Naughty List Week Continues with Something Has To Give by Maren Smith

Hohoho! Today Maren Smith is here to share an excerpt from Something Has To Give which can be purchased on it's own or as part of The Naughty List which is a collection of Five Christmas Spanking Stories which I am featuring every day this week. Each author is also sharing a fun Christmas memory. 

Blurb: Freshly divorced and newly-discharged from the military, Quint Rydecker comes home for the first time since his wife left him, expecting to find his house empty and quiet.
Elsie Redding thinks she’s found a place to call her own–an old abandoned farmhouse in the middle of the Utah desert–where she might finally evade the debts and hard times haunting her.

Now, like soldiers on opposing fields, Quint and Elsie wage war with that old farmhouse as the only prize. Both are determined to get rid of the other before winter closes in. But no matter how much she tries, Elsie can’t seem to harden herself against the guilt of taking Quint's home; no matter how much he tries, Quint can't resist the lovely, kissable and all-too spankable Elsie’s charms.

Something will have to give, and it might just be their hearts. 

Excerpt:

“I mean when I get out.” His faint, smirking smile thinned. “Because I will get out, and when I do, I’m going to put you back over my knee. Before I’m through with you, you’re going to wish you’d been born without a bottom. And that’s only if you untie the rope right now and let me out. Because if you don’t…well—” That faint smile of his thinned even more. “—guess what I found in the linen closet.”

He reached up into the sink and pulled a wooden-backed brush into view. The handle seemed a little short for a bath brush, but also a little too long for a hairbrush. Exactly what it was didn’t really matter, she supposed. When he tapped it against his palm and fixed that deadly serious look on her through the reflection of the compact again, the skin across her bottom positively crawled.

Snatching the compact out from under the door so she couldn’t see the way he was looking at her helped, but not a lot. She shoved the two lids under the door. “I hope you choke,” she hissed, backing anxiously away from the door. She wasn’t rubbing her bottom, she told herself fiercely. She was just wiping the sensation of being anywhere near him off her hands.

“What,” he called through the door. “No water?”

“Drink from the tap, you…you animal!” she spat and fled for the stairs.

She could hear him laughing, a hard and bitter sound, all the way back to the kitchen. God, her heart was beating a mile a minute. She bellied up to the sink, falling down to rest her elbows on the thin ledge of counter between the old porcelain and the laminate edge. Covering her scalding hot face with both hands, she tried to think. This was awful, this was impossible. How was she expected to co-exist—even for just a short amount of time—with someone who dealt with women by spanking them? This was the twentieth century, damn it! Who did that anymore?

Well, there was no way she was going to let him out when he was still in that abusive frame of mind. No way at all. Maybe after he’d spent a night or two trying to bed down in the tub he’d be more amenable.

A shadow crossed the window, startling her upright. Her jaw gaped and she stared as two bare feet dropped down from the second floor to become the naked calves (very manly, but naked calves), and then the knees and thighs (hard, thick, muscular thighs that bulged as his feet scrambled to find something to brace against) followed by hips that were clad in nothing but a pair of white briefs (holy Hannah, that bulge). The wooden-backed brush was slung gun-slinger-style in the waist of his underwear, with the bristled head poking up and the tip of that long handle protruding from under the elastic of his right leg. Feet finally finding something other than the glass of the kitchen window to push against, he gave a hop and dropped the rest of the way to the ground.

Eyes huge and mouth hanging open, Elsie stared as Rydecker stood up. He was just tall enough for his head and the top of his naked shoulders to peek up above the windowsill. His dark eyes narrowed. His breath steamed the air, looking for all the world like a dragon seething smoke.

“Oh…shit…” Elsie said.

Moving very slowly, Rydecker took the hairbrush out of his underwear and pointed at her with it through the glass. “You,” he growled. “Your ass is mine.”

Christmas Memory:

When we first moved to Kansas we were pretty darn broke. DH (Dear Hubby, not Dickhead) had found a job after almost two years and we were starting to pull things together, but that Christmas was tight. There were no presents that year, which was okay because we don't have kids so we don't celebrate that way. But what we usually did and which we couldn't that year was pick names off the Salvation Army's Wish Tree. We usually picked a senior, a disabled person, and a child and those were who we usually buy presents for at the holidays. But we weren't able to that first year, and that hurt. What's worse, there was no Christmas tree.

Now, one thing you should know about me is, I love Christmas lights. I go out every weekend in December, pick a direction and drive easily 50+ miles just to look at the houses all decked out in lights. I'll take light nets and hang them up on my bedroom walls, so I can go to sleep all month long surrounded by sparkling, pretty lights. But that first year here, we couldn't do any of that. We couldn't even afford a tree. So, one afternoon about a week from Christmas, in a blue funk, my sister and I decorated the filing cabinet instead. Draping it in every net light we had, we hung ornaments on the wires, put the treetop star on the center cabinet, and when DH came home from work, we told him it was the Christmas Filing Cabinet. Everyone laughed. It was an instant pick-me-up for all of us. We turned on Christmas music, turned off the lights, and sat drinking Wassail around these three old, beat up, gray-metal, decorated in dinosaur stickers filing cabinets. It was the best Christmas.

For the next three years, we purposefully decorated the Christmas Filing Cabinet over a tree. We made it a postcard one year and sent it to the relations along with my traditional Christmas letter. This year is the first year we've decided to actually buy a tree since we moved to Kansas, but the Christmas Filing Cabinet is a tradition now and I'll keep it up for as long as I have a cabinet to decorate.