by Jillian Hart
“What?”
“A rapist. According to Granny, who’d been visiting her sister at the time, it was all over the local papers down south. He’d helped himself to a pretty young lady, a judge’s daughter, and the law showed him no mercy, just as he deserved. They ought to have hung him, a monster like that, but they sent him to prison over at Deer Lodge.”
“The hard-labor prison?”
“Not hard enough. He served his time, they let him out when he ought to be caged like the animal he is. And to think you’d been driving out to deliver his laundry. Think what could have happened! What he could have done to you! Do you see now why we did it?”
Her knees gave out and she sank weakly onto the nearby chair. The chair Duncan had made with his big, gentle hands. Gentle hands she’d experienced on nearly every inch of her body. The tender caresses, the knowing strokes and the loving touches.
No, it can’t be true.
“All the times you could have been assaulted, and we didn’t even know the danger. To think he could have hurt you and worse, and we might never have known what had become of you. You can never see him again. You see now why you must stay away from him?” Joshua savagely swiped the top step with the broom and the wooden part that held the bristles flew off the handle.
“It’s broken. You have to be careful with it.”
“Then buy a new one that works!” Joshua’s temper was burgeoning as he stormed down the steps, grabbed the broken part from the snow and bent to twist it back onto the wooden handle. “Damn it, I’ll buy you one myself.”
He tossed both the bristles and the handle into the dark reaches of the yard. “I need to hear the words, Betsy. Tell me you won’t go anywhere near that man. I couldn’t live with myself if I let something happen to you.”
“Oh, Joshua. The very worst thing has happened—No, he didn’t touch me.” She stood, trembling with shock, but she was not weak. No, she was not afraid or heartbroken or confused. It was all very clear. “Did you tell this to Mama?”
“Tell her? Hell, no, it would have sent her into the vapors. We all love you. We want what’s best for you.”
“I know you do.” She pressed a kiss to his cheek, her poor, misdirected brother. “But I’m not a little girl. I’m thirty years old. I can take care of myself. Go home, and don’t tell anyone about this.”
“You’re one of those soft hearted types, Betsy. You’re not going to go see him, right? You understand how serious this is? He’s a monster, and there’s no way I’m ever going to let him hurt you.”
“Don’t worry, Josh.” She stepped away, lost in the night, overcome by the truth.
She saw it all so clearly, what had happened. That Duncan had come to her tonight with his confession, and it shone in an entirely new light. All that he hadn’t said weighed on her now as she leaned against the railing, snow wetting through her coat, but she didn’t care.
“There is no more danger,” she told him. “There is no need to worry. Just leave me alone.”
“You cared about him?” Joshua sounded incredulous.
“No, I was in love with him.” There was no possible way her brother could understand. He’d never been in true love, the kind that came not from the physical, but from the soul. So he could not understand what she’d lost.
She put her face in her hands and wept. Wept for the man who’d walked away from her. Grieved for what could never be.
Chapter Twenty
It was a sloppy and nasty mess. Duncan wiped his rain-drenched hair off his forehead and positioned the wood chunk with the awl. Last night’s snow had turned to rain and until winter set in for good, the yard would be mud. The snow melting on the roof was going to keep sliding down in dangerous chunks he would have to watch out for, and everywhere sang the musical drip of water. Off the trees, off the stable, plopping into the mud puddles and the stream made by so much runoff gurgling everywhere.
He’d had a bad night. He hadn’t been able to sleep at all. He’d woken to a dismal day and worked in the downpour since sunup, not that he could have seen the sun then or for a single moment since.
He hefted the sledgehammer to his shoulder and, summoning up all the strength he possessed, swung. The iron head rammed the awl into the wood grain, tearing the heavy wood chunk into two smaller parts. Smaller, in that it would take several dozen swings of the ax to split the hunk into manageable sizes for the stove.
Puffing in the cool damp air, he bent to kick the pieces out of the way for splitting later and dragged another log into position. That’s when he heard it. The faint squeak, squeak, squeak of a buggy wheel. Of Betsy’s buggy wheel.
She ought to get that thing fixed and oiled.
He turned his back to her. He had better things to do than to listen to her tirade. Yeah, he already knew why she was here. She’d come to give him a piece of her mind for deceiving her. For being a criminal. For a man like him daring to touch a good woman like her.
Hell, he agreed with her. Her silence had said everything last night. Her shock had cut him to the quick.
So much for unconditional love.
Bitterness filled him up like fouled, black water, and he turned away. Tried hard to find some reason to hate her, because hate was a good shield. Anger was one, too. Except, how could he be mad at her? How could he hate the sunshine of a woman who’d healed him?
She’d come to say her piece, he knew women had a knack for doing that, but the truth was, something within him had changed. The bleak suffocating pain that had haunted him for half his adult life was gone.
He’d found the man he used to be before prison and discovering his mother’s grave. A man who was more than bitterness, more than what circumstances had made him. He stood taller now. No matter how others looked at him or what they called him, he knew the truth down deep in his soul. It was time he let go of that great wound. He knew he was no criminal. He was no rapist. He could not be broken.
