Rehabbing the Beast

by Abbie Zanders

  Danny’s lips thinned and his voice lowered to almost inaudible levels. “Because she’s one, too.”

  Seth’s hands curled into fists. “Is that why you all hate her?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know,” Danny answered somberly. “For the record, I don’t hate Quinn.”

  Seth noticed Danny didn’t even attempt to deny that his father and brothers did. He couldn’t even begin to imagine what it must have been like for Quinn, surrounded by that unrelenting animosity. No wonder she kept her personal life to herself.

  “Then why?” Seth asked, fearing the answer was even worse than what he’d already heard.

  Danny poured himself another glass and tossed it back. “They blame her for our mother’s death.”

  Whatever Seth had been expecting him to say, it wasn’t that. To say he was stunned was putting it mildly. His sweet, gentle Quinn? How could anyone believe for a moment she’d be capable of hurting anyone?

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Danny muttered. “You have to understand—our mother was everything to my father. He worshipped the ground she walked on. She gave him four strapping sons without missing a beat, then suddenly she bleeds to death while giving birth to Quinn? No one expected that.”

  Jesus Fucking Christ. The more he heard, the worse it got.

  “My dad lost it, man. Went fucking batshit. We had to stay with relatives until he could get his shit together.” Danny paused, fingering the label on the bottle of Jack. “Finally, after a while, we came back home. Dad was functioning again. Said we needed to stick together, be a family. It’s what mom would have wanted.”

  “None of us knew what to do with Quinn,” he said, the corner of his mouth twitching slightly. “She was so little. Dad said we had to be patient, warned us that babies cried a lot. But Quinn never cried. She’d just watch us with those big eyes of hers, like she was trying to make sense of us.”

  “He tried, he really did, but sometimes Dad would just look at her and break down.” He looked at Seth. “That’s some scary shit, man, to see your old man lose it like that. And my brothers blamed Quinn for making him like that.”

  “She was just a baby.”

  “Yeah.” The sadness was back, the same kind of haunted look Seth sometimes saw in Quinn’s eyes when she thought no one was watching. He blew out a breath. “It only got worse when she started fixing shit.”

  “Fixing shit? Like what?”

  “Injured animals, us. We were always fucking around, getting hurt. And Quinn always fixed us.”

  “And that made it worse?”

  “Dad thought if she could fix us, she should have been able to fix Mom, too.”

  “That’s fucking insane.”

  Danny shrugged. “It is what it is. I protected her the best I could, man, but I couldn’t be there twenty-four-seven, you know? I took a lot of beatings because of it.”

  “Did they hurt her?” His voice was so quiet, so deadly, he barely recognized it as his own.

  Danny stared at the glass in his hand. “They knew they could get away with pushing her around because she never fought back. Not Dad, though. He never raised a hand to her. He just yelled at her a lot and said nasty shit. I think sometimes that hurt her more.”

  “Not you.”

  “No.” If Danny had answered ‘yes’, Seth wouldn’t have hesitated to kill him where he sat. As it was, it was taking every bit of his self-control to sit there and not run back to that house and beat every one of them to within an inch of their miserable lives.

  “I’m the youngest, next to Quinn. The others, they remember our mother more than I do. Her death hit them harder than it did me.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?” Seth finally asked.

  Danny shrugged again. He didn’t have an answer to that. Standing, he threw a couple of fives down on the table. “When you see her, tell her Danny-boy says hey, will ya?”

  Seth felt worse than ever. The burger he’d had earlier wasn’t sitting so well, and he wished he’d had the foresight to skip dinner entirely and buy a bottle of Jack like Danny.

  He lifted his hand, prepared to do just that when he dropped it again. What the hell was he thinking? How could he possibly consider doing any such thing when Quinn was out there somewhere? He’d only heard secondhand about what she’d been through, and he’d had that knowledge for all of what, an hour? Quinn had had to live with the horror day in and day out since the day she was born.

  Knowing that he hadn’t treated her any better made him sick to his stomach. The horrible things he had said...

