by Gigi Moore
Sabrina must have sensed how frustrated she was, for she came from behind the counter and put an arm around her. “Look at it this way, kid. Maia didn’t tell him who the artist is.”
“Yet,” Maia chimed in.
“You can’t tell him,” Lucy said.
“Why on earth not?”
“I don’t want him to…to pity me.”
“Pity you? Whatever for? He paid for that picture without even knowing who you were. That means he saw talent, pure and simple like I see when I look at your work. Pity is not even a concern.”
After years of being told she was a dummy who couldn’t draw her way out of a paper bag if her life depended on it, Lucy found Maia’s contention hard to believe.
All Lucy could see was Rance sneering as he snatched and crumpled her doodles before throwing them away, calling them useless garbage.
Maia came from behind the counter now and put her arm around Lucy, too. “I honestly thought I was helping your career get off the ground.”
“Career?” What career? She didn’t have any talent.
“Yes, your career. You can’t let talent like yours go to waste.”
“You really think I have talent?”
“Trust me,” Sabrina said. “She’s always bending my ear about how your work should be on display in a gallery somewhere in New York or Paris. You have talent, Lucy.”
Lucy took a deep breath.
“Okay now?” Maia asked.
“I think so.”
“No more doubting yourself or your gifts.”
“I can’t make any promises, but I’ll try not to.”
Maia, Sabrina, and Rebel all laughed and Lucy joined them, feeling a little less fretful than she had several minutes ago.
“So, what did Pretty Boy want?” Rebel asked.
Lucy winced at Rebel’s nickname for Ki, despite it fitting him to a T. She shrugged in answer, not knowing what to say to the other women or how to say it without them judging her a fool for not rushing down to the Justice of the Peace the minute Ki had asked her to marry him.
They just didn’t understand why she was stalling now that what she wanted was well within her grasp.
She wanted Peyton’s. She wanted the house she had decorated with her heart and soul and lived in for the last several years. It used to be a gilded cage, with Rance as her jailer, but now it could be a place she could actually call home. Except that she didn’t want to be married, not this soon after Rance and not to someone she barely knew. She’d gone down that road before with Rance when she didn’t have a choice. Now she had a choice, at least half of one.
Six months for half of everything.
It had seemed like such a good deal at the time, but now she was wondering.
Could she survive six months in that house, alone with Ki, as Ki’s wife, without falling victim to that fatal charm she had seen in action all too often this last week? Could she survive him hurting her, if not the way Rance had, then some other horrible way?
She told herself she was young, she was strong, and she was a survivor. Even a mighty oak could crack under the right amount of pressure, though, and she was nowhere near as sturdy and solid as a mighty oak. During the last six months before Ki had showed up, she’d felt as fragile as an egg sometimes. She was afraid to lose her newfound freedom taking a risk on such an unknown quantity as Rance’s nephew.
He’d asked her to give him a chance. He’d told her that he wasn’t the monster she was making him out to be.
Could she take that risk?
The bell over the entrance tinkled, breaking Lucy out of her daydream and pulling her attention to the front door where Ethan Crawford stood just on the threshold. He looked as lost as most of the men who came into the shop unchaperoned by their wives or girlfriends.
“Can we help you?” Sabrina asked.
Ethan only gave Sabrina a passing glance before peering at her. “I came to see Lucy.”
“Well, aren’t you the popular lady today,” Rebel teased.
“Me?”
“Can I speak to you in private?”
“Whatever about?”
“Not here. Please.”
Lucy frowned at him. She’d never seen Ethan in such a state before. He looked nervous and…desperate. “O–okay.”
“You can use the storeroom,” Maia said firmly.
Ethan looked grim and resigned as he nodded and warily stepped into the shop to follow Lucy to the back.
“We’ll be here if you need us. Just give a holler.” Maia glared at Ethan as he passed her.
* * * *
Prentice had been avoiding Ginger all week. It hadn’t been difficult to do, as her father had tightened his reins on her since the dinner interruption incident.
Prentice, for his part, had been playing the dutiful, prodigal son working in Clint and Kate’s mercantile as if it was his fondest ambition. He needed a way to make money and without his powers, he had to do things the old-fashioned way. He didn’t have a problem with hard work. He’d worked his way up the ladder of his parents’ company from the ground up. There had been no nepotism or other crutch for him to fall back on. He’d just liked having that safety net his powers provided, that cushion.
Today, he’d decided he was going to have a go at some sight-seeing and job-hunting, see what was going on in Elk Creek’s other businesses and shops, specifically Healing Magick.
He had been building up his nerve all week at the prospect of being in the same room as the three people he had tried to kill in his previous incarnation.
Prentice had never considered himself a coward—there in the Old West or in the twenty-first century where he had prided himself for clawing his way to the top of the corporate world in his parents’ company. Guilt, however, was a strong motivating factor, as strong as pride, and one of the main reasons he had stayed away from Healing Magick for as long as he had—guilt and shame.
