A Warriner to Rescue Her

by Virginia Heath

  Cassie climbed the stairs and entered his bedchamber, only to find it woefully missing an irritated vicar. Dread settled heavily in her gut as she realised he was in her bedchamber—a place he usually avoided unless he was camped outside her locked door reading the scriptures and praying for her infected soul.

  With the certainty which came from years of his abuse, she realised she had walked into a trap. This was a new and terrifying development. It smacked of another level of distrust. In that moment, Cassie understood he had not just arrived home. He had arrived home hours ago. His suspicions would have been raised by her initial absence, but as the afternoon wore on and she had not made an appearance, his temper would have bubbled. Creating more force behind it. Waiting to erupt with potentially explosive consequences. If ever there was a time to run, Cassie knew it was now.

  Behind her, she sensed him and slowly turned. He was blocking the top of the staircase, almost as if he had known she would bolt, his eyes narrowed with hate and malice. One snowy white cravat dangling damningly from his clutched fist.

  ‘What is this?’

  It had to belong to Jamie, although why it was there or where he had found it she had no clue. He must have lost it on the night he had hidden in her bedchamber. Cassie could already feel the guilty blush creeping up her neck and the icy terror in the pit of her stomach. If he ever found out she had had a man in her bedchamber, then it would confirm all of his worst fears about the state of her tainted soul.

  ‘It must be one of yours, Father. I have no need of a cravat.’

  ‘I would not be seen dead in something as fine as that one—this linen is of the best quality. An unnecessary frippery bought out of vanity. Which begs an interesting question, Cassandra, doesn’t it? If it is not yours, and it is very definitely not mine, whose is it? And, more importantly, what was it doing under your bed?’

  He did not give her the chance to answer. The back of his hand hit her soundly across her cheek, causing her head to reel back. Cassie clutched her face, stunned. He had never struck her before; it was another terrifying new deviation in his behaviour.

  ‘I swear to you, I do not know!’

  ‘Liar! His initials are on it! You are a disgrace, Cassandra! Like your mother before you!’ The hand lunged out again, this time violently grabbing her hair above her ear and yanking for all he was worth, pulling her head down and dragging her like a yoked animal. The heels of her boots scraped along the floor as she resisted, because this time Cassie knew she had to resist and she had to leave for good. There could be no coming back from this. She could feel the fury emanating from him. Violent, boiling fury—much worse than any she had encountered before. But he was too strong. Too angry. His nails dug into her scalp so fiercely he had to be drawing blood. Even with Cassie exerting all of her strength, he still managed to easily drag her the few feet to her bedchamber.

  ‘Do not fight me!’ He practically threw her to the floor.

  A floor covered in every belonging she possessed. Automatically, she used her legs to push herself away from him, still reeling from the unexpected and horrendously violent assault.

  ‘Did you bring your lover here? Did you let him raise your skirts and spread your legs in my house?’

  ‘No, Papa, there is no lover! I swear it! I would never—’

  ‘Liar!’ The arm still gripping the cravat swung and hit her hard on the cheekbone. The blow was so severe it blurred her vision for a second. ‘You have dishonoured me under my own roof just like my treacherous wife. She denied it, too, then left me! But like her you prostitute yourself in harlots’ clothes!’ He snatched up a pair of her silk stockings which he had placed on the bed and then rummaged in his pocket to produce her pretty floral garters. He flung the garters at her. ‘Do you deny those are yours, girl?’

  Tears of desperation had begun to silently trickle down her face. ‘I just wanted something pretty...’

  ‘Something pretty to lure men to your bed! How many have there been? And do not lie to me—I have found your stash of coins. The money they left on your nightstand after they had paid to fornicate with you.’

  His fist plunged into her hair again and he used it to force her eyes to look at his. The maniacal gleam in them was beyond anything she had witnessed there before. The raw hatred glowering down at her. ‘I have never lain with a man, Papa! I promise you. I am still a virgin!’

  He yanked her to her knees and wrapped one hand tightly over her windpipe, not forcefully enough to choke her, but enough to convince her he still might do so. The other anchored her in place with her hair.

