Katy Run Away (6 page)

“You don’t believe me?”

“Not a word.”

She frowned; he chuckled and nudged her back, keeping her walking all the way through the swinging doors. Just before she crossed the threshold, she hesitated. He had to nudge her again and was so tired that he almost didn’t notice that she was looking off to one side. Following her gaze, Cal spotted a woman in an upper floor window of the Abilene, just down the street. The woman vanished behind a fluttering curtain, but not before Cal recognized her.

Lowering his mouth to Katy’s ear, Cal said, “Don’t even think about it, baby girl.”

Katy shot him a mutinous glare. Gathering her dirty skirts, she swept into the hotel with blue eyes flashing and head held high.

Cal ordered a room and a fresh bath—his second extravagance for the day. “You can go first,” he told Katy (rather magnanimously, he thought) as they climbed the second-story stairs. The look she shot back at him over her shoulder said once more they were not in agreement. Cal let it go. She was tired, and so was he. Tempers were bound to be short and a little frayed around the edges.

There were six upper floor rooms: three that faced the main street through town and three that overlooked the busy lumber mill out back. He opened the door and gestured for her to precede him, but for the second time, Katy paused in the threshold.

“Don’t worry,” he told her when she only stared inside at the bed. “I’ll sleep on the floor.”

She had twin spots of color burning in her cheeks again. She glanced back down the hall the way they’d come, then sidestepped, allowing the proprietor enough space to lug an oblong tin tub into the room. Laying a towel on the floor, he placed the tub in the center and then got out of the way, allowing the two women who had followed him to empty into it the four steaming buckets they’d been carrying. When they were done, four inches of heated water covered the bottom of the tub and Katy and Cal were once more left alone to stare at one another.

“Well?” she said, bracing her hands on her hips.

Sinking into a cushioned chair by the window, Cal propped his feet up on the table and let out a groan of relief. “I promise not to peek.”

Katy glared at him, her hands knuckling into fists. She didn’t say a word. She didn’t need to—and after a moment, Cal dragged his feet back down off the table. Stifling another groan, this time, certainly not one of relief, he stood up again.

“I’ll bring you something to eat.” He crossed the room, noting how she edged away from him as he trudged back out into the hall. “You’ve got ten minutes. Don’t take all the hot—”

She went inside and closed the door before he could finish.

“Water.” Cal nodded once, then he shook his head. His weary footsteps seemed heavy and loud as he headed down the hall for the stairs.

“Two hot dinners,” he told the proprietor as he passed the counter. “A sweet tea for the lady, and I’m going to need a beer. We’ll take them in our room in about fifteen minutes.”

“Certainly.”

Cal tapped the bar and nodded, but he didn’t stop walking. He left the hotel, making an immediate right and heading to the end of the wooden walkway, around the corner of the hotel and all the way down the alley to the rear of the building. The lumberyard was busy. He could see half a dozen men scraping bark from a variety of tree trunks, preparing them for the saw. Now that was a difficult job. It was hard, hot, physical labor.

It almost compared to this.

As he rounded the back of the hotel, Cal unbuckled his belt and tugged the worn length of leather from his belt loops. He was still wrapping the buckled end around his palm when the brunette from the Abilene saw him, squeaked and ran. Katy was hanging completely out of the upper story window, dangling by both hands from the windowsill and feeling with her feet for the thin frame across the top of the lower floor window directly below. As low as she could get, she pushed away from the wall and jumped, landing on her feet and only a little off balance.

“Ha!” she crowed, and stood. Her smile vanished when she saw him coming. She tried to run, but he caught the scruff of her dress first and then her arm. Her shrieks caught the attention of the men in the lumberyard. “No, wait! Cal! Don’t!”

“This is just a taste.” He snapped his belt across her bottom with a great deal more force than he would have used, but for all the layers of clothing that padded her bottom from the full effects of the leather. Those three sharp strokes still made her hips jolt outward, eliciting fresh yelps from Katy. “Something for you to think about until I get you back upstairs, where I’m going to bare your bottom and do the job properly.”

He gave her one last lick, laying it low across the very tops of her thighs, and from her howling, bouncing response, he guessed she was probably wishing she had more protective padding, not less.

