by Fiona Brand
She must have signalled her distress, made some kind of sound, because Cullen uttered a low, succinct oath and covered the distance between them. His arms came around her as he eased her in close against the hard, solid warmth of his body.
Time passed, and he continued to hold her. Rachel let her head sink against his shoulder and wrapped her arms around his lean waist while she listened to the heavy, regular beat of his heart. Eventually he drew away.
"I'm a damned fool," he said quietly. "You're pregnant, you've worked yourself into the ground organising the wedding, and now you're dead on your feet. Why don't you lie down while I bring the rest of your stuff in? Your room's down there." He nodded at the far end of the corridor. "Take a nap. I'll make a start on dinner."
Dazed and still tingling with the warmth of Cullen's embrace, Rachel reached the doorway to her room. And stopped.
The rest of the house was bare, but over the past few days Cullen must, have worked night and day in this room. The wood floor was polished to a high sheen and partially covered by a large Turkish rug in warm, muted colours. The walls were painted a similar tawny colour to the one she'd used in her flat, and the multipaned sash windows were draped in filmy muslin. There was a bed. A romantic dream of a four-poster constructed from black wrought iron and hung with delicate folds of mosquito netting. Her suitcase sat on an antique chest at the foot of the bed. There was other furniture too: a dresser and dressing table, bedside tables—all with the glow of valuable antiques.
"How did you know?" she demanded.
"About the bed?" Cullen was directly behind her, his voice a velvety rumble just above her right ear. "Helen gave me a decorating magazine. She said you'd wanted the four-poster for the flat but it wouldn't fit."
"So you got it for me. Why?" she asked, weariness fading as she faced him.
Again the puzzling air of tightly condensed fury, of emotion locked beneath adamantine control. "I wanted you to be … comfortable."
"This is more than just comfortable." It was sumptuous, expensive and, under the circumstances, impractically extravagant. "But then, you can afford it, can't you? You're a member of the Lombard family."
"My mother was a Lombard," he conceded.
Rachel inhaled sharply at his deliberate evasion. There was, she decided, no point in being subtle. If she wanted information she would have to prise it out of him. "Okay, you're related to the Lombards. What I want to know is why you're letting this town put you through hell when you could pay someone to take care of everything for you?"
For a tense interval she thought Cullen wasn't going to answer, then he said bluntly, "It's my property, my responsibility. I'll be damned if I'll back away from it because the people of Riverbend are squeamish about a Logan being back in residence. I could hire a manager. I've got access to funds, but I've never wanted the money for myself. As far as I'm concerned, it all still belongs to Celeste."
"If she's dead, then she must have left it to you."
"Celeste didn't acknowledge me at any stage, and the Lombard family wasn't aware of my existence until after she died. I was sixteen when they first contacted me, and by then I'd lived in more places than I could remember." His mouth twisted. "And dealt with agendas that swung from the pure profit motive to saving my soul. The Lombards wanted me because I was Celeste's son. All I wanted was out."
"They didn't claim guardianship?"
"They tried. But by the time they got the paperwork done, I was long gone. Gray Lombard, Blade's older brother, tracked me down eventually, but by then I was seventeen and working with a construction crew. When he realised I wasn't going to go back with him, he left. Gray used to turn up periodically, checking on me, and when I was being held in the cells at Fairley, he bailed me out. I didn't call him. I don't know how he found out what was going on." Cullen lifted his shoulders. "For Gray, I agreed to meet with my grandparents, and I accepted the only thing I did want. The Lombards have some heavy-duty connections with the military. Gray pulled some strings, and I went into the army, eventually following both him and Blade into the SAS."
Rachel listened numbly to Cullen's clipped series of statements clearly outlining how ruthlessly single-minded he'd been, even at seventeen. He'd held off a powerful, charismatic family and extracted what he wanted from them. Then she grasped what he hadn't said. "You used Lombard money to do all this." Cullen would wade through burning oil before he would use any of his mother's money for himself. But he'd broken that tenet for her. And the baby.
