Only there was someone.
She jerked and stumbled backward into the shelves, bruising her calves as she did.
Away. She had to get away.
Her fingertips trailed along the unyielding spines as she inched her way to the sofa, one small step for every other shuddering breath she drew.
The man, there on the street, watching the library window—he’d stared straight at her. He was watching still, she just knew—
If I can’t see him, he can’t see me.
She chanted it in time with the beat of her heart, the words melting into a frantic muddle as she sagged toward the floor, commanding her weak legs to move.
Away. She had to get away, to hide—
The library door swung open.
Ah God, the man had come into the house somehow and—
She blinked, looked again.
Sebastian had come.
He looked her over, halfway toward collapsing to the floor, and went for the window.
“Don’t,” she begged. “He’ll see you.”
“That man?” He leaned further into the window frame. “I want him to see me. To let him know I know what he’s about.” He stared out a few moments longer. “That ought to do it. He’s leaving now.”
He sighed when he turned and caught sight of her. “It was only some man passing by,” he said.
“You don’t know that,” she accused. She tried her knees, found them still too weak to hold her.
“No, I don’t. But I’m here, and Junius is in the garden.” He slowly walked toward her, wariness in his steps. “Even if he meant harm, he’d never get past either of us.” He took her hand, pulled her up. “Come. Sit.”
She looked at that hand enclosing hers so completely, warm with just a hint of roughness. It was only a hand, touching only her hand, but she felt the pull of it all the way to her belly.
He led her over to the sofa, her calves aching with each step. He tucked her next to him—and kept hold of her hand.
Yesterday, when she’d pressed that hand to her neck, her thigh, it had trembled as much as her own. She’d learned then that Sebastian was not a man to touch a woman lightly.
“What do you think he wanted?” she asked.
His fingers tightened on hers. “Don’t worry about him,” he said. “That’s my job.”
Hardly an answer.
She wet her dry lips. It wasn’t only the man outside dragging along her nerves. She’d dreamed last night of the judge vomiting up blood and viscera instead of his breakfast. Of being forced to scrub the floor clean of it while McCade watched with his cold half-smile.
But now Sebastian was here and he was holding her hand.
She squeezed her fingers against his, feeling the strength there.
“I would never allow him to harm you,” he said.
“I know.” The fervency in his tone burned away her uncertainty, had her pulse slowing.
Something very like a smile touched his eyes, even as his mouth remained firm. It had felt soft under her lips, though.
“Better?” he asked.
“I am, thank you.”
And she was. As she studied the smile in his eyes, she realized she wanted to kiss him again. Badly. It was a smolder at the center of her, this urge to taste him again.
Her kisses with Joaquin had been pleasant, but never entrancing enough to make her forget herself. She’d taken comfort in the knowledge she was not a woman at the mercy of her baser natures.
But she’d been wrong. With the right man—with Sebastian—her baser natures were powerful enough to run her into the worst irrationality.
What a dreadful time for this realization.
Her heart echoed in her ears, her entire world shrunk to that sound and her desire.
She’d kissed him after being shot at, she’d pressed his hands to the very places where she’d been wounded, she’d told him over and over he was no monster—it was madness, her reaction to him. A madness she wanted to taste again and again.
Such madness did not touch him, judging by his protests after their kiss. He was here only to protect her, to ensure she made it to that witness stand.
A smart rap to her heart, that.
But he made things better. Always, he made her feel better. She wanted to do more than kiss him. She wanted to unlock him, to get a close look at the gears that made him run.
“Isabel?” Such steady concern in his voice. “Are you certain you’re all right?”
No. She thought it had only been her orderly existence that McCade had tipped off its axis with a flick of his trigger finger.
But she herself was upended as well.
“I’m fine.” She pulled her hand from his, but the heat of his touch lingered. “A little bored, I’m ashamed to admit.” She waved weakly to the books surrounding them. “I certainly have enough to choose from.”
“Did you find something to your taste?”
“I thought I might read Middlemarch again, but I find myself unable to.”
“Hmmm. We shall have to find something to hold your attention, then.”
The smolder in her belly flamed as she thought of one particular activity that would hold her attention.
A crease formed between his brows as he pondered how to entertain her. She wanted to touch that furrow with the tips of her fingers, to get the texture of it under her skin—
“Isabel?”
“Pardon?” She blinked hard. She’d been staring so intently at him she hadn’t registered his words.
“I asked, do you play chess?” That smile was back in his eyes.
“No.” She’d always wanted to learn, though. “We’ll have to find something else to occupy us.”
“I can teach you. If you’d like.”
Ah, those words and what they did to her insides. He wanted to teach her. No one had offered to teach her anything since... well, since she had become a teacher.
“Yes. Please.” She smiled at him with all the gratitude she felt.
Some time later, he set the board for their second game. “So,” he said, “you lead the local temperance meeting.”
“Yes. We’ve had some successes—the saloon shut down last year.” For all that she and the Obregon sisters would likely never join in such a cause again, it remained a proud moment.