In the lumberyard beyond them, some of the men had paused to see what the commotion was about. Others were already going back to work. Cal wasn’t sure if she had even noticed they had an audience. If she had, it obviously did not rank high on her immediate list of concerns.

“You have no right!” she wailed.

“No? Well, I guess that’s something we need to add to the list of things we’re going to talk about back in our room.”

“No!” She bounced, catching the back of one stinging leg with her free hand and rubbing fiercely.

“Yes.” The belt in one hand and her arm in his other, Cal turned her around and marched her down the narrow alley toward the front of the hotel. “I can promise you, Katy, this is going to be a long and thorough discussion because I’m tired of having to chase you down. I’m tired of the arguments, the attitude, the sulky looks. You and me…we are going upstairs and we are going to sort this out.”

She stopped rubbing her bottom when they reached the main street. She tried to pull away from him only once, and that was when he pushed her through the swinging doors into the hotel. When that failed, she became very quiet and very obedient, moving almost woodenly. He saw her face reflected in the mirror of the bar. She was biting her bottom lip and looking up at the stairs, her fingers twisting and wringing at the skirts of her dress, no doubt thinking about what was still coming and trying to weigh it against the smart she could already feel.

The proprietor was a professional. He took one look at the belt dangling from Cal’s hand and then pretended to be absorbed in wiping down the glasses behind his bar.

“Two hot dinners,” Cal repeated as he marched Katy passed the bar and straight toward the stairs. “One iced tea. Two beers.” He tossed the hotel owner a small, weary smile. “And you’d best make it twenty minutes.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Cal awoke with a start when he heard the sharp knock at the door.

“Stage,” the muffled voice of the proprietor called.

Struggling through the stiffness, Cal sat up. He rubbed at his head first and then yawned. It was an even harder struggle to get up off the floor. His foot kept tangling in the blanket that lay half on and half off the bed. Kind of like Katy.

She lay sound asleep on her stomach, her feet hanging off the foot of the mattress with her bloomers still dangling from one ankle. Her dress was bunched around her hips, her bottom only just covered by the volumes of rumpled cloth. The twin stripes he’d laid across the tops of her thighs showed as a crisscross of vividly wide and overlapping lines. Having concentrated the majority of his discipline upon the lower swells of her bottom, he knew for a fact that had to be at least as red and quite possibly even darker. She had fallen asleep with one hand still resting just above the tender swells, palm up, as if she were still trying to ward off the spanks that were no longer falling. She hadn’t even touched her supper.

Cal looked from the ham and potatoes on her plate, back to her. She couldn’t have been asleep for very long. Her cheeks were still a little flushed from crying, as was the tip of her nose, and still to him she looked as pretty as a painting.

Loathe to wake her, he reached down, brushing a wisp of honey-blonde hair off her forehead before letting the backs of two fingers glide down her cheek.

Her eyelids fluttered. Her soft and steady breathing hitched.

“Stage is ready to go,” he said.

Groaning, Katy closed her eyes again.

“Yeah, I know.” He was implacable. “Change your clothes and let’s go. You can sleep on the way.”

Turning her face into the mattress, Katy groaned again, then sighed. Dragging her hand back off her bottom, she pushed herself up and rolled gingerly into a sitting position. Her face underwent a myriad of expressive winces, all of which Cal pretended not to see. He turned his back, making himself busy over a basin of cool water, washing his face and trying to close his ears to the whisper-soft rustle of the young woman striping out of her dress just behind him.

Katy stood up slowly. She looked at the rip in the back of her bloomers—a casualty of their earlier ‘discussion’, when she had fought so valiantly not to be bent over the bed or stripped of her underwear—then kicked it all the way off and left it to lie as a crumpled puddle of dusty cotton on the floor. Moving slowly, listlessly, she took off her cactus thistle infused dress and dropped that on the floor too. Left now in only knee stockings and a waist length camisole, she pulled the dress Cal had bought onto her lap and then just sat there, shoulder hunched, idly fingering the cotton cloth. He knew all this because he couldn’t quite make himself stop peeking at her reflection in the dressing mirror. He watched her squirm and wince, very tenderly reaching back to press her hand along the side of her hip and then grimace, shooting his back a very disgruntled glare. That look did not last more than a few seconds, before smoothing away into first a grimace of guilt and then reluctant acceptance.