Cullen eyed her with a trace of wariness. "This farm, this house, are not what you're used to—"
"You're right," she returned. "I'm used to an Auckland flat, noise and smog and too much traffic. I'm certainly not used to that!" She gestured to one of the windows, at the view of wild country sweeping into endless hills, of the sunset retracting off a distant, glittering fall of water, of a raw granite face rising out of darkness into light.
"It's quiet here," he agreed. "I'll give you that much. It's also lonely. I'm gone most days—all day. The nearest neighbour used to be Alistair Carson, but since he died, nobody's shown any interest in living in the shack he used to call home. You could visit your brother, but that's still a twenty-minute drive. On horseback, a good hour's ride." His gaze finally centred on her. "Not that you'll be riding."
Rachel's breath caught at the curt statement. She wasn't planning on riding, either, but she resented Cullen setting limits. So far they were playing by his rules, but no way was she going to be a doormat for any man. "I'll be working most days," she retorted crisply. "I imagine I'll get all the social contact I'll ever need at the salon."
Cullen's eyes narrowed, and suddenly the sense of tightly leashed control evaporated. He looked like he was spoiling for a fight.
Rachel's hands curled into fists. Ever since she'd met Cullen Logan, her life had gone from lonely and unsatisfactory to sheer, utter chaos. She was miserable without him. She was miserable with him. She was pregnant. A fight would be just fine by her.
Just when it looked like she was going to get her wish, awareness of how he was reacting dawned in Cullen's gaze. His hands bunched, released, and he went abruptly, oddly pale. Then Rachel was staring at his broad back as he strode out into the hallway. A door thumped closed. His bedroom.
She let out a breath that shook with temper and nerves, and discovered she was still holding her wedding hat. Grimacing at what she'd done to the expensive scrap of silk and gauze, she tossed it on top of her suitcase and began to pace. Her heart was pumping flat-out, and she was pretty sure she needed to break something, but, like the childhood temper tantrums, she'd left that behaviour behind when she was three.
His door opened a few minutes later. This time Cullen's step was louder, and she knew he'd changed into jeans and riding boots. When his footsteps faded, her nervous tension went with it, and she flopped down on the bed and stared at the ceiling, letting the swimmy feeling of exhaustion have its way with her. But along with stillness came the doubts.
She was married to a stranger.
Her sheer lack of knowledge about Cullen was daunting. He obviously had enough money to make a few phone calls and have some of the most expensive, exclusive retail shops in the country jump through hoops for him. He could probably make this whole empty barn of a house look like a decorator's paradise if he wanted.
That he'd decorated her room and nothing else jarred. She felt set apart—like a princess stashed in a tower—as if he wanted to shield her from anything unpleasant, even from the fact that she was living in his house. As much as she loved the room, she didn't like the sense of being separated from Cullen in such a way. It was what her family had always done to her, and she resented it fiercely.
Then there was the whole marriage thing. The possibility that, despite separate rooms, Cullen might share her bed at some stage. She knew the bartering force of his sexuality, the mind-numbing pleasure of his touch, but she also knew that wouldn't be enough. If they were going to make love again, she n
eeded him to feel something for her. She needed him to want to be with her. And, most of all, she needed some kind of real commitment from him.
* * *
When Rachel awoke it was full dark. Light filtered into her room from the hallway. She could hear distant kitchen noises: the chink of crockery, water hissing into a sink.
Pushing herself upright, she fumbled for the lamp on the bedside table, located the switch and flooded the room with a mellow glow. Her watch said it was eight. She'd slept for a good two hours.
When she'd changed out of her creased wedding suit and into snug jeans, a warm shirt and her favourite dark red sweater, she found the bathroom, splashed water on her face, then made her way downstairs to the kitchen.
Cullen was just removing a casserole from the oven. He glanced up as she walked in. "I was just going to wake you."
Her stomach grumbled as Cullen set the dish down on a heat pad on the table. Plates and silverware were already set out, as well as a bowl of steaming rice and a crisp, green salad. "You can cook," she said faintly.
