The Cursed One

by Ronda Thompson

  She felt the warm spill of his seed against the inside of her thighs. His body jerked and convulsed as hers had done and she knew he had found his pleasure. He pulled her closer and she rested her head against his shoulder, breathing hard against his neck, listening as he struggled to bring his own breathing back to normal. It was the most glorious thing Amelia had ever experienced.

  “God,” he said again.

  Amelia snuggled closer against him and sighed. “I am a woman now.”

  He gently stroked her hair. “You were always a woman. An extraordinary woman.”

  Her lack of experience had her wondering if what had just happened between them could have been as wonderful for him as it had been for her. “Did I please you?”

  He laughed. “If you had pleased me any more, I don’t think I could have survived it.”

  His praise warmed her nearly as much as the heat radiating from him. As her body began to register the shock of what Gabriel Wulf had just done to her, she remembered his injury. She pulled back to look at him.

  “Your leg,” she whispered.

  Gabriel pulled her closer. “To hell with that,” he said. “You are good medicine. I forgot all about my injury.”

  Amelia wasn’t convinced. Carefully, she slid from on top of him. Her thighs were sticky with his seed and, she imagined, her virgin’s blood. “What I wouldn’t give for a bath,” she said, settling beside him before pulling the blanket around them.

  “I can’t give you that, but I imagine there is a pump and bucket outside. I’ll get you some water to wash with.”

  She wondered if he could even manage to rise. Amelia thought of offering to fetch the water herself, but she knew Gabriel wouldn’t let her go outside, not while he wasn’t certain they were safe. Besides, she wasn’t positive her trembling legs would support her. She hadn’t had time to absorb what had just happened between them, what she had in fact instigated. Would he think less of her now? Did he love her? He’d certainly never said that he did.

  As she watched him, he fumbled beneath the blanket draped around them, obviously pulling himself back together; then he rose. He grunted with the pain but said nothing. He bent and offered her his hand.

  “There is a soft feather mattress in the next room. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have suggested we go in there. The floor is hard and probably none too clean.”

  Amelia was thankful the darkness hid her blush. She had copulated with Gabriel Wulf in a blacksmith’s cottage on the floor. She had managed to shock even herself. If he’d been thinking clearly? Did that mean that he hadn’t known his own mind when he had made love to her? Did he regret his actions already? Should she regret hers? Amelia didn’t believe she could if she wanted to. Were these sudden insecurities and doubts what her mother had hoped to spare her from? The gnawing fear in her gut that he did not feel about her as she felt about him.

  Since he still stood with his hand out to her, she placed her smaller one in his. He pulled her to her feet and she clutched the blanket to her breasts. He kissed the top of her head and turned her toward the next room.

  “Go. I’ll join you in a moment.”

  She went, and Amelia knew she was being foolish, but for one moment when he opened the door and disappeared, she wondered if he would ever come back.

  Gabriel wasn’t so blinded by emotion that he forgot to be careful. He moved as silently as his injured leg allowed and found the pump, a bucket next to it as was custom. A thousand emotions assaulted him. Guilt, disappointment for his weaknesses, lust to have her again, worry that he should leave her. But he couldn’t leave her. She wasn’t safe without him … she wasn’t safe with him.

  He glanced up at the nearly full moon overhead. The wolf was closer now; Gabriel felt it. Had he fallen in love with Amelia? The widow of a onetime friend, a woman as different from him as night was from day? He wanted to say that he hadn’t fallen in love with her. That she was no different from the other women he’d taken his pleasure of in the past, but he knew that was a lie. She was different.

  Maybe he had known that on some deep level the first moment he saw her standing on the streets of London. Maybe that was the reason he had dreamed about her.

  Now that the fading embers of lust had banked, his leg hurt like hell. All the rationalizing in the world couldn’t erase the fact that he’d just taken Lady Amelia Sinclair Collingsworth’s virginity. A right that should have been reserved for her husband. At least reserved for a man who could offer her a future. At least for a man who was only a man and nothing more.

  And now Gabriel understood that being with a woman he had an emotional tie with was different. He was different when he was with her. He liked pleasing her, watching the expressions cross her face. He liked it too much. He suddenly very much wanted to experience that again with her.

  Gabriel worked the pump. Although it nearly killed him, he bent and stuck his head beneath the chilly water in order to clear his mind. He would not go back inside and make love to her again, this time on the soft mattress in the small room another man once shared with his wife. Gabriel swore he wouldn’t, but the wolf beneath his skin urged him to forsake his pledge. To ignore every pledge he’d ever made to himself.

  Could he stop what he felt happening to him? Gabriel glanced up at the moon, nearly full in the night sky. For a moment, he merely stared, mesmerized. The moon called to him, seduced him as easily as Amelia had seduced him. The wolf beneath his skin crept closer to the surface. The beast gave him strength, whispered dark thoughts in his head. He still smelled Amelia’s scent on him.

