Maybe forever.
The residual ache in her leg and a few new bruises courtesy of her tumble from her horse this morning told her she was very much awake.
That her nightmare had become a reality.
Her eyes snapped open, revealing her unkempt brother-in-law’s hostile leer as she instinctively reached for her hip.
Shit. She’d left her guns in their suite when she’d changed out of her work attire. Why would she need them within the safety of Inverthorne?
In a way, it was a blessing she didn’t have them. Because if she’d laid her hand to a real pistol, Boyd would have squeezed the trigger of the Colt currently aimed right between her eyes.
“How did you manage to get to Scotland?” The question tumbled out of her on a gasp of disbelief.
Alison had said in her letter that the Masters brothers were hunted men, that their wanted posters were scattered from California to Ellis Island.
Right alongside hers.
With Boyd and Bradley’s swarthy, almost exotic coloring and uncommon height, they weren’t the kind of men to get lost in a crowd.
“Escaped south of the border, even though some would-be-hero marshal who started that whole fucking massacre winged me on that train. ’Course, we had to take the time to dig a grave for my brother first.”
The back of his hand connected with her cheek with such force, little starbursts of darkness danced across her vision.
When she blinked her eyes open again, her head swam, but he’d moved to the foot of her chaise, continuing in his conversational manner.
“We set sail out of Puerto Cancún, Mexico, once we got word of what you did to them Pinkertons we sent after you.” He made a short sound of reluctant mirth. “Fuckers should have listened. I done told them a skinny girl like you don’t make no easy target, and could still shoot their eye out at fifty paces in the dark. That’s what you count on, isn’t it? Men underestimating your scrawny ass until you put a bullet in their heads?”
“No.” She shook her head rapidly enough to dispel the sight of him and regain her equilibrium. “I didn’t want any of this to happen … you have to believe that.” A bolt of terror seized her muscles. “Boyd, who let you in the keep? Did you—did you hurt … anyone?”
“You mean that mountain of a man you went and married before my brother’s corpse done gone cold in the ground?” His lips curled back in a terrible sneer. He’d lost another tooth since she’d seen him last. Even covered in grime and smelling like a peat bog, Boyd Masters was a passably handsome man until he smiled. She wondered if he lost that tooth to rot or tobacco. Probably both.
Hysteria threatened her consciousness. “Boyd, tell me you didn’t—”
“Calm down, you simple slut, I ain’t done him no harm. Been freezing our balls off in the forest tryin’ for days to figure a way into this fortress. And wouldn’t you know it, this mornin’ luck was on our side. Every last workin’ man rode north without you, for once, and then some blind old biddy left the gate wide open.”
Samantha’s heart leaped into her throat, and she had to swallow the bile threatening to escape her stomach as she pushed herself to her elbows. “Lady Eleanor? Where is she? Where’s Bradley?”
“Stay right where you are, girl.” He pushed the rim of his bronze cowboy hat up on his forehead to squint down from where he towered over her. “He’s gatherin’ up some folks. He’ll be along directly.”
“What have you done?” Gunshots would surely have roused her from her nap, but Bradley never had been much good with a gun.
He preferred to use knives.
The thought chilled her so completely, her soul shivered. What kind of hell had she brought to these people? How could she have been so stupid? She’d hoped that Boyd and Bradley would have to stay on the other side of the world. She’d hoped Boyd had been fatally wounded. That they’d forget about her in time.
She’d hoped … and that had been her gravest mistake.
“How is that little ass of yours, Sam? Quite a fall you took this mornin’.”
A wave of helpless frustration almost knocked her over. Of course. She should have known. The stables were the only part of Inverthorne open to the small horse pastures and the forest beyond.
And a burr under the saddle was the oldest cowboy trick in the book.
“The thistle … that was you?”
“That was Bradley’s doin’. I thought you were too good to let a horse dump you on your head.” He snorted. “I only had two brothers in the whole world, and you kilt the smart one.”
