by Wynne Roman
Nathan raised an eyebrow but didn’t otherwise comment. Rather, he glanced at Mariah, gave a nod toward the settee, and encouraged her to sit. When she did as he directed, he poured himself another drink and resumed his own seat.
“What took so long?” Tristan asked after another minute. His voice sounded calm enough, and he’d crossed one ankle over his knee in a casual pose, but Nathan didn’t believe it for an instant. Tension radiated just under the surface of his brother’s seemingly cool posture, coiling him as tight as a watch spring. Nathan behaved the same way at times.
Just like Jordan at his best.
“Didn’t know who I was or where I should go.” Quite deliberately, Nathan kept the admission simple.
“What?” The whisper was Mariah’s, while Carolyn brought a hand up to rest over her heart.
“What the devil?” snapped Tristan.
“Amnesia.”
The room fell utterly silent, until Mariah’s soft cry. “Amnesia?” she breathed. Her eyes filled with unshed tears that surprised him. “You forgot who you were? And you forgot . . . us?”
He had no chance to answer before Carolyn fell back onto the settee in a dramatic fashion and began wailing. Jesus holy Christ.
“Mother!” Tristan snapped, sounding so much like Jordan that Nathan could only stare at his brother. Fortunately, Mariah had enough wits about her to shush Carolyn, and then the room fell blessedly silent again.
“You should go to your room if you can’t remain calm,” Tristan announced with a heavy glare. Carolyn averted her gaze and didn’t answer.
So, Tristan had become Jordan’s mirror image, Nathan realized with surprising disappointment. He hadn’t the time to consider the truth of it before Tristan asked stiffly, “What happened?”
Nathan lifted one shoulder. “The Wilderness.”
Tristan’s already honed gaze sharpened. “You were there.”
Nathan trained every bit of his attention on his brother. The worst of the details could wait until they were alone, if they needed to be repeated at all. The women didn’t need to know any of it—and he couldn’t remember it all, anyway.
“I was. And it was . . .” His voice died as he searched for the words, but a shake of Tristan’s head told him he needn’t say more. Not now.
Nathan shrugged. “Most of that still eludes me. I’m told I must have been separated from my unit and thrown in with the North Carolinians at the Mule Shoe and Bloody Angle. The Yankees found me with my name pinned to my chest, just enough of it left to guess my first name.”
“What happened?” Tristan asked again. His expression, his tone, everything about him seemed as empty as if he weren’t there at all. Living in the hell of his own memories, Nathan guessed.
“Prison. Camp Douglas in Illinois.”
Horrified gasps came from Mariah or his mother—or both—but Nathan didn’t look away from his brother’s face.
“Outside of Chicago.”
Tristan nodded as though he’d heard of it.
Nathan stared, nothing more to say. The conditions, the sickness, the depravity all were part of a past he would give anything to forget, now that he couldn’t.
“I stayed there until the end of the war,” he added after several silent moments. “Found my way to a farm where I worked until—”
He cut off the words. Until what? He could not say any of the things he wanted to. None of the things he held close in his heart. He couldn’t even think them. Not here and not now.
Blinking, he refocused his attention on Tristan. “Until an accident. Lightning struck close, knocked me from the roof, and . . .” He shook his head like the details still eluded him. They didn’t, but he wanted to keep all that to himself. “I started to remember,” he finished.
“And then you came home,” Mariah said softly, and he had to look at her. The tears she’d been holding back now trickled down her cheeks, sending a fist to his conscience. Jesus, she deserved a better man than he could ever be.
He forced himself to nod. “Then I came home.”
She surprised him when she slipped from her seat and dropped to her knees next to his chair. Her skirts spread around her like an ebony puddle, and she looked up at him with soft encouragement in those pansy-blue eyes.
“They were good to you, at the farm? Cared for you and helped you?”
He closed his eyes against the tender hope on his wife’s face. How could he look at her with everything he’d done? Everything he’d been?
“Yeah. They helped.”
He stood then, and because it was the gentlemanly thing to do, he bent to help Mariah stand, too. There was more to say, so much more, but not now. His head throbbed with all the differences, with the unfulfilled expectations and his part in the many disappointments. With a future that suddenly looked as bleak as it ever had.
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” he said to the room in general. “I have questions of my own. But not tonight.” He shook his head. Not tonight.
He stalked toward the doorway, thought of Mariah only when he took that first step into the hall. He stopped long enough to reconsider but knew almost immediately that it was a mistake.
Keep going, the voice inside him urged. For once in your goddamned life, do the right thing.
8
Mariah slipped into her bedroom with a soft sigh. Exhaustion, amazement, restlessness, and sadness spun within her, in tangled commotion like a litter of enthusiastic puppies. The day had overwhelmed her, draining her as she tried so desperately to exert a semblance of control over herself. But how could she ever find her footing again after the world had gone all topsy-turvy?
Nathan was alive!
The words stalked her, had throughout the day. Arising from nowhere to soar through her and drive her to distraction. Not only was he alive, but he had returned. He had survived far more than she’d ever imagined, and he’d come home. To the ranch and to her.