“Aren’t you going to leave?” she finally asked, when he straightened from his selective bath and began to dry his face and hands.

“Nope,” he replied. He did, however, step off to one side, moving out of range of the mirror. Facing the wall, he folded his arms across his chest and waited. This time, he kept his eyes firmly off the mirror.

Katy didn’t move. “I can’t change clothes with you in the room. It’s not decent.”

“You show your drawers to a room full of strangers for a living.”

“Not privately!”

Cal almost started laughing. Almost. “First of all, I’ve skinned your drawers off you not once now, but twice. We don’t have much more in the way of secrets between us. And second, I’m not looking at you. I’m looking at the wall.”

“You’ll peek.”

He tipped his head slightly, trying hard not to roll his eyes. “I won’t peek.”

“I don’t trust you.”

“There’s only one person in this room who hasn’t lied to the other. I’ll give you a hint: it’s not you.”

“You’ve lied,” she muttered, but he also heard the familiar zip of laces being irritably jerked loose.

“When have I ever lied to you?”

“Never mind.” The sound of rustling cloth became short and angry sounding. Then her foot kicked at the floor, and a moment later, her dirty dress landed just behind him. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

If his arms weren’t already folded, he’d have folded them all over again. Cal struggled for patience. “No, ma’am. Huh uh. You made an accusation, now you back it up with fact.”

“You said you wouldn’t leave me.”

“When did I say that?” Cal stared at the wall, his eyes narrowing. “I never said anything like—”

“You did too! When I was sick in bed with the mumps and everyone went down to the barn because Sookie was having her calf and it went bad, and you were the only one who stayed with me because I said please don’t go. You said you never would, but then you did.”

Irritation gave way to bewilderment. “No, I didn’t,” Cal said. “I stayed with you all night, feeding you sips of sweet cream and tea with a spoon because it hurt so bad you couldn’t open your mouth wide enough to drink from a cup. I never left your side, not once.”

“You did too! You and your father both, you left.”

Cal’s jaw dropped. “Three years later!”

“You still left! That’s still a lie! It’s even worse, because you didn’t just lie to me, you lied to a child!”

“Now hold it just one minute.” Cal shoved away from the wall and turned around, forgetting everything except the irrational argument brewing between them. It wasn’t until he saw her, sitting on the edge of the bed with that gown lying over her lap and no closer to being dressed than she had been before, that he suddenly remembered why he’d been facing the wall in the first place. He quickly snapped back around, but it was too late.

“I knew it!” Katy jumped off the bed with a shriek, yanking the dress up to cover herself. “I knew you’d peek!”

Cal ground his teeth in frustration. “Put your damn clothes on so we can talk about this like adults.”

“I don’t want to talk about this.” Her voice muffled as she threw the dress on over her head and quickly swam up through the volumes of cloth until her arms came thrusting out the sleeves and her head poked up through the top. She slapped an errant tear off her cheek, and then began hurried working her way up the long stretch of mother-of-pearl buttons that lined the front. “There’s nothing to say anyway. Everybody leaves. It’s just one more fact of life I have to get used to. The only thing anyone can do to stop it is leave first!”

The next thing Cal knew, Katy did just that. While he was still struggling to figure out how she had come to that lonely life-changing conclusion, Katy walked right past him and out the door. She’d left her food untouched, her dirty dress and ripped bloomers abandoned on the floor, and him facing the wall, although he turned around quick enough when he heard the door slam shut behind her.

Cal caught up to her halfway down the stairs. There were several people lined up at the bar and one couple, probably fresh in off the stage, enjoying a late lunch by the windows. The hardest thing he’d ever done in his life was keep his tongue in check while he followed her out of the hotel. She glanced once at the Abilene, but though it knocked at the back of his head to wonder if she might try running that way, but she didn’t. Instead, she gathered her skirts and stepped off the high wooden walkway, marched out into the sunlight and across the hard-packed street, to where the stagecoach was parked just outside the livery. Four fresh horses had been hitched up to the coach, and the driver and his companion were just coming out of the saloon next door, with lunch in a satchel and two canteens each of water for the road. Katy spared neither of them more than a glance. She simply boarded the coach, disappearing into the shadows inside.