Three Times a Bride (10 page)

“Only so’s I can tell you what an ass I think you are. You broke Rachel’s heart, you bastard.”

Clint bit down hard. “The hell I did,” he retorted. This time when he poured, his hand wasn’t as steady as it should have been. And when he downed the triple shot, the whiskey had suddenly acquired a foul bite. Or was it loneliness he was tasting?

“She’s lost weight since she come home. Big Jim’s at his wit’s end.”

Clint tapped the bottle with a forefinger. “Sure you won’t have a drink?” he offered, trying to ignore what she said. “There’s plenty left.” A good half jug, by his reckoning. Too much to waste.

“Last time I saw her at the mercantile, her eyes were all red from crying.”

Clint poured faster this time, slopping the equivalent of a shot on the bar. Shrugging, he swiped his forearm across the spill, then downed the whiskey that
had
ended up in the jigger. No good. He could still see Rachel’s face on the pillow, her thick brown hair spread like a dark angel cap on the slightly singed linen.

“Nobody told her to go,” he muttered, his voice whiskey thick.

“Maybe not in so many words,” Dora Faye exclaimed in a low hissing whisper. “But a woman as sensitive as Rachel can read between the lines.”

“What the devil are you talkin’ about?” Clint demanded, his head beginning to swim ever so slightly.

“You jackass! I’m talkin’ about that bully of an aunt you imported.”

Clint drew his head back and squinted down his nose at his red-headed accuser. It took a full second to get her face in good focus, and then he realized he liked it better when he couldn’t see the green sparks shooting out of her eyes. Was this the way Rachel felt without her glasses? he wondered. Like the whole world was on the opposite side of fogged glass?

“Bully? Aunt H—Hester?” Damned if the whiskey hadn’t numbed his tongue instead of his head. “Is that what Ra—Rachel told you?”

“Not in so many words, but I could tell she was hurting.” She poked a finger at his chest. “Rachel gave everything she had to that ungrateful family of yours, and what did she get back? Not so much as a ‘thank you, ma’am’ or a ‘don’t let the door hit you where the good Lord split you.’”

“Where the good Lord what? Now wait just a minute—”

She jabbed a finger at his nose this time. “So she can’t cook as good as a woman who’s been doing it for thirty years or more? She tried her best, didn’t she? And maybe she did singe a few underdrawers, but that don’t mean you boys didn’t have clean clothes when you needed ’em, along with a smile and a cheery word when you come home tired and hungry.”

“I never said—”

“That’s just it, you fool cowboy. You never
said
nothing she needed to hear, like how much you appreciated her tryin’ so hard. Or how nice it was that she was there when you come home, or how pretty she looked, or how sweet it was at night
to pull her close.” She paused to haul in a breath. “Instead, you washed your hands of her the minute you didn’t need her any more. Even in the bedroom, behind closed doors, you worthless toad.”

Recalling the nights after his aunt’s arrival when he’d felt too self-conscious to make proper love to his wife, Clint felt heat sear his cheeks. “What occurs between a man and his wife behind closed doors is no concern of yours,” he muttered, staring at the amber liquid in the bottom of his glass.

“Pathetically little happened for you to keep secret, from what I heard! Crinkling corn husks, my hiney.”

Clint stared at her in amazement. “Is
that
why she left? Because I was worried about makin’ noise and wasn’t very—well, you know?”

“That and other things. Like maybe because you never told her you loved her. Don’t deny it. If you had, she never would of left, not in a million years.”

Clint bristled at that. “I did so! Plain as can be! I told her several times.”

“Not according to Rachel. She says you told her you
thought
maybe you did.”

Clint had no answer for that. Thinking back on it, he recalled now that he had skirted the issue, telling Rachel he thought he loved her, but never saying he knew it for certain. “That still didn’t give her any call to leave,” he said under his breath.

