hips. Mindy automatically changed course, giving him a wide berth lest he try to embrace her or—as was more likely—to grab her ass.

  “Don’t be like that,” he called. Even with two cars between them, he fell into step with her, trailing her to the entrance. “Come on, have a beer. We don’t bite...hard...”

  She should have ignored him altogether but, trying to avoid a scene, she offered a brisk, “No, thank you.”

  Into the store she went while James stopped just short of the doors, which swung heavily closed on his brothers’ barks of laughter. “Crash and burn, bro. Crash and burn!”

  As Mindy bent to pick up a shopping basket, her eyes met those of Carol, who manned the empty check out lane. They both rolled their eyes.

  “They’re rough, but they’re harmless,” Carol said, shaking her head and buffing her nails.

  “So everybody keeps telling me.” Slipping the twin handles into the crook of her elbow, she headed for the minimal produce aisle. A half hour later, she left the grocery store with a single paper grocery bag balanced on her hip. The Balrays were still outside, and judging from the quantity of empties lined up on the hood of their jeep, they’d each had at least two beers more.

  “Hey!” James shouted out when he saw her. “Hey, I want to talk to you!”

  “No, thank you,” Mindy said automatically and turned her back for good measure, cutting the long way across the parking lot and going around the feed store just to avoid walking past their jeep. It was a relief when she finally stepped out onto the long road that led back to Nana and home. One quick glance over her shoulder and she sighed with relief. For a change, the Balrays seemed to have given up.

  A half mile down the road, however, Mindy heard the familiar roar of the jeep’s modified muffl
er. Automatically, Mindy stepped down off the narrow country road, hopping over the ditch just in case whoever was driving got it into his head that it might be funny to tap the backs of her legs. Again.

  Even halfway expecting it to happen, Mindy still jumped when the jeep suddenly swerved off the road just in front of her, bumping down into the ditch and throwing great clods of dirt back up at her when it screeched to a stop.

  “Oh!” Mindy snapped to one side, dropping her groceries as she spun sideways in an attempt to avoiding getting hit by flying earth and rocks.

  “Douche,” James mildly rebuked his youngest brother, Marcus, who was currently behind the wheel.

  In the passenger seat, Danny shook spilled beer off his hand, tried effectually to brush the worst of the wet from his pants, and then whacked Marcus upside the head. They both followed James out of the jeep without speaking.

  Brushing dirt from the side of her waist and hip, Mindy froze, her eyes wide as she watched them come. They were an ominous bunch: dirty jeans and t-shirts stained from the garage where they worked, lanky hair and hungry, gleaming stares. James at least was smiling, a wolfish look that instantly made her skin crawl, especially when he began to shake his finger at her. “You’re not being very friendly, Ms. Caveat.”

  A car drove by them without slowing. Suddenly realizing the bushes flanking her might also be hiding her and this rapidly unraveling situation, Mindy grabbed her grocery bag back into her arms and almost fell over a tangle of sticks in her haste to get back to the road. Her shaky, “Excuse me,” became a startled scream when an arm hooked around her waist, yanking her back against a rock-hard chest. Groceries went everywhere when she dropped the bag again.

  “Polite,” James said, sultry and low, his breath hot against the side of her neck, “is not friendly.”

  He buried his face in the side of her hair, his deep-drawn breath sending prickling fingers rushing all the way down her spine.

  “Let go of me!” It was surprising how angry she sounded, when in fact all Mindy could really feel (aside from the strength of his arm squeezing her to him and that ominous bulge digging into her back just above her buttocks) was stark and devastating fear. She pried at his wrist, struggling to twist away but she might just as well have been trying to bend iron bars with her bare hands. Her one comfort, that not even these degenerate hicks would dare to assault her this close to the road, shattered like brittle glass when James began to push her. She dug in her feet, but he was stronger and he simply walked her deeper into the bushes.

  “Have a beer,” he offered, pushing her ahead of him, her stiffly braced legs dragging through the grass and shrubs without slowing him in the slightest. “Take it, and let’s all get nice and...friendly.”

  The two younger Balray boys closed in at her sides. Unsmiling, Danny offered her his half-spilled beer and knowing now exactly what was going to happen next, with a trembling hand, she reluctantly accepted.

  “There now, see.” James grinned at his brothers. “She’s not so frigid after all.”

  Mindy hit him with the bottle. Gripped at the base, all she could do was jab back behind her head with the mouth of it and hope she hit something vital. She was aiming for his eyes but missed, landing only a glancing blow that bounced off the side of his forehead and hit his ear when he jerked instinctively back. But that reflexive jerk also loosened his arm from around her and that minute release was all Mindy needed to wrench herself free.

  Pelting Marcus with the sloshing beer bottle, she ran right through a tangle of blackberry brambles—losing her shoe in the process—to get around the front of the jeep and then leapt back across the ditch and dashed into the road. She was just over a mile away from home with little more than nothing in between here and there, and although Willow’s Grove was closer, she knew there was no way she could outrun the jeep or Balrays, who were yelling and swearing and already giving chase behind her. Mindy snapped around for town and very nearly ran head-on into the front grill of the Snake Man’s bus.

