A gentle rhythm vibrated against her ear, like the sound of hoofbeats on the marshy earth of Erradale. A rhythmic lullaby punctuated by a warm breeze tickling errant hairs at the top of her head.
She should have known she’d not be allowed to stay here. That the dark wouldn’t remain peaceful, that demons and memories would find her and yank her back to face the cold light of day.
For this place—this cave—was not somewhere she belonged, nor did she deserve to remain. It was safe here. A place where she wasn’t a liar. Where she wasn’t a murderer.
Where she wasn’t a mother.
The word “mother” pulled her from where she’d floated in weightless obscurity, and dropped her into her body with jarring, unceremonious brutality. This new place met her with a plethora of merciless particulars. Her left calf throbbed. Her mouth tasted of the sun-baked desert. Her bones seemed to have melted, no more able to lift her limbs than she could a one-ton cow.
But she was finally warm. Utterly, deliciously, languorously warm, and … oddly comfortable.
Unable—or unwilling—to return to the land of the living just yet, she sank into the heat, luxuriated in the cocoonlike sheath that seemed to coil around her in just the right places.
But for the dull ache in her leg, she’d have thought it all a nightmare. Some drink-addled dream she’d regale Bennett with upon waking. About the train robbery gone wrong, forcing her to shoot him. About a harrowing journey across the Atlantic, and a slice of land that might as well be heaven but for the treacherous cold. A cold Samantha hadn’t known existed until now. A cold that reached through the layers of her clothing, through her flesh and sinew and bone, until it chilled even her marrow.
Even her soul.
His coffee-colored eyes would crinkle, and he’d quirk that half-smile which seemed to have vanished once they’d married. He’d tease her like he used to, in the early days, saying that a girl so small shouldn’t drink bourbon before bed.
Squeezing her eyes tighter, she sniffed at the sting of tears searing across the seam of her lids and escaping down her temple into her hair.
The rasp of a thumb against her skin, smudging the damp path of her tear, both soothed and vexed her. She turned her face toward the sensation, her thoughts swimming in nebulous clouds just beyond her reach.
“Why do ye weep, bonny, are ye in pain?” The concerned question filtered through the distance in dim echoes, as though reaching her from above the surface of a bath in which she remained emerged. “Do ye need another dose of laudanum?”
Bonny. “Bonny” meant beauty.
How did she know that?
“I—I deserve … pain,” she rasped through a throat made of sandpaper and blocked by tears. “I shot him. I killed him.” Maybe it was best her eyes never opened. That she joined her degenerate late husband in hell.
Except … she had more to consider now than just her own sins.
“Nay, lass, doona fash yerself over what ye had to do. Ye did what ye must to protect what was yers. No man could have done better.” A gentle hand settled in her hair and stroked through the strands with a tender strength that opened an aching void in her chest. “Had ye not shot them, a quick death would not have been a mercy I granted them.”
Who was this being with a fierce, beautiful voice? An avenging angel, perhaps?
“You don’t understand,” she whispered. How could he? She wasn’t talking about the men who’d burned down Erradale and wounded Calybrid. She’d killed them both and she’d do it again. She’d been referring to her husband, the man she’d shot little more than a month ago. How could she recount the strange and terrible decisions that brought her to this moment, to the burly angel with the lovely voice and brogue both foreign and familiar?
She’d have to start at the beginning, with the death of both of her parents. Smallpox. She’d had it too, and had recovered. The Smiths, ousted Mormon ranchers who’d maintained the outlawed practice of polygamy, had taken her in as an orphan under the guise of good, Christian duty.
They’d worked a seven-year-old girl as hard as any ranch hand. Though, she had to admit, it hadn’t been because she was not their own. They’d treated their thirteen natural children—born of the three various Smith wives—with the same expectations of strenuous duty.
Idle hands were the devil’s workshop, and bleeding hands reminded you of the divinity and sacrifice of the Lord.
