The Firm Hand of the Law Read online

  “You want that ride now?”

  She did want that ride. Actually, she wanted back into the cell, but she wasn’t going to say that aloud. She had been awake for nearly twenty-four hours and she really needed some sleep. He was going to make her ask for it, though, or at least admit she wanted his help. And that would be the beginning of a slippery slope all the way to snitchville—which was a town she really didn’t want to get caught visiting.

  “I’ll get a cab.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  She wanted to kick him, he was so damn irritating. He was just doing his job, but his job made him a massive asshole as far as she was concerned. His job was to turn her life upside down, find out everything about her, and use it against her. He could not be trusted as far as she could throw him. In fact, it was safe to say that at that moment he was far more dangerous than any bullet. A bullet could rend flesh and break bone. He was capable of destroying her entire life.

  Lily pushed off the counter with all the dignity she could muster and made her way out of the bathroom without a word or a look back at the cop. He might have followed, she didn’t know. She went out front, called a cab, and went home. When nobody shot her, she assumed it was safe to go to sleep.

  She managed to sleep all of five minutes before a pounding at the upstairs door woke her. At first, Lily tried to ignore it, but it only got louder and more insistent. Eventually she was compelled to get up, still pajama clad, and answer it. It did not amuse her in the least to appear in purple pajamas with kitties playing across them, but the door sounded like it was about to come off the hinges. Wrenching it open, Lily squinted into the morning light. She recognized the shape of the one who had knocked instantly. It was that damn cop.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Making sure you got home safe.” He smirked at her. “Wouldn’t want anything untoward to happen to you.”

  “This is harassment.”

  “This is your friendly local police officer checking in after your traumatic experience this morning.”

  “I’m going to sleep,” she said, closing the door. “Go away.” The door got stuck on something before she could close it. That something turned out to be Gareth’s boot. “What the hell do you want now?”

  “We need to talk.”

  “We talked already. Go away.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

  She was so tired she could have cried. He was wearing her down in the most insidious of ways, messing with her at every turn. She should have expected it, she supposed. He’d sensed weakness and he was closing in for the kill. Beyond frustrated, she stepped back inside and looked around for something to throw at him.

  “Before you do something silly, remember assaulting an officer is a serious offense. Could definitely charge you for that.”

  “I don’t care,” she said tiredly. “I don’t care what you do. I don’t know what the hell you want.”

  “I want your cooperation,” he said. “If you want an easy life, you’re going to have to be a good girl and do as you’re told.”

  “Refer to my previous answer,” she said, shutting the door on his foot again. It didn’t work any better the second time than it had the first, but it was fun to see him wince a little. Steel caps were keeping his tootsies safe, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel her anger.

  “Okay, I’m done being nice,” he said as he pushed the door open and came inside.

  She had the choice of getting out of the way or being run over. She chose the former. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to tan your hide, missy,” he said, “and then I’m sending you to bed.”

  “I want to go to bed, you idiot!”

  “Careful,” he said with a paternalistic drawl which riled her beyond belief. “Right now I’m going to spank you over your panties. You don’t want to be spanked with them down, do you?”

  “Go away!”

  He caught her by her wrist and drew her close. “No,” he said, his lips less than an inch away from hers. He sat down on her couch and pulled her over his thighs. She went kicking and screaming, but he didn’t care. He pushed down her pajama bottoms as if he had some right to be touching her however he liked, and then he started spanking her panty clad bottom with firm swats.

  Lily was quite befuddled by the whole affair. She had no idea what gave him the right to hunt her down and spank her. He didn’t have the right, that was why. And yet, it was happening. Again. And her bottom was starting to get sore. Again.

  “Stop!”

  “Nope.” He was quite firm about that. “I’m not going to stop until you understand how important it is to be a good girl for me.”

  “We’re not… what… you…” she spluttered a half-dozen beginnings to sentences, but none of them culminated in a statement that made any kind of sense. She was being spanked. On her panties. By a man she barely knew who had apparently decided that he was more than a police officer; he was judge, jury, and executioner of her bottom.

  The swats made her squeak, delivered with enough force to make hot tingles spread over her bottom and a deeper heat sink through her flesh. It was not comfortable, but it didn’t hurt as much as she’d expected it to. For reasons best known to himself, he wasn’t beating her, he was just… warming her ass.

  “We could go back and forth on this for weeks,” he said as his hand clapped against her bottom. “You could tell me to go fuck myself. I could tell you to watch your language. You could get hurt. I could scrape you up off the street. Our investigation would continue and people would go to jail, including you. Make no mistake, Lily. This is the end of the road for you. The only question is, are you going to take the chance you’re being given?”

  “I’m not going to flip,” she squeaked through the spanking. “I’m not a rat.”

  “Is that so? Do you think your associates will be as loyal to you as you are to them? We already know what this place is. We already know what you have stored in the basement. We know when your deliveries come in and when they go out. Rex has already told us enough to put you away, Lily Brannigan.” He accompanied his lecture with a hard swatting and slapping that left her gasping.

