He repositioned one leg, and she realized he was treating her as though she’d never had a partner before, as though he wanted to show her how she could serve him better, instead of waiting for her to figure out if she could do it on her own. She appreciated that probably more than she should, but she knew if she were left to her own impulses, it would be a much slower process.
He started to move with urgency, his length moving in and out of her easily. She could hear her own breathing speeding up, a tightening in her core she didn’t understand or know what to do with.
And then he was pumping furiously, each time eliciting a cry from Lilly as he brushed up against her, each time met with nothing other than eagerness.
When she came, it seemed to catch her by surprise. Her body trembled at the release, spasming around him.
He was quick to follow, burying himself deep within her as he came, loving how she clamped down on him, milking the last of his erection from him. He buried his face into her neck, feeling her pulse beneath the surface, her heart still thudding in her chest.
Lilly quivered beneath him, moving her hand gingerly up to his head to let her fingers slide through his hair. Every nerve was still singing, her body still fresh on the high from his touch.
She hadn’t known lying with a man could be like that. She hadn’t even imagined it could be anything close to that.
She’d been married for years, and her husband was the only man she had ever intimately known. When he took her, it had always been for his own pleasure, and she had received very little in the process, except the pleasure that came from knowing it was one night he might not raise his hand to her.
This had been different. Eli had seemed to care about whether or not she enjoyed herself as well.
In the stillness after the passion, Lilly let her hands roam over him, lightly exploring the expanse of his body, the things she hadn’t yet given herself permission to do in the daylight. Her touch was light, sliding over the slope of his shoulder and the muscles of his arms, tracing his long fingers.
Though it was dark, she could make out that his eyes were closed, and she studied his face. The new beard obscured his jawline, but gave him a different kind of fierce quality. The lashes against his cheek gave him the look of innocence you might expect to find in a child, and not a grown man. Especially not one who looked as big and intimidating as Eli.
He had slipped a knee between hers, pressing her body close as though they were still connected, and with her eyes heavy, her hands stilled, and she slipped into sleep, safely cradled against him.
Chapter Eight
The morning sun wasn’t yet up when Lilly woke and began to detach herself from Eli. She’d watched him in the dark for a long while before beginning the process. As gently as she could, so as not to disturb him from his sleep, she unwound his body from hers. She couldn’t wait until morning to use the lavatory, and she certainly wasn’t going to pull out the chamber pot with Eli in the bed beside her.
Her body was sore. Deliciously sore, and each movement recalled exactly what had happened the night before. The first time they’d consummated this thing they were calling a marriage. The first time she had woken next to him and watched him sleep. With a stretch, she slipped from the bed, tugging her nightgown into some semblance of order before hurrying out into the darkness to relieve herself.
The late night air was cold, bringing gooseflesh to her arms and legs. It was easy to forget how hot the days would become during the night, where it was almost chilly enough to see your own breath. Lilly was quick, but still shivering by the time she was stepping out of the little outhouse.
Something about the air felt different as she took her first step back toward the house. It was charged with something new, and Lilly though back to the bear, wondering if he was close by and if he had seen her. That would be just the thing she’d need to explain to Eli, after he had made it so clear that she shouldn’t leave the house in the night.
And then, she saw them, between her and the house, and she was wishing it had been the bear instead.
Anything was better than coming face to face with James. But, unbelievably, there he was.
And he wasn’t alone. Flanking him were three other men. She could see their hands settled on their weapons, still tucked into their holsters.
Fear froze her to her spot. Ice ran up her legs, preventing her from moving even though every cell in her being was telling her she had to go.
But the truth was she had nowhere to go. They were starting to fan out, moving so she had no hopes of getting past them fast enough to get to the front door and safely inside with Eli.
And, what if she were inside with Eli? That wouldn’t stop James. She would just be putting both of them in danger. Maybe it would be better this way. James would take her and Eli would never know what had happened. He would never need to learn the kind of woman she had been before she had become his.
“Lilly,” he said darkly. “You seem surprised to see me. Surely you must know I will always come for my belongings.”
Lilly said nothing. There was nothing she could say in response to that. She’d dreaded that would be the case. She’d done everything she could have to help make it impossible to be found. But it wasn’t enough. She should have known it wouldn’t have been enough. She steeled herself for what would be coming next.
The men flanking him were getting antsy, and Lilly could tell by the way they were looking at him and looking back at her, that they’d been promised something for their trouble. Something that wasn’t James’ to promise.
He flicked the butt of a cigarette to the ground. Freshly rolled. It was the only way James took his cigarettes. And he only smoked when he was agitated. The sharp tobacco odor always permeated the air when he was in one of his rages.
This time was no different. He stalked toward her, grabbing her arms hard enough to elicit an involuntary gasp, and yanking her body toward him. “How dare you disrespect me as you have. You worthless whore.”