  Seth settled his tab and walked out into the chill of the evening. The sky was overcast, blocking out the moon and stars, leaving only the sense of a suffocating blanket. He looked up at the sky and took a deep breath, expelling the second-hand smoke from the bar and refilling his lungs.

  He didn’t know what he was going to do, but he had to do something.

  “I’m coming, Quinn.” He whispered the promise on the sudden breeze that whipped around him.

  He slid into his truck and punched “Erehwon” into his GPS. It was only then, seeing the display reflected in his window that it hit him: Erehwon was Nowhere spelled backward.

  Chapter Seven

  Erehwon was small, even by small town standards. Forgotten in time by everyone except those who lived there. It had everything it needed and nothing more: a modest mom-and-pop grocery store, a post office, a church, a single pump gas station with an attached garage, and a bar – or pub – as the sign proclaimed.

  As scenery went, it was beyond idyllic. Tucked in the side of a mountain, the land was heavily forested outside of the populated areas. The town was built along the shores of a lake where the water still looked just as pure as it probably had a million years ago.

  This, Seth decided, was where good people went when they died, if they somehow managed to find it. A ring of constant fog surrounded the mountain about half-way up, and Seth had had to fight the strong inclination to turn his car around and go back the way he came. Had his will to see Quinn not been so strong, he probably would have.

  Seth had familiarized himself with the town proper before paying a visit to the sole bed and breakfast and acquiring a room. He was received with such genuine excitement that he wondered how long it had been since the place had had a paying guest.

  When asked conversationally how he had come to find himself in Erehwon, he said simply that the brother of a friend had pointed him here as a place to find that which he sought. A bit vague, perhaps, but true. Oddly enough, the kindly old woman who ran the B & B smiled at him and assured him that he had come to the right place.

  It didn’t matter what the local culture was, or where in the world it was, the best place to get information was at the local bar. After a truly delicious homemade meal (included as part of his guest fee at the B & B), he walked the short distance to the pub. He wouldn’t require much use of his car here, he mused, wondering absently if that was one of the reasons why the air seemed so much cleaner.

  The townspeople, he learned, were primarily of either Irish or Scottish descent. While there was still some suspicion because of the simple fact that he was an outsider, it seemed to be based more in curiosity than hostility. As in Graystonville, their distrust grew noticeably less when he told them his name was O’Rourke, and even less so when he revealed that his mother’s maiden name was MacDougal. It just so happened that there was a clan of MacDougals right there in Erehwon. A few of them were summoned to the pub, and after several hours of hearty drinking, darts, and shooting pool, they declared that he was most definitely a kinsman.

  One of them – Malcolm, Seth thought his name was, noticed his limp. “If you’re staying for any length of time,” he was told, “you’ll be wanting to see old Siobhan. She’ll fix ye right as rain.”

  “Or her granddaughter, if you have any luck,” said the one called Cian.

  “Ah, she is a fine thing,” another chimed in longingly. “A slip of a girl, really, but with
the prettiest big gray eyes that’ll melt a man’s heart right in his chest.”

  “It’s not your heart that’s burning for her, Rory,” laughed the big, fiery-haired man behind the bar (Ewan).

  “True enough,” he grinned unrepentantly, “and I’ll not apologize for it.”

  “But alas, she won’t even give him the time of day.”

  “Nay. Rumor has it she gave her heart to another. Lucky bastard.”

  “And what do you know of him?” Seth asked, his interest piqued.

  “Nay much. It’s not right, a fine young woman going to waste like that. Hands like an angel, that one, but the body of a temptress. It’s why they fake so many injuries,” Malcolm confided to Seth with a wink. “The young ones will do just about anything to get her to touch them.”

  Yeah. Seth knew just how they felt.

  Chapter Eight

  “Quinn, lass, are ye ready?” Siobhan poked her head into Quinn’s tiny room and sighed. “Goodness, child. Ye are no’ even dressed yet?”

  Quinn pulled the covers up over her head. “Go without me today, Gran. I’m not feeling well.”

