Gabriella looked around the half-cleaned and still cluttered kitchen. “How does anyone live like this?” she whispered, glancing toward the living room. She gave a soft snort. “My mama told me men don’t even see dirt, and that’s why they need wives. She said having someone to wash their clothes and cook their meals is the only reason they get married.” She looked back at Fiona and grinned. “That, and for sex.” But then she frowned. “Only when I asked her why any woman would get married if cooking and cleaning and having sex were all men wanted from us, you know what she said?”
Fiona stopped making the sandwich. “No, what?”
“She said that women are born with a powerful yearning to have children, and for that we need husbands. She claimed women are stronger than men in every way except physical strength, and so we need them to provide us with a safe home. She said that putting up with all their posturing is well worth the security we get in return.”
Gabriella walked back to the table and sat down, and started hunting for stray socks again. “I remember her showing me a drawing of lions in Africa once, and she explained that they were a perfect example of how marriages work. Apparently, the female lions do all the hunting and raise the cubs while the male lions just lie around all day, basking in the sun. But when the pride—that’s what a family of lions is called—is threatened, it’s the males that do the fighting.”
The young girl suddenly stilled, and her eyes grew distant as she stared down at the sock in her hand. “Just like Papa and all the men did when our keep was attacked.” Gabriella looked up, her face awash with pain. “I guess I still have that powerful yearning my mother spoke of,” she continued shakily, “but now, whenever I think about having babes, I remember my father standing in front of Mama and me, trying to protect us. Papa’s roar of outrage still wakes me up sometimes at night, and the smells and horrible sounds of battle fill the room as if it’s happening all over again. I keep seeing those men slashing at him with their swords, and then I see him lying in his own blood, his eyes filled with a terrible pain as he helplessly watched them dragging Mama and me away.”
Fiona rushed over and hugged Gabriella to her. “Shh, it’s okay,” she crooned. “He’s no longer in pain, Gabriella. It’s over.”
“I know that. I’ve been with my parents all these centuries, and we were at peace.” She leaned away just enough to look Fiona in the eyes, her own eyes welling with tears. “But I’m alive again, and I still yearn to have babes someday. Only … only now I’m afraid.”
“What is it you’re afraid of?” Fiona smoothed down her hair. “Of being with a man? But it won’t be anything like what happened to you, Gabriella. If you find a man you care for, and he cares for you, making a child is not a violent act.”
“I am aware of that. Unlike in most arranged marriages, my parents actually loved each other, and they would often disappear up to their room for hours, and Mama was always smiling when she came down later. Being with a man doesn’t scare me nearly as much as having children. The look on my mother’s face when those men were killing my father and the expression in Papa’s eyes as he lay there dying, watching us being brutalized, that’s what really frightens me,” she whispered. “Loving a husband and children is supposed to be the most wonderful thing in the world, but now I’m afraid to love that much. What if something just as bad were to happen to my husband or child?” she quietly sobbed, her eyes brimming with pain. “I … I don’t think I could go through that again.”
“William survived losing all of you, didn’t he?” Fiona offered softly. “And he was able to find peace and happiness with Madeline.”
“But it took him centuries to get past his anger at not being there to save us,” Gabriella said. “And I don’t have centuries. Mac said I was only returning to live out the remainder of my natural life. But what kind of life will it be, if I’m too scared to love anyone?” The girl swiped at her eyes. “I don’t think I have what it takes to be a nun, Fiona, because I still have that powerful yearning to get married and have babes.”
Fiona brushed her distraught friend’s hair off her face, smiling encouragingly. “I believe your mama also said that women are stronger than men, didn’t she? Of course, it took William centuries to get over what happened, because he didn’t even know he had a heart to risk. It took a strong woman like Madeline to bring him to his senses.” She shook her head. “Although I have no idea why she wanted to.”
That got a tentative smile from Gabriella. “You only pretend to dislike William.”
Fiona arched a brow. “Are you sure about that?”
“William told me that when you were a hawk and he was a dragon, the two of you spent a lot of time together.”
“Only so I could rub his misery in his face.”
The girl snorted. “So you really didn’t mean to tell William how he could find Kenzie Gregor and lift the old hag’s curse? And when he broke his dragon wing and couldn’t hunt, are you saying you accidentally dropped all those doves and rabbits on the ground near him every day for several weeks?”
“I was bored, and your brother was entertaining.”
Fiona started to leave, but Gabriella held on to her, the girl turning serious again. “Do you have yearnings?” she whispered.
“I would give anything to have another babe,” Fiona told her honestly. “But I have no yearning to be with a man in order to get one.”
“Did you … before?”
“Yes,” she softly admitted. “I spent my entire childhood wanting a husband and children, as well as to live in a village, to go to festivals, and to have women friends I could talk to about all sorts of things.”
“But you can have all that now. We’ve both been given second chances.”
Fiona pulled away before Gabriella could stop her again and walked back to the counter. “Oh, I definitely intend to find a way to have another child, only I will be the one to give it a home and protect it. Madeline raised Sarah for six years without a husband, and I’ve seen where plenty of women today are single parents.”
