A groan. And it was a deep, sustained one at that, until she caught herself doing it and clamped her mouth shut.
It was a good thing she couldn’t see him smiling behind her.
But despite his success at overriding her cultivated reticence, that was far from the only thing he subjected her to. He varied his technique quite considerably, learning what she liked and what she didn’t, what got him a startled, indrawn breath until she squelched it and what she was perfectly able to be silent and stoic through, which he hated.
He did always go back to the moaning technique, though, and, to her disgrace, it never failed him.
As his fingers were having their way with her, the rest of him was clamoring to do the same, and Cage had finally gotten to the point where he felt he had to give in or he was going to disgrace himself all over her. Touching her like that did that to him, to more of an extent than exploring any other woman had. So he guided his rock hard self to where it needed to be, pressing insistently against her, and feeling her body stiffen as a result.
He kept his tone soft and soothing as he said, “I told you I’d be gentle and I will. I’m not trying to hurt you.”
“Yes,” she answered acerbically, although she was panting as she did it, so it kind of dampened her efforts, “but the effect is the same.”
He had half a mind to simply drive himself into her as almost any other man, including, he’d bet, her non-existent husband wouldn’t hesitate to do, but he just couldn’t. He didn’t want to bring her pain, he wanted to bring her ecstasy, and alienating her with that kind of move wasn’t the way to do it.
So he reigned in his temper and very slowly began to slip inside her. She was even slicker now than she had been, and besides a quickly caught breath and a slight moan, which both had him stopping for a long moment to allow her to acclimate herself to him, he didn’t gather that it was that horrific for her.
“All right?” he asked when he’d claimed as much of her as her body would allow.
She sniffed but didn’t deign to answer him.
He took that as a “yes” and pressed just a bit further, which had her yelping a tiny bit. Far enough, then.
He kept his rhythm slow and undemanding at first, not allowing himself to forget about his fingers and their very important role in making this easier for her, or at least more pleasant than it might be.
His mouth wasn’t lazy in this, either, kissing up and down her neck, his tongue tickling her ear, teeth gently nipping their way around to her nape, thoroughly enjoying the involuntary sounds that were escaping her at his ministrations.
Cage couldn’t believe how amazing she felt around him—so hot and soft and clingy, so terribly, terribly tight that he was again in the situation where he didn’t think he was going to be able to last very long. He wanted to see to her before he indulged himself in her, so his fingers picked up the pace.
Rachel’s head fell back onto his shoulder as if it could no longer support the weight of her head, not if he was going to keep doing this to her, anyway. She was making her best effort to try to keep her mouth closed, but it was a losing battle. Everything he was doing to her—yes, even the fact of his invasion itself—seemed to stir quite a bit of passion in her, although she would be loathe to admit it to him.
It hadn’t hurt her nearly as much this time as it had last time, despite the lingering soreness. It actually felt very good—and that was the last thing she wanted. She was hoping it would be agonizing, and then the way his fingers were molesting her would be moot, but she wasn’t that lucky. Instead, one fed off the other. Being filled and stretched repeatedly around him only seemed to contribute to the maelstrom that he was creating by teasing that bit of flesh he seemed obsessed with, until she rapidly got to the point—once he’d mounted her—that she had felt before, this tightening of a spring within her. His big fingers were relentlessly driving her towards the ultimate, undeniably blissful release of all that built up tension.
Even though she’d already experienced the glorious culmination of it all, she was still a bit trepidatious about it, and she couldn’t stop her body from tightening, as if against the inevitable.
And it was then that she heard him issue a cry of pure pleasure, and she suddenly had the consciousness altering thought that she wondered if she could affect him in the same devastating manner as he did her. Seconds later, she deliberately contracted her lower body as a test, and was immediately rewarded by another even lower groan that was almost more of a growl.
She couldn’t continue her research, however, because his fingers were just too distracting, and before she knew it that coil had wound down so far that there was nothing for it to do other than to release itself within her. Rachel had the strange, random thought that she desperately wished she could have been holding onto his arm while he made that agonizingly pleasurable storm rage within her, causing her to shout her culmination to the world, the sound of her ecstasy echoing off the walls of the small cabin. His groans followed hers seconds later, but she was much too far gone to make the obvious correlation between the two.
As he pumped into her, that frighteningly all-consuming pleasure went on and on, his fingers not missing but a few beats, taking every bit of ecstasy he could from her and leaving her devastated in its wake.
Rachel was horrified to find her thoughts so scattered afterwards—much worse than before, even, perhaps because it hadn’t hurt as badly as it had then, and, because of that, both parts of what he did to her had brought her to new, depressingly blissful heights.
Cage wasn’t much better off. He was practically asleep already. He was jarred to awareness by the slamming of the barn door.
“Something’s wrong—I think those men are back. I’m going outside to check things out. You stay right here and be quiet.”
He was already on his way to the door when she cried out in a sleepy tone, “You’re leaving me here tied up? What if they come in?”