“Really?” He adjusted one last piece on the board. “I won’t go easy on you this time.”
“I’ll still win.”
“Doubtful. How did you get the saloon shut down?”
She made her first move. “Well, it took months of work. The saloon owner, unsurprisingly, was most resistant to our appeals. So I went to speak to James Harper.”
“He’s one of the most prominent men in town, isn’t he?”
She nodded. “He’s also a teetotaler.” Her voice strengthened as she went on—he was listening with the most gratifying attentiveness. “After some carefully reasoned arguments on my part, appealing to his moral nature, he spoke with the man who owned the building housing the saloon. The saloonkeeper was told to look for new accommodations, and he chose to leave Cabrillo.”
She left out their previous efforts to convince the other men in town to stop frequenting the saloon, efforts that had failed. And there was no need to speak of the anger those men had directed at her once the saloon was gone.
“What did your fiancé think of your efforts?” He kept his eyes firmly on the board, but there was hint of something—disapproval?—in his voice.
“Oh, Joaquin was most supportive. A town without a saloon is one with fewer disturbances.”
He nodded abstractedly at the board. “That is very true.”
“It hasn’t all been victories,” she admitted. She deployed her castle, seeing an opportunity to capture his bishop and harass his king. “My efforts in the valley to organize a temperance meeting haven’t been as fruitful. And in Cabrillo… well, the Larsens still sell liquor out of their living room on Saturday nights and provide whiskey at the barn dances. Not
even the ax incident halted that.”
His eyes were quicksilver with surprise. “The ax incident?”
Heat crawled under her cheeks. She wasn’t particularly proud of that story.
“At one dance the men were imbibing much more heavily than usual. I’m not certain why. It doesn’t excuse the violence of my response, but one particular man—Mr. Kern—his wife was only a month away from delivering their fourth child and he was near to falling down with drink. It made me angry that she must suffer his drunken attentions, his loss of control, while in such a vulnerable state.”
“So you went for an ax?”
Her face felt as if the noonday sun were burning it. “No, not then. I saw my sister with…” She sighed. “With Billy Carey, of all people.” Her ears buzzed to hear herself say his name. “He was trying to get her alone, rather roughly, and she was resisting. He pinched her, hard enough to make her scream. She managed to throw him off and ran back to the barn. So I found an ax and smashed every last bottle of whiskey I found.”
She kept her eyes firmly on the board, pretending to ponder her next move, but in truth not wanting to see censure in his gaze.
“You did the right thing.”
Her gaze snapped to his. No one had thought her action that night to be correct—the town had laughed about it behind her back.
“It was very immoderate of me,” she pointed out.
“And the drunkards there weren’t behaving immoderately?” He drew an edge on the question.
She wasn’t quite sure what to say to that. Even Joaquin had disapproved of what she’d done. She’d never told Catarina that she’d seen Billy’s assault on her, that the entire incident had been to avenge her sister. No doubt because her initial impulse had been so reprehensible—she’d heard her sister’s scream and thought, Catarina shouldn’t have gone off with him like that.
But of course her sister had never deserved such treatment.
He slid his knight across the board, not waiting for her answer. “So, you took up the cause of temperance for your sister?” he asked.
“No, for my students. My father never touches strong spirits, so it was in my students where I first saw the damage a drunken father can do to a family.”
She’d seen her students going hungry because their father had spent the grocery money at the saloon the weekend before, their mothers swelling with yet another baby they couldn’t house because their fathers couldn’t control their animal urges—and then there were the bruises…
Being confronted with the damage to her pupils, knowing there was little she could do to prevent it—if ridding a town of liquor spared those children, she’d smash every bottle herself.
He pinched a rook between his fingers much too tightly, the skin going red and white with the force he was applying. “I see.”
She swallowed hard, debating how far she should take this conversation. Unease was written in his shoulders, in the too-hard grip of his fingers. She wanted to soothe that unease, to give him the comfort he’d offered so often to her, rather than make things worse.
But he had brought the subject up. “I made it my mission to save those innocents—the wives, the children—from that. Why should those who are most powerless pay the price for a man’s weakness?”
He set the rook back on the board almost too carefully, never looking up. “Innocents always pay the price. You would have to overturn the entire world to change that.”
You paid that price, didn’t you? You and your mother.
“Even so, we must try. Even if our efforts are doomed to failure, the struggle is still worthwhile,” she urged.
He continued scrutinizing the board, although it wasn’t his move. She sensed him struggling with something within—not the darkness she sometimes saw, but something deeply melancholic.
When they’d discussed justice before, her arguments had slid right off that reserve of his. But she’d touched a buried nerve this time.
“If you think the struggle is useless,” she asked gently, “why become a marshal?”
“I don’t believe the struggle is useless, only that…” He gave a wave of his hand, the futility in the gesture squeezing at her heart. “I became a marshal because I do believe in justice. But I know it’s not always served.”
She pushed further. “So you do consider what happens after you deliver a man to the courts?”
