by Jillian Hart
He feared it wasn’t his bitterness as much as the tarnish of prison that he could never wear off. If it’s real love, it can’t break. That’s what she’d said. That’s what she’d told him. That she would love him no matter what.
Now was the test. The time to know if her love was real. Or if any love, no matter how true and rare, could stand this test without shattering.
He feared he already knew how this would go, but when there was a war and his country needed him, he fought for the Union. When his mother found herself homeless and abandoned by her first white husband, he’d settled down, started a business and taken care of her.
When a spoiled little rich girl had lied, he hadn’t run. He’d faced the vigilante’s justice and then a trial with a jury who’d already made up their minds. He’d served time and he’d been released.
He was no coward, no quitter, no fop that would rather run than fight.
Even if that fight would cost him Betsy’s love.
She twinkled like the stars in the heavens. How could it be that no other man had snatched her up and made her his wife? How could it be possible that this amazing creature brightened in his presence? That she looked to him with love and trust and came to him with her hands out, ready to take his. Expectation lighting her up.
It was all going to end. He knew it.
He should say the words. Just spit it out. It didn’t have to be pretty. It didn’t have to be nice. It just had to be honest. The truth, plain and simple.
No embellishment, no explanations, just the stark facts. And then he’d better prepare for her to hate him. To shudder at the thought of letting a man like him touch her intimately, love her tenderly, and dream of cherishing her forever.
“That was your mother?” he found himself saying instead. Coward, he wanted to call himself, but how could any man, regardless of how strong, knowingly say anything that would cause her pain?
“How long were you watching? It was odd that I didn’t know you were there. You are…so distant. I can feel you, isn’t that strange?”
“No, because I can feel you, too.”
“I can’t now.”
“No.” How could he tell her he’d made himself as frozen as the night. As empty. As dark. “I would not be a man, or what a man ought to be, if I don’t tell you the truth.”
“What truth?” Her hands found his and her touch was as startling as lightning from a clear blue sky. As snow in June. As a twister pointing from the clouds to the sky and touching down without warning.
He was not so well shielded, after all. “I’m not a little in love with you.”
“You’re not?” Her brow wrinkled.
He leaned his forehead to hers, an intimate connection, tender as she gazed into his eyes and the worry lines fell away. He searched for the right words, words for feelings he could not describe or name. Only wish he didn’t feel.
“And I’m not just a lot in love with you.”
“Me, either.” As if she understood, her lush mouth curved into an inviting grin. “You are a gift. You know that, don’t you? When I never thought I would ever feel this way again, I found you. A man I love more than anything. I didn’t know it was possible to love someone so much.”
Hell, she was killing him. As if shot in the gut and mortally bleeding, his knees turned to water and it was all he could do to stay standing. To force the confession from his soul. “Yes.”
It was only one word, but her breath caught like a sob and her fingertips brushed his chin, pulling him to her kiss.
He hungered for her. Not out of lust, it went far deeper than that. It was love overwhelming him, flooding him with a fierce need to make her his again and again. To hold her tight while he could. Before she knew the real Duncan Hennessey, past and scars and all, and could not accept him.
He’d seen her mother. One of those proper society matrons who judged no one ever to be good enough. She was the kind of woman who’d been the most hateful to him those long years ago. In another town, in another time, but he would never forget the outraged mothers who’d wanted him hung and only after a good beating for daring to harm a judge’s daughter.
And not only because of the rape; those women had made it seem doubly worse that he was a half-breed, a man without social or financial clout. A working man with nothing but a storefront and a savings account at the town bank.
Betsy’s mother was the kind of woman who condemned without mercy and if she knew of his past, there was no way Betsy would be standing before him alone and unguarded by all of her brothers and half the town.
“You’ve ridden all that way and you’ve got to be freezing. Your hands are ice.” She kissed his knuckles, her lips caressing and nibbling and sucking.
All proper woman, but warmhearted and passionate, too. He swallowed, trying not to remember exactly how passionate, how tenderly she’d shown him how much she loved him, for remembering would only make it harder.
“Do you want to come home with me? You can warm up by the fire in the parlor and I’ll warm up some stew and cornbread.”
“What I have to say won’t take long.”
“Something is wrong, and I have a suspicion I know what.” She could feel the hurt rolling off him like vapor from an icy pond and she wasn’t about to leave him alone. Mama might be innocent of the cruelty her family had shown him, but that didn’t mean Joshua hadn’t decided to intervene.
Well, she knew exactly how to handle him. As for Duncan, he was like a warrior of old: powerful and silent and invincible.
A real man, who’d stolen every last bit of her heart.
“Come home with me.”
“Home with you? Alone?” There were houses lined up in orderly rows, their windows golden rectangles, and they seemed so close. He felt so closed in.
But it wasn’t the structures or the town. It was him, twisted up until his skin felt so tight he was ready to pop right out of it. He’d felt like this while he waited for the jury’s verdict. It had taken them exactly forty-five minutes to declare him guilty. Despite his alibi, despite the discrepancies in the young lady’s story. Truth didn’t matter, he’d learned that the hard way.
