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pocket of his tunic, and shook his head again. “You’re beginning to get perilously close to that spanking we discussed, Miss Wilson,” he added grimly.
    Anne slid down the rock, and made a futile grab for the matchbook. “Give those back, damn it! They’re my personal property. And while you’re at it, you can dispense with the stupid threats. It’s getting boring. Besides, I thought you boy-scout types could start a fire with two sticks, or smashing rocks together, or whatever.”
    “I can,” he growled. “If driven to it, but I’ve found that matches work almost as well. So, in the event you find another book of matches somewhere, I’ll expect you to turn them over. In any case, there’ll be no further smoking, until we get out of here.”
    “Why not?” she cried.
    “Because smoking is a filthy habit, and it smells, and because until rescue arrives, you and I will be living in extremely close quarters.”
    “You have absolutely no right to stop me from smoking, if I want to,” she sulked. “We’re both probably going to freeze to death, anyway, as you keep pointing out.”
    “I’d rather freeze to death than be blown to kingdom come,” he explained patiently. “I’ve drained the fuel tank, but there may still be fumes in the line, or enough residue to guarantee our fiery demise.”
    “Yeah? Well, all this fucking moss you made me collect smells bad, too,” she grumbled. “A hell of a lot worse than a little cigarette smoke. And it probably has bugs, too.”
    Tired of arguing, Cameron turned, and started to walk away. “Try thinking of the bugs as protein,” he called over his shoulder.
    Anne grabbed up the pile of the moss at her feet, and hurled the tangled mass at the back of his head with all the strength she could muster in her sore arms. The clods of dirt clinging to the dry roots caught him across the shoulders, and exploded almost instantly into a cloud of grit and dust— most of which found its way under the high collar of Sergeant Cameron’s bright scarlet tunic, and down his neck.
    The large boulder where she’d been sitting was slightly too high to be a comfortable perch for someone only a few inches over five feet tall, but for a ramrod straight man of just over six feet and five inches, it was apparently the ideal height. Suddenly aware that she had pushed the sergeant too far, Anne attempted to evade his grasp by darting quickly to the left. She wasn’t quick enough, though. In one swift, fluid move, he caught her around the waist, swung her off the ground, and sat down on the same boulder she had recently vacated. At first, she thought he was simply going to hold her long enough to deliver another lecture about safety, or yell at her. Or explain his duty. He was a policeman, after all—like any other policeman, probably— bound by the solemn oath he had taken. The oath that all policemen in any country took—an oath to protect and defend her—or whatever.
    It was the “whatever” part that had begun to worry her.
    She was still thinking about that oath when it came to her that there wasn’t going to be a lecture. Her position—facedown over his knee—would have made a lecture difficult to deliver, or to hear. Later, she would blame her slowness in reacting on fatigue, but in reality, the actual time that elapsed between her initial escape attempt and the first resounding “ thwack” across her rear end was less than two or three seconds.
    The mind is funny that way.
    After that first whack, though, the time seemed to go very, very slowly. In reality, the first spanking of Anne Wilson’s life lasted just under seventy-four seconds, from beginning to end, ( excluding the fifteen or twenty seconds spent jumping up and down, holding her scalded buttocks, and calling the Sergeant obscene names.) But Anne didn’t know that it was only seventy-four seconds, and she wouldn’t have believed it if she’d been told the actual number.
    Pain is funny that way.
    He had