by Merry Farmer
“I don’t like Hector,” Mason murmured against Libby’s ear. “At best, I think he’s a bully. At worst…”
His body went hard behind her. Libby knew anger made it that way, but anger or not, it highlighted the strength of his muscles, the breadth of his shoulders. The possessiveness of his embrace was almost enough to convince her to give herself over to him. She’d always enjoyed marital things with Teddy. That pulse within her was eager to see if she would enjoy them as much with Mason. Perhaps if she could surrender herself to passion with Mason, it would erase her capitulation with Hector.
Mason dipped forward, pressing his lips to her neck. A shock of desire pulsed through her, confirming her suspicions. This could work. This could be good, blessed. Her body surged to life, tingling with anticipation. She hadn’t felt that thrilling ache since…
With a gasp, she opened her eyes wide and stepped away from Mason.
“We need to do two things before this marriage can get off to the good start it deserves,” Mason said before she could so much as open her mouth.
Libby blinked. She hadn’t expected him to say anything close to that. “What two things?”
Mason took her hand, leading her away from the kitchen and over to the warmth of the fire that snapped away in a handsome, stone fireplace.
“Most importantly, we need to get Hector out of your life, once and for all.”
Libby’s mouth dropped open to protest that it was impossible. The determination in Mason’s eyes stopped her. “How?”
A victorious twitch pulled at Mason’s mouth, and the confidence in his eyes increased. “Well, that I don’t know. Yet.” He took a step closer to her. “Every man has a weakness. Hector came here because he wants you.”
“And his baby.” She lowered her eyes.
“No.”
She jerked up to meet his resolute gaze. “No?”
“No,” Mason repeated. “Men like that, like I suspect Hector to be, have no interest in babies. Theirs or anyone else’s. I watched that man stand at the back of the church and call you names, try to hurt you with his words. His sort don’t make good fathers. And frankly, he didn’t give so much as a second glance to Petey or Matthew, either to warm up to them as a prospective father or to threaten them. No, my guess is that children in general are invisible to him.”
A spark of hope ignited in Libby’s breast. “They are.” This time, it wasn’t a question. Mason was right. She searched back through her memory to every time she and Hector had spoken. She couldn’t remember him ever looking at the boys. Her mother’s instinct had needed to get them out of harm’s way before Hector took notice of them. Even after she’d told Hector about the baby, it wasn’t the promise of a family that had lit Hector’s eyes, it was lust.
She shook her head to clear away the fear associated with those thoughts. “It’s me he wants.”
“He can’t have you.” Mason finished her thought.
She pressed her hand to her stomach. “So…do you think he’ll go away now that he’s seen that?”
Mason rubbed a hand over his jaw and winced. “I want to say yes, but something tells me no.”
Libby dropped her shoulders in disappointment.
“I’ve met his sort before,” Mason went on. “They’re fueled by pride and their own self-importance. If he can’t have you, he’ll try for revenge, I just know it.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Libby sighed.
To her shock, Mason smiled. “Finally.” He stepped closer, slipping his arms around her in a comforting embrace. “I finally know what you’re afraid of.”
“But…what…” Libby could only stare at him in puzzlement, wondering why he didn’t sneer at her cowardice or push her away.
No, instead of casting her off, he kissed her. His mouth was warm and soft, though full of power at the same time. He was patient, yet demanding. His lips parted hers, and their tongues brushed against each other. Patient, considerate, and smoldering with desire. Currents of longing zipped through Libby. The joy that came with knowing she could still feel passion, could still want a man the way she wanted Mason nearly lifted her off her toes. The answer to a question she had carried locked away in her heart for ten years—what if Mason was the one—rushed through her.
He broke their kiss. “There’s something else important we need to do to begin our marriage,” Mason said, his lips a breath away from hers. He’d shifted his embrace so that his hands traced the lines of her sides.
“Oh?” she asked, trembling. Her body already knew what he had in mind, and her heart thundered against her ribs, alive again.