What had Betsy said to him? You’re such a good man. What possible bad thing could you have done? Words that had given him faith to hold her hand in his and to know there was nothing he would ever do to hurt her.
She had to know the truth about him. He didn’t want it coming from her overbearing brother or that fierce granny of hers. She deserved to hear the story from him, and the freedom and time to decide for herself what she believed. If the words she’d said were ones she meant.
And if not…
Then at least they both knew. They could end it here, before they became more involved and before it was even harder to walk away. To minimize the pain and the heartbreak.
“No, I don’t want to be alone with you. This is fine. There’s no one around and this won’t take long.”
“You are starting to scare me. What’s happened?” Her hand stroked his chest, as if he were a cat to calm. In the shadows, silhouetted by the streets of houses, he could see the round worry of her eyes. “Did you hear what my mother said?”
“No, this isn’t about your mother, but it is about your family. There’s no other way to do this, and I know it’s going to hurt you. And I’m sorry.”
“Are you ending this? Please, don’t tell me that. I meant what I said this afternoon and I thought you did, too.”
He could feel how he’d hurt her, and it was killing him. There was no way he could let her think he didn’t love her. “Being with you is the very best thing that has happened in my life. I can’t tell you—”
There were no words, only actions, and so he kissed her one last sweet time. The brush of their lips, the mix of their very breaths, the sweep of their souls was like touching heaven. He savored her as long as he could. Love beat in his heart as he broke away.
“Remember how I told you that I have a past I’m not proud of?” He s
troked her chin with the pad of his thumb, doing anything to touch her, to remain connected to her.
She leaned into his caress, feeling the connection, too. “And I said what possible bad thing could you have done?”
The way she said it was as if she saw the real Duncan Hennessey, the man he’d always been. It was a heartening experience to have someone so good, someone who cared truly for him and saw the truth in him.
But would her opinion hold when she knew more?
Please, don’t fail me, he pleaded as he took a breath. “You hardly know anything about me. About what I’ve done. A while back I spent ten years in the territorial prison.”
There. He’d said it. He wasn’t waiting around to see the look of horror on her face. He already knew how she would recoil. It was predictable. What woman on earth would want a man like him? He was hard. He was obstinate. He was cold. A convicted felon, a rapist, had no chance of a normal life. None at all.
He didn’t blame her one bit for the shock dragging down her jaw. For the way she stammered, unable to speak, too confused by what he’d said.
“I don’t understand.” She shook her head, but it didn’t clear it of the thunder crashing through her ears so loud, she couldn’t think. Only it wasn’t thunder, it was her pulse and she couldn’t seem to take in enough breath. “Y-you were in prison?”
“Yep. I was sentenced and sent to the hard labor camp up near Deer Lodge. The quarry, where I worked from sunup to sundown every day for ten hellish years. I paid my debt, and I don’t intend to go back.”
Jail. Ten years of hard labor. It didn’t make sense. She couldn’t get her mind to think. She’d expected him to have overheard what her mother said, about the banker and tolerating whomever it was Mama had chosen.
But not this. She hadn’t expected him to say this. “Prison?”
“Yes. I’m a convict.”
She said nothing more, and that said everything. He couldn’t wait for the shock to wear off and her disgust to sink in, so before she could say anything that would break him, he walked away.
She didn’t call out for him.
He didn’t expect her to. He kept going, leading his gelding down the shadowed road, his boots crunching in the accumulating snow, until he reached the main street. Looking back, she was still standing in the lot next to her buggy. Snow crowned her. Made her shimmer like an angel in the background light from all the windows up and down the street.
You disappointed me, Betsy. His soul throbbed with a pain that felt worse than defeat. More encompassing than sorrow. He’d lost his future; he’d lost more.
He’d never hold her again. Never bask in the cheer of her smile. He’d never know what it would be to call her his wife. To hold her in his arms at night while they drifted off to sleep. Never know what it was like to be loved, truly loved.
It was a pretty high price to pay, and to keep paying. But she’d behaved about the way he’d expected. She was a proper town lady. Her mother had appeared to be a matron of society in her finely tailored clothes and expensive surrey and with her personal driver. Betsy Hunter was a rich woman’s daughter, and women like that didn’t marry men like him. Loners. Outcasts. Convicts.
It was a good thing he was made of steel. Nothing could hurt him. Not anymore.
He mounted up, nosed the gelding into the frigid wind and rode through the snow and the night where no moon lit his path. Where no stars shone on the polished nightscape.
It was a dark night, cold and mean. He rode until he was like the night, desolate, and without a speck of hope to save him.
Chapter Nineteen
The dense shadows of nightfall were made longer by the snow falling around her, cold pieces of ice she could not feel. She could not move. She could not think. She watched as Duncan walked away, back straight, without looking back. His confession reverberated in her mind over and over again. I spent ten years in the territorial prison.
Prison? He was in prison? She simply could not believe it, and yet he’d been very clear. Prison. How could that be? He radiated strength and integrity. While she’d never known a convict before, she knew Duncan. She’d felt his heart, touched his soul. If she closed her eyes and became very still she could feel his emotions, as if they were her own. All she felt was one big black glacier of pain and misery.