For a second she could have sworn he was going to smile; then he shrugged. "It's nothing fancy. When you get dropped in a foreign country for weeks at a time with nothing to eat but army rations, you learn to improvise. Fast."
Rachel pulled a chair out and sat as Cullen pushed a plate laden with rice and casserole toward her. Normally the amount he'd just served up would have made her blanch. Now she helped herself to salad and barely restrained herself from starting before he did.
Before Cullen sat down he walked to the fridge, poured a large glass of milk and set it down in front of her. "For the baby," he murmured.
As Cullen pulled out his chair and sat, the enormity of what they were doing suddenly hit Rachel. They were married: Husband and wife. This was their first meal together. Normally the wedding breakfast was a ritualistic affair with speeches and ceremony. When she'd married Adam there had been over a hundred guests sharing in the ritual, toasting their good health and long life together, but in all the excitement the symbolic aspect of sharing a table, the intimacy of eating together, hadn't occurred to her. It did now. With the stillness of night closed in tight around the farmhouse, the shadows barely pushed back by the lone bulb screwed into the kitchen ceiling, the simple meal Cullen had prepared seemed more steeped in symbolism—more deeply linking—than that other, more formal, wedding breakfast.
Rachel picked up her knife and fork and tasted the casserole; it was plain, and it needed salt, but it was edible. Cullen didn't seem to notice the lack of flavour. He ate with a steady, relentless appetite that reminded her of her brothers. The food on his plate was needed fuel for his body; he neither liked nor disliked, and ate everything with an unbiased concentration. If he was filling his truck with petrol, he would probably have the same expression on his face.
Evidently he wasn’t the least bit bothered by the symbolism of eating their first meal together.
By the time Rachel had finished her dinner, Cullen had polished off his second impressive helping and was loading his plate into a gleaming new dishwasher. Glancing around the kitchen, Rachel noticed that the stove matched the dishwasher, and the refrigerator and freezer also looked suspiciously new. She hadn't investigated the laundry yet, but she would lay odds there were a brand new washer and drier in there. A curl of hope started deep inside her. If Cullen had spent all this money on the house, then maybe, just maybe, he had hopes for the future, too.
Rachel had just loaded her plate in the dishwasher when she became aware that Cullen was leaning against the counter, thumbs hooked in the belt loops of his jeans, watching her, "Dan Holt showed me that letter you took in to him."
Rachel blinked at his bald statement and closed the dishwasher. He'd said the words quietly enough, but she could hear the force behind his calm statement. So, this was what that air of condensed fury had been about. Cullen was intensely male, protective and possessive. He hadn't liked it that she'd kept the letter from him. "It was just a sick joke. I thought the police should deal with it."
"You didn't think that I should know someone was making … allegations about me?"
"You're not a murderer. That piece of paper is a tasteless prank by someone who should be seriously considering therapy."
Cullen didn't move from his reined stance against the counter, but Rachel didn't mistake his stillness for indolence. He was coiled tight and ready to explode.
"You're right about the therapy part," he noted softly. "But did you consider that this person might be dangerous? Baby, I could shake you. Whoever put that message together means business. If anything like this happens again, I want to know about it."
"Aren't you making too big a deal out of this? Any schoolkid could have put that message together."
"If you really thought that, you wouldn't have taken the letter in to Dan. That message wasn't the work of some schoolkid. There were no fingerprints on the paper besides yours, Rachel. It was absolutely clean."
A cold chill went down Rachel's spine. No prints? He had to be joking. Of course, even if there had been prints, there was no guarantee of finding out who they belonged to. The perpetrator would have to have a police record for that to happen. But no prints at all?
Abruptly, Cullen pushed himself away from the counter and prowled the length of the kitchen. When he spoke, his voice was low and clipped. "This morning I went in to Fairley to lay formal charges against Frank Trask for illegal discharge of a weapon and attempted arson. Last night Trask tried to burn this house down."
"Burn the house," Rachel echoed, automatically following Cullen, feeling the same crawling sensation she'd felt when she'd first read the anonymous message. "Why would he want to do that? Surely he's not still carrying a grudge about you helping Dane and his wife?"
