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CHAPTER 4
Jake
Grace tried to plead with me on the way to the truck, twisting around to try to look me in the face as I marched her to the passenger door.
“Please… Mr.… I mean…” She swallowed visibly. She didn’t want to say sir; I could see it in her pretty green eyes. I reached out and opened the door of the trusty old F150.
Grace got a little frantic, trying to pull her elbow out of my grip. She’d started to tremble, too.
“Sir… please…”
I thought I could already tell that everything Mrs. Brown had told me about the girls the New Modesty Authority had sent to Grasskiln was pretty much on target. Grace Franklin had a tough exterior, but on the inside lay a sweet young woman badly in need of guidance from good people like Shelly and me.
Grace’s reaction to the knowledge that she’d soon get what seemed very likely the first whipping of her life definitely indicated that the other part—the sexual part—of Mrs. Brown’s description was also accurate. From my long experience of disciplining my wife the old-fashioned way, I could tell that Grace, like Shelly, had a complicated but highly sexual relationship with corporal punishment.
Grace Franklin had, that is, come to the right town to finish growing up, and to find a husband who could take her in hand and care for her properly.
“Get in the car, Grace,” I told her. “Don’t make it worse for yourself.”
“But—”
“What did I just say, girl? Did you not hear me?”
Another hard swallow. Tears had started to form in the corners of her pretty eyes.
“B-but?—”
I cut her off again, squeezing her elbow more firmly and starting to push her, with my grip on her arm, up the step into the passenger compartment of the truck.
“Every time you say but, girl, it gets a little worse for yours. Don’t make me whip you right here in the street.”
That drew a cry of fear from Grace. She hopped up into the seat, looking around from side to side as if she thought she might be able to find some way to escape.
“Fasten your seatbelt,” I told her, and then I closed the door and started around to the driver’s side. When I got there and opened my own door, I saw that Grace hadn’t in fact fastened her seatbelt, and that her little hands hovered in front of her, reaching just an inch or two toward the handle of the door. She had obviously had the impulse to try to get out of the truck and run away, but she apparently also had a lick of sense, so she had ended up frozen in that position, clearly trying very hard to control herself.
I saw a chance to teach her a little something about me, and how things would be living with me and Shelly. I pretended not to notice that she had almost made a very foolish attempt to get away, and I started to sit down in the driver’s seat, taking my time to climb in.
As soon as Grace felt my weight on the bench seat, she turned to look at me with wide eyes. At the same time, she reached for the seatbelt and started to pull it across her shoulder.
“Good girl,” I told her. She had turned to find the buckle of the seatbelt, but now she turned back, her eyes going even rounder. I didn’t have the slightest doubt, from the expression on her pretty face, that the words had the same kind of effect they’d always had on Shelly: the sense of solid, benevolent, old-fashioned masculine dominance and the rightness of a strong woman submitting to a stronger, caring man.
Grace
I looked away from Mr. Carpenter quickly, my cheeks burning. I didn’t like how my body had reacted to him saying good girl like that, and I didn’t know what it meant.
I wasn’t a good girl. Hadn’t I pretty much proven that? I had shoplifted. I had gotten arrested. I wasn’t completely sure what had happened in the hearing room with the judge, if I had to be honest, but it definitely meant the government thought of me as a criminal, didn’t it?
I tried to tell myself that I had in fact chosen to become a bad girl. I knew deep down that I hadn’t actually chosen it at all—really I had just kind of wanted to see what it felt like. But that didn’t mean that I had any interest in playing the part of a well-behaved young lady for this asshole who some ‘authority’ had designated as my foster father.
My body, though, seemed to have a different idea. My chest, in particular, where a treasonous warmth seemed to have arisen, something like pride, however much I tried to deny it—but also, horrifyingly, down below my belt, where the notion of being a good girl seemed to become so complicated that I simply refused to think about it.
Thankfully I had a good excuse for looking away, because I had to obey his instruction to fasten the seatbelt, didn’t I? I managed to spend long enough on it that Mr. Carpenter had started the car and pulled out into Main Street before I had to turn back toward the windshield.
I looked out at the tiny town of Grasskiln. I saw we were actually about to leave the built-up part of it completely and drive out into the gently rolling farmland that seemed to surround the town on all sides. I felt for a moment like I had somehow, despite everything, managed to find my way out. I had grown up in a grimy suburb and moved to a grimier city, with no prospect of finding anything softer, or greener, or just better. Here I was in the heartland, apparently with a roof over my head—or at least in the cab of an old, but clearly well-loved, pickup truck.
When I remembered what Mr. Carpenter had promised would happen once I got under his roof, though, the warmth of those few seconds of something like contentment drained out of my body in an instant. I had my hands on my knees, half-consciously trying to cover up the fashionable rips in my jeans. At the recollection of what the big, bearded man had said when I had stupidly talked back to him, and he had grabbed my arm—that’s nothing compared to how much your butt is going to hurt by the time you go to bed tonight—I clutched so hard at my legs that I forced a little cry of pain from my throat.
“Grace, honey?” Mr. Carpenter asked, startling me as much by his attentiveness as by the surprisingly gentle tone he used. He turned to look at me briefly, then returned his attention to the twilit road, then looked at me again. “You okay?”
