heard the chink of a glass bottle and the glug-glug of liquid pouring. Whiskey. The sharp scent brought back the images of the memory as the noose burned into his throat, choking him as the end of the rope was tossed over the center beam and pulled. Some nightmares were real, and he was looking at another one.
It was night—his cabin was pitch-black. He was alone with her. There were signs of no one else in the room. Who else would be here? And she was in her underclothes, wearing one of his flannel shirts that, unbuttoned, slipped off her shoulders.
He tried to lift his head off the pillow. He couldn’t. His limbs felt as heavy and dull as lead. Weakness washed through his veins. He was too weak to move. Too weak to protect himself. Too weak to put Miss Laundry Lady on his horse and make her leave.
“I was beginning to worry that you would never wake up.” She chatted in that friendly way she had.
The way that he despised—because they weren’t friends. He didn’t want to be friends. He wanted to be left alone. Horror churned up inside him until he could taste the sourness of it filling his mouth. “Just go.”
“And leave you like this? Not for anything.” She seemed to float over him, but then he realized it was the light dancing on the wick. The golden glow lapped at her luminous skin and bronzed her shimmering hair. “I owe you my life. And I’m the kind of woman who pays her debts.”
“Git. Shoo.”
“Go ahead and growl. You don’t scare me a bit.” Her kindness warmed her soft words and added extra beauty to her serene face. She held a tin cup to his lips. “This will help with the pain.”
Whiskey fumes nearly had him coughing. His chest wheezed out and puffed in air, and agony drained him. He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t push her away. He couldn’t move.
Shame filled him to the brim with darkness. He managed to turn his head away to stare into the shadowed room. He didn’t have the strength to do more than breathe. He was alone with a woman he couldn’t trust.
He’d rather bleed to death than let her touch him, and the truth was, he couldn’t stop her from it.
“You’ve lost a lot of blood.” She paused as, with a clunk of tin, she set the cup aside. “I’ve sewed up the worst of the gashes, but the truth is, you’re still bleeding. I’m afraid this is going to hurt quite a bit, but I’ll be as quick as I can. And as careful.”
He didn’t acknowledge her. He had his pride.
The first stitch hurt no worse than he was already hurting. He took it—he had no choice. She leaned forward and as she worked, he could feel her nearness like a breeze against his skin. The satiny tips of her curls danced and skipped over his arm and abdomen. Out of the corner of his eyes he could see the fullness of her breasts.
This was wrong. All of it. His vision blurred into darkness and back again. He tried again to tell her to leave him be, that dying alone was better than this disgrace, but he couldn’t form the words. His lips were too numb to speak.
“That’s it. I’m almost done with this one. That bear sure got you good.” Her voice was like poetry, like the sweeping cadence of Shakespeare’s sonnets. “I’m so glad you’re still with me. I’ll have you patched up, and then I’ll make a good hot soup. My ma says there’s nothing a good bowl of soup can’t cure.”
Great. Just his luck to be trapped with a talker. He liked his women silent—in fact, he liked his women to be absent. Was there any way to be rid of her?
A horse’s whinny pierced the darkness and even though the thick walls muffled the sound, he knew it was not one of his. He withered at the faint clomp of steeled shoes on the hard packed earth outside his front door. A light flared in the window, bobbing up and then away.
“What the—” The laundry lady set aside her needle and thread and the bed rope groaned as she stood. Her slender shadow fell over him.
With an ear-splitting crack, the door broke open, wood splinters flying into the air as wraiths and ghosts emerged from the night. Eerie dark shapes that became men as the light touched them. Wide-shouldered angry men, with rifles in hand and a lantern shining suddenly into his eyes. Onto the bed. Where Betsy Hunter stood, her hair tangled, her undershirt and skirt covered with spots of blood.
He knew what was going to happen next. He’d been surly and rude and horrible to this prim and sheltered woman, and now he was going to pay for it. He knew how this was going to go.
His mind leaped forward and he saw what was to come in a flash, but it was really the past. The murderous rage, the shouted accusations, the noose closing off his air. He would lose everything. His life, his home, his work, his freedom.
He remembered Ginetta Green’s tears as she’d spoken to the sheriff and how Duncan had had hope then, hope that reason would rule and it was all a big mistake. What else could it have been? He’d never hurt Ginetta. He’d never hurt anyone. Ginetta had used him, she’d lied about him, and she’d betrayed him for reasons he would never know.
Betsy Hunter stood in the shadows, radiant as a midnight star in a moonless sky, but he was not fooled. Not by a woman’s beauty. Not by her seeming goodness. Not by her kindness. She wanted something. What? How was she going to use this to her advantage?
Duncan saw the barred door close on his future once more. Her rescuer with his search party stormed through the dark main room. Beefy hands closed around his throat and Duncan knew the sting of a woman’s betrayal twice in his life.
At the edges of his vision he saw her. Perky Betsy Hunter, ready to condemn him. No one was going to believe him, a man convicted of rape. Defeat curled around his soul and from a distance he heard the men shouting, the flare of lantern light on a rifle barrel as it aimed directly between his eyes. He felt stitches at his neck tear, felt the hot rush of blood.
“No!” Suddenly she was there, her calm touch against his face, she was splaying the flat of her free hand against his wound. “What is wrong with you, Joshua? Put him down before you kill him.”
“That’s the idea.”
“Stop it. Didn’t you see the bears dead in the road?” Men. She would never understand them. She’d grown up in a houseful of brothers, she’d been married, and all the time in the presence of the species she could never figure out why they were so downright bullheaded and pushy and all male temper. “What’s wrong with you? I said, put him down.”
Her oldest brother kept right on choking the dying man. Duncan might be the bigger of the two, but he’d lost more blood than Charlie had, at least it seemed that way, and she couldn’t bear it, she simply couldn’t. “James! You get over here and help me. His stitches are torn. Isn’t that just like a man to rip out half an evening’s work.”
Joshua gaped down at her, some of the wild male protective rage leaving him. A small glint of intelligence came back into his eyes. “But he hurt you. Don’t try and defend him.”
“He saved me. Think, would you? Look at the wounds. Doesn’t that look strangely as if a bear clawed him?”
Betsy gave her brother a kick in the shins, and grabbed her other brother by the wrist. “That’s no way to treat the man who nearly died for me. Ease him down gently… That’s right.”
Her heart was breaking, that was it.
