Learning to Live Again (Corbin's Bend, Season Two Book 9) Read online

  Learning to Live Again

  Corbin’s Bend, Season Two

  By

  Ruth Staunton

  ©2015 by Blushing Books® and Ruth Staunton

  All rights reserved.

  No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  Staunton, Ruth

  Learning to Live Again

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-62750-692-2

  Cover Design by Anthony Walsh

  This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults. Nothing in this book should be interpreted as Blushing Books' or the author's advocating any non-consensual spanking activity or the spanking of minors.

  Table of Contents:

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Epilogue

  Ebook Offer

  Blushing Books Newsletter

  Blushing Books

  PROLOGUE

  Grant Taylor pulled his pickup truck into the driveway of the home he shared with his wife and two teenage daughters. He killed the engine and pocketed the keys, but he didn’t immediately get out. Instead, he dropped his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes, not wanting to move. Exhaustion made it feel like he had lead in his bones. He was getting too old for these twelve hour shifts. In his younger days, when he was working patrol, he hadn’t minded the shifts. If anything, he’d liked working only three days a week. In those days, he’d actually taken time off on his off days rather than picking up side jobs to make extra money like he’d been doing for the past decade or so. The constant working was wearing on him, but as hard as it was, these days being at work was often better than being home. The girls argued constantly, about any little thing. They whined worse than they had as toddlers. Anything they were asked to do or not to do turned into a long drawn-out debate, usually ending in Lainie begging and pleading or giving up and doing it herself. He’d much rather sit here in the driveway and enjoy the peace and quiet than go into the house and face the chaos that had become the norm in their household.

  Steeling himself, Grant got out of the truck and went into the house. In contrast to his dire predictions, the house was unnaturally quiet, though he could hear the heavy thump of Kathleen’s music coming from her bedroom upstairs. He made his way to his own bedroom, putting away his gun, handcuffs, hat, and radio, before coming back into the kitchen where his wife, Lainie, was cooking dinner.

  He wrapped his arms around her from behind and pulled her back against his chest, hugging tight. “How was your day?” he asked, dropping a kiss on to the top of her head.

  “It was fine,” she said softly, but something in her voice had him doing a double take. He caught her chin in his hand and carefully tilted her head back against his chest so he could look into her eyes. It was immediately apparent that she had been crying.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  Lainie shook her head. “Nothing. It’s just been a long day.”

  Even without years of law enforcement experience, he could have spotted that lie a mile away. He tightened his grip on her chin just enough to be firm. “Don’t even try it,” he told her, letting his voice take on the touch of the authoritative tone he often used with inmates and subordinates.

  Lainie sighed. “It’s nothing really,” she said. “I was grading students’ retests, and they are horrible. It’s like they don’t even try, and the girls were arguing. Kathleen was whining about food as usual. Same stuff, different day. It just wears me out sometimes.”

  Grant turned her in his arms so they were facing and hugged her again. There was a time when she would have gladly leaned into his embrace and melted against him, but these days, she just stood there. Not pulling away but not actively leaning into him either, as if the affection never touched her. Cupping a hand behind her head, he guided her head gently onto his shoulder and smoothed his palm over her hair. “I’m sorry you had a hard day. What do you mean about Kathleen?”

  “It’s not important,” Lainie said, dismissing it with a wave of her hand.

  “If it’s bothering you, it is important,” Grant insisted. “Talk to me.” It was an old refrain. One he had repeated many times. He had tried for years to convince Lainie that he wanted to help her. What was important to her was important to him, no matter how trivial or inconsequential she found it to be. Unfortunately, much to Grant’s private annoyance, Lainie seemed to have a very hard time remembering that.

  Lainie stepped back out of his embrace and turned away, fiddling with the food cooking on the stove. “She doesn’t eat lunch at school because she says the food is gross, but she won’t get up early enough to pack lunch, so by the end of the day she’s starving. She starts demanding snacks as soon as she sees me. When we have to wait for Natalie to finish tutoring, it just goes downhill from there,” Lainie replied. “I’ve thought about packing something myself just to be sure she eats, but I really don’t have time. I’m barely getting there on time as it is with the way the girls drag around in the mornings.”

  Grant frowned, wondering why this was the first he’d heard about this problem. His jaw clenched as he fought down the familiar wave of frustration. Why hadn’t she told him these things? How many times did he have to tell her that he wanted to know? He couldn’t help her if she never told him what was going on.

  Taking a deep breath to calm himself, Grant asked, “How long has this been going on?”

  “A while,” Lainie replied. The offhanded way she said it only served to frustrate him more. He wondered how much more had been going on for ‘a while’ that she hadn’t bothered to tell him about.

  Grant scrubbed a hand through his hair, trying to shake off his irritation. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

  “I didn’t want to bother you,” Lainie said. “It’s not that important anyway.”