“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of them—and you.”
She watched in stark terror as he ambled out of the house, and after a quick debate with herself that didn’t even include a worry about disobeying him in the least, she began to scream for help, praying that the two men would capture Cage and be of assistance to her.
She heard gunshots outside and did what she could to protect herself—tipping the bed over so that she could hide behind it, although her wrists were still tightly bound. At least there was something between her and the door, and she was never more grateful for anything when the door did burst open and she heard the sounds of spurred boots, recognizing immediately that it was not Cage. Suddenly she realized that the devil she knew might be the better choice, in that instant coming to thoroughly regret having called for help.
Seconds later, another pair of footsteps joined the first and she knew the two strange men were in her house.
Before they could get to her, before they could even call out to her, though, she heard a tremendous roar in her ears and then another one right after it, and then the sounds of two heavy things falling to the floor.
“Rachel?”
It was Cage’s voice. She didn’t know whether to feel relieved or not.
“Are you all right?’
She wanted to tell him no, that she could barely hear for all of the din around her, that the gun blasts had nearly left her deaf, that she was so scared that she’d nearly peed herself, and that she still wished it had been him because he’d left her there bound to the bed until they’d almost discovered her.
“Rachel!” his voice was sharp and she could hear the terror in it, but she didn’t dare to make a peep, and she refused to look over the barrier at what she was quite sure were two dead bodies bleeding out in her once pristine house.
“Rachel Hemmingway, answer me! Are you all right?” He stalked into the cabin, saw how she had smartly arranged the bed and went over to peer over it at her. “Why didn’t you answer me, woman? Here I was thinking they might have killed you, and yo
u’re sitting there right as rain–”
Her sobbing wail interrupted him berating her, and he immediately reached down to cut her bonds and hauled her into his arms, holding her very, very tightly against his good side for a long moment, brushing the hair back from her face and murmuring stupid, soothing things to help her calm down.
When he tried to put her back in her little hidey-hole, she made as if to hold onto him.
“No, honey, I have a few things to take care of. I want you to stay right there. You’re safe, but I don’t want you to look at what’s in the cabin. Let me get things straightened away outside, and then I’ll come back for you and hold you for a while, okay?”
She nodded more automatically at what he’d said than because of any real comprehension on her part. He’d seen that look before. She was a bit shell-shocked.
“Rachel, I want your word as a lady that you’re going to obey me and sit there like a good girl while I take care of a few things.”
“I will.” Her voice sounded very far away and little.
“Good girl. I want you to turn around so that you’re looking at the wall.”
As she did as he said, he went to the bookcase and took out the most well worn copy there, The Pickwick Papers. “Read this until I get back,” he said, looking down at the bodies of the two men he had shot.
His first order of business was to take care of them, and then he wanted to have a look at the barn where a lot of the fighting occurred. He didn’t think there was much left alive in it, but he had been proven wrong about things in the past and he hoped, for Rachel’s sake, that he was this time, too.
It took him quite some time to dig graves for the men, who were definitely not Rangers of any sort. No, they were—according to the papers that one of them had on him—in the employ of his father’s archrival. He was not surprised. Cage thought that the taller of the two—the one who had done the talking to Rachel—was the one who was responsible for the hole in his side.
The situation in the barn was at least as bad as he’d thought it might be. If Rachel was poor and having to live on half rations before, she was downright destitute now.
Exhausted, his wound bleeding and hurting like a bitch again from all of the exertion, Cage made his way back to the cabin, throwing dirt from outside over the bloodstained dirt of her floor so as to minimize the shock of her seeing what he and the two men had wrought.
She was, he was glad to see, exactly where he wanted her to be—facing the wall with her book in her lap, although she wasn’t reading. She was sitting there rocking herself back and forth, and that had him worried. He’d seen that behavior before in men who had been mentally broken by the War. He hated to think that Rachel might end up like them.
From what he’d seen, it didn’t do to coddle them too much. They needed to be treated as if they were absolutely fine so as not to set their minds too comfortably into a pattern of nothing but terror that they could never quite get away from. So he spoke to he sharply. “Rachel, I need you to get up, honey, and come to me.”
She continued to rock.
Knowing what he had to do and hating it, he leaned over the bed and grabbed a hold of her shoulders. “Rachel!” he yelled. “Do as I tell you! Get up and come with me.”
Her eyes, which had looked troublesomely hazy when he’d first seen them, seemed to clear a bit and she nodded, albeit slowly.
Cage helped her over the bed, grabbed her dress and put it on her, noticing that it was badly ripped at the same time she did, but it put her over the edge into hysterical weeping.
“Rachel, do you have another dress?”
She was crying so hard he didn’t think she’d heard him.
This time he shook her a bit as he asked the question. “Rachel, do you have another dress to wear?”
As if his words had gone right over her head, she suddenly turned to him and said, “You ripped my only dress! I don’t have anything to wear or any means to repair it—this was not my good dress, it was my only dress!”