She took a deep breath, lowered her eyelids, and dropped her head back against the solid wood of the door. Home. Yes, he’d returned to the Sangre Real, but she would be a fool to see that for what it wasn’t.
Do not, for even a moment, think that he came back for you, insisted a voice with firm insistence. The truth is he found himself saddled with you years ago, and nothing can ever change that.
She straightened and took another breath. From the instant she recognized her husband’s face beneath the dusty, wide-brimmed hat and overgrown beard, she’d struggled with emotions that had dueled relentlessly. They returned again now: exhaustion, amazement, restlessness, sadness.
Yes, he had returned to the Rancho de Sangre Real; it was his family’s legacy. It meant he was forced to return to her, as well. Quite literally, he had no other choice.
Neither of them did.
Mariah would have scoffed, but it turned into something of a laugh that scraped through the air. If she had been offered a choice?
A choice between . . . what? The question shredded her heart and her conscience with uncanny precision. A choice between having Nathan alive or dead? A choice between living alone or with her husband?
A choice between men?
Heart pounding, she closed her eyes once more. Gabriel was a wonderful man. He had brought her back to life. He’d been kind and considerate and tender. He had shown her that she’d been willing to settle for far too little in her life. She would always care about him, for him—but he wasn’t Nathan.
She would never choose another over her husband. For better or worse, with or without the vows.
Straightening, she stiffened her spine, raised her head, and pushed her shoulders back with purpose. She was Mariah Carpenter Fairchild, and she had survived her own personal brand of hell. Somehow, she found herself with an answer to prayers she’d known were so impossible, she hadn’t even voiced them.
How did that happen? What did it mean? Could God be giving her—them?—a second chance?
Pull yourself together! She’d had all day to worry over this, an
d her tangled thoughts had done nothing but baffle her even more.
With purpose, she stepped away from the door and discovered Nathan’s knapsack and bedroll pushed into one corner. She stopped and stared.
He’d left his things here, in her room.
No, his room first, she reminded herself automatically. Breathlessly. Now it was their room. Did that mean he intended to come to her? To sleep in the same bed? And more?
Her heart had only just begun to calm, and now it rattled in her chest like the devil had reached inside of her and squeezed. Her breathing went shallow and ragged, leaving her mouth dry, and her thoughts raced madly.
They hadn’t discussed sleeping arrangements; in fact, she had avoided even thinking about it. Facing his things now, she could no longer pretend. There was every possibility that Nathan would come to this room and expect . . . sex.
It’s just as likely he won’t, and you’ll do well to remember that!
The thought brought her up short; she needed the reminder. She knew it the instant it sank in. She hadn’t seen him since he’d stalked out of the parlor, and that could mean anything. The discussion with Tristan had been difficult for all of them.
Her brother-in-law hadn’t said a word after Nathan’s departure, and so Mariah had collected Carolyn and escorted the older woman to bed. She had stayed only long enough to help her mother-in-law unfasten her buttons, then she’d escaped to find this. An empty bedroom holding the tantalizing prospect that Nathan might come to her.
Refusing to allow herself another instant for what-ifs, Mariah turned to the bed with purpose. She had been in earlier to light the oil lamp on the dresser, and now she bent to turn down the always-tidy covers. It was then that she noticed the rippled fabric that creased the far side of the quilt.
She stopped and stared. Wrinkles? She blinked.
Nathan. She knew he’d come into the room; his bags provided evidence enough. He must have rested here, too.
The image of him stretched out across the bed, relaxed and waiting, did something to her insides. It shouldn’t; she couldn’t allow it. She forced her suddenly trembling hands to move. She continued preparing the bed and then pulled her nightgown from where she’d left it folded in a tidy square under her pillow.
She hurried through the rest of her evening toilette, quickly undressing and pulling on her white cotton nightgown. The rounded neckline and long sleeves were slightly pleated and decorated with pale blue ribbon. The garment fell shapelessly to her ankles, and she offered up a quick prayer of relief.
She was protected, hidden. Nothing about her would give Nathan the wrong idea.
If he came to her.
The only thing left was her hair. She moved to the dresser, pulled the pins from her intricate hairstyle, separated her hair into three plaits for braiding, and began to brush. The downward motion of the third stroke coincided with the opening of the door.
Mariah froze, her eyes gone wide and arms still raised to fuss with her hair. She lowered them the instant Nathan came in, and the hairbrush clattered to the dresser top. He stared back, eyes flickering over her hair, her face, and didn’t move for seconds that ticked by to become minutes? Longer?
Time ceased to matter while it held her prisoner. She watched helplessly as his chest moved with every bit of the effort it took for him to breathe. Finally, finally, when she thought she couldn’t stand it another second, he released her with a blink and quick shake of his head.
He stepped into the room, closed the door behind him, and turned to face her once more. He started in her direction, keeping his pace slow and steady.
“Nathan,” she said softly.
