Child Bride

by Suzanne Forster

  Chase shook out the fourteen-foot rawhide thong, bringing it up and back in one fluid, lethal arc of motion. He put the end of the whip exactly where he wanted it, around the slimy bastard’s ankles. The man lurched forward, and Chase flipped the whip handle to his left hand. As he pulled the rawhide tight, he reached for the pump-action twelve-gauge he’d slung over his shoulder. He cocked the shotgun with one hand, a trick he’d learned in the military, and jammed the gun butt up against his shoulder as he approached the grounded man. “Who are you?” Chase demanded. “And what are you doing on McAffrey property?”

  “I work here!” the man screamed, thrusting out an arm as though warding off demons. “I was riding fence, that’s all.”

  Chase held him at bay, taking in the man’s wiry, sweat-slicked features and wild-eyed fear. “Mending fences, my ass. Why the hell did you run?”

  “Who wouldn’t run with a maniac like you chasing him?” the man said, rubbing a grimy shirtsleeve over his dripping brow. “If you don’t believe I work here, ask the foreman. He hired me yesterday.”

  Chase didn’t like anything about the situation. He could smell a liar, and this bastard stank like hell on housecleaning day. He shook some slack into the whip and motioned the man to his feet. “Let’s go have a talk with your foreman.”

  “Come here, Shadow,” said Annie, trying to coax the Border collie away from his post by the cabin door, where he’d been waiting ever since his master left. The dog regarded her with wary disapproval, as though he were holding her responsible for his master’s disappearance at the very least, and perhaps for any number of other things.

  Glancing around the cabin, Annie shivered a little at its austerity. A large stone fireplace dominated the main room, and the few pieces of furniture Chase had were of sturdy white pine. Other than a couple of rifles hanging above the fireplace, there was nothing on the walls—no pictures, no curtains on the windows, no touches of color anywhere to alleviate the grayish expanse of unfinished wood. The place had all the severity of a monastery and none of the charm, she decided.

  For some reason Shadow chose that moment to break his vigil. As Annie crossed the room to take a closer look at the kitchen area, the dog fell in behind her, sniffing at her legs and bare feet. Annie let him inspect her until he seemed satisfied, then reached down to stroke the silky black hair on his muzzle.

  The cabin’s kitchen was a little homier than the rest of the place, she noticed. A blue metal coffeepot with white speckles sat on a two-burner wood stove, and a red checkered oilcloth covered the small dinette table. The kerosene lanterns hanging from wall spikes made her think of scenes she’d read in her father’s western novels, of winter storms when the snow heaped up to the eaves of a cabin’s roof.

  Shadow brushed her leg, seeking her attention, and his cool, wet nose startled a chuckle out of her. “Aren’t you a friendly fella all of a sudden,” she said, scratching the white patch on his head. The dog whimpered softly, and she crouched impulsively to give him a hug, surprised at the welling of emotion she felt. It was bittersweet and yet soft at the edges, an odd kind of yearning that seemed to concentrate in her arms, moving her to hug him tighter. She nuzzled into his ruff a moment and then released him, laughing as he began to lick her face. He was quivering with affection, and it was the first warmth Annie had experienced since she’d started her desperate journey. Lord, it felt good to have someone want her around. It felt almost like coming home. Or what she imagined that would be like. She’d never had anything resembling a normal home life.

  Her eyes were misty as she sat on the floor next to the dog and surveyed the cabin again. If only the place weren’t so cold and forbidding. It wasn’t at all the house she’d been seeing in her mind all these years. She’d envisioned it as a picturesque log cabin with a tiny kitchen all fixed up with yellow curtains and ruffled seat cushions, a shaft of morning sunlight drifting through the window, warming a knotty-pine breakfast nook.

  And of course she’d imagined herself in that kitchen, cooking up a mess of ham and eggs for breakfast. And the man of the house? Her cowboy lover? She closed her eyes, remembering the sweetest part of the dream for her. He would be out back splitting logs for firewood, probably shirtless and sweat-sheened, working up an appetite. After he’d washed up, he would want to steal a kiss, of course, and probably something more, but she would remind him that his sunny-side-up eggs were getting cold.