  He closed his eyes and breathed it in, let it heat his blood and fire his lust for her again. Glancing toward the darkened cottage, he picked up the bucket and moved toward the house and his prey.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Gabriel was having the dream again. The one where he watched his father turn into a wolf at the dinner table. Only it wasn’t just his father who was transformed. Gabriel looked down and saw his hands, misshapen, covered by fur, long claws jutting from his fingertips. Then Mullins was there, laughing at him. “You are one of us,” he hissed, then laughed again until his neck split open and blood gushed from the wound. Gabriel came awake with a start.

  At first, he had no idea where he was or why. Then he saw Amelia and the night before came rushing back to him. He’d returned to the cottage with every intention of ravishing her again, but when he’d stood over her in the small bedchamber, looking down at her sleeping countenance, her features those of an angel, the man had gained control of the beast. He’d slid off the coarse trousers, washed up as best as he could, and slipped into bed with her. And finally, he’d found sleep himself.

  Amelia was now perched on the side of the bed staring at him. She wore a pair of snug trousers and a white shirt that laced at the neck, although her breasts did not allow her to lace it closed and offered him a tantalizing peek at her cleavage. He saw the dusky color of her nipples through the shirt. When he could take his eyes from them, he noted her hair had been brushed and tied back with a black ribbon. She looked fresh and ripe for the picking.

  “You must have found some of the lad’s clothes,” he said. “I knew from my search last night you wouldn’t be able to wear Bruin’s wife’s things.”

  “Yes,” she answered. “I always wanted to wear men’s breeches.”

  “You don’t look like a man in them,” he responded, allowing his gaze to run the tantalizing length of her.

  He thought she might have blushed. She rose from the edge of the bed. “I found food. Not much, but a few dried apples and the other half of the loaf you brought me last night. Are you hungry?”

  She’d returned to the bed with her scavenged items and stood looking down at him.

  “Hungry for you,” he answered honestly.

  She blushed again, but with pleasure, he thought. “You are in no condition to … well, I shouldn’t have seduced you last night,” she admitted.

  “Regrets already?” Gabriel trie
d to rise and winced. He quickly settled back against the pillows, the scratchy blanket draped over his lower half.

  “I have no regrets,” she announced before placing the food items on the bed and leaning forward to press her cool palm against his forehead. “You feel unnaturally warm. I think you have a fever.”

  Gabriel snatched her hand and brought it to his lips. “A fever for you,” he assured her.

  Amelia rescued her hand and placed both on her hips. “Stop trying to seduce me. You are in no condition; in fact, I worry that you are in no condition to look for Mora, either. Perhaps I should go.”

  Her words sobered him. “That is not an option,” he assured her. “I will go. The sooner the better, so that I can get you safely away from here.”

  She tilted her dimpled chin up. “I can help,” she insisted. “I know you think I’m relatively useless, but—”

  “I do not think that,” he interrupted her. “I might have at first. I misjudged you.”

  And he had. Amelia was an extraordinary woman. An extraordinary lover. She was brave and thoughtful and none of the things he might have at first glance assumed about her. She was too damn good for him, that was certain.

  She smiled softly at him, then quickly frowned. “You find me useful in what way? I remember what you told me when we were in the woods. About women serving a purpose.”

  Damn. As if things were not complicated enough between them. Now Gabriel must appease her female sensibilities, something he had never cared to do before. “The village is dangerous, Amelia,” he explained. “I don’t know who is friend or foe. I’ll be better able to concentrate on finding Mora if I know you are here safe.”

  Gradually, her frown faded. “I suppose you’re right.” Her beautiful blue eyes suddenly filled with tears. “I hope Mora is alive. I feel this is my fault. If we hadn’t forced her to come with us—”

  “She would already be dead,” Gabriel assured her. “The man posing as the blacksmith said they didn’t want any witnesses left behind. That would include all of us.”

  Gabriel steeled himself and bent forward to reach for a pair of trousers Amelia had obviously draped across the end of the bed for him. Pain shot through his leg, but he managed to grab the clothes. He’d never had a woman take care of him before. Not since he was a young boy. He rather liked it. Throwing the scratchy blanket aside, he managed to gain his feet. Dressing nearly killed him, not to mention ignoring Amelia, since she stared boldly at him.

  She wasn’t shy, his Amelia. Gabriel immediately corrected the thought. She wasn’t his. She would never be his except for in the way she was his last night. If they did manage to reach Wulfglen safely, they had no future together. Especially not now.

  “The leg looks horrible,” she commented. “But the rest of you is quite something.”

  He lifted a brow while fastening his trousers. “How do you know? You don’t have much in the way of comparison.”

  She smiled and he wondered if she realized how seductive it was, her smile. “I may be many things, but I’m not an idiot. You are a beautiful man, Gabriel Wulf. If you hadn’t chosen to hide yourself away in the country these many years, I imagine you would by now have become an expert at beating women off with a stick.”

  The reason he’d hidden himself away robbed him of the ability to enjoy her flirty banter. The sooner he found out about Mora, the sooner they could move on and, he hoped, reach the safety of Wulfglen. Gabriel had no idea how long he could keep the wolf inside him at bay, but it wasn’t something he ever wanted Amelia to know about him. Let her think him beautiful; let her think anything but that he was a monster.