The squeaking sound approached and he kept his back to her. He didn’t need to look at her. It was over. There was no sense in stirring up longing he could never satisfy and love he could never express. He sent the sledgehammer into the awl and the steeled wedge cracked open the enormous log. Rain sluiced down the back of his neck and wet his shirt from the inside as well as the outside.
He didn’t turn when the buggy stopped squealing and he could sense the radiant light of her presence. He just bit out while he kept on working. “What do you want? I hope to hell you didn’t come for my laundry.”
“Uh, no. It’s not my usual delivery day.”
He retrieved the awl and positioned it, tapping it into the center of the log round where sap seeped like blood. He kept his heart hard and his eye on the wedge of steel and he pulled back the hammer. “I have no time to listen to a woman’s idle chatter. I’m firing you as my laundry lady. Get outta here.”
With all the agony of his broken heart, he heaved the sledgehammer through the air and onto the target. Metal screamed and wood ripped apart. Huffing, he didn’t look at her. He erased her from his thoughts, from him senses and from his memory.
“Well, I refuse to be fired.”
“Too bad.” He remembered to count to ten, but all he could see was red. Anger built in his head like steam in an engine, roiling ever hotter. “How much do I owe you?”
“You always pay ahead. You know that.”
“So then what’s keeping you?” He didn’t bother to wait for her reply. “I’ve got work to do.”
He heard her sharp intake of breath. He’d hurt her. He wasn’t proud of it. In fact, agony ripped through his belly as he did what he had to do.
But he was no longer a dead man who was still walking. He was achingly alive and it was all Betsy’s fault. She’d done this to him, and like a bear out of hibernation, he could feel the cold, feel the pain and emptiness that his life had been. He tossed down the ax, sending the dangerous edge deep into the earth, and marched away. When everything within him screamed for him to go to her, he
forced his feet to carry him in the opposite direction.
“Wait, Duncan! I brought a peace offering.” When she should have been furious with him, when her lovely voice ought to have been dripping with contempt, her words carried a hint of humor.
Humor? That didn’t make any sense. Puzzled, he turned and there she was, holding a strawberry pie. The golden crust oozed the sweet fruit through the flowers cut into the covering.
“Do you have to put flowers on everything?” he growled.
“I don’t know how to cut a bear into pastry, or I would have done that in honor of your charming personality.” Her chin thrust up and there was a challenge in her beautiful eyes, not hatred. Her mouth was lush and bow-shaped, as if anticipating his kiss, not pulled down into a grimace of loathing.
She was everything he loved, everything he desired and everything he’d hungered for through years too lonely to describe or to think about. “Why are you bringing a peace offering?”
“Because of how I treated you yesterday when you came to me. When you came to tell me about your past.” She set the pie back in the buggy and wiped her hands on her skirt and she came to him.
A roar filled his ears and he felt as if he were shattering from the inside out. “I don’t understand. Why are you here?”
“I brought a strawberry pie. It’s probably not equal to the way I behaved yesterday, but I was simply so surprised. And then, after speaking with Joshua, I knew why.”
His head bowed forward and he stood back straight, arms at his sides, legs braced, looking like a man who knew he’d lost everything and still, if nothing else, had the pride to stand upright. “I don’t want your pie.”
“In a way, my strawberry pie started this. I thought it would be appropriate.”
“To end it?” He scoffed, and it was a bitter sound.
But it didn’t ring true. His pain fractured through her and she dared to lay her hand on the center of his back. She felt the snap and crackle of attraction and the stir of her soul. This man was the one she would love and take good care of for the rest of her life.
“No, I told you this is a peace offering. Because I need to ask you to forgive me. I should have said to you then, Duncan, ‘that doesn’t make sense.’ How could a man like you, so noble and true, have done anything to land you in a hard-labor prison?”
He remained like granite. As still as the mountains in winter and silent beneath sheets of glacial ice. He didn’t even appear to be breathing.
“But when Joshua said you’d been convicted of rape, I knew for absolute certain.”
He squeezed his eyes so tight they hurt. He didn’t have to listen; he simply had to appear to be listening. Let her say her piece, take her pie and leave forever.
But her hand on his back made it impossible to stay as cold as stone. His spirit turned to her like the earth to the sun and he waited for her hateful words because he deserved them.
He should have told her from the start. Then they never would have fallen in love and became lovers and he wouldn’t be standing here, with everything that ever mattered in his life crumbled to bits for the second time—no, the third time in his life.
“There is no way you could have done anything so terrible.”
Hope lurched in his chest even as he knew he had to have imagined what she’d said. Everyone save for his mother had taken one look at him and judged him to be guilty.
“I know the man you are.”
She swirled around him, her skirts brushing his ankles as she wrapped her arms around him and laid her cheek upon his chest. Her tangled curls bounced and shimmered and he went rigid, not believing. He simply couldn’t believe.
“You were innocent. You would never hurt a woman, and I know because you were willing to give your life for mine, the laundry lady you detested— I noticed you didn’t like me so much at first.”
“You’ve got that wrong,” he ground out, not believing this could be real, but wrapping his arms around her tight anyway. “I loved you from the very first moment I saw you in that frilly buggy of yours and you wearing a yellow bonnet and yellow dress. And I knew in a million lifetimes that I could never have you. Ever.”