  With a deft hand, Siobhan yanked the quilt from the twin-sized bed, exposing Quinn in her nightshirt and boy shorts. “Bullshite. Yer fine and ye ken it. It’s them young bucks ye be trying te avoid.”

  With a groan, Quinn burrowed her head beneath her pillow. In an instant, that, too, went flying across the small room, first hitting the wall, then the floor, with the softest of thuds.

  “Honestly, child,” Siobhan said, trying to sound stern and failing miserably. “Ye have them linin’ up just for the chance to gain yer favor.”

  “It’s insane, that’s what it is,” Quinn said irritably as she sat up, her hair mussed and shooting out in every possible direction. “Last week Callum McRae hit his own hand with a hammer, trying to pass it off as ‘an unfortunate farming accident’. And Cian O’Reilly had his fool cousin crack a few of his ribs just so he’d have the excuse to take his shirt off in front of me, Gran. It’s ridiculous!”

  Siobhan gave in to the laughter. “Ah, Quinn, darlin’. ‘Tis both a gift and a curse ye’ve been given, I’m thinking.”

  “This isn’t funny, Gran. Someone is really going to get hurt.”

  “Then ʼtis nothin’ else for it. Ye’ll better choose one and put the rest of them out of their misery, for I doona believe anythin’ else is going te stop them ʼcept a ring on yer finger.”

  Quinn made a distinctly unladylike sound.

  “Come now. There must be one among them that quickens yer heart, no?”

  That was the problem—there wasn’t. Quinn really wished there was, because it would make things so much easier. They’d court, they’d marry, have lots of “bairns” and spend the rest of their days in this forgotten paradise. She could be happy here, except for one thing: as long as Seth O’Rourke held her heart, her life would continue to consist of a bunch of well-meaning, randy men competing for her attentions, none of whom she felt more than genuine, platonic affection.

  “No,” Quinn exhaled.

  “Heavens, ye have it as bad as I’ve ever seen. I’ve got to wonder, then, why ye’re here with me instead of out there with yer man?”

  “He’s not my man,” Quinn sniffed as the tears started to fall. “He’s rude and insulting, and he detests the very ground I walk on.”

  “And yet ye love him?” Siobhan questioned.

  “Yes. I know it sounds crazy, but deep down, I know he’s a good man, Gran. A good man who was hurt very badly. He nearly died trying to save the men in his unit. They all survived, but the cost to him was so terribly high. Nearly every bone in his body was broken when they found him... barely alive.”

  “A brave man, then.”

  “Yes, very brave. But so angry at all he lost. He hates what he’s become, as well as anything that reminds him of that. Unfortunately, I fall into that category.”

  “He was a patient of yours?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is he the one who put those marks on yer face?” The question was asked softly, but there was no disguising the edge to Siobhan’s words.

  “No! Of course not! He was... verbally abusive, but he never lifted a hand to me. I... got in the middle of a fight between him and another man and became collateral damage.”

  “Och, ye fool girl! Gettin’ between men when they’re acting like men! God made us smarter than them for a reason, lass.” That made Quinn smile a little. “Now come along. If those boys are goin’ te all that trouble, the least ye can do is gift them with a smile or two.”

  “There’s no way you’re going to let this go, are you?”

  “Nay,” Siobhan admitted with a smile. “A Fated wind is blowing this morning, lass. Best ye get yerself ready for whatever is headed our way.”

  Fate was what had gotten her into this mess in the first place, she thought. With a heavy sigh, Quinn rose and began to dress for the trip down the mountain and into town.

  Chapter Nine

  “Hi, Quinn,” Shane McManus said, coming to sit on the small examining table before her when it was his turn. At one time, the small space had actually been a doctor’s office. It looked very much the way it had when old Doc Shaughnessy had seen patients here fifty years earlier. Two exam rooms, a waiting room, and a small apothecary in the back. Since mostly everyone went to Siobhan anyway (including the now-retired doctor), the town hadn’t put much effort into finding a replacement.