No wonder she had been so troubled when he’d destroyed it yesterday.
“That’s not a problem.” He shrugged out of his shirt and put it on over the top of her dress, and she was quite well—if unusually—covered. “We need to leave this place. Take what you can and we’re going to be off.”
“Leave? I can’t leave here. I’m safe here. What if he finds me?”
“He who, honey?”
She gave a look that chilled him to the bone. “Mr. Hemmingway. Or–or,” she grew unbelievably whiter and quieter, which he wouldn’t have thought was possible, “my father.”
Cage took her hand, unable to bear how lost and frightened she looked. “You don’t have to worry about either of them any more, honey. You’re with me and I’ll keep everyone you don’t want to see away from you.”
Leave it to her to want a loophole. “But what about you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who do I have to be with to not be with you?”
Surprised at how her timid question struck at his heart, Cage smiled softly. “No one, honey. I’m it for you. Better get used to that.”
He hadn’t intended to make such a definitive statement to her—not that it was one of undying love, but it was a commitment to her that he hadn’t really even known he was interested in making, only now he had, and it felt somehow right to him.
But not, apparently, to her—not that he should really be surprised, considering the circumstances of how they’d met, and how he’d treated her over the past two days.
“No,” she said stubbornly, planting her feet and refusing to go any further with him.
Cage was not going to put up with that. He tugged her arm hard and made her crash against his chest. “I wasn’t asking, I was telling.” He arched an eyebrow down at her. “Unless you’d like to get your little bottom blistered before we leave? That can certainly be arranged.”
“No!”
“Good, then do as your told and I won’t have to give you spanking.”
He made it sound so easy, when Rachel knew it couldn’t possibly be. Nothing about life was easy. There was always a price to be paid.
She gathered up a few things she still held dear—she’d certainly had to pare that list down when she’d fled her erstwhile husband—into a gunny sack and followed him out of the house, uttering a horrified gasp when she saw the damage that had been done to her place. She began to take a few steps towards the barn but Cage grabbed her upper arm and hustled her towards one of the horses the men had ridden in on.
“But–But Sissy and Cleo–”
Cage’s face was grim. “We need to get going before someone else shows up. Let me help you mount up.” A thought struck him. “You do ride, don’t you?” He imbued the question with just enough of tinge of teasing insult that she reacted indignantly, just the way he wanted her to, stopping her from perseverating over much less pleasant things.
“Of course I can!’ As he helped her into the saddle, she didn’t mention to him that she had only learned to ride astride a few years ago when she’d left the East in such a hurry, since her old-fashioned father had insisted that a lady only rode sidesaddle, if at all.
At first, he took the reins of her horse rather than allowing her to go have a look-see at things he didn’t want her to have bad memories of, but once they were well away from the house, he gave them to her, saying as he did so, “It’s even more important now that you obey me without question. There’s no telling who we’re going to meet along the road, and we’re going to need to do some things that might irk your conscience, but I don’t want an argument from you about any of them. Am I making myself perfectly clear?”
He’d brought his horse around next to hers, reaching over to grab its bridle.
She stubbornly refused to answer him.
“Rachel,” he fairly seethed, “this is no time to act like a spoiled brat. I will have your answer, and I’ll remind you at the same time that at the cabin, while I was tryin
g to save the both of us and after I had told you to keep quiet, I heard you calling out to those men who most assuredly would have hurt you, given the chance. And I’m going to blister your behind tonight so you’ll remember that I mean what I say and that you have no choice but to do as I tell you to.”
Her wide eyes offset the stubborn line of her grim mouth. “Yes, yes, I understand.”
“Sir.”
“What?” she couldn’t have looked more surprised if he had asked her to call him Santa Claus.
“Sir. I want you to call me Sir.”
She was positively gaping. “I don’t usually balk at respectful terms of address, but I can hardly imagine how you think you’ve earned that particular title.”
He leaned towards her. “I saved your life. Those men entered your cabin with guns drawn. What, did you think they were going to calmly sit down and discuss the situation with you over tea? That they were going to rescue you from me? They wouldn’t have wanted any witnesses left to tell the tale of what they had done. They’d killed everything else on your little plot of Heaven and, since you were easier pickin’s, you were next on their list before they came for me.”
Her soft sobbing and even her subdued, “Yes, Sir,” which had been his goal, were like ashes in his mouth. He hadn’t intended to confirm what she must have already guessed—that her animals hadn’t survived the gunfight. He’d wanted to leave her with that one last illusion intact, but he hadn’t been able to do even that small thing for her.
Chapter Seven
They rode until they came to a clearing, which was the homestead of her nearest neighbor, who likely was actually out hunting. Where his wife was on their property she didn’t know, but Cage left her with a hissed warning to stay put, and she could see him sneaking about the place, stealing both a shirt and a dress from the line of laundry that stretched between the house and their barn.
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