By the time Samantha had turned sixteen, she could ride, shoot, herd, rope, and brand cattle just as well as any of the Smith boys.
She’d casually thought she’d marry one of them, as well, though they’d grown up close as siblings. Northern Nevada wasn’t exactly known for its populace, and she’d been one of the only girls within a day’s ride that didn’t share the last name of Smith.
Bennett Masters and his brothers, Boyd and Bradley, had showed up at the Smith ranch looking for work the year she’d turned seventeen. They’d been a lean, masculine trio with excellent demeanors and good teeth. Both of those virtues were in short supply thereabouts.
That Bennett Masters could charm a serpent out of his skin, Ada Smith, the second wife, had warned the girls. You avoid temptation, you mark me.
Samantha had listened to Ada, and really, she’d tried to avoid temptation … but when the Masters brothers had returned the next year with the seasonal ranch hands, along with a balding man named Ezekiel, and a few gauchos from Mexico, Sam hadn’t been inured to the sparkle of mischief in Bennett’s eyes. Or the wickedness in his smile.
And when Mr. Smith informed her of God’s revelation that the sour, solemn, pious Ezekiel was to take her back to his cabin for his second wife, she’d run into Bennett’s open arms sobbing and panicked.
He’d offered her escape. Excitement. He’d plied her with all the foreign emotions never afforded her since her parents had died, and then some. Affection. Validation. Anticipation of a different fate. One that wasn’t breaking her back beneath the desert sun until exhaustion, illness, or injury put her in an early grave.
Samantha had always known she didn’t have the heart of a pioneer.
What she hadn’t realized was that her new husband and his family were not only orphans, they were outlaws, and the next four years had been a slow decline into infamy. She’d fought it, at first, like a weak child swimming upstream. She’d done her best to change him, to transform them all into honest men. But eventually an empty stomach, the fear of Boyd’s brutality, and the relentless desperate hope for a better life overcame her scruples.
That was, until she’d met Alison Ross.
Her conscience had settled for a thief as a husband, but never a cold-blooded killer.
Oh God, how could she have been so senseless? How could she have been so blind? She’d thought that shooting Bennett would be the absolute worst thing she’d ever done. The worst tragedy she’d have to survive. It would be the stain on her conscience she’d forever have to live with, but on the same hand, she’d thought the nightmare was over.
She’d assumed they wouldn’t find her here, perched on what had seemed to be the wild, untamed edge of the world.
She’d been a damned fool.
Now she knew the remaining Masters brothers had used their fortune to find her. That they’d sent those men after her, and once word reached them that they’d failed to do her in, they’d come for her again.
Boyd and Bradley wouldn’t stop sending people after her until she’d paid for what she’d done to Bennett. She knew this with a zealous fervency.
“Shhhhh.” A soft croon whispered through her, vibrating in her ear and rippling down her flesh, creating goose pimples with a pleasant shudder. “Doona cry, bonny, I have ye. Ye’re safe.”
Would she ever be safe again? Who could protect her from vicious Boyd and his dead-eyed aim? Or cruel, simple Bradley with his heavy fists? Who would stand against men known to massacre an entire train car of innocent people?
Who would … wait … whose bed was she in right now?
Moaning her disapproval, she wrenched her neck to the side, and instantly realized her angel was not that of the avenging cast. Neither was he celestial in the least. Oh no. The handsome features hovering above hers knew nothing of grace, sacrifice, or piety.
This man had surely fallen from heavenly favor eons ago. His soul besmirched with sin, self-indulgence, and unrepentant wickedness.
Lord, but he was beautiful, though. She could imagine him a fallen angel, perhaps, with a span of long, powerful wings.
Never a halo, though. Never that.
Thorne. Her deluded memory whispered to her. He was Thorne. Or … a thorn … Was that what prodded against her backside even now? No … it was too blunt, too hot.
“Welcome back, bonny.”