A scuffle and uneven footsteps disturbed the silence from the door behind her and she craned her neck in time to see Eammon with his arm around Eleanor leading a small procession into the solarium. Alice, a plain, bespectacled woman, stumbled on their heels, and Calybrid followed after, his hand pressed to his middle. It had been a month since he’d been shot, and he’d much improved, but gut shots were slow to heal, if they healed at all.
Bradley sauntered in behind them, his pistol trained on the little procession, his features too gaunt for his wide, dark eyes. He’d always been the ugly Masters brother. Opium and alcohol hadn’t helped any.
“I locked the staff below stairs and barred the door,” Bradley announced proudly.
“Sam?” Calybrid’s reedy, befuddled voice broke her heart nearly as much as the sight of the wild tufts of fluff he called hair and his unsteady knees visible beneath his wrinkled nightshirt.
He’d been napping, too.
Emotion and regret stung behind her nose and filled her throat with woe.
“No chance ye got yer pistols on ye, Sam?” He blinked bleary, hopeful eyes at her, his shoulders slumping when she wordlessly shook her head. “Bugger.”
“What’s going on, Alison?” The tremble in Eleanor’s voice defeated her completely.
“Please, Boyd, don’t hurt them,” Samantha croaked.
“Aww. Now we ain’t here to hurt innocent folk, Sam.” Boyd tugged the thighs of his denims so his long legs could squat down at the foot of the chaise. “You’ll hurt ’em plenty by tellin’ ’em the truth. That you’re a lyin’, murderin’ whore.” Though his voice remained deceptively mild, malevolence leaked from every syllable, as malodorous as the unrefined sludge they pulled out of the ground in Texas and New Mexico.
Samantha bit back a whimper as he rested the hand holding his pistol on the chaise. The barrel pointed between her parted feet. Were he to pull the trigger now, his bullet would land in her womb.
“When you’ve finished hurtin’ them … then we’ll hurt you.” He cocked the pistol, and the familiar metallic clicks sent her hand to her belly. “We’ll hurt you good for what you did to my little brother. And once they know the truth, they’ll let us do it. Hell, they might even help.”
“You don’t want to do this—”
“Yes, I fuckin’ do. It’s all I’ve thought about for two months.”
Breath sawed in and out of her as she fought to force the words past a throat quickly squeezing closed.
“The lassie’s with child, man.” Eammon blurted a plea. “Have some mercy.”
“You think I fuckin’ care that your master squirted some Highland brat into this worthless piece of—”
“Ye will when the son of a Mackenzie Laird comes for ye,” Calybrid warned ominously. “Because he’ll bring all the suffering hell can contain down upon ye.”
“Not before I shoot her in the—”
“If you kill me, you murder your own kin.” There. She’d done it. No going back now. The only mercy to be found was that she didn’t have to look into Gavin’s eyes the first time she revealed her deception. Boyd was a man without conscience or scruples, but family meant everything to him. Enough to risk crossing the Atlantic and storming a castle to take his revenge. “I’ve been pregnant since I left America. The baby belongs to Bennett.”
The potent silence contained the individual astonishment of every person she’d come to care for.
And e
very person she’d come to hate.
Their thoughts, their fear, and their disbelief hurled through the space between them and battered at her with an inescapable dissonance.
Boyd stared at her blouse, as if he could see through it. “If you’re lyin’ to me…”
“I’m not. I’m more than two months along.”
“You squirrely slut.” Bradley’s glee bounced around the room with a sickening chortle. “Is that why you married the first dupe who would look at you? So you could pass the baby off as his?”
“Fuck you, Bradley,” she spat, her temper overcoming her fear, even her common sense. “That stunt you pulled in the stables this morning could have killed Bennett’s child.”
“You watch your whore mouth!” The butt of the pistol in Boyd’s hand sailed toward her jaw, and Samantha braced for the blow. For the blood.
“Ye’re already dead men.” The voice from the doorway carried such arctic vehemence, it froze time.
The blow never landed, though pain still exploded through Samantha’s entire body, caused by the undercurrent of fury burning beneath the ice in her husband’s words.