“Or you could make things a whole lot easier by simply falling in love and living happily ever after,” Gabriella said, walking to the counter. She bumped Fiona’s hip with her own. “Mr. Huntsman might be a bit … rugged-looking, but he does have a home, and according to William, he’s a formidable warrior, so he would certainly be able to protect you and your babe.”
Fiona started gagging on the bite of meat she’d popped into her mouth. She spit it out in her hand and gaped at Gabriella, utterly speechless.
The girl sauntered back to the table, picked up an armful of folded clothes, and headed toward the bedroom. “And the poor man does appear to be in desperate need of a wife,” the girl said, her laughter trailing behind her.
Chapter Nine
She was actually going to do it. The little witch intended to serve him goat’s milk again, even though he’d told her he hated the stuff. She must have figured out that he’d been messing with her about putting the skunks in Maddy’s truck, which meant that Kenzie hadn’t been jesting when he’d said Fiona rarely got mad but that she did like to get even.
He couldn’t let her get away with it, of course, or the next thing he knew, she’d be buying his socks. What in hell was it with women, anyway, that they refused to leave a man alone in his misery? Single women were the worst kind of snipers, waiting to ambush the first available chump to step into their crosshairs. And apparently, the more miserable a guy was, the more attractive a target he made.
Yeah, well, he was quite capable of taking care of himself, thank you very much. Any soldier who managed to survive boot camp knew how to make a bed, put a crease in a pair of pants sharp enough to cut paper, and shine a toilet with only a toothbrush.
Except he wasn’t in the military anymore, and if he wanted to sleep on dirty sheets, dress in marginally clean clothes, and wash dishes only once a week, it was his God-given right to do so, dammit. And what was so god-awful wrong with a little dust, anyway? A
ny idiot knew that sterile environments made a person’s immune system so weak that even a common cold could prove deadly.
It wasn’t like he was going to become one of those crazy old hermits who walked around town muttering obscenities at everyone; he was physically and mentally strong. Hell, old Rusty Peterson had looked after himself for nearly a quarter-century, and the feisty ninety-four-year-old probably would have lived to be a hundred if he hadn’t walked in front of that delivery truck on his way to the mailbox last winter.
Seeing Fiona approaching with a tray of food, a large tumbler of milk prominently on display, Trace swept his arm across the table beside his recliner. “Here, let me make a place for you to set that,” he said over the sound of books and magazines, a couple of empty beer bottles, and other small items clattering to the floor.
“Thank you,” she said sweetly, though maybe a tad aggressively. She set the tray on the table, then dropped a spotless hand towel onto his lap, presumably for him to use as a napkin. “Is there anything else you’d like me to get you before Gabriella and I go try and catch our two little stink-bomb buddies?” she asked, her smile warm enough to melt butter.
Trace rubbed his hands over his face, tempted to ask her to get him one of his guns so he could shoot himself. “No, I’m fine. Thank you,” he said, keeping his face covered as he listened to her quietly walk away.
Dammit to hell, he didn’t like being waited on by a woman trying to atone for her supposed sins against him. And he sure as hell didn’t like how he noticed the intrinsic grace of her movements, or the way her eyes sparkled like sunshine, or how his heart seemed to speed up and all his blood rushed south whenever he caught sight of her.
Okay; either it had been way too long since he’d had sex, or he really was fatally attracted to walking disasters.
Because he sure as hell was attracted to her.
Trace spread his fingers to make sure she was gone and then lowered his hands to glare at the tray sitting beside him. It was obvious that Fiona Gregor was familiar with at least some of men’s baser appetites, because she’d made him a sandwich big enough to choke a horse. He grabbed the glass of milk and downed half of it in one swallow, then sat staring toward the kitchen, listening to her explaining to Misneach that if he didn’t want to smell like their landlord, he’d better stay away from the skunks.
Trace wondered when his ego had gotten so big that he thought he had to be everyone’s hero. Although he certainly had a knack for pulling off impossible military missions, when had he decided that his personal mission in life was to save the world one person at a time?
And why in hell did that person always seem to be a woman?
He gave a derisive snort and downed the rest of the milk. As near as he could tell, he’d started acting the hero at age seven, when he’d punched Johnnie Dempster—his best buddy at the time—in the nose for saying something to Paula Pringle that had made the first-grader cry. Having remembered how good it had made him feel, that punch had been the first of many schoolyard and then gravel-pit fights, which had eventually led to one massive explosion at age seventeen.
That’s when he’d gone into the military in order to escape going to jail.
After spending the night cruising the roads with his uncle Marvin in search of the man’s missing daughters, Trace had walked into his kitchen at two in the morning to find his mother cowering in the corner beneath his drunken father, cradling her ribs and holding her other arm protectively over her head.
The towering brute had even had the balls to kick her in front of Trace, when she’d tried getting to her feet so she could pretend—again—that nothing was wrong. Trace had stood staring at his mother’s battered face for several raging heartbeats, only to realize that he was finally strong enough, and sure as hell angry enough, to rescue a woman who had needed a hero for her entire miserable marriage.