  Grant’s pulse, which had been steadily rising throughout this exchange, shot up. His chest tightened painfully. His hands curled involuntarily into fists and his fingernails dug into his palms. Slowly, deliberately, he spread his fingers and laid his hands, palm down, on the counter top. “That’s where you’re wrong,” he countered. “It is important. Little things become big things, and I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what’s going on.”

  “I do tell you about the big things,” Lainie replied. “I just didn’t think I needed to bother you with every little argument and annoyance.”

  “Maybe not every one,” Grant agreed, “but when it gets to the point that it’s bothering you, that makes it important. I want to know, especially if it concerns the girls. I’m not here with them the way you are. I need you to tell me what’s going on.”

  “As much as you work, you have enough to deal with,” Lainie told him. “You don’t need to worry about what’s going on here at home. I can handle it.”

  As much as Grant loved Lainie, sometimes he just wante
d to shake her. He wasn’t a child. He didn’t need to be protected. He was the one who should be protecting her. “That’s not the point,” he said, exasperated. “We’re in this together. You don’t need to do everything all by yourself.”

  “I can handle it,” Lainie insisted. “I always have.”

  Anger, white and hot, shot through Grant. His face flooded with heat and color, and the restraint he’d been holding onto by his fingertips fled. He slammed his hands on the counter and spun to face her. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  That got Lainie’s attention. Her eyes widened, and she paled. “Just that I’ve always handled the household and the kids,” she said quietly. “It’s my job. You’ve always made that clear.”

  Since when? It wasn’t her job. It was their job. He did his damn well best to get her to tell him what was going on around here. She was the one who tried to do everything herself. “Have you heard a single word I’ve been saying? I’m trying to tell you that you don’t have to do it by yourself. You’re the one being stubborn.”

  “Stubborn?” Lainie echoed. The quiet uncertainty vanished, and she faced him head on, outraged. “I’m doing everything I can to keep things going around here, and of course I’m the one who has to handle it. You’re never home.”

  “I’m never home because I’m working,” Grant shot back. “You make it sound like I’m out carousing with my buddies. I work damn hard.”

  “And I don’t?” Lainie countered.

  “Of course you do,” Grant said. They both worked damn hard. That wasn’t the point. When had this turned into an argument over who worked harder anyway? He’d wanted to help, not fight. Taking a deep breath, Grant made himself step away. He took a glass down from the cabinet, filled it with water and drank. “I don’t want to fight,” he said after downing most of the water. “I want to help.”

  “I’m fine,” Lainie repeated. She turned away, jiggling a pan on the stove.

  Grant would have bet his last dollar Lainie was anything but fine, but she clearly wasn’t receptive to any further conversation. “Do I have time to take a shower?” he asked, swallowing on a nagging feeling of defeat.

  Lainie nodded. “Dinner will be another fifteen, maybe twenty, minutes.”

  Grant set his glass in the sink and headed for their bathroom, turning on the shower and stripping out of his uniform. He tried to put the conversation with Lainie out of his head, but it nagged at him. Did she really think he expected her to handle the kids and house by herself? That couldn’t be further from the truth. It went against everything he had been raised to believe. Sure, maybe the modern culture expected women to be super women, but that wasn’t how Grant’s father and grandfather had believed nor what they had taught him. They believed that a man should be the leader of the household. It was his job to provide, to protect, to teach, and to lead. He had the providing part down cold. He worked damn hard. He always had. Being gone so much, he had left most of the parenting decisions to Lainie. She was the one at home, and she was the one who had training on dealing with children. He didn’t always agree with her. He was a lot more old-fashioned in what he believed, but what right did he have to speak up when he was gone so often? She was the expert.

  He’d told himself that for years, so many times that he had begun to believe it. Mostly. Now though, alone under the spray of hot water with nothing but his own conscience, he began to doubt the truth of that. It was an excuse and a flimsy one at that. He knew exactly what his father and grandfather would have made of it too. A bitter wash of shame followed. Either or both of them would have handed him his ass on a platter if they had lived to see the state he’d allowed his family to get into. Then again, if they had been here, it was unlikely the family would’ve ever gotten into such a state, but he’d lost his grandfather shortly after marrying Lainie, and his father when Natalie was still a toddler. If he were honest, that had been when he’d started to slip. He’d been devastated to find himself without the two men he’d relied on for guidance and leadership all his life. There were months afterwards that he remembered little of. Everything had been consumed in a gray haze of grief. Even after he’d begun to emerge it was far easier to let Lainie do things her way. There’d been a few skirmishes early on, mostly over discipline, which was the one area they’d had vastly different ideas about. Grant knew and believed wholeheartedly in the value of a good spanking for correcting misbehavior. He’d experienced it any number of times during his own growing up years, and had learned as a young man, that his mother, and he strongly suspected his grandmother as well, had been subject to the same type of discipline. He’d always thought that he’d run his own household much the same, but the reality had turned out to be far different. Lainie’d had very little supervision of any sort as a child, much less correction. She’d cut her teeth on child psychology and education theory, and as such, declared any kind of physical discipline to be ineffective at best and abusive at worst. After a while, it had just been easier to stop fighting. He stayed away and took on more and more work, telling himself he was just trying to be a good provider and leaving the household as Lainie’s sole domain.