“But whether yer death is mercifully swift or agonizingly unhurried depends…”
Samantha almost didn’t recognize his voice. It was Gavin, but not. Gone were the silken tones of indolent sin, the leisurely indifferent confidence replaced by something as hard and unforgiving as the stones of his ancient keep. He sounded like a demon.
No. He sounded … like a Mackenzie.
“Depends on what?” Bradley could add impatience to his multitude of idiocies.
“On how she answers yer question.”
* * *
Somehow, Gavin knew the second that Callum had ridden into Erradale and informed him of the evidence of a few outlanders’ camps found in the forest that he’d have to kill someone today.
He hadn’t realized until this moment, just how much he looked forward to it.
His grip tightened on both the pistol he had in his left hand and the dirk in his right. He trained the gun on the big, dirty fucker who’d almost hit his wife. Boyd, she’d called him. And the bastard had recovered his wits fast enough to aim his own weapon right back at Gavin.
The dirk he held in his off hand was poised to fly in the direction of the man to his right, but a knife was much slower than a bullet, and the slim, rat-faced cowboy had his gun pointed at Eammon and Gavin’s mother.
Christ, he shouldn’t have let Callum go back to the woods to track them. He’d thought Inverthorne impregnable, and still some instinct had sent him racing home. He’d expected to take his wife into his arms and warn her that her enemies might be close. To assure her that he would protect her and his child always. To tell her he was sorry for how he’d acted this morning. That fear had made him crazy.
That love had made him furious.
What he’d found was torment enough to turn his heart into an iron weight in his chest. An empty stable and an open gate. The signs of a scuffle and dragging footsteps.
He’d no time to go to the tower for the key to the armory. So he’d drawn his dirk and the sidearm he’d taken to wearing since the night Erradale burned, and searched his home for intruders.
He’d never have guessed one had lived among them all this time.
“Alison?” For some reason, her name from his lips sounded wrong, even to him. Only the back of her dark head was visible above the damask arm of the chaise.
She didn’t look at him.
And in that moment, his heart turned from iron to ice as suspicion lanced him with a vengeance.
“Alison!” Boyd crowed the name as though it might be the most hilarious word he’d heard in his life. “You mean this poor bastard still don’t know who you are?”
“Boyd…” It was the first time he’d heard actual terror in his wife’s voice. She’d turned the man’s terrible name into a plea. “Boyd, don’t—”
Gavin itched to put a bullet right in the muddy brown eyes gleaming with the relish of a victorious predator about to rip out the throat of his opponent.
“You see, what we have here is what we call, back in the States, a Mexican standoff. You ever heard of that? It’s where every party has an advantage, and a disadvantage. The moment you try to win one way…” Boyd gestured to his pistol, still pointed at Gavin, and then to his brother’s gun, aimed at Gavin’s family. “You lose another.”
“Call it what ye like, ye still won’t leave this room alive.” No one entered a Highlander’s house, terrorized their women, and left with their heads attached to their shoulders.
“I ain’t so sure about that.”
“Ye should be certain enough to make peace with yer Lord before I send yer screaming soul to hell. Or maybe I’ll let ye live long enough to watch one more brother die.”
“Gavin.” His mother’s whispered gasp distracted him long enough for Boyd to strike out and drag his wife to her feet, turning her to use her slight body as a shield.
Her cry of pain still sliced through Gavin’s fury and wrath to nick at his heart.
The control on his rage slipped, and he took a threatening step forward.
“Get your hands off me, Boyd,” she spat, squirming in his one-armed grip.
Rat face made a startling noise. “If you’re lucky, this bullet won’t punch right through this Irish fuck and hit the old lady … You usually lucky, mister?”
The words caused Gavin uncharacteristic hesitation.
Nay. Fate and fortune had deserted him before he’d even been born. He’d a decidedly unlucky life. Unlucky in fealty. Unlucky in paternity.
Unlucky in love.
