Something Has to Give by Maren Smith Read Free Book Online

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

CHAPTER FOUR
     
    Quint saw her mouth move and heard her second—starting to sound a little panicked—“Oh…shit!”
    Yeah. He smiled grimly. He was a little surprised to find he could still fit through that narrow bathroom window too.
    Enough gaping. Time to get this party started.
    He feinted right, as if running for the front door and Elsie raced to beat him there. But Quint ran left instead . The grass felt stiff with frost and by the time he reached the rear porch, his feet were screaming for relief from the cold. Unfortunately, the back door was locked, but around the other side of the house, the double cellar doors lifted on his first strong yank and he heaved one side open far enough to access the rickety wooden steps. It was dark in the windowless cellar. The only light was what daylight filtered in behind him and once he got halfway across the floor, that didn’t help him much.
    He crashed into what felt like his dad’s old army tent (kind of musty smelling now), fell into a couple cardboard boxes (Christmas decorations, he thought, something broke) and whacked his head into what felt like an obstacle course of hard balls dangling from the ceiling rafters. He batted at them as he ran, but the last one caught him square on the nose and, to add insult to injury, he whacked his toes on the lip of the bottommost step and went down hard and cursing on one knee.
    Above him, Elsie’s panicked footsteps beat across the floorboards for the back door and, swearing and hopping, Quint ran up the cellar stairs. He threw his shoulder against it, but the cellar door, which always used to stick, opened easily, spilling him clumsily into the narrow hallway behind her.
    Elsie spun with a shriek ; Quint peeled himself off the wall and limped two steps forward, trapping her in the laundry room. The only way she had to go now was out the back door. The only thing he wasn’t sure of was whether he could move fast enough to catch her while she was still fumbling to get the lock open, or if she’d be in his hands and then over his knee before she could leap off the back porch and run screaming through the field.
    Quint smirked and stalked her down the short hallway, reaching for the hairbrush at his hip. “Like I said, your ass is…”
    He felt all around his waist, but his grandmother’s old favorite go-to disciplinary device, the hairbrush, was gone. He’d dropped it somewhere in the mad scramble to get back in the house. Well, hell…
    He scowled at Elsie, but with her back against the locked door, she was all through running. She grabbed a broken broom from beside the washing machine, snapped the handle in half right along the duct-taped seam and held it against him like a samurai warrior wielding his sword.
    Quint had spent the last twelve years of his life in the military and while not all of that time had been spen t in combat situations, he was a man who had experience evading knives, bullets, shrapnel and bombs. There was no way he was going to back down from a woman armed with a broken broom handle.
    He moved in sideways, grabbing when she swung at him and cursing loudly when it hit his shoulder before he could catch it. She might have been only one woman, and a small one at that, but she was stronger than she looked. She was also wily—while he fumbled to grab the broom handle, she snatched a bucket full of cleaning supplies off a nearby shelf and flung that at his head. When he threw up his hands to avoid a mouthful of powdered cleanser, she body-slammed him into the dryer with all the fury of a defensive linebacker and ran right over the top of him. He grabbed after her, missed and was nearly kicked in the head as she escaped.
    He scrambled to give chase, cornering her in the kitchen, where Elsie became the dervish from hell.
    He ducked a pot—damn, she was fast! And fierce, so