"I don't know what thoughts go through Trask's head. But I'm pretty sure the arson attempt and the letter are related. Someone wants me out of Riverbend, and they're not too particular how they go about it, or who they hurt in the process."
Rachel frowned. "But why?"
Cullen's hands moved as if he were going to touch her. With a savage oath, he strode several paces away and gestured toward one of the chairs. "Sit down, and I'll try to explain. Maybe when you've heard what I've got to say you'll make the sensible choice and go back to Auckland."
Cullen watched Rachel sit down and jerked his fingers through his hair, cursing the naked feeling at the back of his neck, and wondering why he'd ever let Blade and the rest of the crew talk him into having his hair cut. Respectability had never bothered him a damn before, and it had always been too late to worry about it in Riverbend, anyway.
Just like it was too late for a lot of things. He'd never voluntarily talked about the hellish situation when his father had died. He didn't want to tell Rachel now. His first and strongest instinct was to tell her nothing, to keep her cocooned and as happy as he could through this pregnancy. But events had forced his hand. Rachel had to know what was at stake, for her own safety and that of their child. "You've probably heard enough gossip to piece my past together," he said flatly. "I'm going to give you the unadulterated version."
Taking a deep breath, he settled his hands on the back of a chair. "My mother left Riverbend as soon as she could after giving birth to me. According to my father, Celeste was wild, a drifter. He didn't know where she came from or where she went, or that she had money. Alistair Carson's wife, Mae, looked after me until I was old enough to move in with my father, and then…" He paused, his hands tightening on the chair. "I had what you might call a dysfunctional childhood. In lay terms, my father beat the hell out of me whenever he'd had too much to drink. And sometimes just for fun."
"I heard you ran away," Rachel said softly.
"I made a career of it. I grew up fast, and I grew up hard. I was shunted out of this town when I was nine and didn't make it back until I turned eighteen. Riverbend didn't know what hit it. I was hell on wheels, literally. The whole place must have sighed with relief
when I finally left. And when the cops picked me up and tossed me in a cell for the murder of my father, no one was in the least surprised. I was the perfect suspect."
The images sprang at him, as raw and hard-edged as if it had all happened yesterday. His knuckles whitened as he related the incident when he'd walked in on Caroline Hayward and his father, the ensuing fight, Ian Logan's death, the pieces of the puzzle—like the too expensive whiskey—that just didn't fit.
Rachel met his gaze levelly. "So, someone got your father drunk, beat him up, then left him on the side of the road, and now this person's scared you'll find out who he, or she, is."
"That's the only way I can figure it. There was no way my father could or would afford to drink a fancy whiskey like Chivas Regal." His mouth twisted. "He liked quantity, not quality."
"Then it follows that the attacker had to be someone who could afford to buy Chivas."
Cullen inclined his head. "I'd lay odds that whoever's encouraging me to leave town panicked when they heard we were getting married. Suddenly it looked like I was going to stay."
Rachel's gaze narrowed. "You know who left your father on the side of the road."
Cullen couldn't prevent a quick smile of approval, but even so, her quickness startled him. She was putting the pieces of the puzzle together almost as fast as he could give them to her. "I think Trask was involved, but only as hired muscle. The other person is more shadowy, but I'm pretty certain it's Richard Hayward."
Rachel's eyes widened. "My God," she muttered. "What a mess."
Cullen wasn't about to argue. It was one hell of a mess, and threatening to explode all over Riverbend. "I imagine Hayward wouldn't want any dirt rubbing off on his professional reputation. Being implicated in a murder investigation, even if he was never formally charged, would kill his business."
"He doesn't deserve to be practicing," Rachel said heatedly.
"That's if he is involved. All I've got is supposition and gut instinct. I don't have one shred of proof. I could run all this by Dan, but seriously, if you were a cop, who would you believe? A lawyer who has a solid standing in the community? Or a man who has no roots—who makes a living out of violence?"