Samantha blinked rapidly against the overwhelming devastation wrought within her by that smile, trying to regain her scattered wits. Everything was so muddled. It was as though the earth had sped in its orbit and she could not catch it up. Her tongue was heavy and useless in her mouth. She wriggled her fingers, only to establish that they remained attached to her hands.
“Wh-where am I?”
That smile again. It dazzled and infuriated her at the same time.
“Ye are in my bed at Inverthorne Keep, lass. A position coveted by untold throngs of women.”
Inverthorne Keep. Certainty permeated her untidy consciousness, dawning with slow degrees of mounting horror on the heels of each revelation.
The feather-soft floor of her cave had been the Earl of Thorne’s mattress. The hard, warm, unyielding walls were, in fact, the lean muscles of his incomparable body, honed to obdurate swells by long months spent toiling in his brother’s barley fields.
She lay positioned on her left side, and Thorne had curled his body against hers from behind, fitting himself into every curve and bend.
Jesus Jehosephat Christ. She’d not been safe in the least. In fact, other than the clutches of Boyd Masters, himself, she couldn’t think of a more perilous place to be than this bed with this particular Highlander.
Instinctively, she reached for her pistol at her side, and only found her bare hip.
That fact was enough to lance whatever had drugged her wits with a lightning bolt of sobriety. But it didn’t last. Her muscles remained weighted down like wool cast into a loch. Full and slow and heavy.
Crisp hairs tickled her shoulder blades each time the swells of his chest rose and fell with even, cavernous breaths. The rippled definition of his stomach rolled against her spine.
The thing pressing against her backside with hot, insistent flexes was, in fact, not a thorn, but could prick her just as easily.
Could wound her much more seriously.
Because, she realized, he was as naked as she beneath the heavy covers.
He’d lifted onto his elbow and now smiled indulgently down at her. His arm, which had been casually draped over her middle, belonged to the gentle fingers wiping at the tears still leaking from eyes peeled wide with astonished panic.
“Doona worry, bonny,” he soothed, though a gleam of something dangerous shone beneath the concern in his verdant eyes. “Ye’ve nothing to fear from me. Though, I’ll warn ye that ye’re not leaving this bed until ye’ve revealed to me yer dangerous secrets … beginning with just who is after ye, and why they burned Erradale to the ground.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sometimes Gavin would take someone, anyone, to bed and pleasure them into oblivion for the sole purpose of having a person to press his body against in the night. It was a raison d’être he never admitted or expressed. At the end of any given night, form and feature held little sway over his decision, and he didn’t especially pick a woman whom he might want to invite back or form an attachment to.
Because he didn’t want them to guess his motives. He didn’t want them to recognize him for what he truly was.
A boy who’d spent too many nights hiding in a closet, or huddled in the hollowed-out tree trunk of the ancient oak he and Callum had claimed as their own domain next to Bryneloch Bog.
On those nights, he’d crafted his hatred very carefully. He’d covered his bruises, his lashes, and his pain with the balm of cold calculation. Until he’d nearly forgotten what it was to feel.
What it was to live.
It wasn’t until he’d met Colleen as a boy on the cusp of manhood that he’d realized what would keep him human. The primal and instinctive necessity of physical contact. Of pleasure, or pain. It was both a palliative and a compulsion. When his thoughts would race, when his gorge would rise, when his mind seemed to want to disconnect from his body and lose itself into the vast emptiness that yawned inside of him, only the touch of another would anchor him to reality. He’d reach for someone in the night, whoever it was, and offer pleasure, his only intention to hide the endless, cavernous need inside of him.
It had made him a legend, this fiction, which had not been his initial intention. The women he’d taken assumed that his voracious need had been more erotic than emotional.
And he’d let them.
Because life had taught him, with few exceptions, that once a person discovered your true desire, it was in their nature to deny you. It’s not that he blamed anyone, exactly. Power was a heady thing, and having your fingers clenched around the pulse of someone else’s greatest ambitions, or their driving force, meant you owned them.
Body and soul.