He was trying to drive her away, just as he’d done all along. And this was why. He didn’t believe she could ever look beyond his past. And who could?
A criminal. No, she couldn’t see it. Maybe she didn’t want to see it. But no matter how hard she tried, she could not imagine him doing something so wrong or illegal. Not the same man who made such beautiful furniture. Nor the man who kept volumes of English poetry in his log cabin. Certainly not the man who had opened up to her and loved her with devoted tenderness.
It wasn’t only that she couldn’t imagine Duncan a criminal; it was that he had the heart of a poet and the soul of an artist, despite the growling and snarling and the solitary life in the wilderness.
He’d lost his family. He’d lost ten years of his life. The question was, why?
She could not love a bad man. Could she?
He’d gone. There was no one to ask but the snow tumbling down everywhere, making the world feel more cold and heartless as she climbed into her buggy.
All the way home, his confession troubled her. All the while unhitching the buggy and stabling Morris, she felt as frozen as the winter landscape. Her heart ached from disbelief, shock or disappointment, she couldn’t say. Only that the house looked so dark as she latched the stable door behind her and trudged through the yard.
The hinges on the garden gate gave a mournful squeal and she had to give it a hard shove to knock aside the wet snow that had accumulated so she could squeeze past. If a storm wasn’t blowing in to stay and there had still been even a drop of daylight to see by, she’d have headed out of town as fast as Morris could go. She would have hunted down Duncan and demanded the answers to her questions. What had he done? How could the man she loved be a convicted criminal?
She’d felt his heart. She’d touched his spirit and she knew. Whatever it was didn’t matter. Whatever he’d done had happened a long time ago, obviously. It suddenly all made sense, how he kept away from people, how he’d found contentment living on the mountainside. How he kept everyone at a far distance.
Whatever he’d been as a much younger man, he had changed. Whatever had happened, maybe it was what Mariah had said, how he’d lost his family and that had changed him for the better. The Duncan Hennessey she knew was a hardworking and honest man who made beautiful furniture, wasn’t afraid of hungry and wounded bears and who read Shakespeare during the long cold evenings in his home.
That was the Duncan she loved and trusted. This Duncan had spoken with shame of his past. He feared it would drive her away—and it probably should. Heaven knew that if Mama ever got wind of this information, she’d have a conniption that would be the talk of the town for the next twenty years.
Well, she doesn’t have to know. No one does. Duncan had paid for his crime. He obviously had become a good, strong man and maybe that spoke even better of him. Perhaps that showed that he’d overcome great mistakes and circumstances, and while he might be bitter, he was a man who could love and protect and, when he touched her, there was only tenderness in his hands, in his voice, in his warrior’s soul.
Duncan had expected her to reject him, she could see that now. And he was wrong.
Love still burned for him, more brightly than ever. She needed to tell that to Duncan. She’d have to wait until morning to see him, and she didn’t know how she was going to even pretend to sleep. Not when she could feel his pain. Not when she knew he was hurting, believing he was alone in the world.
He wasn’t. He wouldn’t be, not ever again.
Determined, she trudged through the snow toward her dark house. In the thick blackness the snow cast a ghostly glow to the roof and eaves and the rails of the porch where the precipitation
clung. A man’s shadow huddled on one of the chairs she’d bought in the furniture store. A prickling crawled down her nape and beneath her collar and a cold uneasiness sharpened her senses. It wasn’t Duncan. Whoever it was he remained as still as stone, and in the dark she couldn’t see his face, but she recognize the tang of pipe smoke lingering in the air and the hunch of wide shoulders.
“Joshua?”
He didn’t move. He sat as still as ever. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong. Panic shot through her. And launched her up the steps. “Is Mama all right? Granny? She’s not sick, is she—”
“No.” His answer came like a single echo of thunder. “Ma said something interesting when I ran into her at the mercantile.”
Oh, here it comes. Betsy braced herself for her brother’s fury because in truth, he was going to get a little bit of hers in return. “All of my life, I’ve looked up to you, Joshua Monroe Gable. You’ve been my big brother. My confidant. My comfort when I lost Charlie. And my very first laundry customer.”
He slowly rose, unfolding his over-six-foot frame from the shadows. “Don’t you find fault with me, I know that’s where you’re going—”
“Damn right I am!” She didn’t care if she interrupted him or that he was twice her size, she kept coming, ready to knock him off the porch if that’s what it took. “You left him there to fend for himself. When he was too wounded to do more than breathe! You left him!”
“Do you see why I did? I knew this would happen! That you’d develop this heroic view of him and he’s nothing but a common—”
“Don’t you dare say it! He’s served time, I know, he told me. But he saved me, and not just from the bear. You and Granny had no right to abandon him—” She wanted to grab her porch broom, the old one she used for sweeping the snow off the steps and whack him with it, not to hurt him, but to knock some sense into him. “It was wrong what you did, and you had no right. He could have died. He certainly suffered—”
“That would be too good for the likes of him. Suffering! Ha!” Dark rage poured off Joshua and, as if he’d guessed her desire, he grabbed the broom by the battered handle and marched past her, his boots slamming into the boards, punctuating his fury. “He’s a rapist! Did he tell you that?”