  He began to chant to the sky. ‘Lord, what shall I do with this filthy girl? Leviticus tells me “The daughter of any priest, if she profanes herself by harlotry, she profanes her father; she shall be burned with fire.” Do you want her dead, Lord?’

  Cassie began to feel light-headed as his grip around her throat tightened. She clawed at his hands ineffectually, fighting for her life. ‘Please, Papa.’ The words came out in a barely audible whisper. ‘Papa...’

  ‘Never call me that again! I have no daughter.’

  Both hands came about her neck and squeezed. As her bedchamber began to fade away, Cassie thought about the only two things she cared about. Her pretty little pony and her handsome pirate. When she closed her eyes there was a sunset and she was riding towards it.

  Free at last.

  * * *

  ‘Cassie is lovely.’

  Jamie’s elder brother said this a little too casually over the breakfast table as he popped a crisp bit of bacon into his mouth. The fact Letty was missing this morning was also a little too convenient. She had taken her breakfast on a tray in bed when she never took her meals alone. It all smacked of an imminent elder-brother chat. Jack had even dismissed the footmen. No doubt some great, earth-shattering wisdom was about to be imparted unless Jamie could sidestep it with indifference.

  ‘I suppose she is.’

  ‘You suppose? What an odd turn of phrase. Especially as you continually look at the girl exactly like a man besotted looks at a girl.’

  ‘I am not besotted.’

  I’m in love. Hopelessly, desperately, miserably in love and I have no idea what to do about it.

  ‘I wish everyone would stop trying to pair us off.’

  Usually, this belligerence would garner a witty riposte, but Jack simply stared at him for several moments, then sighed. ‘I know you believe no woman will want you now that you are lame, but...’ He paused at Jamie’s warning glare and sighed again. ‘I doubt she cares.’

  ‘I care.’

  ‘It’s just a few scars and a limp, Jamie.’

  ‘No, it’s not and we both know it. You all know I am not...’ What? Safe? Sane? Jamie threw up his hands in exasperation. ‘You all know I’m not right, Jack. I thought it might have gone away by now, but it hasn’t. It’s as bad as ever. I am dangerous, Jack.’

  ‘That was months ago and Jacob was unhurt.’

  ‘Only because you and Joe were there to pull me off him. I almost killed him. My own brother.’

  ‘In your defence...’

  ‘There is no defence!’ Jamie slammed his palm on the table so hard the crockery rattled. The savage had possessed him and he had not been able to distinguish the face of his youngest brother from either his father or DuFour. In his mind, at that time, all he could see was both of them and both of them had to die.

  ‘In your defence,’ his brother continued, undaunted by the quick display of temper, ‘you had only just arrived home. You were still so sick. You were in constant pain, confused with the laudanum, and it was obvious to anyone with eyes in their head you were exhausted. And not just physically exhausted. For a long time, you were almost dead inside. Monosyllabic. Isolated. You have come a long way in the last six months. You will get better.’

  For almost a
year Jamie had hoped he would—but the irrational fears showed no signs of abating. If anything, they were now so ingrained he could not remember a time when they weren’t present. His peculiar nocturnal madness had become normal. ‘Until it is gone, I cannot consider any sort of relationship with a woman as anything more than platonic.’

  ‘Perhaps if you talked to someone about it? You’re so stubbornly tight-lipped about it all. Maybe if you opened up and told one of us what happened in that gaol in France...?’

  ‘No, Jack! Not now, not ever. I want to forget about it!’

  ‘Clearly you are doing a magnificent job then. How many pistols do you sleep with? One? Two?’

  Jamie scraped his chair noisily as he shot up from the table. ‘Stay out of my room, Jack.’

  There were three pistols. One under his pillow, one in the drawer of his nightstand and another hidden down the side of the mattress with his dagger. The French cutlass he had taken from Dufour’s corpse was stashed under the bed. Despite his outburst, his brother appeared nonplussed as he blotted his mouth with a napkin and then dropped the linen square on to the table before rising as well.