All of his life, Trace had watched his father repeatedly make his mother pay for getting pregnant at sixteen and listened to the bastard blame her for trapping him in a dead-end job in order to support a wife and a child he’d never wanted.
That was the day the unwanted child had liberated his father by beating him to a bloody pulp and kicking his drunken ass out the door and all the way down to the docks. Trace had then thrown the bastard into the ocean with a final warning that if he ever came near either one of them again, he would kill him.
After taking her to a hospital to have her cheek sutured and her ribs wrapped, Trace had driven his mother to a divorce lawyer in Ellsworth. He’d changed the locks on the doors when they’d gotten home, tossed his father’s belongings into the old man’s truck and driven it to the cannery, and walked away without once looking back.
Their peace had lasted exactly one week, before the sheriff had shown up with a restraining order against him and his mother in one hand and a warrant for Trace’s arrest for assault in the other.
Waving a list of juvenile altercations under his nose and pointing out that Grange Huntsman would probably walk with a limp the rest of his life, the DA—who just happened to be female—had given Trace a choice between fighting for his country or prosecution, pointing out that he couldn’t very well support his mother from a jail cell.
Three months later, on his eighteenth birthday, Trace had left for boot camp.
His mother had moved in with her sister, Maddy’s mom, and started building a new life for herself. She’d gone back to school to become a paralegal, eventually growing independent enough that she’d started depositing the checks Trace sent home into an account in his name. And six years ago, she’d married a man who thought she alone was responsible for making the sun shine.
Grange Huntsman had left Midnight Bay not long after Trace had, to pursue the life he claimed they’d stolen from him, only to die a couple of months later in some alley in Boston from alcohol poisoning. Uncle Marvin was the only one to attend the bastard’s funeral, and then likely only so he could spit on his brother’s grave.
Blowing out a sigh that did nothing to quell his frustration, Trace picked up the sandwich and peeled back one of the slices of bread. And yup, that sure as hell looked like Eve Gregor’s award-winning goat cheese to him, slathered over all that meat.
What a terrible thing to do to perfectly good chicken.
He took a large bite and chewed without tasting, wondering how a person went about getting revenge on a walking disaster without overstepping the bounds of fair play. He didn’t want to actually scare the woman, much less crush her blossoming spirit; he just wanted to pay her back for organizing his tools and turning his home into a zoo, and for the skunks, for his being laid up, and for the goat’s milk.
But mostly, he wanted to make her stop making him want her.
Threatening to cut off all of Maddy’s hair had certainly served him well when his then-thirteen-year-old cousin had caught him screwing Leslie Simpson in the woods behind his house. But he’d dared to make such a threat only because he’d known that not only would Maddy have survived the injustice but the little Peeping Tom would have risen to the challenge. And then the brat would have one-upped him, just like she had last night by stealing his shoes, disabling his truck, and dressing him in Sesame Street pajamas.
Hell, maybe he would put the skunks in her SUV.
As for Fiona … well, old lady Peterson had been a schoolteacher, and Trace was pretty sure he’d seen one of those handheld antique school bells kicking around here somewhere—the ones teachers would ring to call kids in from recess that could be heard nearly all over town.
It could definitely be heard as far as his upstairs apartment. And seeing how it was his tenant’s fault that he was out of commission for a week, he should probably find that bell and ring it whenever he needed something.
Hell, maybe he’d been going about this attraction thing all wrong. Instead of going out of his way to make sure Fiona wasn’t afraid of him, he should be making sure she absolutely, positively, without question disliked him.
&nbs
p; Because really, what man could possibly be attracted to a hostile woman?
It certainly had worked on Mac when the fool had tried to steal Maddy from William. But after spending a single afternoon with Peeps, the drùidh had decided he sure as hell didn’t want to spend a lifetime with a woman who called him pond scum to his face.
Trace took another large bite of his sandwich and felt some of the cheese plop onto his chest. He frowned down at the clean shirt he’d spent twenty minutes hunting for this morning and tried wiping it off, only to end up smearing it into the material.
Well, Christ, he’d been out of the military only five months, and he’d already turned into a slob. Come to think of it, he hadn’t gotten his hair cut since he’d come home, and he bothered to shave only once a week, and then only because he went to his mom’s for Sunday supper—usually wearing clothes still damp from the dryer because he’d forget to throw in a load of wash the night before.
Giving up on the shirt, Trace stuffed the last of his sandwich into his mouth and used the towel to wipe the cheese off his face. He stopped in mid-wipe to crush the soft material into his nose and frowned. Apparently not all of his olfactory cells were dead, because he’d swear he could smell roses—just as he had the afternoon Fiona helped him bank the house.
Great. Wonderful. How friggin’ nice of her to spread her scent over all his stuff.
The porch door slammed open, and Trace dropped the towel when he heard footsteps running through the kitchen. “There’s a storm coming,” Fiona said, barging into the living room. She kicked the footrest closed on the recliner and tried to haul him out of the chair. “Come on, I have to get you to the basement where you’ll be safe.”
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