His Little Runaway Read Free Page A

too early to know anything, but of course we need to determine the causes and assign responsibility for this unfortunate occurrence.”
     
    Wes shook his head as he turned off the phone. From the top of the driveway, he could look east across the whole of the little valley where he had built himself a new life after the navy, into the perfect pink ball of the rising sun.
    This unfortunate occurrence. Had they used words like that when they’d decided his fate? No, violation of the rules of engagement had been more the speed of the court-martial.
    He had saved Marmara, though. In Wes’ blackest moments, he wondered whether he had done the wrong thing. He didn’t care about the rules of engagement—he hadn’t cared about them since the moment Marmara told him, weeping hysterically, that her uncle had sold her virginity to the warlord, and the warlord had decided she would marry his cousin.
    Marmara: just eighteen, like Ashley Lewis. A sweet tooth like nothing Wes had ever seen, and a smile that said princess and brat but also sweetheart and baby doll. Teaching her to pronounce Wesley in her musical accent.
    “May I call you daddy ? I’ve always wanted a daddy, Wesley.”
    He felt a little pang in his heart for this orphan whose eyes always seemed bright nevertheless. “Call me sugar daddy , honey,” he had replied, grinning. “I don’t think I can ever give you as much candy as I’d like to.”
    “You can try,” Marmara said, pouting.
    “Do you need a spanking, young lady?” Wes asked playfully. “Where I come from, girls who pout get something to cry about.”
    He hadn’t known where that had come from, really, about the spanking. He had heard of ageplay, and he had known he might want to try it someday, but Marmara seemed to bring out a side of him he had thought might lurk in his fantasies but which had never shown itself to anyone—even Wes himself—before.
    And on one level, as he said it, it had felt so wrong. Marmara had lost her parents to a bomb before she was four years old. Corporal punishment of the worst kind—the kind given just to prove that the person with the cane had power and the person, especially the woman, crying as the cane fell over and over, did not—made a fundamental note in family life in Marmara’s world.
    Nevertheless, he saw something light up in Marmara’s eyes. “What’s a spanking?” she asked, though Wes knew that she, a very bright girl, must know.
    “Come here,” he said, “and I’ll show you.” Wes was standing in the road, and Marmara in the little garden she tended every day.
    He didn’t expect her to come, but she did, first looking around to make sure no one from her family could see. She crossed the five feet or so to stand in front of him, a mischievous look on her face.
    “Show me, daddy,” she said, looking up at him with a little smile.
    He knew he couldn’t, as much as he wanted to. He would have loved to bare her bottom and turn her over his knee, the way discipline from a daddy should always be given, but he had seen enough of Marmara’s culture to know that the consequences of that for her could be terrible. Really, he needed to put a stop to this; he couldn’t even turn her around and give her the swat over her clothes that he wanted to give her.
    “I think you know, honey,” he said, smiling warmly.
    “What if I do?” A very bratty expression now.
    “If you’re telling a fib, no more candy.”
    “Fib?” Now Wes could tell she really didn’t know that word. He chuckled and pulled a chocolate bar out of his pocket.
    “A little lie, honey. What you just did when you pretended you didn’t know what a spanking was.”
    Walking down to the cabin, remembering Marmara and wondering what to do about Ashley, he stopped his mind from going back to what had happened only a week later: Marmara in tears. Not an unfortunate occurrence but an act of anger and of justice. A violation . But he had saved Marmara, and he would do it again.
    Wes