He had done Maia, Thayne, and Cade a great disservice, and he didn’t know if he could ever make amends to them for his actions. He knew somewhere down the line he would have to gird his loins to try though and that saying sorry just wouldn’t cut it. The conscience he felt slowly growing and filling in the previously empty spaces deep inside him called for nothing less than completely sacrificing all his previously held beliefs about justice to do the right thing.
Prentice hadn’t run into Thayne since the night of his resurrection and he hadn’t been looking forward to seeing him or his brother and their woman. He’d specifically avoided going into Peyton’s to look for work for exactly this reason when he’d found out that Cade was tending bar there.
To say he was desperate to see a friendly face was an understatement. To get to that one friendly face, outside of Ginger McCall’s, he knew he would eventually have to go through Maia, Thayne, or Cade at Healing Magick. He’d wanted to see Lucy badly enough to risk the encounters and finally talked himself into coming in.
“What is it you wanted to talk to me about?” Lucy asked.
Prentice smiled as he turned from the closed door to see her standing across the storeroom with her arms folded across her generous breasts. He’d always liked the way she got right down to business, even when she was obviously feeling out of her element.
Her nervousness made him feel less so, more like his old confident self, more like Prentice Teague and less like Ethan Crawford.
“It’s been a while,” Prentice opened.
Lucy frowned. “I guess.”
“You do recognize me?”
“Well, of course I do. I just don’t rightly know why you’re acting as if we’re old friends or something.”
Prentice realized then that she thought he was Ethan.
Damn this infernal body and damn Ethan for whatever he’d done or not done to Lucy.
“I mean if you pulling my ponytails and dipping them in the inkwell makes us friends, then I guess we were friends.”
So Ethan had been a bit of a jerk when he was a kid.
> Prentice could see that, the sense of entitlement the younger Ethan must have had being a comparatively rich shop owner’s only son.
Then he saw them all coming at him in a rush, the faces of all those good-looking, mean and spoiled jocks from school who’d tormented and bullied him. His heart suddenly ached for Lucy’s obvious victimization at Ethan’s hands.
Okay, he had to try another tactic. “I need your help, Lucy.”
She peered at him, searching for Prentice didn’t know what, but he was sure she hadn’t found it when she said, “How can I help you? Seems to me you’d do better going to your Miss McCall for…help.
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m in a bit of a pickle myself. Not all of my own doing, mind you,” Lucy said, her fists now planted on her hips.
He smiled, unsure if she meant the pickle Rance had left her in or the one she had gotten into agreeing to marry this rich Easterner. “I heard about your…difficulties.”
“Difficulties? That’s a nice way of putting it.”
“I didn’t mean to trivialize your situation.”
She frowned at him again and Prentice was beginning to wonder if he was talking too highfaluting for her, too.
“Where exactly were you shot?”
“In the back. Why?”
“Well, why would you ask me such a fool question like whether or not I recognize you and then ask me for help and not your…girlfriend if you weren’t shot in the head?”
God, he had missed that sass, that fire. He hadn’t realized how much until this moment.
“And what in heck are you smiling about?”
“Forgive me. I…haven’t been myself since I came back.”
She frowned again and Prentice wanted to tell her to stop or she’d ruin that beautiful face of hers putting those furrows in her forehead, but he thought that might alienate her more than endear him to her.
“That’s for sure as shooting you’re not yourself.”
“So you do know me.”
“If you ask me that one more time…” Lucy sighed and Prentice could feel her exasperation filling all the spaces between them. “I grew up with you, Ethan.”
Ethan. Like everyone else in this dustbowl she believed he was Ethan.
He shouldn’t have been surprised that she didn’t actually recognize him. He had Ethan’s face, Ethan’s body. Why would she not see Ethan? Prentice had just hoped that she would, on some level, recognize his essence inside Ethan’s shell.
He was a little disappointed in her, disappointed that she was, at least in this, no better than the rest of the people in this town.
“Are you feeling all right? You want me to get Doc Malloy?”
“No!” He realized how hysterical he sounded and tried to tone down his voice and response. “That won’t be necessary.
Lucy peered at him long and hard then shook her head.
Had she seen something? Was there a flash of realization?
Prentice was beginning to wonder if telling her the truth was really such a good idea, but he needed some allies in this friendless and godforsaken town. He needed someone to have his back and Lucy had been the closest thing to a confidante that he knew.
Prentice had slept with plenty of women, but none who had touched his soul the way Lucy had with just one sexual encounter, and none that he truly considered a friend afterward, not until Lucy. He supposed he had Rance to thank for throwing Lucy his way and selling her services to Prentice. There was more to their connection than just sex, Prentice knew, though he would have been hard-pressed to say exactly what had anyone asked him. He just felt something for Lucy in his gut—protective from the first moment he’d met her—the same way he felt guilt and regret for what he had done to Maia, Thayne, and Cade.
“Maybe you need to sit for a spell and get off your feet.” Lucy came over to him and took him by an arm, leading him over to the ladder where she directed him to sit on a rung.