  ‘For what it’s worth, your Cassie looks at you in exactly the same way as you look at her.’

  ‘She’s not my Cassie.’

  His brother chuckled and shook his head. ‘I recall a similar conversation between us a few months ago, Jamie, during which you rightly pointed out that Letty was my Letty and I was just too stubborn to see it. And guess what? You were right and I shall be eternally grateful to you for it. Once I stopped being a stubborn fool, Letty turned out to be exactly what I needed.’ He walked to the door, then turned. ‘Has it occurred to you that Cassie might be exactly what you need, too?’ The words stubborn fool did not need to be said. ‘Tell her, Jamie. All of it. I suspect she will surprise you.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  Jamie spent the rest of the morning and a great deal of the afternoon thinking about Jack’s advice and his tangled feelings to no avail. He waited for hours on the riverbank for her to trot along on her pretty pony and felt even more wretched when she didn’t materialise.

  He still did not know what to do. He wanted to her to be his Cassie more than anything, but he couldn’t trust himself—or more importantly the savage inside him—not to harm her in a fit of blind panic and really did not have any desire to saddle the poor girl with an invalid for the rest of her life. That was no life for a vibrant, generous and whimsical creature like Cassie. Once the bloom was off the rose, something was doomed to happen sooner rather than later when she understood how truly broken he was inside and out, he would see the quirky sparkle in her eyes turn into the flat gaze of patience as he inevitably slowed her down and disappointed her. Seeing that would destroy him.

  However, a tiny part of him refused to give up hope. The more he thought about it, the more he became certain that Cassie had wanted him to kiss her yesterday afternoon. And he almost had. His damned conscience had reminded him of the fact she had only minutes before been a terrified bundle in his arms—which had made him hesitate and ignore the desire he thought he had seen swirling in her eyes. Kissing her then had felt like taking advantage. Then all the usual doubts clogged his mind and suffocated the impulse. He had practically run out of the cellar and no matter how much he had tried to behave as if nothing had happened he suspected he had made a royal hash of things. Again. She had left with her button nose in the air and a look of irritation in those lovely gold-flecked, big, brown eyes, leaving him stood at the end of the lane without a backward glance.

  Really, there was nothing else for it. Much as he would rather squirt lemon juice into his eyeballs and insert red-hot needles under his fingernails, there was no escaping the fact his brother was right and they had to talk. It was the mature thing to do. The decent thing. They would have an honest and frank conversation about exactly what was going on between them in order to obtain some clarity. Jamie needed to know if she considered him more than a friend and he would have to find a sensible, matter-of-fact way of telling her that he was well on the way to being hopelessly in love with her and so consumed with lust he could barely look at her without drooling. Or toned-down words to that effect.

  Just thinking about it made his toes curl. He was going to have to lay himself bare before her, tell her about the ugly scars on his body, admit to his physical limitations and his private feelings. Tell her about his irrational fear of the dark and his propensity for extreme violence in the grip of a blind panic. In all probability, she would ask uncomfortable questions, so he would have to confess that, yes, he had killed a man with his bare hands—which would dredge up all of the horrors of that dank French hellhole he had been incarcerated in. Kick the blasted hornets’ nest he had been doing his level best to forget about and then wait to see if she decided he was worth all of the bother or if he had misread everything and she was perfectly content with simply being his friend.

  As he lay listlessly on the bank, staring half-heartedly at the wispy clouds in the early summer sky, Jamie did not hold out a great deal of hope his woeful charms and buzzing hornets’ nest were going to be enough to woo the fair maiden by the end of his sorry tale. His only hope was she dismissed the pathetic belief that she was open to being more than platonic friends at the start of the conversation and thus rendering the rest of the mortifying conversation unnecessary.

  He heard his horse snort and sighed. ‘You’re back then, are you? I hope you had a better afternoon than I did.’ Disgruntled and bored with his master’s long swim in the ocean of self-pity, Satan had flown across the fields as soon as Jamie had removed his reins. The bad-tempered beast had been gone for over an hour. But when he turned his head, Satan was not alone. Next to him stood Orange Blossom.

