Bailing out the Bride
Chapter One

by April Hill
Copyright © 2008

Any couple knows that after many long years of marriage, it’s sometimes hard to keep the romantic memories fresh and alive—or even accurate. My husband, Mike, is a good example. Mike proposed to me on a beautiful, moonlit night, while we were seated on a lovely little bench in a secluded, terribly romantic wooded glen in Central Park. That's my version, and I'm sticking to it. Being both a man, and a hard-bitten officer of the law, Mike is less given to nostalgia, and remembers it differently.

"Sure, I remember," he says with a grin. "That was right after I finally blew my stack and blistered your butt for the first time. You were hollering your head off the whole time, but nobody blinked an eye. The place was crawling with snoring drunks and hookers that night. Every screwball in the city seems to come out of the woodwork when there's a full moon."

Okay, call me a hopeless romantic, but I like my version better.

And whereas I recall our first meeting as adorably cute and our first conversation witty and charming, Mike's memory of that part is also a shade more jaundiced. "I should have hauled you out of the damned car and spanked you right then and there—and saved the city the expense of issuing a warrant for your arrest." Yes, Mike was, and is a cop. One of New York's finest, and at our first meeting, I was driving aimlessly around Central Park in circles, looking for the entrance to the zoo. Mike, on the other hand, was serving in his official capacity, diligently attempting to make the park a safer place for all the snoring drunks, hookers, and screwballs. I was about to give up my search when I noticed a panel of those all-too-familiar red and blue lights flashing in my rear-view mirror.

I’d lived in New York for less than a year, but my relationship with the NYPD was already strained. Most of our disagreements, I freely admit, had resulted from my refusal to blindly accept the city's bizarre traffic regulations. I had been driving in the Big Apple for less than five minutes when I discovered that every street I needed to turn onto had been designated by some officious fool as "one-way." Confronted every day and at every intersection by a Byzantine cluster of bewildering and contradictory signs, locals appear to survive this chaos by committing to memory an endless list of which street goes which way, and at what time of what day. At thirty years old, I still hadn’t been able to memorize my multiplication tables, so in self-defense, I had adopted an alternate traffic strategy. Unless there was a police vehicle directly behind me, I would simply ignore all of those annoying little black and white arrow signs. Not a foolproof strategy, of course. I had managed to accumulate a smallish collection of traffic citations, along with a stupefying number of parking tickets. There were so many summonses of one kind or another in my glove compartment that I'd been forced to tape it closed. Why pay a bunch of silly tickets, I reasoned, when I might be squashed into oblivion by an oncoming garbage truck at any moment— while traveling down a one-way street in the wrong direction?

But on this particular fall evening in Central Park, there were no one-way signs, and I certainly wasn't speeding (another unfortunate tendency of mine,) so I found it extremely irritating when I was waved to the side of the road. I attempted to point this out to the tall police officer who stepped from his vehicle.

"Why are you stopping me?" I demanded, leaning my head out the window. "I didn't do anything, for God's sake!"

As he came closer, I got a better look at the officer, and had I been one of those shallow women who allow themselves to get all hot and bothered by tall, incredibly handsome men with divinely expressive slate-gray eyes and well-defined muscles rippling under crisply pressed blue uniforms, I might even have found him attractive. But I'm not that kind. I'm the other kind—the kind drawn to out of work and out of shape jazz saxophonists who sleep all day and never pay for their own beer.

"Good evening, ma'am." He touched the brim of his hat with one finger. "The reason I pulled you over was because you don't have your headlights on."

I'll never know why I got hostile so quickly. Maybe it was because yet another traffic ticket was dead last on the list of things I needed. Maybe I was just tired. In any case, I geared up to do battle in record time.

"Well, why should I have my lights on?" I asked in all innocence. "When it isn't dark, yet."

The officer glanced quizzically up at the sky, then back at me. "Excuse me, ma'am, but it's been dark for more than an hour. I'm surprised you haven't run into something, the way you were weaving all over the road. Have you been drinking, tonight?"

"I wasn't weaving," I snapped. "I was merely driving slowly while I looked for the entrance to the zoo, and I resent your implication. I rarely drink, and I never get drunk." (This was true, by the way. With most of the guys I've dated, I've always been— by default— the designated driver.)