Dora Faye, who glared at him nearly nose to nose, caught the words. “Oh, really? And what would have convinced her to stay, you stubborn mule? You married her for her talents as a house keeper. As I understand it, you never made any bones about it, not from the very first, and Rachel feels like she failed you at every turn.” When Clint tried to protest, she waved him to silence. “Her words, not mine. After good old Aunt Hester showed up, she didn’t feel needed anymore.
In fact, she felt like she’d done such a miserable job that you were all hoping she’d leave.”

“That is
not
so.”

A pulse throbbed in Dora Faye’s temple. “She thinks you wish you’d never married her in the first place.”

“That’s silly.”

“Is it? I don’t think so. And after you think about it, I don’t think you will, either.” She fixed him with those fiery green eyes of hers for a long moment. “She’s leavin’ on Monday, you know. Goin’ back east to stay with some relatives and go to some kind of school. And why wouldn’t she? Now that you’ve tossed her back, she has no hope for making a life here in Shady Corners.”

The church seemed to be unusually crowded for early
services. Rachel stood just outside the doors with her father and sister, held back by the press of people trying to move en masse into the church. Molly kept standing on tiptoe, craning her neck to see. “I wonder what’s happening?” she asked for at least the dozenth time.

“I have no idea,” Rachel replied.

“Well, I’m going to find out!” her father vowed.

He began shoving his way through the crowd, cutting a path for Rachel and Molly in his wake. They fell in after him like farmers behind a plow. Just inside the church doors, Rachel realized the interior of the building seemed oddly quiet. Once people got inside, they usually visited right up until the preacher stepped to his pulpit. She strained to see over the shoulders of men, wondering why the crowd seemed to have gathered at the back of the church.

When at last her father had worked his way through the throng, Rachel felt sure she would discover what was holding everyone back from finding their seats. But at first glance around the church, she saw nothing unusual.

“Hells bells, there she is. Took you long enough, darlin’. We were about to give up on you.”

Rachel’s heart leaped. She would have recognized Clint’s voice anywhere. She homed in on the sound and finally made out his blurry outline. He was sitting on the floor, almost precisely where the two of them had been discovered together that other ill-fated morning over two months ago. His back was supported by the rear church pew, one knee raised so he might rest his arm. Beside him sat a jug of liquor.

“Folks, may I present to you my wife?”

Her only thought to get out of there, Rachel pivoted to leave. But the crowd had closed ranks behind her, and there was no way out.

“You can’t run from me, Rachel. Hightail it, and I swear I’ll come after you.”

She turned back to find that he had pushed to his feet. “Why are you doing this?” she asked thinly.

“The way I hear it, you’re planning to leave town. I thought maybe I should clear up a few things before you take off.”

“What things?” she asked expressionlessly.

“Like the fact that I love you.” He took a step toward her.” And that I think you’re beautiful and sweet and absolutely wonderful. And that’s not to mention that I can’t live without you.”

Rachel felt her skin pinken, and she lowered her gaze to the floor. “Oh, Clint, don’t.”

“Oh, Clint, don’t? Why not? Do you think I want to lose you? Dammit, Rachel, you had no business runnin’ off without talkin’ to me. Do you think I care that much if Aunt Hester makes good pies? Hell, no. I like pie as much as the next man, but I can live without it, and so can my brothers. What we can’t do without is the heart of our family. The love and the laughter. Havin’ someone around who’ll leave the laundry tub to boil dry if we need her. Someone to tell stories. Hell, even Useless misses you.”

She squeezed her eyes closed. “You don’t need me. None of you do!”

“Matt’s drinkin’ again!” he bit out. “And last night I joined him. Cody’s got the nightmares again, too. To top that all off, there’s beef and venison hangin’ in the smoke house again, and I gotta tell you that neither the buck or the steer died of old age. And there’s chickens gettin’ their heads chopped off right and left. You gotta come back, Rachel. That’s all there is to it. To save the poor animals, if for no other reason.”

“You’ll just have to save them yourself.”

“The place is goin’ to rack and ruin without you.”

“Not with Aunt Hester there! I’m sure she has everything under control. She’s a paragon.”