  “I sure got it wrong, didn’t I, Shadow?” She leaned into the dog’s furry warmth for comfort as another lonely kind of aching flared up inside her. “This place isn’t at all what I expected. And neither is he.”

  Shadow whimpered sympathetically and nuzzled her face.

  “Thanks,” she told the dog, smiling sadly as she accepted his condolences. “It’s sweet of you to want to help, but the problem is bigger than both of us, I’m afraid. Your master doesn’t seem to remember me. Or maybe he doesn’t want to.”

  She drew the dog close again, warding off the panic that was stirring inside her. What would she do if Chase refused to help her? She couldn’t throw herself on the mercy of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. She’d heard all the horror stories about illegal aliens being held in compounds for months, then shipped like cattle back to wherever they’d come from. And even if the stories weren’t true, she almost certainly wouldn’t be allowed to stay in the country if she couldn’t prove her citizenship.

  A chill washed over her like an icy bath of water. Sent back to Costa Brava? After the nightmares of the last five years? She released the dog and pushed to her feet, fighting a wave of dizziness that crested so suddenly it threatened to drag her under. “I can’t let that happen, Shadow. No one’s going to send me back there.”

  Chilled through to the marrow, she made it over to the cot and pulled the quilt coverlet around her. How long had it been since she’d eaten? Hours? Days, maybe? She was losing track of time again. Everything was blurring together. A seductive kind of lethargy was seeping through her muscles and bones, dragging her down into the sweet oblivion of sleep. The sheer weight of it had overwhelmed her before. She’d slept in parks and bus terminals, drugged by exhaustion. She supposed it was a variation on the fainting spells, but she couldn’t let herself give in to the heaviness now. She had to stay awake, stay focused. She had to find a solution to her problem.

  “What am I going to do?” she said, as the dog came over to sit before her. He looked up at her eagerly, but his huge brown eyes were so sad and sympathetic, they filled her with despair. Finally he rested his muzzle in her lap, and it seemed as if the two of them sat that way for a long time.

  Consummation? The word came to her in a burst as she huddled in the threadbare quilt material. It created such a shimmering explosion of awareness inside her that she felt as if the reference must have been sent to her through some kind of divine intervention.

  “Consummation,” she murmured aloud, testing the word’s susurration on her tongue, and getting a sense of its deeper significance as she let the awareness take on meaning and shape. Suddenly she knew what had to be done. She knew!

  With a quick smile she glanced up. “Thank you.”

  Shadow’s tail was wagging so hard by that time, it shook his whole body. Annie scratched his ruff, excitement growing inside her, reviving her. “You know it, too, don’t you, Shadow? You understand that I’m going to have to seduce your master. There’s no other way.”

  Her heart began to pound recklessly as she considered the possibilities. Seduce Chase Beaudine? Could it be done? Was there a woman alive who could bend that iron man’s will and make him want her enough to succumb? Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but something inside her needed to believe that making love would help Chase to remember their bond. He couldn’t pretend she meant nothing to him once he’d made love to her, could he? He couldn’t pretend she didn’t exist.

  Shadow began to whimper eagerly, and Annie realized she’d stopped stroking him in her preoccupation. “This isn’t going
to be easy,” she said. “How do you seduce a man who refuses to be in the same room with you?”

  Beyond Chase’s obvious reluctance, she herself had a major handicap when it came to undertakings like seduction and consummation. She had no experience with men. None! At a time when most girls were learning to flirt, she had been teaching Indian children to read and write Spanish in a convent school. If she’d aroused Chase while undressing, that was a lucky accident. She wouldn’t know how to seduce a man if he gave her step-by-step instructions, and Chase Beaudine didn’t seem likely to do that.

  “ ‘Where there’s a will,’ ” she said, abbreviating another of the proverbs she’d picked up from the sisters. Actually, Sister Maria Innocentia’s advice had usually been a bit wordier. “Action must necessarily follow resolution if goals are to be achieved,” the venerable mother superior was fond of saying.