Before she could prepare herself, his hand was reaching back, his full weight behind the open-handed slap. Her ears were ringing and her head spinning, her cheek throbbing where it bore the imprint of his hand.
A scream rent the air, and Lilly realized belatedly the sound was coming from her own mouth.
The scramble that followed was confusing. Another loud sound split the night’s quiet, scattering the men who had been behind James. Lights began to flicker on in the brothel, doors swinging open.
One of the men was rushing at her. She had time to process that before he tackled her to the ground. Her head hit the dirt with a resounding thud.
The last thing she remembered was the earth coming up to meet her.
When she woke, she was back in the bedroom. It was oddly dark — like it was still night — but she knew that couldn’t be the case.
But then she started to wonder what she really did know. What had happened? Maybe none of it. Maybe Eli had never come to her in the first place. It could have all been a dream.
It wasn’t, though. She knew from the way her eye was too swollen to open, from the tender mess that had been her face.
This was a feeling she was used to waking up to.
There was a lit lantern nearby, giving off a gentle glow. As she struggled to open her eyes and focus on what was around her, Eli’s face came close. His brow was furrowed. Concerned or angry, she couldn’t tell, his jaw hard and unyielding.
“Lilly?” he asked, his voice gentle and full of gravel. “Are you alright?”
“I’ll be fine,” she said, finally giving up on the struggle to keep her eyes open. She let them close, resigned herself to being in the dark.
She felt him take her hand, the pad of his thumb moving over the back of her hand.
“You should have told me,” he said finally, the slightest edge of accusation to his voice, his other hand reaching up to stroke her hair.
“I couldn’t tell you.” Her voice was flat, her words emotionless. She hadn’t
wanted him to know how lacking she was. And even if she had wanted to tell him, how was she supposed to?
In the end, she didn’t need to. Everything had come together very quickly for Eli, when he’d heard her scream and had launched from his bed out of a dead sleep. It all made a terrible kind of sense. The way she would push down her own feelings. Her overly practiced sense of serenity and disinterest. The way she hadn’t known what she should expect from his touch. It had taken him so long to put it all together, and knowing he had failed her, had let her wade through all of that on her own, left him sickened.
He had wondered what had pushed her into an arranged marriage, and there it was. A man she had hidden from him. A man she had crossed a continent to escape from.
He let his hand run down across her hair and cupped her face, careful not to press into the ruined flesh there. “They won’t be bothering you again.” His voice was hard. His words left no room for interpretation.
He was grateful she had been unconscious for that part of the experience. He’d held nothing back. Not that he’d had any say in the matter. The view of her out there with those men had sent him shifting before he could even get out the door, and he had crashed through that bedroom window and torn into the men in a mere moment.
He had disposed of the others first.
The husband he had let run.
Not for long, of course, but long enough that he might believe he stood a chance.
It the frenzy, Eli knew the women of the brothel would be sending their men out to check on everything and he kept on going until he hit the base of the mountains, where the woods became dense and he could shift back to a human, and say the bear had made its escape.
But, truly, if he didn’t get himself together, he was going to have people on the hunt for a bear. This had to be the last of his visits, or Eli was going to need to uproot himself again and start somewhere else.
He’d stopped by his stash of hidden clothes before heading back to the mess. At least he wasn’t going to have to make his return buck naked. He didn’t even want to think about how he might explain that.
When he’d arrived, light was beginning to break and people were still scattered liberally over his yard. Mostly undressed ladies, men in various states of clothing and arousal. Lilly, already gathered and taken into the house, blessedly unhurt except for the bump on her head and the contusion on her face.
Eli told the others the bear had gotten away. Better that way than to say he had been wounded. They would think he would stay local then and might be tempted to hunt in earnest for him, hoping to put an end to the bear that would come so close to humans. Everyone knew if an animal attacked once it would be happy to do so again.
And he would have. If he could live the moment over, he would have done it exactly the same way. Maybe he would have allowed for more suffering, but the end result would be the same.
He gave them a modified version of the attack, that it had been a robbery in process, that one of them had tried to drag Lilly out with him and they had just happened onto the bear in the process. No one seemed to think anything was unusual about the tale, and Eli didn’t have to divulge any of the intimate particulars. Like he’d just had sex with his wife for the first time. Like she was actually not his wife at all and a woman on the run from an abusive husband. Like he had shifted into a bear and mauled the men in question.
Yes, when it was all said and done, it was much better to stay as far away from any of those facts as possible.
Someone had carried Lilly into the room and the women had set about fixing her up, producing cold water to clean her face and split lip, fluffing pillows, and covering her up.
Eli felt a wave of gratitude for them and their willingness to look out for one of their own. And for their willingness to consider Lilly to be one of theirs.
He had wanted the bodies gone before Lilly came to. Whether she hated that man or not, she didn’t need to see the mess Eli had made of him.
And, even more importantly, he didn’t want her to fear the bear. He couldn’t stand knowing that she might be afraid of him if she knew what had happened out there.