He closed his eyes for a moment. “I try not to. What you do, fighting for temperance, losing as often as you win… The directness of being a marshal suits me.”
It pained him to speak of this—and an answering echo of that pain moved through her.
“Yes,” she said slowly. “It does suit you.” Studying him for a moment, taking in the melancholy weighing on him, she pondered her next words. “You say that you could not do as I do, fighting for temperance… well, I could not do what you do, protecting the innocent from the criminal. We each of us have our own fight, and none is less consequential than another.”
His face, when he lifted it from the board, was suffused with a gratitude that pained her to see. His gaze held hers for a long moment, and then his expression twisted, mirrored her own ache, and he looked away.
He said nothing, simply breathed into the silence, his hunched shoulders speaking of a need to conceal himself.
Enough. She couldn’t allow his torment to continue.
“Shall we finish?” she asked with studied calm.
He straightened, inhaled deeply, and slipped back into impassivity once more. But his next question betrayed his clouded thoughts. “Finish what?”
She gestured to the board.
He frowned down at it. “But you won. Again.”
The pique in his voice had her biting back a smile. “Another game?”
An hour later, he was staring at the board in the most delightful state of bafflement. She was only two moves from checkmate—again—and he was dreadfully perturbed.
She watched him considering his options as he studied the pieces, his frown deepening as he discarded one possibility after another. And then, his eyes never leaving the board, he raised his thumb to his mouth and sank his white teeth deep into it, holding tightly.
She nearly gasped. He had never before done anything so… abandoned. She could imagine her own teeth sinking into that exact same spot, his skin yielding to the firmness of her mouth, his eyes fluttering closed in surrender—it made her shudder to her very toes.
“You won. Again.” Close to a growl.
She blinked hard to clear her mind. “Do you regret teaching me the rules now?”
His mouth twisted. “Yes, I do.”
She busied herself with the board, trying to ignore the persistent quivering in her belly. “Don’t like to lose, do you?”
“No. I thought the first two games were sheer chance, but this third?” His eyes narrowed, giving the quivers new life. “Were you by chance lying when you said you didn’t know how to play?”
She snorted at the slur to her honor. “Certainly not. I’m simply better at this game than you are.”
“No more chess, please. Let’s find a game you’re not good at.”
“It doesn’t exist. I never would have expected you to be so put out by losing.” She wagged a finger at him. “You’d best be careful, or I’ll have all your secrets soon.”
His gaze dropped, his limbs tightened—and the atmosphere turned oppressive.
“I certainly hope not,” he said quietly.
She swallowed and tried for levity. “Why, are you afraid I’ll stumble across your mad wife in some locked room?”
His gaze slid over her, leaving gooseflesh in its wake. “Hardly. And you are not poor, plain, or obscure.”
Well, well, so he was familiar with Jane Eyre. And Pride and Prejudice and Portrait of a Lady and Ramona and likely scores more she had yet to mention.
“You do read novels!”
“I never said I didn’t read novels. I said I didn’t care for them.”
&nb
sp; “You seem to have read quite a few for someone who doesn’t like them.”
“I read them to my mother.” His voice was soft, almost regretful, as he looked off at nothing. “She was… blinded in her right eye and can’t read for long periods. It gives her a headache. So I read to her. And once I read a passage, I remember it. Always.”
Her lungs emptied in a rush, as if he’d worked her like a bellows. “Oh.” She searched for a response. “I didn’t notice. About your mother.”
He continued to ponder something she couldn’t see. “There were a great many things no one noticed.”
She laid a hand on his arm, her skin starkly white against his suit. Had any other man told her he read novels to his mother, she would have thought it unremarkable.
In him, she thought it extraordinary.
“I shall pray for you,” she offered. “The both of you.”
He shook his head. “My mother is… She doesn’t need those prayers any longer. But me?” His voice was harsh, low. “I do. I most certainly do.”
“Then I will pray for you.” Pray that his torment might cease, that he might find a measure of peace.
He turned to her, his expression bleak, and her heart rent at the sight.
She wanted to offer him something, some assurance that he wasn’t alone—but he already had all of her secrets. Knew how deeply she herself had suffered.
But she did have something to offer him—it wasn’t her own secret, but it might ease his pain.
“My mother,” she began, “she was married before. He—he hurt her.” Isabel’s heart hammered with anxiety. Perhaps she ought not to be sharing this, perhaps she ought to have kept this last secret to herself—she prayed she wasn’t miscalculating.
His expression remained bleak. “Such a story is all too common. There’s nothing unusual in it.”
She recognized the impulse behind those words; he didn’t think himself deserving of sympathy.
“There’s more to the story. You’ve heard of the Alvarado heiress, I’m sure. The one who… who shot Judge Bannister’s brother.” She couldn’t say murder, couldn’t say the word husband.
“Of course.” Puzzlement creased his brow. “Bannister men murdered her brother, supposedly. She disappeared after killing her husband. But the judge had nothing to do with that—he was a very young man at the time.”
Autumn Sage Page 20