“Libby, I need you to know that I do not now, nor will I ever think of you as a soiled dove,” he said, voice rich with longing. “I need you to see and to feel that I want you and will honor you as an upright woman. I need to show you that I’m your husband, and that I will always adore you as such. But only—and I mean this more than I’ve ever meant anything in my life—if that’s what you want. I won’t so much as look at you if you don’t consent to it.”
The excitement of those words should have led Libby to take a step back and cool down, but it didn’t. Far from it. She leaned into Mason, circling her arms around his shoulders and tracing her fingers through his hair.
“I consent,” she whispered. “You make me feel safe. You make me want to remember that I’m a woman, a wife.”
She kissed him, opening her heart to him along with the rest of herself. Guilt knocked at the door of her soul, but a louder, stronger voice argued that, unlike Hector, this was right. This was inevitable. If not for Teddy, this would have happened a long time ago. She wanted it to happen, needed it to happen so that she could be whole again. She wanted to give pleasure of her own free will and receive it with gladness, and she knew God would bless the union.
“I will be your wife, Mason,” she whispered, looking into his eyes. “If you’re not afraid of my past and not ashamed to take me to your bed, then there must be something good about me.”
“Everything about you is good, Libby. I’ll prove it.”
He lowered one hand to her backside and lifted her against him as their mouths met once more. The world around her ceased to feel real. All of the stress and grief of Teddy’s loss and Hector’s menace slipped away as the heat between her and Mason grew. His kiss was gentle, yet passionate, drawing her in and pushing her worries further and further aside. He wanted her, in spite of her troubles and sins.
Just as she thought she would lose her head and forget herself completely, Mason stepped away. “Are you certain this is what you want?”
Her heart leapt with growing excitement at the question. “Yes, Mason, it is.”
His eyes burned with wanting, but he took her hand like a gentleman and led her into the bedroom, shutting the door behind them.
Chapter 7
It didn’t take a spectacular afternoon and magical night of making love to his new wife—a woman he’d loved for years and now felt comfortable admitting it—to underscore Mason’s decision to do something about Hector. Whoever that man thought he was, he’d hurt Libby. Mason didn’t believe for a moment that the situation his wife had found herself in after Teddy’s death had been as cut-and-dry as she claimed it was. No man worth his salt would make those kinds of advances on a new widow—or any sort of good woman—without marrying her. Libby had turned down Hector’s marriage proposal, so there was no excuse for any part of his behavior.
Which was why the man needed to be dealt with.
Mason stepped up to Haskell’s jail, knocked on the door, then let himself in. “Morning, Trey.” He took off his hat and nodded to the sheriff.
Trey Knighton had been Haskell’s sheriff for the past two years. He was young, muscular, and had a scar that ran from his forehead across his eyebrow, then down over his cheek. Whenever anyone asked about it, Trey just shrugged and said he was lucky he hadn’t lost his eye. No mention of the circumstances that had led to that almost loss. Mason had the feelin
g Haskell’s sheriff might have been on the other side of the law at one point, which was why Mason was at the jail now.
“Mason.” Trey pushed his chair back from the jail desk where he’d been doing paperwork. He smiled as he stood, and stepped around to shake Mason’s hand. “What brings you out here today? I usually only see you when you’re bailing Cody out after a night at The Silver Dollar.”
Mason snorted and shook his head, grinning. “Yeah, and Travis has bailed us both out plenty of other times.”
Trey laughed, then stepped back and crossed his arms, sitting on the edge of the desk. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
The corner of Mason’s mouth twitched. “How far could I go to put the fear of God in a man, as it were, before crossing the line into illegal assault?”
Trey’s grin dropped. “What’s going on?”
That was the other reason Mason headed straight to the sheriff the morning after his wedding night. If anyone in town would back him up in his efforts to get rid of a man who had hurt a woman, it was Trey.
Mason shifted, rubbing the back of his neck with his free hand. “You know I married Libby Sims yesterday, right?”
