This time, she complied, slowly bending her knees to squat as she complained, “If that thing slithers up here and fangs me on the fanny, I am never going to let you hear the end of this.”
Snorting at her phrasing, he cautiously knelt about six feet from the bed to look beneath it, only to find the snake escaping out the other side. Wishing like hell he weren’t barefoot, he scrambled around the bed to see where it was heading, only to shout in surprise, stopping short to avoid stepping on a second, somewhat smaller snake.
“There’s two of them?” he shouted as he jumped onto the bed next to her. “Why didn’t you tell me there were—”
“I didn’t see it! Look! The big one’s getting away!”
“The hell he is,” said Beau before the sound of the first gunshot boomed like thunder in their ears.
* * *
“You’re sure you got them all?” Emma asked as she looked up from the big plush sofa in the bedroom sitting area where she’d sat quivering for the past fifteen minutes, her knees drawn nearly to her chest and a blanket covering her bare shoulders.
“There were just the two.” Beau nodded as he closed the door behind him. The door of his bedroom, upstairs where he’d carried her to wait while he checked things out and made some calls.
Outfitted with a comfortable sitting area, expensive-looking rustic furnishings and fixtures, and a king-size bed with a headboard artfully inlaid with veins of turquoise and silver, the spacious suite was as solid and masculine as the man who’d just reentered, now wearing a pair of worn jeans and boots to go with the long day’s worth of stubble and the big revolver in his hand.
“‘Just the two,’ you say—” she shuddered “—as if that’s not enough to warrant years of therapy. Even worse, I saw him, or at least his silhouette, as he was scrambling out that window.”
More than anything, she wished she’d gotten a better look. Or that she could be as certain of the identity of the intruder as the sheriff had been about what he’d imagined he had seen in the game cam photo. But one thing she knew for certain. When she’d been frightened nearly out of her mind, she’d reached out without thinking for the one man her instincts insisted she could count on.
And once more, without hesitation or any thought for his own safety, Beau had rushed to her aid. But not even blasting the two snakes—themselves blameless victims of her tormentor’s machinations—had served to stop her shaking. Or the nausea that struck each time her mind replayed what had happened.
“What if he’s still hiding nearby,” she asked, looking over to where Beau set the gun down on the dresser, “waiting for his chance to finish what he’s started?”
Crossing the room to her, Beau touched her hair, gliding his fingers over the still-damp strands. “He’s long gone. I’m sure of it. After checking out the house, I went outside and found fresh tire tracks where a vehicle had pulled up off the road behind some shrubs not far behind the guest wing. I called Fernando, too—”
“This guy didn’t show up for his cache, did he?” Emma felt her stomach give a queasy slide.
“No, and I doubt he will. But our security cameras there are all back online now, so I’ve asked Fernando’s older sons, who were pulling the night watch over there, to secure the weapons he left and hightail it over here to patrol the perimeter around the mansion.”
“What about your family? Is everything still—”
“Sound asleep,” he assured her. “I checked on them.” A smile warmed his brown eyes. “Gave me a little scare at first when I couldn’t find Leland, but it turns out he and his brother are on the floor of Cort’s room, camping out with their sleeping bags on the floor with both the dogs.”
“I’ll rest easier knowing they’re together,” she said, certain the animals would sound the alarm if they heard anything suspicious. “That is, if I can ever bring myself to sleep again.”
He dropped his hand to Emma’s bare shoulder, giving it a squeeze. “You’re stiff as a board. Can I get you something to drink? A glass of wine, maybe? I’m sure we have some in the—”
“Don’t leave me alone again.” She grabbed his hand and held on for dear life. “Every time I close my eyes, I keep seeing his shape in my window and imagining I hear another snake rattling on the floor.”
Sitting beside her on the sofa, he pulled her into his arms. While she rested her head against his chest, he gently stroked her hair, her back, until the tightness in her body eased.
“It’s all right, Emma,” he said, in a voice as smooth as the finest of aged whiskeys. “I’m right here, right with you. And I’m not going anywhere, except maybe to my closet over there to grab you one of my shirts. You must be cold in just that towel.”
She reached to adjust the light throw that had slipped off her shoulders. “Not cold now. Don’t move. Please,” she said, opening her nostrils to the clean, outdoorsy smell of him as she snuggled closer, matching her own breaths to the movements of his warm and solid chest. Finding in him a slower, calmer rhythm. A pace that felt as right, as natural, as the ebb and flow of tides.
“Before he came,” she said, barely speaking above a whisper, “I had a nightmare. A nightmare where he—where Jeremy said he’d killed you just like he’d killed Russell. And like he killed our baby.”
“You had a baby,” he said quietly.
“I was pregnant, almost five months along when I—when Jeremy burst into the office of my department head with his wild accusations. He claimed that everyone at the school knew, that they were all in league, covering for the fact that the baby wasn’t his.”
“Sounds seriously paranoid.”
