Page 6 of Something Has To Give

Except that he didn’t mean “good night” at all. Rather, he meant “go to hell”. She could hear the words hanging like icicles in the air between them.

“Not in this bed,” she said hoarsely, so impotently helpless to stop him that she didn’t know what to do. Obviously, she couldn’t call the police. She couldn’t physically stop him; it was laughable even to try. There were no guns anywhere in the house that she knew of, and although there were weapon-able knives in the kitchen, exactly what was she supposed to do once she’d retrieved one? Attack him? Yeah—she looked him up and down—yeah, right. He was a trained soldier. He was bigger, tougher—one hand crept back behind her to touch her still burning, throbbing backside—and definitely meaner. She had absolutely no illusions about how such a confrontation would end.

“Anywhere else,” she said, waving her hands over the bed, blustering in the hopes he might listen because bluster was literally all she could do. “Anywhere else in this house, but not in my bed!”

Taking hold of the quilt, he whipped back the bedding. “Get the door on your way out.” He got in and jerked the blankets back up over him. Casting her one final look, he punched his pillow twice and lay down on his side, with arms folded hard across his chest and his back to her. “Get the light too.”

And just like that, her bedroom was no longer hers. Elsie stumbled backwards out into the hall. Shaking, she grabbed at the door handle, missed, grabbed again and finally managed toslam it shut between them. Then she stood there, shaking with anger and helpless fear. After eight months of false security, now she was going to lose everything all over again.

Except that “everything” in this case hadn’t really been hers in the first place, had it?

Yes, because she’d made it hers! She’d taken this dilapidated, abandoned house and she’d patched it up, fixed it up, and turned it back into a home. She wasn’t going to leave! Where would she go if she did?

There was no place. She had nothing.

Elsie covered her mouth with her hand, and momentarily bowed by the sudden weight that hit her in the back along with that realization. She had nothing. She was once more exactly where she’d been last spring. She could taste the desperation in the back of her mouth, that sickly taint that made her feel as if she were going to throw up.

Get a hold of yourself, Elsie.

Dragging herself up the wall, Elsie straightened her spine. Rydecker might be a soldier, but she was used to fighting too. She’d been fighting every single day for every fragile toehold of gain she’d taken, and she wasn’t about to back down now. If he’d had the power to really throw her out, the cop would have arrested her. He hadn’t; so Rydecker didn’t. The only way he could win this battle was by getting her to admit defeat.

Well, Elsie was all done being defeated.

She scrubbed the tears she hadn’t realized were winding their way down her cheeks and then she marched back into the bedroom. Sometime during her crisis in the hall, Rydecker had got up and shut the light off himself. He was back in bed now, still with his back to her, still with his arms folded across his chest. He was pretending to be asleep, but she knew better.

She wasn’t about to strip down to her usual nightshirt, but she did kick off her shoes and then she got into bed too. Robbing himof at least half of his blankets, she scissored them between her legs to ensure he couldn’t wrench them back and freeze her out during the night.

“Damn it!” he swore, lifting his head off the bed’s only pillow while he tried ineffectively to tug back enough to cover himself.

She grabbed the pillow next and yanked it out from under him, then lay down facing the door with it clutched tight in both hands.

Swearing again, she could feel Rydecker’s indecision a bare moment before he elbowed the mattress in frustration and lay back down with his head now cushioned on his own forearm.

It was a Mexican sleep-off, and it was one she intended to win. Back to back, they made that bed into a silent battlefield and neither one of them slept easily or well.

Chapter Three

December 22nd…

Quint awoke with the light of the rising sun glaring through a crack in the window curtain and falling directly across his face. Right away he knew he had two major problems: the first, Elsie was making a full-frontal assault on his side of the bed. Sometime during the night, he had taken back the pillow, and she had retaliated in true female fashion by turning him into a pillow instead. Her cheek was plastered to his chest. Her arm lay heavy across his stomach and she had one leg thrown indifferently across both of his. Flyaway wisps of tangled brown curls were tickling his shoulder, neck and one side of his face. She was snoring. Soft little in-drags of breath that puffed out again, spreading sleepy warmth across his pecs and down his ribs, adding merciless fuel to the fire of his second problem—he had morning wood the likes of which no military man wanted to wake up with while living in a barracks full of men…like, ever.

Except that Quint wasn’t in a barracks full of men right now. It was worse than that; he was waking up in bed with Elsie—hismortal enemy (well, maybe that was a bit overly dramatic) and the first woman he’d been to bed with since his last leave with Maydeen. What had that been…three years ago? Oh no, a full-on morning erection was the last thing he wanted to have to explain right now.

He had to get out of this bed before he did something completely insane—like roll Elsie over, rip those pesky jeans off her for the second time in less than twelve hours and, in a long, slow thrust (a motion he was certain would be the single most satisfying movement his body ever made), bury his cock all the way up inside her. He could already feel the mind-blowing heat emanating from her hot little core, like a brand searing its beckoning heat right into his hip.

Elsie softly snored again.

He had to get out from under her. Right now. Before he forgot how much he didn’t like the thieving little wench and made love to her instead.

He tried to move, but she stopped snoring and he froze, praying like hell she wouldn’t wake up. No such luck. She scrunched, hugging her arm in, drawing her leg up his body until her thigh was stroking right up the underside of his cock, pressing it hot against his belly with the bulbous crown peeking out at him from under the elastic waistband of his underwear. When she pulled in a sleepy sigh, her hand coming up to rub at her eyes, Quint completely panicked.

He erupted out of bed, throwing both her and the blankets back onto her side of the mattress and leaping over the protesting top of both in his mad-dash to the bathroom.

“Hey!” she mumbled, thrashing to find her way out from under the blankets.

Quint slammed the bathroom door and threw the lock.

“Jackass!” she barked after him.

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