“I’d heard.” Trey nodded. “Also heard she’s newly widowed. I can’t lie, Mason, it seems a little sudden. A couple other folks think so too.”
“Yeah, well, you’d understand why it had to be sudden if you knew what Libby has been through.”
He fixed Trey with a stare meant to communicate how bad things were without words. Trey narrowed his eyes and nodded slowly, understanding at least a little.
“There’s a man in town,” Mason went on. “Showed up on the train yesterday. Name’s Hector Sterling. Former logger, but he wears nice clothes. His family has money.”
Trey’s gaze lost focus for a moment as he thought. “I might have seen him over at the hotel. Said he was looking for gainful employment.”
Mason hoped that much wasn’t true. If Hector had it in his head to get a job in Haskell, then he was serious about pestering Libby.
“I don’t know all the details,” Mason went on, voice low, “but the rat hurt Libby.”
Trey jolted to his feet, jaw hard.
“He showed up right after the wedding claiming Libby was his fiancée. When he saw that Libby’d just married me, he called her names, made threats.”
“And now he’s trying to get a foothold in this town.” Trey hissed, shaking his head.
“I won’t have it,” Mason said. “I need to know how far I can go without breaking any laws.”
Trey studied him, then began to pace. He rubbed his jaw, the wheels of thought turning so hard in his head that Mason could practically see them. Not for the first time, he thanked God that Haskell had a clever man for a sheriff.
“The trouble is,” Trey said as he reached the far end of the room and turned, “any kind of assault is illegal, even if the rat deserves it. A fair fight is another story, but I still don’t know if I can look the other way for that.”
“I’ve got to do something,” Mason insisted. “Libby is in a bad spot with this whole thing. She thinks she’s at fault for some reason.”
Trey rolled his shoulders, eyes still fixed on the floor, as he headed back to Mason. “Any chance what this Hector fellow did to Libby was itself illegal?”
A sick, shivery feeling passed down Mason’s spine. An ugly word came to his mind—a crime and an abomination. He hated to think that that crime had been committed against his sweet Libby, and at a time in her life that was already traumatic, but he answered, “Yes.”
Trey’s expression pinched to regret. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “That’s something no woman should ever have to go through, and something that warrants ripping the man’s head off.” He sighed and shook his head. “But without proof or a trial or, I don’t know, a confession, there’s no way to bring him to justice.”
“A confession?” Mason blinked and frowned. He thought back to the ease with which Hector had blurted out everything that had happened between him and Libby at the church. Under the right circumstances, would he blurt out more?
Trey sat on the edge of his desk again with a shrug. “No man who’s done what that donkey’s behind has will walk into a jail and confess to his crime.”
The gears were already turning in Mason’s mind. “But what if he confessed it somewhere else, to someone else?”
Trey winced as he thought about it. “If they were reliable witnesses and he confessed under, let’s just say, sober circumstances, then you might be able to build a case against him for the next time Judge Pilfrey comes through town.”
“Then that’s what I’ll do.” Mason slapped his hat back on his head. “I’ll catch Hector unawares and get him to confess where people can hear it.”
“Hold on there.” Trey raised his hand. “There’s a little something called ‘entrapment’ that you have to watch out for.”
“Entrapment?”
“Any confession the rat makes might not hold up in a court of law if he can prove that he was strong-armed into confessing. If you’re going to do this, it needs to be of his own free will and without anyone holding a gun to his head, literally or figuratively.”
Mason could have punched his way through the wall. “Why does the law make it so difficult to catch criminals?”
Trey let out a breath and shook his head. “If you’d ever been falsely accused of a horrible crime, you’d know.” He got up from his desk and came over to slap Mason’s back. “Let me know if you need any help nailing the man.”