“The pregnancy—he was so happy when we first found out, enough that I began to hope we might have some chance, some path back to the way we’d once been. But over time it seemed to magnify all his insecurities, which only made him drink more and take—I’m not even sure what he was on that day, only that he was—I was humiliated by his raging. And terrified he’d scare Dr. Lee into a stroke with all his shouting.” She shook her head, fighting back the tears. “When I tried to interfere after he’d cornered the poor man in his office, he shoved me—hard enough that I fell into some cabinets, cracking a few ribs in the process. He ran out then. I think he’d scared himself. But with all the pain and the—the emotional upheaval came the cramping...and a rush of blood.”
In her worst moments, she still saw it, shockingly deep and red and spreading far too quickly.
“There’s nothing I can say except—I’m so damned sorry, Emma.” Beau’s voice roughened. “And if I ever get my hands around the son of a bitch’s neck, I swear I—”
“And the worst part?” she went on, lost in the pain spilling from her like the tears she could no longer hold back. “The worst part was the doctors saying that the miscarriage was unrelated to my injury. That there was some kind of issue with—with the placenta—that it might have happened any time, as if what Jeremy did had not a thing to do with losing her.” Her. Jaime Lynn. That was the secret name Emma had given the impossibly tiny daughter—so very pink and inconceivably fragile—who had come into a broken marriage and a broken world too soon.
“So your—your husband got off scot-free?”
“Thirty days in the county lockup, and after that probation. And I filed for divorce the first moment I was able.”
“How long ago was all this?”
“Ten months, but it still feels like—” She laid a hand over her heart, which staggered on as always despite the pain she carried. “It feels like yesterday inside me. If only I’d thought first of protecting her, called security instead of barging into Dr. Lee’s office and intervening that day. Or if I’d really understood how much I wanted her, how much I already loved her, instead of worrying all the time about how things with Jeremy were—”
“Don’t do that,” Beau said. “Emma, please. Don’t put this on yourself. I know it’s tempti
ng to turn your grief and anger inward. God knows that no one’s more aware of that than I am, but in the end it doesn’t change things. Or leave you anywhere but aching and alone.”
She looked up into his face, where she saw a bone-deep weariness that had nothing to do with the late hour. A twinge of sympathy loosened the past’s grip and reminded her of the gossip she’d overheard in the café. “You’re talking about your wife, aren’t you?”
She felt, as well as heard, his sigh.
“You weren’t—you weren’t with her, were you,” she asked, “when it happened?”
“It was a Friday afternoon, and I’d gotten a call at work. Melissa hadn’t shown up to get the boys from day care the way she’d promised. I asked our babysitter to pick them up and went to find her. To confront her, because I figured she’d gone to happy hour with her work friends and gotten carried away with the wine and lost track of the time.”
“She’d done it before, I take it?”
Beau nodded. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. Melissa was my best friend—and a great mom, a wonderful woman who juggled two little ones, our household and a high-stress job without nearly as much help as she deserved from me. But every so often, things got to her and she had to blow off steam. Sometimes in a very big way.”
“So she was a binge drinker?”
He shrugged. “I guess that’s what you’d call it, dating back to her college days. She’d go months and months without slipping up and then...”
Emma squeezed his hand to let him know she understood.
“But that day,” Beau continued, “I’d had a big ski resort security job I’d worked for weeks to set up fall apart while she was out at this little hillside tavern that was popular with both the tourists and the locals. So I was plenty ticked off when I found her sloppy drunk, cutting up with a couple of her coworkers. Angrier still when she refused to leave with me, insisting she would keep her keys and drive herself home. It was an awful scene.”
“Sounds like it.”
“Yeah, but there was no way I was leaving her there, staggering and slurring, so I got one of her more sober friends to help me force her into my truck. Once we got her buckled in, I took off with Melissa, with her screaming over how I’d embarrassed her for the last time and she wanted me out of her life.”
Emma hugged him tighter, feeling his distress in the pit of her stomach. And dreading the rest of the story, for all that she was certain of his need to get it out.
“I wish I could say I’d handled it better in that moment, that I’d told her I would always love her. I’ve wondered ten thousand times what would’ve happened if I’d tried a little harder to make her understand. Or if I hadn’t let my hurt or the ugly words I was shouting back take any of my attention from the road. They say it wasn’t my fault, that I was still inside my lane as we rounded the curve heading toward home. They say it was just bad timing, our being there at the same moment the driver of that logging truck had some kind of seizure and—and—”
“Oh, Beau. Oh, no,” she said, her throat closing as tears choked her. “You couldn’t have possibly known that driver would lose control of his vehicle in that place at that moment.”
“You’re right about that. But I could have—I could have sat in that parking lot a while longer, tried to talk things out with my wife instead of being in such a rush to get her back home. I could have made her understand that I was willing to make changes, to spend more time and take on more responsibility at home, to do whatever I had to to make her happy.”
“It doesn’t sound as if she was in the frame of mind to listen right then.”
“At least I could have make sure the last words she heard from me, the last words she heard on this earth, weren’t me—me telling her that the boys and I would be better off without her.”