  “Hi, Shane,” she said warmly. For all her earlier bellyaching, she had become fond of the townspeople, even the block-headed men who made no secret of the fact that they sought her attentions. Shane was one of her favorites. Approximately the size of a small barn with the most beautiful auburn hair she’d ever seen, he was as charming as he was big.

  “What can I do for you today?”

  He grinned, a roguish grin that had her smiling too. “Is that a trick question?”

  She laughed and swatted him on the shoulder. “Yes, let me rephrase. What malady brings you here?”

  “A broken heart?” he said, unrepentant.

  “You are incorrigible,” she said, but there was no bite to her words, not when his teasing was done with such warmth. She’d had enough of the truly vicious kind to know the difference.

  “I got a tattoo down in the city,” he finally confided with some seriousness, “and it’s a bit sorer than I thought it should be. I was hoping maybe you or your gran could give me some salve or something.”

  Quinn nodded. “Okay. Let’s see it then.”

  Shane removed his shirt. Quinn couldn’t help but draw in a breath at the exquisite artwork that now adorned his muscular upper back and shoulders. “Shane... it’s beautiful.” The design was one of ancient Celtic origin; she could feel the power of the symbols rippling back through her.

  “You like it?” he asked.

  “I love it,” she said sincerely. “And I have just the thing.”

  She stepped away for a few moments, then returned with a small jar. She climbed up on the table behind him and began to gently trace the lines with her fingers, releasing a flow of healing energy as she did so.

  “That feels amazing,” he moaned. “Can you keep doing that forever?”

  Quinn smiled. “No, but I’ll give you a jar and you can have Angus apply it for you.”

  “You’re much prettier than Angus.”

  “Yes, but you’ll have a better chance with him than you do with me.”

  Shane covered his heart with mock heartbreak. “You wound me, Quinn. You truly wound me.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I saw you with Maggie O’Reilly on the shore of the lake the other night.”

  Shane blinked, but didn’t miss a beat. “Saw that, did you? Makes you want to try some?” he said, waggling his eyebrows suggestively.

  “Get out,” she said, laughing, pushing him toward the door, “and tell Maggie I said hi.”

  “I will. Thanks, Quinn.” With a quick peck on the cheek, he was gone.r />
  And so the afternoon went as she saw one “patient” after another. Her grandmother was just as busy, but with the exception of a few lonely widowers, most of Siobhan’s patients had legitimate complaints.

  Quinn was just getting ready to wrap up things up for the day when her last visitor came through the door.

  “Hello, Cupcake.”

  Quinn froze at the sound of that rich, deep voice. She turned, certain that she had been mistaken; that her imagination had crafted the voice based on the fact that she’d been thinking about him all day.

  “Seth?”

  She expected to see the man she’d left at the rehab center. But instead of his closely shaved head, he had let his hair grow, and thick, wild strands of jet black now framed the harsh lines of his masculine face. Ice blue eyes trimmed in thick black lashes regarded her. But what shocked her more than anything else was the fact that he was standing. On his own.

  “Seth!” she cried, forgetting herself and everything he thought of her, overcome by the sight of him standing unassisted. “You’re walking! I knew you could do it!” Without thinking, she flew across the room and wrapped her arms around him.

  He grunted softly and absorbed the blow with only a half-step backward.

  “No thanks to you,” he said, his voice rough.

  Hearing those words and realizing what she’d done, she backed off and tried to regain some semblance of self-control. The smile on her face faded as her cheeks flooded with color. Clearly, six months of daydreaming and fantasizing had made her delusional.

  “You left me, Cupcake. Left me with those sadistic bastards.”

  His deep voice rolled over her like crushed velvet, darker and smoother than she remembered. Seductive and almost playful, it was like the deep purr of a large cat. And wow, he looked good. Better than good. The man wore a pair of jeans like they were meant to be worn. And that snug Henley reminded her of everything that lay beneath, all those muscles she had spent hours massaging. The ones she still felt beneath her fingers when she dreamt of him every night.