“She’s someone to help you with the work, and nothin’ more. Someone to make life a little easier so you can have more fun with your family. When the babies start comin’, she’ll be an even bigger help. But the bottom line is, she’s just a side dish, Rachel, not our main meal. We need you, honey.” He broke off and swallowed hard. “
I
need you.”

Rachel gave a start when his scuffed boots suddenly came into view. The next instant, his large warm hand curled under her chin, and he forced her to look up at him. Rachel discovered that she was standing so close to him that she could see the sooty lashes that lined his eyes, the stormy gray-blue of his irises, the burnished tone of his skin. Her heart kicked hard against her ribs. He looked good enough to eat. He surely did.

“You have to come home,” he said huskily. “There aren’t any flowers on the table, and I love you so much, I can’t live without you.”

With no warning, he bent and began fishing in her skirt pocket. When he came up with nothing, he dived his hand into her other pocket as well. A satisfied gleam entered his eyes. The next thing Rachel knew, he was settling her spectacles on her nose. Bending slightly at the knees, he made a
great show of looking her over. Then he flashed her a devastating grin.

“I knew it. You look adorable in spectacles.” He glanced around, as if to draw comment from others present.

Someone nearby said, “I didn’t know you wore spectacles, Rachel.”

Clint replied, “She darn sure does. She just doesn’t wear them in public because she has the fool notion they don’t look good on her. I disagree. I think she looks beautiful in them.”

Rachel cried, “Clint, stop it. You’re embarrassing me!”

“Then come home with me,” he demanded in an oddly gruff voice, “so I can tell you in private how beautiful I think you are.”

Tears filled Rachel’s eyes, and her spectacles began to fog over. Clint took hold of her hand.

“Please, Rachel. Come back home where you belong. Every hour I spend apart from you, I die a little more inside. Please…” When she didn’t immediately speak, he hastened to add, “I’m sorry you felt cast aside after Aunt Hester came. Lookin’ back, I can see how it must have seemed to you, me all of a sudden backin’ off and usin’ the corn husks as an excuse. But I swear it wasn’t that way. I truly was worried about her hearin’ us.”

Rachel shot a horrified look around. “Be quiet! Do you want everyone to hear!”

“See?” he said with a devilish grin. “It’s a private affair, isn’t it?”

She narrowed her eyes, but it was all she could do not to smile. “You’ve made your point.”

“Then come home,” he said huskily. “Where we can talk in private.”

“Oh, Clint. Are you certain you really want—”

He cut her off with a kiss that answered her question far more eloquently than words. A sweet, wonderful kiss that
sent tingles down her spine and made her toes curl. Exactly the kind of kiss Rachel had always dreamed of and had never received. Until she met Clint Rafferty, of course.

“I love you,” he whispered against her cheek. “Please believe that, Rachel. I’ll love you forever.”

The throbbing timber of his voice, so packed with emotion, would have convinced Rachel. The way his hands shook when he touched her was added proof that he was sincere. Joy welled in her chest, nearly cutting off her breath, and she threw herself into his arms.

His arms…His wonderful strong arms. The instant they closed around her, Rachel knew she was where she belonged and where she would remain.

For the rest of her life.

CATHERINE ANDERSON, the award-winning author of both contemporary and historical fiction, lives with her husband and three canine friends—a mixed spaniel named Kibbles and two Rottweilers named Sam and Sassy, who seem to think they are teacup poodles and that obedience training is for people.

Loretta Chase

Devon, England
June, 1820

The Devil was partial to Dartmoor.

In 1638, he rode a storm into Widdecombe, tore off the church roof with a lightning bolt, and carried off a boy who’d been dozing during the service.

This was merely one of several personal appearances. More often, though, Satan appeared in disguise as an enormous black hound or a ghostly stallion galloping across the moors.

His attachment to the area surprised no one, for Dartmoor could not have been better fashioned to suit satanic natures.

Storms lashed the rocky uplands, which loomed stubbornly in the path of Atlantic gales. Heavy damps swirled into the valleys, blanketing villages in impenetrable mists, shutting off communication and travel for days.