Prentice gladly sat, enjoying the feel of her hand on his biceps. It was the first touch outside of Ginger’s that he’d experienced since he’d come back from the dead that wasn’t purely clinical or spurred by curiosity and fear. “I’m not who you think I am, Lucy.”
“Well, I can imagine coming back from the dead the way you did would change a man, at least his perspective.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. I mean…I’m not Ethan.”
“I know you said you’re not yourself, but—”
“Ethan didn’t come back from the dead.”
“And who, pray tell, are you, if you ain’t Ethan?”
“I’m Prentice.”
“Prentice.” She took a step back, shaking her head. “Why would you say something so hurtful, Ethan?”
Prentice stood. “Because it’s true. Look at me.”
He didn’t know if it was the command in his voice or his words, but Lucy stopped backing up and stared at him again, not looking away this time.
She took a few steps forward until she was standing just an inch in front of him, tilting back her head to look at his face.
He didn’t remember her having to tilt back her head so far to look at him before. Then he remembered that Ethan was a couple of inches taller than he had been, which made him half a foot taller than Lucy’s 5’5” instead of just four inches taller.
It wasn’t his height that preoccupied her now though, he knew, but his eyes, his face.
She raised her hand and froze. “Prentice?”
“Yes.”
She slapped him, hard.
“What the—?”
“Do you have any notion what I’ve been through since you’ve been gone?” She shoved him in the chest with both hands as if her slap hadn’t been an indictment enough.
Prentice caught her by both wrists and pulled her close. “Pardon me?”
“I’m all but destitute! You promised to help me. You said—”
“Seems to me you didn’t do too bad for yourself.” He sneered and immediately regretted his accusation when he saw the tortured look in her color-change eyes. “I’m sorry that Rance screwed you in his will, but would you rather he was still alive to screw you literally and figuratively?”
“Well, no, but…dang it!” Lucy jerked her hands free and covered her face.
Damn it, was she crying? What was it about him and women lately where they just had to cry around him? Was it something he’d said?
Prentice watched her shoulders shake and thought she was sobbing before she took her hands away from her face and he saw that she was…laughing. “What is so funny?” She was taking his life being on the line mighty lightly and he didn’t appreciate it.
“Nothing’s funny. I just rightly realized you’re telling the truth.” She smiled and shook her head. “Ain’t a person around these parts that talks the way you do, Prentice. Screw me?”
“Well, yes. That’s what he did to you, isn’t it?”
“I suspect it is.” Lucy sat on the rung of the ladder recently vacated by Prentice.
He got on his haunches in front of her and took both of her hands in his.
“Ever since you were lynched I had this feeling that you weren’t really dead. I thought I was going crazy.”
“You’re not going crazy. It’s really me.”
“It is but it isn’t.”
She had hit the nail right on the head.
Even though Lucy accepted him and knew who he was now, he was only Prentice to her and no one else. The only other people that would believe him were people he could not make himself vulnerable in front of because Thayne, Cade, and Maia probably wanted him dead more than whoever wanted Ethan dead.
“What are we supposed to do now?” Lucy whispered.
Prentice saw the expression on her face and his heart dropped. Had he made a mistake in confessing to her? “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“I’m not the monster you’re thinking I am.”
“And how would you know what I�
��m thinking?”
“Easy. I can see it in your face.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I do, better than you think. But before you judge me, why don’t you ask Isaiah how he feels about me killing Rance? Ask the kid if I saved his life. Cade may have found him in that mine, but I’m the one who got him away from your sick, pedophile husband.”
“I know you did all that. You saved me and Isaiah from Rance and…” She shook her head and smiled. “Ki said the same thing to me the other day. He told me he wasn’t the monster I was making him out to be.”
“Ki?”
“Hezekiah. My fiancé.”
Oh yes, the infamous fiancé. And what a cute nickname he had.
Prentice grudgingly appreciated that he and this fiancé had something in common where Lucy was concerned, but wondered what Mr. Hezekiah had done to deserve Lucy’s verdict. “I think we can both agree that you can’t tell your fiancé about this.”
“Can’t tell me about what?”
Chapter 8
“Ki!”
He watched Lucy jump away from the dark-haired young man and balled his hands at his sides at the flush of color suffusing his fiancée’s cheeks.
If he wasn’t the civilized man that he was, he might have challenged the mystery man to a duel, but not with guns. No, no, he would use his rapier and take pleasure in running the scoundrel through.
There was something to be said for the intimacy of fencing, the satisfaction of facing one’s opponent across the length of a shiny blade, close enough to feel his breath, sweat, and body heat against one’s skin when one attacked and lunged.
“We didn’t hear you come in,” the young man said.
“I would imagine you were a bit preoccupied.” If they had been about something improper, Ki was sure they would have locked the door, but then he hadn’t locked the door when he’d been with Lucy earlier. He hadn’t anticipated doing anything improper either, but one couldn’t always plan for something like that. Sometimes lust just got the better of a man.
Lucy was an alluring beautiful temptress alone in a room with a stripling, someone with whom, from what Ki understood, she had grown up and gone to school, which meant the mystery man was almost a decade younger than Ki.