He smiled. "I'm sorry, but we have to do that, sometimes. Ask questions that people resent, I mean. The problem is, the zoo has been closed since five-thirty. There've been a lot of muggings in this area, lately, so the city's getting pretty strict about headlights."

I sighed. "Well, then, I apologize. Sincerely. I didn’t know that the zoo was closed, or about the headlight laws, either. I promise to be more careful in the future. Am I free to go, now, officer?" I inquired, batting my eyelashes.

But the handsome officer wasn't buying the act. "Not quite." He pulled a summons pad from his hip pocket. "I noticed when I walked up here that your inspection sticker has expired. I'm afraid I'm going to have to cite you for that, and for driving without lights. May I see your license and registration, please?"

Okay, try a quick guess. Whose registration had expired?

"I'm sorry about the registration," I offered lamely. "I simply forgot. But that headlight business is ridiculous! It isn’t dark, yet."

He kept writing. "Yes, Ma'am, so you keep telling me. Why don’t I just note the time of day down here on the summons, and let a judge make that decision. That's what they get paid for, and they make a lot more money than I do."

"Hah!" I cried. "Like a judge is going to believe me over you! Just tell me, am I under arrest or not?"

"No, Ma'am," he said wearily. "It's only a ticket. The NYPD tries not to jail people just because they don’t have the common sense not to drive around in the dark. Not unless they run over one of us while they're doing it, anyway." At this point, he handed the summons through the window. "If you'll just sign this, you can be on your way."

I shook my head and refused to touch the ticket. "What if I don’t take this thing? Or sign for it?"

He sighed again. "Then I get annoyed, and the county ends up wasting forty one cents of the taxpayers' money to send it to you in the mail. But you'll still have to appear in court on the date written there."

"Well," I declared huffily. "The fact remains that I didn’t do anything illegal, and I'm not going to sign a piece of paper that says I did."

"It doesn't say that." By this point, I was beginning to detect a certain strained quality in the handsome officer's voice. "All it says is that you've read the summons and understand that you have to show up in court on the designated date. Nothing more."

"But, why should I have to show up in court at all when I didn’t do anything illegal?" I persisted. (Yes, you’re right, I am probably insane. I have absolutely no idea why I was behaving like this. This guy probably held my automotive future in his hands, and I was doing my level best to piss him off.)

The officer was staring at me, now, his forbearance apparently at an end. "Is there something wrong with you, lady?"

"Meaning what?" I asked haughtily.

"Meaning you sound like you're missing about half your…" He stopped in mid-sentence. "Look, ma'am, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have…" He took a deep breath. "Maybe I should explain again how this works."

I waved my hand dismissively. "Thank you very much, but I don’t need another long-winded, officious explanation."

After scribbling something on the bottom of the ticket, he stuffed the pad into his hip pocket and thrust one of the copies back through the window. "All right, then, I've noted on the summons that you refused to sign it. The court date is listed on the bottom. Have a nice evening."

"And I don’t need to be patronized, either," I snapped.

And that's when I heard the man to whom I have now been happily married for fifteen years mutter something under his breath. Something that sounded a lot like, "Why do I always get the damned nutcases?" When he started back to his vehicle, he was still muttering—audibly. "No, lady, what you need is five good minutes with a wooden hairbrush." I had already started the car, getting ready to back out onto the road, when it occurred to me that if I tried really, truly hard, I could make things much, much worse. "It’s very upsetting to be wrongly accused," I yelled. "Someone that upset might…Well, who knows? Maybe even back up and accidentally run over someone else's… Someone else's foot, or something!"

The officer turned around, one eyebrow quirked. "Yeah, and if something like that should happen, someone could find herself in a lot of very hot water."

"Oh, I see," I said smugly. "So, in this city, a perfectly innocent mistake, like barely touching some officious bastard's little toe gets you a life sentence?"

This time, his voice was noticeably weary. "No, ma'am, but this officious bastard you mention just might take it into his head to give someone else the kind of spanking she'll remember for a good, long while."