  “So you’re going to hit me until I do what you want me to do?”

  “This isn’t hitting and you know it. This is to teach you the lesson you need to learn, that the game is over. You co-operate and you’ll get out of this without a jail sentence.”

  “And if I do, I’ll come out of this dead. The people who use this place don’t play. You know that. If I help you, they’ll kill me. They might have already tried.”

  “We can keep you safe, Lily.”

  “The police never keep anyone safe once they have what they want. Snitches end up in ditches.”

  “I’ll keep you safe,” he promised again.

  “Why would you do that?” She laughed humorlessly, then squealed as his palm landed hard across the rise of her cheeks. “I’m not stupid. I know I’m just another scumbag you’re shaking down. You’re not going to lift a finger to help me if this goes wrong.”

  The spanking increased in intensity, but slowed in tempo as he spoke, one hard swat punctuating each of his next three words: “Yes. I. Will.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Your not believing it doesn’t make it any less true,” he said, swatting her panty clad bottom one last time. Then, “Time for bed,” he said, letting her scramble to her feet. She did so quickly, clutching at her heated cheeks.

  “I can’t believe you just did that.”

  “Believe it,” he said, his expression firm and stern. Looking into his crystal gaze, she felt instinctively that she could trust him. Still, that didn’t mean she was going to. There was no reasonable reason for her to trust. He was a police officer. He was the other side of the coin, and he would use her for what he needed and cut her loose. It happened all the time.

  “Did you promise Rex you’d protect him too?”

  “I made
a different deal with him.”

  “Here’s the deal I want to make right now,” Lily said, rubbing her bottom. “You get out of my house. You leave me alone, and I don’t file a formal complaint.”

  “Oh, you want to file a formal complaint?” He chuckled and pulled out his cell phone. “I’ll do you one better. You can talk to my boss directly. Tell him what I’m doing. Tell him I spanked your little ass for refusing to do as you were told.”

  Lily gritted her teeth. He was so damn insufferable, and he held all the cards. She could refuse as much as she liked. If he knew what he claimed to know then she was done for anyway.

  “Just get out of here,” she said tiredly. “Let me go to bed.”

  “Oh, I’m not leaving.” He stayed sitting on her couch, looking very much at home in the most maddening way.

  “What? What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m not going to let you out of my sight. I’ll be here, or nearby, every day and night until this thing is done.”

  “Oh fuck…”

  “Language.” He said the word darkly, and with a tinge of disappointment, as if he were surprised that she had not learned her lesson. “I was going to play this from a distance, but like the chief said, you know when you’re being tailed. There’s no point trying to sneak around, and there’s nothing to be gained from letting you get yourself into even more trouble. From now on, you answer to me.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  He sighed and rubbed his large palms over the length of his denim clad thighs. Her eyes were drawn both to the hard line of muscle and the sheer size of his hands. He was big and he was not taking no for an answer.

  Frustration mixed with exhaustion and resulted in an expletive laden outburst which was conducted at the top of her lungs and continued until she ran out of breath.

  “It’s time you went to bed,” he said mildly. “Go on now, before you get into real trouble.”

  Her home had been commandeered, there was no mistaking that. Her home, and her life, and her butt too. Too tired to fight, Lily dragged herself back to her bedroom, flopped down on the covers, and promptly fell asleep.

  The next thing she knew, the alarm set for three p.m. was waking her. She’d had all of five hours sleep, not nearly enough, but better than none at all. She was so groggy that she was halfway through her shower before she remembered about Gareth. The memory was enough to make her shut the taps off and scamper back to her bedroom, where she dressed in the closest thing she had to armor—a pair of tight black jeans and a skull-pattern argyle sweater along with black leather steel toed boots, imperative for kicking ass. She dried her hair and let it flow loose over her shoulders as she applied a little lip color and a lot of mascara.

  The cop was still in her apartment. She could hear him moving around in the kitchen. It was odd to have someone else around, even odder for it to be a cop. He must have slept on the couch. That couldn’t have been comfortable given his height. Lily didn’t feel any sympathy for him, even though it went against the spirit of hospitality Gammy had instilled in her.

  “You’re still here.” She made sure the words sounded accusatory as she walked into the main room.

  “I am,” he agreed. “Coffee?” He’d taken the liberty of making coffee. Closer inspection revealed that it was not her usual coffee. There was also fresh bread, which was surprising given that the nearest bakery was in another district.

  “You went out for groceries.”

  “The only thing you have in this house is beer and candy.” It was his turn to sound accusatory.

  “Brain food,” she grunted, opening the refrigerator to discover it stocked with vegetables, of all things. “Plenty of calories.”

  “Plenty of calories, no nutritional value at all. It’s amazing you don’t have scurvy.”

  Abandoning the refrigerator to pour herself a cup of coffee, Lily tried to ignore the cop who was taking over her world. It was a difficult task. He’d settled himself in a little too nicely for her liking, though he had done the dishes that had been piling up for the better part of a week, so that was nice.

  “So what now?” she asked.

  “Now you carry on, business as usual.”