He’d never allow someone that sort of power over him.
Never again.
Now, pressed against his petite nemesis, he was stunned to discover that his motives had somewhat realigned from their usual arrangement. Certainly the obvious difference had been she was no lover or companion.
Indeed, neither was she even a willing occupant of his bed.
The slim, fragile body against his offered him nothing, and yet provided what others could not, despite their best efforts.
He’d like to call it distraction, but in reality it was something else. Something that felt like purpose. Something akin to contentment. Relief. Peace.
But … that couldn’t be right, could it? Not with Alison Ross. The lass was anything but peaceful. Indeed, she was chaos personified. Since her appearance in his life, she’d been a disruption at best. A nuisance, more like.
An obstacle.
One he was beginning to enjoy coming up against.
Verbally. And now … physically.
It occurred to him to resent her. In fact, he had at first, for the sole reason that she’d kept Erradale from him. Now his motivation for umbrage had just become a great deal stronger. It wasn’t that he no longer desired Erradale; he did. More than ever. But now he desired something else.
Someone else.
And this yearning certainly complicated things. Convoluted his intentions. It made him analyze his own needs. Question everything he knew about himself.
Such as, why should he be more distressed over the near loss of his obstacle, Alison Ross, than the loss of his desire, Erradale?
She’d said that her demise would remove his last impediment to claiming Erradale as his own, and he’d objectively acknowledged the veracity of her statement.
But the moment he’d thought her lost to him, the moment he’d tried to wake her with no success, all thoughts of Erradale had vanished like wisps of vapor before the sun.
All that had mattered was that she survived. Because without her, Erradale would be … empty. Like his bed.
Like his heart.
As he stared down into Alison’s eyes the color of the summer sky, both anxious and unfocused by the opium syrup Eammon had administered to her, the well of fathomless emptiness inside him seemed to abate.
She was awake, and despite everything, it felt like a miracle.
The bullet that had torn into her calf had been little more than a flesh wound. Callum had bound it on the roadside while Gavin
had winched a tourniquet below her knee that lasted through the frantic ride back to Inverthorne.
It had been the cold that had almost taken her, and Gavin had warmed her by using the oldest and most effective method he knew.
Body heat.
It had taken him all of three seconds to consider his options in that regard, as he’d held her unresponsive body against him while Eammon quickly and expertly sterilized and stitched her leg.
Drawing a hot bath would take too long, and a fresh wound rarely fared well in tepid water. Infection was a risk he wasn’t willing to take.
So he’d ignored Callum’s protests, and Eammon’s raised eyebrows, and swept her up the spiral staircase to Inverthorne’s tower. He made short work of stripping his cloak and her night rail off her. That accomplished, he divested himself of his clothing, and climbed into bed.
Relief seemed too insubstantial a word for the all-encompassing feeling that had taken him once she’d begun to shiver and struggle. After what seemed like an eternity, she’d exhausted her strength, and instead of fighting his hold, she’d relaxed into it. Instinct drove her naked flesh against his, seeking the heat he provided.
Which had aroused, for lack of a better word, another persistent dilemma.
Gavin had always been a clever liar, but he’d never truly been able to deceive himself. He’d known that he wanted Alison Ross for some time now. But it wasn’t until he had her here in his bed, soft, pliant, and tantalizingly nude, that he realized just how desperate his carnal need for her had become.
He wanted her beside him. Beneath him. Above him.
He wanted her in his bed … in his arms … for longer than just one night.
All he had to do was figure out how to convince her to remain.
It wasn’t that he was by any means grateful that she’d been attacked, that she’d been in danger, but he was never one to let an opportunity pass him by.
He smudged at her tears with his thumb. Thinking that it was certainly difficult to maintain his wits when they leaked from her eyes in soft rivulets of pain. Instead of kissing them away, as was his first instinct, he capitulated to better sense, driven by the confusion and fear he read in her rare, unguarded expression.
The Scot Beds His Wife Page 15