Even in the darkness, I could feel myself getting red in the face. (Yeah, okay, it was dark, but I wasn't about to admit it to this officious S.O.B.) "Oh, my goodness gracious!" I cried, trying to mask my embarrassment with my usual idiocy. "Surely, you can't be serious, officer! A court would call that police brutality, wouldn't it?"

"They'd probably call it a reasonable use of force, lady. But, look, why risk it? My advice is to just take the damned ticket and go about your business. Maybe find yourself another underpaid civil servant to pick on." I was still seething, as I drove away. The man was obviously an obnoxious jerk and a bully. And what was with all those oh-so-clever little quips about spanking? Just after I'd decided that the handsome officer was a sicko pervert who beat his wife, kicked his dog, and rousted homeless old bag-ladies from their pitiful cardboard boxes, I found myself trying to remember if he'd been wearing a wedding ring. And oddly, I was just a tiny bit curious about what being spanked would feel like. Dumb, right?

An hour after I got back to my apartment, the phone rang. Guess who?

"How did you get my number?" I demanded.

"We officious bastards have our sources. Besides, you're in the book."

I won’t bore you with another lengthy bit of nauseating chit-chat, but after pretending that I despised him for close to an hour, I finally agreed to meet Officer Michael David O'Hanlon the next afternoon—at the café at the Central Park Zoo. And my life changed forever.

Our first "date" didn’t go quite as smoothly as I had hoped. Lunch was on the nervous side at the beginning, but it ended up being very pleasant, and the zoo was great fun. We stayed until closing, then walked around until we found a wooden bench tucked away in a small grove of trees not too far from Mike's parked patrol car. Not the sort of spot I'd normally tarry after dark, but being in the company of a tall, fully-armed police officer does provide a degree of comfort. Anyway, we sat and talked for a while, and finally, Mike kissed me for the first time. After quite a lot more kisses, we took a brief recess, and that's when I, of the famously poor judgment and big mouth, chose to rehash the events of the day before. And at that point, the date went downhill fast.

"Oh, come off it!" I exclaimed, annoyed when Mike wouldn’t agree that he'd been wrong to ticket me. "Everyone knows that all you guys have quotas. You prowl around just hoping to nail some poor slob for breaking a stupid law that nobody gives a rat's ass about, anyway. The city makes a few bucks, you fill your quota and keep your fabulous job benefits, and the innocent sucker pays up because he can't afford to go to court and fight it, right?"

When I looked at Mike, he had his head cocked at an angle, like he was studying me.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"I'm trying to figure out if you really believe what you just said, or whether you're just trying really hard to be ignorant and pig-headed."

Which is when I punched him in the shoulder. Not too hard, but probably hard enough to hurt a little. More like a symbolic feminist gesture, really, but it turned out to be a very bad move. Mike shook his head, took my arm very firmly, and turned me around to face him.

"I knew I should have done this last night," he said grimly. A second later, I found myself sprawled ignominiously across Mike's knee, with Mike's strong left arm around my waist and one of Mike's long legs trapping both of mine.

When he flipped the tail of my skirt up, it hit me that he wasn't joking around, but the realization that he actually intended to spank me came a split second too late to make a successful getaway. I was pinned down over his knee, with my hair in my eyes and my clothes twisted. I 'd already kicked off one of my sandals, and now, Mike's hand was at the small of my back, holding me in place. I was completely at his mercy, and absolutely nothing about the situation suggested that Mike was in a merciful frame of mind. A gorgeous full moon was just beginning to rise when I felt his fingers slide under the waistband of my underwear. Until that moment, I honestly don’t think I had the complete picture. This guy was getting ready to expose, and to spank with his bare hand, something that only a few men had even seen up until now—my totally naked behind! And then, with no further ado, Mike yanked my panties down to my knocking knees.

"Stop it!" I gasped, reaching back with one hand to cover what he'd just bared to the moon and the elements. "This isn’t funny!"

"I'll try my best not to make it funny," he said, and even from my face-down vantage point, I just knew he was grinning. "But I can't guarantee what the passing tourists think. Or the muggers."

"Let me up, you sonuvabitch! If you so much as… O-O-O-W-W-W!! Oh, holy shit!!!"

To Be Continued...

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