  “Except for you up here, in my apartment. Poking through my panty drawer.”

  “I’ll leave your panty drawer alone, you have my word.”

  There wasn’t a whole lot of time left for arguing. It was time to open up downstairs, make sure her employees could get in, and get the bar ready for another night. Thursday nights there was always a live band, which meant some extra setting up.

  “I gotta go,” she said. “Try not to get me killed today, huh?”

  With that, she went downstairs and started setting up. Fraser and Tania were due in shortly for their bar shifts, and Henry would be running the small kitchen which served anything that could be fried. As it turned out, quite a lot of things could be fried. After a relatively slow Wednesday, Thursday was the day when things started picking up for the weekend, the real start of the financial week.

  There was no time to worry about police or smugglers or crooks or anything else once the doors were opened and patrons started flowing in. It was eight o’clock before she knew it, and the bar was starting to fill up. Discordant sounds over the PA were cutting through conversation as the bar set up. She’d changed over the course of the night, lost the sweater and replaced it with a black tank top. More makeup had been applied in between tasks, her face changing like a chameleon as the light faded outdoors and things began to pick up inside.

  “You haven’t eaten.” The words were growled out of the darkness close to her ear.

  “Huh?” Lily whirled around, pitcher in hand to discover Gareth standing nearby. “What?”

  He looked down at her. “You haven’t eaten all day.”

  “I’m working,” she said impatiently. “Go bother someone else.”

  “Go upstairs and eat,” he said, grabbing her arm when she made to walk away.

  “Okay, you need to understand something,” she said, locking eyes with him firmly. “I’m working now. This bar doesn’t run without me, so you need to take your hands off me and let me attend to my business.”

  “The bar will run just fine for a few minutes while you eat.”

  He wasn’t letting the subject go, and his constant harping on the food issue was actually making her stomach rumble.

  “I’ll get something from the kitchen.”

  “That kitchen is disgusting.”

  “Nobody asked your opinion.”

  His palm suddenly impacted her bottom at high velocity, making her shriek and spill a little beer. He was still holding her in place, ready to whack her again if she didn’t listen as he growled down at her. “I’m not asking, I’m telling you to get your ass upstairs and eat something.”

  “What fucking business is it of yours?”

  “People are starting to look. You want to get your ass spanked in front of your employees?”

  The threat was real, she knew that. With as much self-control as she could muster, Lily put the pitcher down and made her way upstairs. Gareth followed close on her heels, his large presence looming behind her all the way into her apartment.

  “Like I said,” she said, turning on him the moment they were safely behind closed doors. “What fucking…”

  “Language,” he growled.

  “What do you care if I eat or not?”

  “I need you healthy and in one piece for this case,” he said, pointing to the kitchen table, which she hadn’t actually seen in a while because it was usually covered in the cluttered detritus of a busy life. It was round, she discovered, red Formica set neatly with a fork and a spoon bordering a plate of freshly cooked spaghetti bologna.

  “You made that?”

  “I did,” he said. “Now sit your ass down and eat it.”

  She looked from the plate to him with no small measure of amazement. “That was… really nice.”

  He almost looked plea
sed. Almost. “It’s not about nice,” he said gruffly. “It’s about adequate nutrition.”

  It had been a very long time since anyone had cooked in the apartment. Not since Gammy left. Back in the day, the entire place had often smelled of rich home cooking. The rich scent of meat and sauce brought memories flooding back, memories of when there had been someone else to take care of her.

  She sat down at the table, picked up the fork, and looked at him. “Aren’t you going to eat?”

  “I ate already,” he said. “You go ahead.”

  “I can’t eat with you staring at me.”

  “I’ll watch TV, then, if you’re so sensitive. Didn’t pick you for one of those girls who can’t eat when there’s a man around.”

  He was walking that real fine line between asshole and nice guy again. God only knew how he did it. Ignoring him, she took a bite of the food and discovered that it was excellent. He hadn’t just put some ground beef and tomato paste together, he’d actually used seasonings to bring it to the next level. Gammy would have approved.

  He was quite an enigma, she thought as she chewed her food and looked at the back of his head. Obviously he took his job seriously. And obviously he didn’t have any life outside of it, or he wouldn’t have had time to sit around her house all day.

  “No girlfriend then?”

  Gareth turned, his arm along the back of the couch as he looked at her. “You interested?”

  She snorted. “God, no. I just meant… you’re here. And if you had a girlfriend, you wouldn’t be.”

  “This is work.”

  “Uh huh. Most people go home when they’re not working.”

  “I’m always working.”

  She believed him. He had the intensity of a man who did one thing and did it very, very well. Right now, that was getting so far up her rear a colonic wouldn’t dislodge him.

  A crashing sound from the bar below meant that one bite was all she got. Before Gareth could respond, she was out of her chair and down the stairs. The clanging of cymbals and the shouting of an irritate singer gave her a fair idea of what had happened even before she saw it. Some drunk fool had managed to fall into the band’s instruments. The band had not taken to that very kindly and were in the process of dealing to the patron the only way they knew how—with flying fists and curses alike.