  Gabriel pulled on his boots. He tugged on a shirt Amelia had found for him. Then he began his search for a suitable hiding place for Amelia while he was gone. While he went from room to room studying the floor, Amelia followed.

  “Did the man … creature say anything else to you in the blacksmith’s barn?” she asked. “About what they have planned and what I had to do with it all?”

  He shook his head. “No, not really. Only that they’d been making some sort of plans for a long time.”

  “What are we looking for?” she asked a few minutes later.

  “An indentation of any sort. I’ll wager Bruin has a small area under the floor where he kept his valuables, maybe his spirits and food supplies.”

  Rather than comment, Amelia began searching, as well. A few moments later she called to him from the kitchen area. “Here, Gabriel. I’ve found it.”

  He joined her in the small area where a cookstove and a crude table and chairs sat. She was down on the floor beneath the table, having pulled a worn rug back to display exactly what he’d described to her.

  He and Amelia pulled the table aside. Bending to grab the small latch of the hidden entry to the floor pained him, but he got it open. The smell of dirt and stored vegetables wafted up.

  “Good,” he said to her. “We’ll leave it open. If you hear anyone come around while I’m gone, get inside and close the door.”

  She nodded. “Are you sure you should go?” she asked. “I can see the leg is paining you. Maybe you should rest today and go out tonight, under cover of darkness.”

  The suggestion was plausible, but Gabriel felt he might have already waited too long to help poor Mora. “Time is important,” he said. “You know that.”

  She bit her full lower lip. “Yes, I know. Please be careful, Gabriel.”

  Reaching out, he brushed her cheek. It seemed only natural to lean forward and kiss her. His lips lingered against hers for only a moment before he pulled away, readied his strength, and rose from his kneeling position on the floor. After instructing Amelia to bolt the door behind him, Gabriel left the relative safety of the cottage in search of Mora. He had no idea what he would find in the village.

  He wound his way through the woods and back to the village. Gabriel moved more slowly than he would have liked, but the leg held him up. He now paused in the cover of foliage to study the village ahead. Hempshire looked deserted. He wondered if the blacksmith’s barn should be the first place he looked for Mora.

  It seemed natural. Mullins had said he had two cousins who helped him. Gabriel was betting the cousins had the same “gifts” as Mullins. Setting off again, Gabriel tried to keep to the foliage as much as possible. It thinned as he drew closer to the village. Luckily, the blacksmith’s barn sat on the edge of the village closest to him.

  A few horses milled around in a corral out back. It had been dark last night when he’d stolen one of them and he and Amelia had made a mad dash from the village. Now, in the daylight, he saw one horse he recognized. His own lame mount he had ridden to Collingsworth Manor upon. He would bet that most of the horses in the corral had once been in Robert’s stable.

  Gabriel leaned up against the barn when he reached it, resting his throbbing leg. Sweat coated his brow and he wondered if a fever had taken hold of him. In the stillness, he heard the mumble of voices coming from inside the barn.

  Gathering his strength, he moved around the side of the barn toward the back. He would be spotted easily from the front entrance by anyone moving through the village. He had to walk through the horses and they snorted and stomped. Horses usually took well to him, at least his own horses. The one he’d ridden to Collingsworth Manor simply regarded him curiously, as if it wondered where he had been and what he was currently doing. Perhaps the other horses were responding to his scent, Gabriel realized. Maybe it had been the reason the one he’d stolen last night had been so wild to handle. It might have smelled the wolf in him.

  Two rear doors opened up into the stable. Gabriel paused at them, listening. The voices were clearer, but not clear enough for him to hear their conversation. He slipped through the doors. A few stalls stood at the back of the barn. Gabriel glanced cautiously in each as he passed. They were empty.

  “How could they have escaped you?” one man asked. “There are only two of them, for God’s sake, and neither with our talents.”
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  “The man handles a horse like no man I’ve seen before,” another man defended. “And the woman, she shot at us.”

  “We must stop them before they reach safety. We’ve waited too long to execute our plans. We can’t have them ruining everything.”

  Gabriel heard a soft snort in the silence that followed. “Who do you think would believe them if they did manage to reach safety?” someone asked. “The two will most likely be charged with the husband’s murder and assumed to be lovers.”

  “Wulf won’t be taken seriously, perhaps. His family has no influence among society. The woman, though, you know we have plans for her.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to work this way,” one man argued. “You know the rules set down long ago. She is not weak or suffering. What we plan for her is nothing short of murder.”

  The hair on the back of Gabriel’s neck bristled. No one was going to hurt Amelia. He’d kill any man or beast that tried.

  “She could have lived at one time. She could have been useful, but now all of that has changed. The plan has changed, as you all well know.”

  “Miss High-and-mighty in the tavern thinks they will come back for her,” a voice proclaimed. “I told her she was naught but a servant and she placed too much hope in two of the higher class. But she insists they will return for her. She claims they are not like others of their station.”

  “She is being guarded well, correct?”

  “Aye, five men in there on watch just in case she’s right. We’ll give it a couple of days to see if we can catch a bigger fish with a small one; then we’ll have to make her disappear.”