Then there were the bogs, filling the hollows and crevices of the highlands, shrinking and swelling with changing weather and season.

Narrow tracks of firm ground coiled through this unwelcoming terrain, yet even the paths could be perilous. At night, or in a mist or storm, it was easy enough for the unwary traveler to lose his way and—if he were especially unlucky—slip into a pulsing morass from which he would never emerge.

Some believed Dartmoor’s mires were the Devil’s own traps, devised to suck their victims straight down to Hell, Aminta Camoys told her son.

It was twenty-year-old Dorian Camoys’s first visit to Dartmoor and the first time he’d seen his mother since Christmas.

“Most considerate of the Archfiend,” he replied as he walked with her to the edge of the narrow track. “After slow suffocation by quicksand, the unfortunate sinner will find Hell’s torments less shocking to his sensibilities.”

She pointed to a suspiciously verdant patch in the bleak wastes below. “Some are bright green like that. There’s a larger one half a mile ahead, but it’s gray—much better camouflage.”

The afternoon had been bright and warm when they’d first ridden out, but a chill wind whirled about them now, and gray clouds swept in, driving out their wispy white predecessors and blanketing the moorland in shadows.

“Thank you for the directions, Mother,” Dorian said. “But I do believe I can find my own route to Hell.”

“I collect you’ve found it.” She glanced at him and laughed. “Like mother, like son.”

He was like her, in more ways than many would suspect.

Although at six feet tall he was by far the larger, the physical resemblance was inescapable. While fully masculine—and puffy and pale at present, thanks to months of dissipation pursued as diligently as his studies—his was the same exotically sculpted countenance.

At the moment, one would never suspect that she, too, was addicted to sins of the flesh. He was the only one, apart from her lovers, who did know. Dorian was her sole confidante.

My mother, the adultress
, he thought, as he gazed at her.

Like him, she detested hats, resenting even that small concession to propriety. She’d taken off her bonnet as soon as they’d ridden out of sight of the house. Thick raven hair like his, though much longer, whipped about her face and neck in the sharpening wind. And when she turned to him, the same unblinking yellow stare met his.

Because of those odd-colored eyes and their disconcerting stare—and because he kept to himself and hissed at anyone who came too close—the boys at Eton had nicknamed him Cat. The nickname had followed him to Oxford.

“You’d better take care,” she said. “If your grandfather finds out something besides studying is to blame for your pallor, you’ll see all your carefully laid plans swept into the maelstrom of his righteous wrath.”

“I’ve exercised considerable ingenuity to make certain he  doesn’t find out,” Dorian said. “You may be sure I shall make a deceptively healthy appearance at Christmas for the annual lecture intended to guide me through the new year. After which I shall watch him scrutinize—for doubtless the hundredth time—every penstroke of the academic reports, looking for an excuse to yank me out of university. But he won’t find his excuse, no matter how hard he looks. I’ll have my degree—with honors—at the end of next Easter term, and he’ll be obliged to reward me with a year’s trip abroad, as he’s done for the others.”

“And you won’t return,” she said. She moved away, her gaze turning to the surrounding moors.

“I’ll never be free of him if I do. If I don’t find work abroad, I’ll be tied to his purse strings until the day he dies.”

That prospect was intolerable.

His grandfather, the Earl of Rawnsley, was a despot.

Dorian’s father, Edward, was the youngest of the earl’s four sons, all of whom, with their spouses and offspring, lived at Rawnsley Hall in Gloucestershire, where His Lordship could
control their every waking moment. The adults might go away on short visits and spend time in London during the Season, and the boys eventually went away to school; but Rawnsley Hall was their home—or prison—and its master ruled them absolutely. Always, wherever they were, they must behave and think as he told them to.

They did it because they had no choice. Not only did he control all the Camoys money, but he was utterly ruthless. The smallest hint of rebellion was promptly crushed—and the earl had no scruples about how he did it.

When, for instance, whippings, lectures, and threats of eternal damnation proved ineffective with Dorian, Lord Rawnsley turned his vexation upon the incorrigible boy’s parents. That had worked. Dorian could not stand by and watch his parents punished and humiliated for his faults.