“You were there for her, Beau,” said Emma, her tears now flowing freely as she reached up to turn his head toward her and felt that his face, too, was damp. “You went to find her because you loved her. To bring her home because you cared about the family you made together. And as hurtful as her words were, as both of your words were in the worst, most heated moments of your marriage, I know that in the end, it surely meant something to her that you were by her side in that terrible moment. That she didn’t have to die alone.”
* * *
He’d been only trying to comfort her, or at least to warn her away from the painful path he’d been stuck on for the better part of three years, a shame so deep that he had never confessed it to another living soul. But with Emma’s willingness to listen, her kind words instead of judgment, he felt a weight slide from his shoulders, like a thick shell of glacial ice slipping down a sun-warmed mountainside.
In spite of every other burden he still carried, the shock of that relief was enough to take his breath away. Without further thought, he pulled her even closer, taking in the scents of soap and shampoo still clinging to her warm flesh and wondering why the hell he’d wasted so much time fighting what any fool could see both of them wanted. And needed, if they were ever to heal the scars that grief and guilt had left on their hearts.
Cradling her face in his hands, he kissed her gently, softly, a kiss she returned with a tentative sweetness that soon melted into something deeper, warmer, her hand sliding across his chest and a little murmur of encouragement rising from her throat.
It was enough that his hands dropped to shift her so that she sat astride his lower body. Where there could be no hiding the effect her nearness and his need were having on him. Yet instead of pulling away, she flexed her hips against him and in one deft move, loosened the towel from around her body, allowing it to drop.
Though his blood was rushing in his ears and his body aching for release from the clothing—far too much damned clothing, with his jeans now painfully restrictive—his gaze lingered on her eyes, whose lashes remained spiky with the remnants of her tears.
“You—you’re beautiful, amazing—but are you sure you want this, Emma?” he asked. “You’ve had a hell of a scare tonight, and I don’t want you to think for a single moment that this is—this is the price for staying safe here with me.”
Reaching down to where his head rested, she straightened her back, looking sensual as a siren and proud as a queen as she placed a finger over his lips. “Enough with the noble self-sacrifice, cowboy. And the talking.” Casting a seductive smile, she ran her fingertip along the seam of his mouth. “For one thing, I can think of better uses for this.”
Bending forward, she kissed him, fully, firmly, and the last of his restraint snapped, his hands finding the soft mounds of her breasts, his fingers squeezing and pinching her erect nipples. As he slid lower to suck, one hand dropped to undo the torment of his fly. In a moment, she was helping him, and soon he was kicking off his boots and sliding free of pant legs, before peeling off the T-shirt that was now the only scrap of cloth between them.
“The—the bed,” he managed, pulling her up with him from the sofa and leading her to the more comfortable expanse of smooth sheets and fluffy pillows—along with the bedside drawer, where in a rare, hopeful moment last year, he had stashed a box of condoms.
Because it seemed, against all odds, that he was going to have good reason to make use of them tonight. It was the last coherent thought he had before she reached down to touch him and all remaining doubt gave way to giving and receiving the rare gift of perfect pleasure...and laying down their worries through the darkest hours of the night.
Chapter 17
As Emma slept in his arms, her breathing easy and her body relaxed in the wake of their lovemaking, Beau fought his own need for sleep, unwilling to risk allowing one or both of the boys, who often barged in to jump in bed with him on those rare mornings when he slept in, to catch him with Emma in his bedroom. As bad an example as that would set—and as stern a lecture as he knew it would incite from his aunt—he was more concerned abo
ut Emma breaking Cort’s and Leland’s tender hearts by leaving...and likely disappearing from their lives.
But as hollow ache hit him, Beau faced the truth. It’s you you’re worried for, not them. Because he had no idea how what had happened between him and Emma had changed things for her, but in him, something critical had shifted. As precarious, as stressful as his future—as both their futures—might prove, he would face it gladly, if only he knew he had a woman as compassionate and loving as Emma by his side. Imagining the two of them together, with each watching for the other, nothing seemed impossible...except, apparently, the fight to keep from tumbling after her into a dreamless void.
He jerked in surprise at the sound of his cell ringing an hour or so later, his sleep-starved brain scarcely registering where he was or what had happened. When Emma stirred beside him, the memories rushed back in a torrent. Pulse accelerating, he extricated himself from her embrace and climbed naked from beneath the covers before grabbing the phone on his way to the sitting area.
“Hold on, just a second,” he told the caller, figuring it was Fernando or one of the men he’d assigned to guard the house. After grabbing a robe from the back of the closet door, he shoved his arms into it before padding out of the master suite.
“Sorry to wake you, Farmer Beau,” a familiar voice rasped as Beau headed for the den, “but I figured you’d be up and at the milking by now, or whatever gets you up so damned early in the morning.”
“This is not a good time to mess with me, Pirate,” Beau said. “We had a little visit last night from that son of a bitch that you’re supposed to be tracking for me.”
“You’re sure about that?” Ty said, clearly thrown.
“Not a hundred percent,” Beau admitted, closing himself inside the den before laying out the evidence, from the items found out in the equipment building to the bizarre nature of last night’s break-in.
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