At Bradley’s threat, Gavin’s wife had gone limp in Boyd’s hold.
The variable outcomes of this situation refused to process through one pulsing fact scratching at his rapidly unraveling humanity.
She wasn’t denying her lie. These men weren’t treating her like some woman who’d gotten in a lucky shot defending her life during a train robbery. At first, when she’d cried out that the child within her belonged to a dead man, he’d thought the worst of this Bennett.
Not of her.
Rape, possibly, for which he would take vengeance upon the entire Masters bloodline. Or dare he hope that she was lying to the man with the gun trained at her head? Using her wits to remain safe?
Look at me, he silently begged. Let me see the truth in your eyes.
She didn’t.
Boyd’s thick elbow tightened below her chin, and her fingers instinctively grasped at his arm. “Once you hear what I have to say, I think you’ll let us walk out of here and take this lyin’ bitch with us.”
He could think again. “Ye will keep a civil tongue in yer head when you speak about my wife.”
“That’s the fuckin’ thing, aint it? She ain’t even your wife.” Boyd sneered. “And seeing as how she murdered her last husband, my brother, in cold blood only two months ago, you’ll be mighty glad of that.”
“Her … husband.” Gavin enunciated each syllable as though inspecting a word he’d never heard before.
“That’s not true!” she cried.
Hope flared in Gavin for an awful moment, but Boyd shot it before it had a chance to take flight.
“Ain’t it?” Boyd said through his teeth, tightening his grip on her neck. “One lie comes out of your mouth, girl, and triggers start gettin’ pulled, regardless of the consequences.”
“Why would I believe the words ye forced out of a hostage woman?” Gavin changed tactics. “Ye’re wanted men. Bandits. Thieves. Yer story means nothing to me.”
Instead of panicking, or searching for another angle, a slow, victorious smile spread over Boyd’s face. “Darlin’,” he said against the tendrils of dark hair at her temple. “Reach into my pocket, would you? Don’t pull out the biggest thing you find, but the folded piece of paper. That’s it.”
The revulsion on her face as she reached behind her and complied with his suggestion shot pure murder through
Gavin’s very skin and sinew. Had his mother not been in front of a bullet, he’d have emptied his barrel into the man’s head right then and there.
Extracting a folded paper, she stared at it like it was a snake threatening to bite her.
“Go on.” Boyd motioned with his pistol. “Don’t keep everyone waitin’.”
Trembling fingers opened what had been folded and unfolded time and time again, if the wear in the creases were aught to go by.
Even the deep groves of the substantial parchment couldn’t hide her unmistakable likeness. The small, angular jaw. The pert nose smattered with freckles. The wide, shrewd eyes. In the rendering those eyes were more malicious than mischievous. The tilt of her full lips pursed in a hard, deviant way in an expression he couldn’t imagine on her actual mouth.
The word WANTED bannered over the thick waves of hair he so loved to tangle his fingers into. A proclamation of her guilt.
The words beneath her picture that drove several daggers into him.
Train Robbery. A slice to his guts, ripping them open to spill on the stones.
Kidnapping. A puncture to his lungs, dragging the breath from his chest with such force he thought his ribs might crack.
Murder. His heart of ice shattered. Again.
“Samantha Masters.” He woodenly read the name aloud and slowly from beneath the damning list of charges, and finally. Finally. She met his gaze. The irony was, he wished she hadn’t.
“Sam.” He whispered her name.
“If you don’t trust bandits,” Boyd drawled. “You shouldn’t have married one.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Samantha had always considered herself a strong woman. She had, indeed, shot her no-good husband just over two months ago, run away to a foreign country, and not only had she survived, she’d forged a life here. She’d thought she was sturdy. Resilient. Capable. If killing the father of her child hadn’t broken her, nothing could.
How wrong she’d been.
Gavin stared at the wanted poster she still somehow brandished in front of her chest, but he’d long since ceased to see it. His was a blind gaze. One of a man who’d effectively retreated inside of himself.
But only for a moment.
The Scot Beds His Wife Page 30