He stopped so close that she could feel the draw of the heat from his body. His gaze stroked a leisurely path from the top of her head, over her nose and to her mouth, falling to her throat and beyond. She lowered her eyelids, unable to watch any longer.
He reached out to lift a long, dark curl of hair from where it trailed over her shoulder. “You’re so beautiful.” Her gaze shot to his in time to see something harden in his expression. “But you know that, don’t you?”
“I . . . what?” She shook her head. “No.”
“You’ve always been one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen.”
“That isn’t true.”
“Why do you say that?”
“You have never seen me that way.”
“Rye.” He sighed and stepped closer, if such a thing were possible. “Despite anything that has gone before, I have always known you’re a beautiful woman.”
His words drew her attention, but it was his proximity and clean but masculine scent that trapped her. She was the one to stare now, and she did nothing to avert her gaze. His gray eyes had gone darkly intense and yet remained guarded at the same time.
“No,” she said again, hating the confused desperation she recognized under it all.
“Do you need proof?”
His lazy touch became something more in an instant. The finger that toyed so casually with her hair became a solid hand at the back of her neck, while the other settled confidently over the opposite cheek. His thumb stroked from the apple of her cheek to her jaw.
“You’ve never understood your appeal, have you?”
Appeal? She shook her head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
An odd, almost-smile teased his lips, but it disappeared the instant he began to speak. “Even when I didn’t want you, my body responded to you. I responded to you.”
She stared, unable to blink or breathe or understand. She couldn’t think well enough to say even one little word.
“I still respond to you,” he muttered, his voice sounding a little gruff. “Did you know that?”
“No.” She shook her head sharply, uneasily.
“Do you know how I can tell?”
“No,” she whispered, still trapped by the intensity of his indecipherable gaze.
“This.”
He dropped his hand from her face, fingers searching until they found hers. He gripped her tightly, but only for a moment, and then he tugged her hand between them. With a twist, he pressed her palm against him—there—and she understood in an instant.
It was him. His manhood. Large and long and very, very hard.
“Nathan?” His name sounded like a breathy whisper, but she could manage nothing more.
He pressed his hand over hers, holding her touch solidly against him. Slowly, almost deliberately, he leaned down until his mouth hovered a hair’s breadth from hers. He stopped, held still for a heartbeat. Two.
“That is what you do to me.”
Her heart pounded frantically, and then his lips touched hers.
9
He had decided to seduce her.
Nathan couldn’t say quite how or when the idea had first come to him, but it had happened somewhere along the way as he’d paced through the soothing night air. He’d stormed out of the house and stalked toward the barn, pretending that he simply meant to do a final nightly check on Clancy.
He’d been lying to himself.
The scene in the parlor had been trying. The others may not have seen it in the same way, but Nathan had hated every second of it. He’d never been one to confide in others about the simplest events in his life, and he considered his war-time experiences particularly sacred. Even withholding the more grisly details because of the women present and struggling with the gaps in his memory, a sea of deep-seated emotions still roiled and churned just out of reach. The pain, the brutality, the things he’d done, and the things done to him. None of it left him with the peace he’d come to crave. The stench and blood and inhuman cries of the battlefield remained his constant companions, while prison camp had come with its own brand of horror.
Battle, at least, gave a man the chance to defend himself.
It had been Mariah’s soft, sad eyes, the unshed tears trembling on her lashes, that had sent him stumbling from the room. Throughout their marriage, he’d treated her only slightly
better than a whore, and she still cared for him with tender acceptance.
Why did this woman love him? And why couldn’t he love her in return?
Susannah’s ghost and Wren’s memory had followed him through the night like unforgiving wraiths as he left Clancy’s side. He’d had no destination, no purpose, and yet he’d somehow found himself standing at the edge of the little fenced-off cemetery. He’d stared through the heavy nighttime shadows at his honorary grave.
How much more of yourself are you going to invest in long-ago memories and useless possibilities?
The question had brought him up short, still reeling from the sight of Mariah kneeling next to his chair in caring supplication. How much more time was he going to spend grieving what had never been with Susannah? Or what could never be with Wren? He’d loved and lost, but he still had the chance to go forward with his life. Why couldn’t he concentrate on that?
It was in that moment when he’d known what he would do.
And so, here he stood in her bedroom—their bedroom—kissing her.
Her mouth was soft beneath his, her breath fresh and minty. He remembered suddenly the little habit she’d always had of cleaning her teeth and chewing mint leaves after meals. It gave him a smile that moved their lips together, and then she was opening up for him.
He didn’t think but pushed his tongue forward, tasting her for the first time ever. In all the times he’d been with her, he’d never actually kissed her. He’d never thought of her pleasure at all.
He wrapped an arm around her waist, pulled her close against him, and leaned forward so she had to bend back. He didn’t release her mouth for even a second, darting his tongue to tease and soothe.
Apologize.
Mariah kissed him back but shyly. And why not? This was hardly normal behavior for them, but if he meant to start in the way he intended to go forward, then he must ease her into this new intimacy between them. Maybe he didn’t love her, but he could make things good—or at least better—between them.