  Annie glanced up suddenly, searching the cabin with her gaze. Chase had mentioned a shower, hadn’t he? She’d always done her best thinking in the convent’s makeshift shower, and she badly wanted to get reacquainted with some warm water and a bar of soap. It had been so long.

  Rising stiffly to her feet, she tugged at the short cotton shift that had once come down to her calves and was the regulation undergarment in the convent. After years of trying to tuck the voluminous thing into her jeans, she’d simply whacked most of the bottom off one day, much to the sisters’ dismay. So as not to further offend their sensibilities, she’d left intact the words embroidered in pink thread across the bodice: VIRTUE IS ITS OWN REWARD.

  She found the shower in a closet-sized bathroom off the hallway. The floor was wooden slats spaced wide for drainage, and the rusty shower head looked as if Chase had stolen it off the nozzle end of a hose. Not what she’d hoped for, but nothing could have dissuaded her from the prospect of cleaning up.

  She turned on the tap and then jumped back with a startled cry as an icy jet of water hit her. It took several minutes for it to warm up, but when it did, she stepped into the stinging spray with great relief, shift and all.

  It was heaven, pure bliss, she decided, scrubbing herself with a bar of gritty soap that smelled so strongly of lye it stung her nostrils. “Cleanliness and godliness,” she murmured. “However that one goes.”

  Turning in the shower spray, luxuriating in its pounding heat, she could have stood forever in the soapy, steaming cocoon. But all the years of convent living and the impoverishment of her circumstances made her feel a little guilty about indulging herself now. She glanced down at her water-soaked shift and felt a pang of despair as she ducked her head under the spray. Was virtue really its own reward? she wondered, soaping her hair. And what chance did a woman with a platitude embroidered on her underwear have of seducing an unwilling man?

  The black Ford Bronco’s chassis bounced against taut springs, its engine snarling as Chase geared down and swerved to avoid a darting ground squirrel. The gravel access road that led to his cabin had ruts the size of small open graves and a pitch too steep for anything but a rugged four-wheel-drive vehicle.

  Grocery bags Chase had forgotten to secure toppled over in the backseat as the Jeep jolted up the hill. There went the eggs, he thought, glancing in his rearview mirror. They’d be scrambled before he got back to his place. But he didn’t bother to slow down. A blazing sunset had drenched the craggy mountain peaks ahead of him in coppery oranges and reds, which meant he had less than a half hour to get home before dark.

  The slimy character Chase had apprehended on the McAffrey spread had turned out to be telling the truth. He was a newly hired hand, according to the foreman, who assured Chase the man had been sent out to mend fences.

  Something about the situation still stank as far as Chase was concerned, but he’d let it go, apologized to the man for roughing him up, and headed into Painted Pony to pick up supplies. Then, before he’d left town, he’d tried to contact his former partners by telephone and hadn’t been able to reach either of them. Johnny Starhawk was arguing an important case before the Federal District Appeals Court, and Geoff Dias was on a top-secret mission somewhere in the Middle East.

  Chase had left urgent messages for both of them. He’d even used an old code word to alert them that his life depended on their quick response. They might not appreciate his tactics when they found out what was actually going on. But hell, it was his life at stake. He had a woman claiming legal rights to his bed and board, to his personhood!

  He didn’t like anything about the predicament with Annie Wells. And he especially didn’t like the fact that he was in such a hurry to get back to her. Actually it wasn’t Annie he was in a hurry over, he told himself. It wasn’t the woman herself who had him worked up. It was all the emotional baggage she brought with her. She was a threat to his way of life, to his very peace of mind. He had to get things under control.

  Not a second later, he had a graphic mental flash of the striptease she’d done in his living room, and he nearly veered off the road. He hit the brakes and brought the Jeep to a stop that sent gravel flying like shrapnel. A vein throbbed in his forehead as his own black eyes flashed hotly from the rearview mirror. Who are you kidding, you dumb ass? It’s not the predicament you’re hurrying back to. It’s her.