Mason nodded in thanks and turned to march back out onto the streets of Haskell. He was fuming now. As much as he’d wanted it to be simple to take out Hector, the truth was that he would have to step carefully. There didn’t seem to be much justice in him having to be careful about how he dealt with a man who’d hurt his wife. A well-placed bullet would have been the best solution, but even that would carry consequences he wasn’t ready to face.
By the time he looped around Station Street and started up Prairie Avenue to Josephine and Pete’s house, he’d forced himself to calm down a little. Libby had driven back into town first thing that morning to help Josephine out around the house and to spend time with her boys. Until their house in The Village was finished, she would continue to do the same every day. Mason couldn’t blame her at all. Family was important, and as much as he loved her, he was a new addition.
“Hey, Mason,” little Petey called out from Josephine’s porch as Mason approached. “Wanna play catch?”
Something about the youthful enthusiasm in Libby’s boy’s face and the fact that he’d asked Mason to play struck a chord deep in Mason’s heart. It soothed his anger by a hair.
“Sure, son.” He smiled and strode up to the porch. Matthew was there too, and together the two boys scrambled down to the yard to meet Mason. “Uh, do you mind if I call you son like that?” he asked with a burst of awkwardness.
Petey scrunched his face and tilted his head to the side. “Well, sir, I’m Theodore Sims’s son. But you’re married to my mama now. So I don’t know what you should call me.”
The innocent wisdom of the boy’s logic squeezed Mason’s heard harder. He ruffled his hand over Petey’s already boyishly mussed hair. “I tell you what. How about whenever I call you ‘son,’ we think of it with a lower-case S, but whenever we talk about you being Teddy Sims’s son, we think of it with an upper-case S?”
Petey grinned. “Okay. I like that. Wanna throw the ball?”
“Me too,” Matthew piped in. “I want to throw the ball too.”
“You’re too little,” Petey told him. “You can’t catch it most of the time.”
Matthew lowered his head in a pout.
“Well, that’s why we need to teach him the right way to do it,” Mason said. “Us being bigger and all.”
Again, Petey tilted his head to the side in thought. “I guess you’re right.”
When he glanced up to Mason with a smile, a burst of pride unl
ike anything Mason had ever experienced filled him. Was this what it was like to be a father? If it was, he wanted more of it.
“Right. You go stand at that end of the yard, and Matthew and I will stand at this end.” He took Matthew’s hand and jogged to the row of Josephine’s rose bushes, while Petey dashed to the far side with the boxwood hedge.
In no time, the baseball was sailing across the front yard. Mason was able to give Petey a few pointers about his throw while showing Matthew the best way to hold his hands to make catching easier. Ever the baseball player that he was, he caught himself thinking that Petey would make a first-rate pitcher for one of Haskell’s teams someday, and if they worked at it, Matthew would be a great player too. Spending time with the boys pushed his anger at Hector to the back of his mind, which was where it needed to be if he was going to get on with things.
“You look like you’re having fun.”
Mason wasn’t sure how long they’d been playing in the front yard before Libby stepped out onto the porch. It had only been a day, but to Mason’s eyes, Libby had changed in so many ways. She wore the same, simple blue dress she’d worn the day before the wedding instead of the black she’d arrived in Haskell wearing. Her thick brown hair was caught up in an unassuming bun. But the smile she wore when her eyes met his was as different as summer was from winter. So was the hot, pink flush that came to her cheeks. If it wasn’t for the boys, Mason would have rushed to her, pinned her against Josephine’s porch railing, and kissed her senseless.
“Mason is teaching us how to catch and throw the right way,” Petey reported. He left his spot at the end of the yard and went to give his mother a hug. “I said he could call me ‘son’ with a lower-case S.”
Libby’s face pinched with emotion, and her eyes went bright. “How lovely,” she whispered, rewarding Mason with a smile.
“Me too,” Matthew declared, running across the yard to hug Libby the way Petey had.
The picture they painted—so innocent and happy—etched itself in Mason’s soul. He would stop at nothing, no matter how clever or drastic he had to be, to get rid of Hector Sterling once and for all.