Consequently, though he’d been born quick-tempered and rebellious, Dorian had learned very young to keep his feelings and opinions to himself.

His outward behavior strictly regulated, all he had to call his own was his mind—and it was an exceptionally good one. That, too, he’d inherited from his mother, the Camoys not being renowned for intellectual acuity.

Since Dorian had performed brilliantly at Eton, his grandfather had been obliged to send him on to Oxford. In another year, Lord Rawnsley would be obliged, likewise, to finance the year abroad.

Dorian would have one year on the Continent to look for work. He was sure he’d survive, and he wasn’t concerned about living in poverty at first. He would move up in the world eventually. All he had to do was concentrate as he did with his studies…and keep his sensual weaknesses under stricter control.

The thought of his weaknesses drew his mind and his gaze back to his mother. She had taken off her gloves and was playing with her rings.

Gad, but she loved trinkets—and fashionable gowns, and Society…and her romantic intrigues.

He wondered why she’d come to Dartmoor. She’d been born and reared here, yet it hardly suited her nature. She was meant for the gaiety of Society, for parties and gossip and admiring men swarming about her.

He’d expected to find her bored frantic. Instead, she seemed quieter than he could remember her ever being. He supposed her recent illness accounted for the apparent tranquillity. All the same, he couldn’t help wondering why, when the doctor proposed a change of air, she’d asked to come here, of all places. She’d been quite adamant about it, Father said.

He approached her. “I wish you would think about coming to stay with me on the Continent,” he said.

“Don’t be absurd,” she said. “I cannot live in a garret. And don’t pretend you’ll miss me,” she added irritably. “I never was the least use to you. I had all I could do to look out for myself. It isn’t easy, as you well know. Lud, I’m so tired of it. You’ve no idea the relief it is to be here, away from temptation and the everlasting thinking and planning and lying. And pretending, always pretending. No wonder my head still aches. It’s so in the habit of laboring, it doesn’t know how to stop. When there’s nothing to think about, it makes something.”

She thrust her hair back from her face—a habit of his, too, and one that had always irritated his grandfather. “That’s the trouble with secrets,” she said. “You can never be rid of them. They haunt you…like ghosts.”

He smiled. “Your sins are not so grave, Mother. Bertie Trent’s grandmother
*
goes through lovers as she goes through bonnets, they say.”

Her brooding gaze upon the bleak wastes beyond, she did not seem to hear him. “I dreamt my sins took the shape of phantasms,” she said in an odd, low voice. “They pursued
me, like the Furies in Greek myths. It was frightful—and so unjust. I can’t help my nature. You understand.”

Dorian understood all too well. He loathed the weakness in himself, but no matter what he did, he could not master it. He could not resist the scent of a woman; he could scarcely resist the mere thought of one. Time and again the need drove him—and Lord, the distances he traveled, the subterfuges he resorted to…for what always, afterward, left him sick with disgust.

It was not nearly so bad with her, he was aware, but then she was constantly under scrutiny, which he wasn’t, and she was a female, smaller in her sensual appetites as she was in size. Still, even her little escapades had taken their toll on her health.

He ought to heed the warning, Dorian knew. She’d only recently recovered. That made it more than six months since Mr. Budge, the Camoys family physician, had diagnosed a “decline.” She’d spent half that time between a chaise longue and her bed.

Dorian could not afford so long a period of debility. He would fall behind in his studies…and the trip abroad would be delayed…and his bondage to his grandfather would stretch on…

He shook off the grim prospect. “It’s Dartmoor,” he said lightly. “Every foot of ground seems to have a spook attached to it. Small wonder you dream of ghosts and demons. I should be amazed if you didn’t.”

She laughed and turned back to him, her melancholy mood lifting as swiftly as it had descended.

From then until the end of Dorian’s two-day visit, his mother seemed to be her lively self again. She related, along with more Dartmoor legends, all the London gossip gleaned from her friends’ letters, and told slightly improper anecdotes that made Father blush, yet laugh all the same. Away from Rawnsley Hall, Edward Camoys was more human and
less his father’s puppet, and though he still treated his wife like a wayward child, that had suited them both for years.