  Instantly his heart soared at the prospect of seeing Cassie and Jamie sat up, but as his eyes hungrily scanned the area for his first sight of her it came to dawn on him that she wasn’t there. Like Satan, Orange Blossom was devoid of both reins and a saddle, suggesting she had escaped from her stable or—the more likely scenario—Satan had broken in to the pretty pony’s stall to fetch his lady-love. That he had chosen to bring the minx back here with him, because Satan certainly did not have any issues with going after what he wanted, made Jamie feel inadequate.

  ‘Have you brought her here to rub my nose in it? I suppose you are feeling very smug, aren’t you? You have a wife.’ Satan snorted and looked down his nose at him. ‘Please tell me you didn’t kick down the Reverend Reeves’s stable door in order to free her, Satan. That man loathes me enough already. I could well do without further ecclesiastical censure caused by your charming talent for demolition.’

  Jamie executed an ungainly manoeuvre to get himself upright and stretched, only to find the soft muzzle of Cassie’s pony nudge him in the ribs.

  ‘I suppose you are annoyed at me, too, aren’t you, Orange Blossom? Is she still angry at me?’ He stroked her mane idly. ‘I made a hash of things again yesterday. The truth is, I really have no idea what to do for the best. Cassie deserves a man who isn’t broken, don’t you think? Someone she doesn’t have to pity. A real Captain Galahad. Brave, strong, dashing. Not a curmudgeonly, limping former soldier who sleeps with a light on and cannot find the words to say what he feels.’ The pony nudged him again, slightly harder this time. ‘Do you want me to take you home?’

  Because taking the pony home would give him an excuse to see her. Aside from Satan, most horses did not wander the land freely so it stood to reason that Orange Blossom might be a little anxious at being without her rider. And if Cassie’s father was home from Nottingham already, then he could hardly assume anything untoward when Jamie was merely being neighbourly.

  Good afternoon, Reverend Reeves, I came across this pony whilst I was out riding and thought I had best return it home. It belongs to your daughter, I am told.

  Perfectly plausible. She would
have to come out eventually to settle her pony back in the stable and Jamie would be hiding there, waiting for her. If the vicar was still away, which he hoped was the case, then Jamie would be able to converse to Cassie openly. Either way, he would see Cassie.

  They could talk.

  Good grief—his toes were curling inside his boots again at the prospect, but it had to be done. The thought of walking around for all eternity wondering what to do was going to send him madder than he already was. Before he could talk himself out of it, Jamie saddled Satan again, but put the reins on Orange Blossom. He hauled himself on top of his mount, then led both horses across the fields decisively.

  * * *

  To begin with, he thought nobody was home. The vicarage was silent. Every door and window locked and the curtains tightly pulled closed. Something about that bothered him, but he could not quite put his finger on why until he remembered he had never seen them closed before. On his two previous visits, Cassie’s bedchamber window was always wide open. Of course, he now knew why. She hated being locked in. A fear he could empathise with wholeheartedly, although to her credit Cassie did not lunge at him with a cutlass between her teeth and try to strangle him. Hers was a quiet, gentle type of blind panic. Civilised. Devoid of a lurking, murderous savage. Unlike his.

  Jamie took a deep breath and tried to focus on the task in hand. The hornets’ nest could wait until he saw her. To see her window closed must mean she was not there. It made sense she would be out searching for her pony and, having lived in some of the unsavoury places she had lived in during her lifetime, it also made perfect sense she would lock up the house before she left it.

  Jamie considered his options. He could return the pony to the stable and leave. An unsatisfactory solution which denied him the chance to see her. Or he could go off and search for her—and perhaps waste hours doing so. The only reasonable alternative was to sit close by and loiter until she came home, and in case her father caught him there he would keep Orange Blossom with him. A readymade excuse for his distasteful presence, and one he could also use on Cassie if she made it plain she did not wish to see him.