“I just couldn’t tell you,” she said again, drawing him back into the moment. “I didn’t want you to know how…dissatisfactory I was.”
Eli felt a knot rise up in his throat. There was something he found so poignantly relatable to her words. “Nothing could be further from that, Lilly. I find you to be beyond satisfactory.” Satisfactory didn’t even begin to cover how he found her, but he supposed it was a start. “Exemplary, actually. Incredible.”
She managed a little laugh, though it was far from convincing. “Kind of you.” She moved to pull herself into an upright position, and he helped guide her body until she was seated, stacking the pillows behind her so she could lean comfortably.
The new position enabled her to see why the room was so unexpectedly dark.
“What happened to the window?” she asked, fully distracted from what had happened to her just a short while ago.
Where the window had been was a single oversized board, held in place by a few strategically placed nails.
He hesitated just a moment. “Yes. Well.” He paused like he was debating what he should tell her, and then said simply. “I jumped through it.”
Lilly jerked forward, rewarded with the unpleasant reminder of her recent injuries. “You what?”
“It happened very fast, Lilly. You screamed and I just couldn’t stop myself. I…jumped through it.”
She inspected him closely, wishing the small lantern would give off a little more light. “How is that possible? It certainly doesn’t look like you jumped through a window.”
His laughter had an edge to it she couldn’t place. “What can I say?” he asked. “I’m a hardy sonofabitch.” He ended the conversation then, rising to his feet and preventing her from asking anything else. “You need to rest, now, Lilly. There’s no need to worry about me at all. And there’s no need to worry about you, either.” He gave her hand a gentle squeeze before releasing it and arranging the covers around her. “You are mine, and I will always protect you.”
The words reminded her uncomfortably of what James had said to her about his belongings, but she tried not to let that diminish what Eli was saying to her.
She felt her eyes growing heavy and knew he was right; she needed the rest. Gently, he guided her back to a lying position.
She was asleep before he left the room.
Chapter Nine
Lilly dreamt of the bear.
She hadn’t before. But since James had made his appearance, there wasn’t a time she closed her eyes that the bear wasn’t foremost in her mind.
She relived their meeting over and over again. The way his eyes had glittered in the dark. The way his mouth had morphed into that smile.
And then, suddenly, it wouldn’t be the bear at all. It was Eli, that thick, dark beard he’d grown, the crisp down of his chest under her fingers, the same hungry smile.
Then she would wake, shaken, sticky with perspiration.
Eli was always nearby. Almost never asleep, but not far away. It would take her a moment to remember that it had just been a dream, that it wasn’t the bear in the room with her at all, but Eli.
Lilly’s face healed. The window was replaced. Before too long, that night was a distant experience. In the physical sense, at least.
But they hadn’t touched since. Or, they had, but not in that all-consuming way they had before. It was hard for that to not weigh heavily on Lilly.
It was like Eli was keeping her at an arm’s length.
And she didn’t need to ask why to know the answer.
In the beginning, she had thought he was just giving her the space she would need to heal and recover. She had even appreciated how he could be so considerate, thrilled she had found someone who would let her choose her own pace.
But then, the days went by and nothing had changed. He was ever solicitous, of course, but he averted hi
s eyes. His touch was always purposeful, never lingering.
It was obvious that her history had disappointed him; that he no long wanted to enjoy her as he had now that he knew the truth about her.
When she was feeling her worst, she worried it went beyond that — that maybe she hadn’t done something right the one time they’d been together. What if he hadn’t enjoyed her as much as she had enjoyed him?
She tried to consider that the less likely of the options. Somehow, it was the more devastating of the two.
Still, even if it wasn’t as good as she’d thought it might get, it was so much better than it had been.
Lilly straightened her shoulders, and smoothed her skirts, seeing Eli from the edge of her vision appearing near the front of the property line, kicking up little puffs of dust as he went. She resolved that she would be grateful for what Eli had done for her and how her life had improved, and not mourn what she couldn’t have.
It took everything he had to keep himself in check. The nights were long, and he paced the house, watched Lilly sleep, forbade himself from venturing outside. It was critical there be no bear sightings for the next few weeks.
If he were smart, he would hightail it to another corner of the state, let this whole thing play out while he was a safe distance away. They would kill a bear they’d attribute the attack to, or enough time would pass that the people would forget it had happened in their backyards.
But he couldn’t stand the thought of leaving Lilly.
She still seemed fragmented — unsure. Like she hadn’t yet learned how to get her feet beneath her.
He spent those endless hours awake, pushing down the need to change until it was nothing but a gnawing nugget of tension in the pit of his stomach. He watched her when she thought he wasn’t looking, while she slept, while she sorted through whatever was weighing heavily on her mind. She no longer met his eyes, or when she did, it was just for a heartbeat, then she was moving away from him, redirecting her attention to something else.
Bears of Burden: STERLING Page 78