  Yeah, and where had that gotten them? It had gotten so bad that he dreaded coming home, and even when Lainie was in his arms, there was a wall between them as real as any concrete and stone. There barely was a them anymore, just two people who happened to inhabit the same space. It was his fault, there was no doubt in Grant’s mind about that. He had failed at his responsibility as head of the family and left Lainie no choice but to stand in the gap. That was his fault and his alone. And it was long past time he stepped up to the plate and tried to fix this mess. It was time to get back to his roots, to be the man his father and his grandfather would have expected him to be. He didn’t expect Lainie to agree immediately. They had discussed it years ago when they were dating but with fifteen years of intervening time where he hadn’t taken any kind of leadership of the family at all, it was only natural that she be wary. He’d talk her around though. He had to.

  By the time he had pulled on jeans and shouldered into a sweatshirt, Lainie had dinner on the table. She was standing at the bottom of the stairs yelling for the girls to come to dinner. From what he could tell, both of them were still shut tightly in their bedrooms, patently ignoring their mother. He touched Lainie on the shoulder and told her to go sit down then headed up the stairs himself. He didn’t give them the option of ignoring. He knocked once before opening the door to first Kathleen’s and then Natalie’s bedrooms and standing over them until they got moving. Not surprisingly, they moved with alacrity once he appeared in the doorway.

  Dinner progressed in the usual fashion, meaning that Natalie complained bitterly about her tutoring session and begged, as she did every single Tuesday and Thursday, not to have to go again. Kathleen alternated between sniping at Natalie and ignoring them all in favor of texting on her cell phone. Grant hated that cell phone. Kathleen acted like it was neurologically connected to the nerves of her hand. It practically had to be surgically removed to get her to put it down. It was on the tip of Grant’s tongue to demand she put it away, but he held back. Not just yet; he needed to talk to Lainie first.

  When they were finally done eating, Lainie immediately got up and started gathering dishes. Grant took that as his cue. He put a hand over her wrist, stilling her. “The girls can do them tonight,” he told her. Lainie, Kathleen, and Natalie all stared at him with identical expressions of shock. “What?” he asked. “Both of you are more than capable of loading the dishwasher. I know you are. I’ve seen both do it occasionally when your mother harasses you into it. I’m not asking; I’m telling, and if I hear one word of bickering about it, not only will you wash the dishes by hand but cell phones and iPods will disappear until next weekend. Understood?”

  The room went utterly silent. He saw both girls cast pleading looks at Lainie. “It’ll only take me a minute,” she began.

  Grant held up a hand, cutting her off. “It’s not
going to take you any time at all because the girls are going to do as they were told. I don’t want to hear another word about it, from anyone.” Lainie and Natalie were staring at him with identical round, blue-eyed expressions of shock. Kathleen looked back at him with hazel eyes like his own, glaring. He looked straight back, not the least bit intimidated by a fifteen-year-old in a temper.

  “Fine!” Kathleen hissed, grumbling under her breath about slave labor.

  Grant’s father would have taken a hand to his backside for the attitude alone, but Grant knew Rome wasn’t built in a day. When both girls started gathering dishes and carrying them into the kitchen, he counted it as a victory.

  Lainie was still looking slightly bewildered, as if she couldn’t quite believe what had just happened. If she were that surprised by such a simple thing, it was worse than he thought. He had clearly let her down, badly. How had he let it get so bad that she was surprised when he stepped in to make the girls wash dishes? He deserved to have his ass kicked from here to Kansas and back again. What kind of man had he become?

  “I want to talk to you,” he said before she could gather herself enough to decide to go do something else. “Let’s go into the living room.” By long habit, they settled on the sofa, turning slightly in order to face each other. Grant swallowed a smile, realizing they had sat with each other in just this way since they were only a few years older than Kathleen was now. It reminded him again just how much he had to make this work. He reached out and took Lainie’s hand, rubbing his thumb over her knuckles. “Tell me something, sweetheart. Are you happy living like this? Really honestly happy?”

  Lainie opened her mouth to agree. He felt the automatic response coming, but the automatic response wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted the truth. “Be honest,” he encouraged, “really honest.” Lainie went very still and her mouth closed again. After a long moment, she dropped her head and shook it slowly back and forth. “I didn’t think so,” Grant said softly. “I’m not either.”