  She barely had time to scream; the bus had even less time to brake but did manage to swerve, missing her at the very last second and screeching to a sudden stop that left a good ten feet of rubber on the blacktop.

  But at least he stopped.

  He also got out. All six-foot-two-inches of him. Lean and swarthy, a tire iron gripped in one broad hand as he came bursting through the unfolding doors to take in the situation. “What the hell are you idiots doing now?”

  Whether it was the tire-iron, the look on the Snake Man’s face, or perhaps because they’d had run-ins with him before, the Balrays immediately abandoned their pursuit of Mindy. Turning tail, they jumped back into their jeep and, spraying dirt, leaves and sticks of butter, they peeled back onto the road and took off in the direction away from town.

  Hands pressed to her tightly knotted stomach, Mindy swayed once on her feet before her knees completely gave up all semblance of sturdiness. She collapsed flat on her butt, right there in the middle of the road, her knees just two inches from the first step of the bus’s gaping folding door and the hot air of the engine billowing through her hair.

  “You just keep on running!” the Snake Man shouted after the fleeing jeep. “Total wastes of human sh—” He backed up two steps, glanced down at her, then back at the jeep just as it disappeared around the next corner, and then back at her again. She started to pick herself up, and belatedly, he reached for her arm. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” But she wasn’t. She was shaking, her dress was torn from her sleeve all the way down the side of her breast and her groceries were scattered across the bottom of a blackberry-brambled ditch. Trying to hold her dress closed, she looked at that week’s worth of badly needed food and her shoulders sagging. “At least you didn’t hit me.”

  “Thank God.” Jiggling the tire iron in his hand, he turned to follow her gaze. There was a wry twist of his mouth as he handed over the makeshift weapon. “Here, hold this. I’ll get them.”

  She took the tire iron—it felt so cold and heavy in her hands—and her knees buckled weakly in and out as she tried to follow him. He caught her arm and then her waist, helping her back to the bus until he could sit her down on the bottommost step. For the first time, the anger was gone from his face when he looked at her. “Are you okay?”

  “I lost my shoe,” she said softly, noticing her bare and bleeding foot for the first time. The brambles had snagged her leg, scratching around her ankle and she hadn’t noticed that either.

  He looked at her foot and then he looked at her again. “I’ll get it. Stay right here. Don’t move.” He pointed at her, a long stern, staying finger, but with that blatant concern still darkening his eyes. He pointed again, just to make sure, and then hurried down into the ditch to fetch the groceries. He found her shoe, too.

  “Thank you,” she said when he brought it back to her. She shook two leaves and a caterpillar out of it, then bent to put to slip it back over her bleeding foot. She had to hold the ripped sleeve of her dress up to keep her bosom from falling out while she was bent over and the scratches had begun to sting but the blood was drying, but by the time she’d righted herself, he’d finished gathering up the groceries.

  “You’ve lost about half your eggs,” he said helpfully, holding out the bag.

  Her knees still felt weak, but this time her legs stayed under her when she slowly stood up. “Thanks,” she said again, not looking at him even as she accepted it from him. She shifted the bag to one arm, offering him his tire iron back. “And again, thanks for stopping.”

  “I’d offer you a ride, but…” he gestured at the bus, half shrugging with one shoulder and looking uncomfortably helpless. “Most folks won’t even park next to it.”

  Trying to keep both the torn bag and dress from spilling their burdens, Mindy stepped back to look first at the bus and then down the long road toward home. She still had over a mile to go. “Do you really keep snakes on there?”

  “They’re caged,�
� he said helpfully.

  Her leg was really starting to bother her. She tried to smile, though she wasn’t really feeling it. “I’d love a ride.”

  “Seriously?” In a blink, his surprise gave way to a look of mixed pleasure. He held up that long staying finger again. “Okay, stay right here. Give me one second to find a place to put you.”

  He really was a gorgeous specimen of man, she half-heartedly acknowledged as he jogged up those three steps and disappeared from sight into the back of his vehicle. The school bus rocked as he shifted weight around in the back. She briefly saw the shadow of him pass the tinted window with what looked like a ten-gallon aquarium in his arms.

  “Sorry, I haven’t had passengers in this thing in years,” he called back out at her.

  “That’s okay. I appreciate the ride.”

  “You’re ol’ Mrs. Caveat’s granddaughter, aren’t you? Up from the city for a while, right?”

  She glanced up in time to see the back pockets of his jeans briefly pressing against the glass of the first and only untinted window along the side of the bus as he quickly bent to stash something out of sight under the seat. Her smile wasn’t quite so forced when he reappeared at the top of the steps again.

  “Mindy,” she supplied.

  “Colton Waters.” He brushed his hands off on the seat of his jeans, then offered her one. “Welcome aboard.”

  He took that poor, beleaguered grocery bag from her arms first, depositing it onto the seat directly behind the door and then reached down to help her up. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting, but as she mounted those steps her breath was stolen by the sight of all those tanks. Only the two front passenger seats remained in the bus. The rest had been removed and floor-to-roof shelves built in their place. Aquariums—some set up for length, like the huge tank that lined the back of the bus, while others stood on end to maximize height—lined those shelves. They were well lit and clean and most definitely occupied, as the bolted-down screen tops suggested.