  The crimson sky was swathed in deep purple velvet by the time Chase pulled up to his cabin. Like a plush theater curtain dropping, it blotted out the footlights of the fallen sun. Unaware of the spectacular beauty around him, uncaring, Chase reached over the backseat and scooped up the grocery bags.

  He thought he’d prepared himself for any eventuality when he nudged open the cabin door with his foot. He’d imagined her sound asleep on the cot, curled up like a kitten. Or long gone with all his possessions. He’d even imagined her staring down the barrel of a gun at him. But it had never occurred to him that she might be standing in the bathroom doorway naked and dripping wet.

  “What the hell?” It was a moment before he realized she wasn’t totally naked. She had on that flimsy, sliplike thing, but sopping wet, the material might as well have been invisible. Patches of it clung to her breasts and hugged the slender lines of her body in ways that were indescribably sweet, and unspeakably lewd.

  Chase felt as though he’d been hit by a truck in high gear. She aroused feelings in him that were both carnal and impossibly innocent. She took him back to his teenage years. She made him yearn for young love. She made him remember the wet dreams and every dirty movie he’d ever seen—or wanted to see.

  Set the groceries down, cowboy. Before you drop them.

  He deposited the bags on the table by the cot, but nothing had changed when he turned back to her. She was still standing there, dripping all over his hardwood floor and staring at him like a wood nymph caught emerging from some magic pool. “Annie, what the hell—”

  “I took a shower,” she said, stating the obvious. She shifted her weight, a barely discernible movement that hung the diaphanous material over her thighs and hipbones like cellophane wrap, revealing a reddish delta of hair. Strawberries and cream, Chase thought, struck by the contrast of her ginger hair and her porcelain skin tones.

  He could feel his breathing quicken as he stared at her. He could feel muscles responding and heat gathering. Luckily there was something stopping him from making wild love to her right there on the floor in a pool of water. It was the total incongruity of the situation.

  The woman standing across the room from him didn’t seen unduly embarrassed by having been caught naked, and yet she couldn’t have had much experience with men if what she’d told him about the convent was true. She hadn’t even been allowed to shower in the nude.

  Sweet God, he thought. Could he actually have made love to her on that mission? If he’d been delirious, he wouldn’t have known what he was doing, but still, she hadn’t been much more than a child. She looked like a child even now with her damp copper-colored ringlets, cameo complexion, and grave, trusting expression.

  “Get yourself dry, Annie,” he said abruptly.
“And get some clothes on.”

  “I don’t have any clothes,” she said. “You took them.”

  So he had. Chase glanced at his blue chambray shirt. A moment later he’d pulled off the shirt and was tossing it to her. “You can wear this,” he said. “I’m going to put the groceries away.”

  The shirt dropped at her feet, and she stared down at it for a long time, but she made no attempt to pick it up. “I have a better idea,” she said at last, her voice soft and trembling. “You could make love to me.”

  Four

  CHASE FROZE WHERE he stood. He knew what he’d heard, but he didn’t want to believe it. And yet the sparkle of fear in her eyes could as easily have been excitement. If he’d had a choice, he would have called a halt to the proceedings right there. But it was already too late for that. His blood pressure was on the rise. His stomach muscles grabbed, and an odd thrill sank deep into the muscles of his legs as he stared at her.

  “Put on the shirt, Missy,” he said, furious with her. And with himself.

  She shook her head, looking more like a frightened, defiant child than a woman who wanted to make love. Chase grabbed the quilt off the cot, strode over to her, and draped it around her shoulders.

  “Is there something wrong with me?” she asked, her voice strangely faint, her eyes sparkling with tears. “Am I too ugly? Too skinny?”

  Chase told himself to let go of the blanket, to release her at once. Instead, his hands curled into fists, and the material tautened in his grip. “No, you’re not ugly, Annie. A little skinny maybe, but that’s not the problem.”

  He caught the clean, damp scent of her hair as she swayed toward him, the freshness of her skin. Her breasts bounced and strained against the wet fabric, her nipples hardening. And even as Chase ordered himself to let go of her, to back off, he knew it was too late to stop.