All seemed well when Dorian departed.

He had no idea that his father had secrets, too, and as the months passed, Edward Camoys would find them increasingly difficult to conceal.

Aminta Camoys’s letter writing, like Dorian’s, was erratic at best. That was why he suspected nothing, though he didn’t hear from her after early September.

It wasn’t until shortly before Christmas, when Uncle Hugo, the earl’s eldest and heir, turned up at Oxford unexpectedly—and, as it turned out, against the earl’s orders—that Dorian learned the truth.

Then, deaf to his uncle’s warnings, Dorian boarded a mail coach headed north.

He discovered his mother where Hugo had said she was.

It was a private, exclusive, and very expensive lunatic asylum.

Dorian found her in a small, rank room, strapped to a chair. She wore a stained cotton gown and thick, rough stockings on her delicate feet. Her long black hair had been sheared to a dark skullcap. She didn’t know who he was at first. When, finally, she recognized him, she wept.

Dorian did not weep, only cursed inwardly while he unfastened the cruel straps. That sent the attendant running out of the room, but Dorian was too distraught to care. He carried his mother to the narrow bed and laid her down and sat beside her and chafed her icy hands and listened, his gut churning, while she told him what they’d done to her.

She’d fallen ill again, she said, and in her weakness, she’d let her secrets out. The earl knew everything now, and so he’d locked her up to punish her because she was a scarlet woman. Her keepers mortified her flesh to make her repent: they starved her and dressed her in stinking rags and made
her sleep on filthy linens. They thrust her into ice baths. They shaved her head. They would not let her sleep: they beat on the door and called her a whore and a Jezebel and told her the Devil was coming for her soul.

Dorian didn’t know what to believe.

Though she sobbed uncontrollably, her speech was coherent. Yet Uncle Hugo had said she’d gone after Father with a knife and tried to burn down the Dartmoor manor house. She heard voices, he said, and saw things that weren’t there, and screamed of ghosts and cruel talons ripping into her skull. Edward Camoys had told nobody about her condition and tried to look after her himself, with the help of the local doctor, Mr. Kneebones. But the earl had visited them in Dartmoor a month ago and, horrified at what he found, summoned physicians from London. Deciding she needed “expert care,” they’d recommended Mr. Borson’s private mad house.

“Don’t look at me so,” she cried now. “I was ill, that was all, and the pain was dreadful, tearing at my skull so that I couldn’t see straight. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t watch my tongue. Too many secrets, Dorian, and I was too weak to keep them in. Oh, please, darling, take me away from this wicked place.”

Dorian didn’t care what the truth was. He knew only that he couldn’t leave her here. He looked about for something to wrap her in, to keep her warm, so that he could carry her away, but there were only the rank bedclothes.

He was tearing them from the bed when the attendant returned, with reinforcements—and Dorian’s grandfather.

The instant the earl entered, Aminta turned into a she-demon. Uttering obscenities and threats in a guttural voice Dorian couldn’t believe came out of her, she lunged at Lord Rawnsley. When Dorian tried to pull her away, she clawed his face. The attendants grabbed her and swiftly shackled her to the bed, where she alternated between bloodchilling curses and heartwrenching sobs.

When Dorian objected to the painful restraints, the
attendants—on the earl’s orders—removed him from the room, then from the building altogether. Shut out, Dorian paced by his grandfather’s carriage while his mind replayed the scene over and over.

He could not stop shuddering because he could not shake off the sickening comprehension of what his mother must feel. In the unpredictable moments of clarity—like the one he’d encountered first—she could look about her and recognize what she’d become and where she was. He could imagine her rage and grief at being treated like a mindless animal. He could imagine, all too vividly, her terror as well—when she felt her control slip and the darkness begin swamping her reason. He had no doubt she knew what was happening to her: she’d said as much, that she was weak and couldn’t keep things in.