“You have me now and forever.”
“You believe me.”
“I’ll always believe in you, my hero, my love.”
She rose up on tiptoes, offering her kiss, and he came to her, slanting his lips over hers. Tenderly opening her mouth with his tongue to slide in deep and slow.
She broke away, her gaze searching his face, and when she spoke, it was the truth he heard, truth he could put faith in. “You and I have been alone countless times, and you worked so hard to drive me away. When we were lovers, from the first moment you touched me, I was astounded by your tenderness. Your gentleness. You have a poet’s soul, my rugged rocky mountain man. I know. Because I can feel you inside my heart.”
“I love you.” Overcome, he held on tight to this woman who was his very life. “Marry me. Be my wife.”
“I was hoping you would ask. I would love to marry you.”
“But what about your family? They can’t approve of me.”
“I can take care of my family. You are the rarest of gifts and they’ll come to love you as I do, or I’ll hurt them.” She winked, but her words of faith and loyalty and love left him in disbelief.
But this was real, as rare and perfect as a dream come true. Overcome, he buried his face in her hair. Blinding joy burned within him. As the rain pounded down ever harder, the cool, cleansing drops seemed strong enough to wash away the past. To erode the years of bitterness and sadness.
Grandfather would think it fitting, Duncan thought, that one woman of pure goodness had given him a new life. One of hope and love and family. Duncan Hennessey, loner and mountain man, was no longer alone.
He thought he felt his grandfather’s approval in the cold hand of the wind that seemed to push them in the direction of the house. Betsy grabbed the pie, he opened the door, and they were inside the sheltered warmth with the view of forest and mountains surrounding them. Fire snapped in the hearth as they shivered together.
As he pulled her down onto the bear rug before the warm flames, he kissed her long and deep. He was no poet, he did not have the words to tell her how dear she was to him. That she shone like a light that blinded him to all else, and from her long hair to her enchanting sweetness to her ardent passion, he adored and loved her. No, love was too small of a word for what he felt for her.
If he could spend his life with her, waken beside her every morning and spend the golden moments of each day with her, then the wrongs of his past were worth it. Because every step of sadness had brought him to her. To the magic of true love that nothing could break. Nothing.
He had no words for his feelings, so he kissed her again with all his heart, so she could feel it. So she could feel his steadfast love for her, the woman who had changed his life.
Epilogue
Later that evening
Betsy didn’t bother to knock on the back door of her childhood home, mostly because she recognized Joshua in the window, straining to see through the evening shadows the tall mountain of a man leading a trembling Morris to the stable. Duncan would be kept busy putting up the horse for a few minutes, and that was about the time she needed to make her point.
The moment she pushed open the door, the warmth and aroma of the kitchen wrapped around her like a warm blanket. Thousands of memories of her childhood rolled through her, of Mama in the kitchen and of Pa coming home from work at the bank. Of her brothers scraped or bleeding or sporting a broken arm or two, since growing boys would be boys.
This was the kind of home she and Duncan would have one day, one filled with memories of decades. A home she and Duncan could grow old in together, in their hideaway cabin in the forest. Where their children and grandchildren could visit, boldly walking in the door without knocking, for they were coming home.
Mama was whipping potatoes in a giant kettle and asking Anya to
check on the buttermilk biscuits that ought to be done. The moment Mama spotted her only daughter, the happiness lit her up like sunshine in December. “It’s about time, young lady. And twenty-two minutes late! I was about to send the boys out for you. Come make your mother happy and give me a kiss.”
“As soon as I’m done talking with my lovely brother Joshua.” Betsy unhooked her hood, focusing her attention on Joshua.
He didn’t even have the grace to look repentant. He was working up a good mad by the looks of it. His mouth was twisted into a premature frown and the tendons stood out in his thick neck. His eyes spit fire as he took her by the wrist and pulled her into the dining room, where crystal and china glinted in the lamplight. “How dare you bring that man here to our mother’s house?”
“Easy. He’s proposed and I’ve accepted. Isn’t that wonderful news? We’re going to announce it at dinner, so don’t spoil the surprise for Mama.”
The muscles in Joshua’s jaw spasmed and a tick beat right along with his pulse. “Have. You. Lost. Your. Mind?”
“No. Duncan was falsely accused, and if you don’t believe me, I don’t care. That is how you will treat him. He is a wonderful man to me and I love him. I’m warning you, Joshua, don’t ruin this chance I have for happiness. Love comes around rare enough in life the first time. Mama has said she’ll accept him, and I expect you to do the same.” She pitched her voice a little louder, in the direction of the archway into the parlor. “And you, as well, Granny.”
“Ha! That will be the day.” The older woman creaked out of the chair, troubled by her rheumatism that strangely came on strong whenever it was convenient for her. “I’m just a poor, sick old lady, and—”
“Too bad. I cannot forgive what you did to Duncan, leaving him when he was so wounded, but I think I will be able to forgive you if you treat him with the respect that is due my husband for all the happy years of our marriage to come.”
