by Gigi Moore
Lucy watched him go out the door and took a deep breath before turning to confront…her new fiancé. “Mr. Benjamin.”
“Oh, certainly we can drop the formality now that we’re engaged.”
“Okay. Hezeki—”
“I prefer Ki.” He took a step toward her, caught her hand and brought it to his lips to place a gentle kiss on the back of her wrist.
She felt like she should snatch her hand away, but his mouth on her skin felt too good. Besides, she didn’t want to be rude, did she?
Cody, on the other hand, didn’t have any such compunction about being uncouth and growled at her and Hezekiah as he pushed by them to get to the door.
He turned with his hand on the knob, giving them one final glare. “You haven’t heard the last of me on this, Mr. Fancy Pants.”
“I’m sure I haven’t.”
Cody left and slammed the door behind him.
Lucy shuddered and felt like she hadn’t made such a bad choice after all. Then she turned her attention back to Hezekiah and saw his crooked smile. “So, Ki is it?”
“It’s what my family and friends call me.”
“Um, that’s…right nice.” She slipped her hand out of his and held it stiffly at her side.
Seemingly unfazed, Hezekiah slid his arm through hers instead, forcing her to bend her elbow as he patted her hand. “Perhaps you’d like to take me on a tour of your fair city and then we could go ring shopping.”
“Ring shopping?”
“Well, of course. We are engaged, after all.”
“Mr. Benjamin, there’s no need to put on a show. We both know that your proposal was just a nice way to assuage your guilty conscience.”
His mouth twitched as if he was trying not to laugh. “My guilty conscience?”
Lucy’s hand tingled with the need to smack that smug smile right off of his face. Lordy, since when had she become so violent and hateful?
She slid her arm from his and put her fists on her hips before slowly tilting back her head to stare him in the face. “What took you so long to come?”
“To Elk Creek?”
Lucy gritted her teeth. How could he be so calm when she was about to explode? “Yes, to Elk Creek. Mr. Flint contacted you several months ago and all his telegrams and letters went unanswered. Why did you finally come?”
“Yes, well, your missive proved quite a bit more, shall we say, persuasive than the lawyer’s.”
“You mean if I hadn’t finally contacted you, you wouldn’t have come?”
“Does it really matter why I came?”
“It certainly does matter to me. I would have been out on the street all this time were it not for friends who helped me and took me in, in my time of need. While you…” She poked him in his chest with her index finger and felt a fluttering low in her belly at the broadness of his shoulders and the general solidness of him. Lordy… “While you we’re out gallivanting around doing Lord knows what with Lord knows who and without a care in the world!”
“Gallivanting?” He laughed.
“You seem the sort not to stay in one place for very long.”
He cleared his throat. “Yes, well…”
Was that a blush creeping up the sides of his neck? Lucy never would have thought it possible to embarrass the shameless…bachelor!
She had heard about his type, what Cody and some of the other cowboys in town had already started calling Fancy Pants, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, living it up in the big city, while she could barely make ends meet.
Maybe she was wrong. Maybe he was worse than Cody. At least she knew Cody was a hard worker, if also a self-important bully. Hezekiah, on the other hand, didn’t look like he had worked an honest day in his life.
She remembered the feel of his hand in hers and the skin on his palm had been as smooth as a baby’s bottom, barely a callus on it.
Lucy swallowed at her train of thought because Hezekiah had hands like…like Prentice.
Why was she thinking so much about him lately? He’d been gone several months now and they’d only had that one encounter at Peyton’s, nothing to base a relationship on.
He had been so caring with her, though, so gentle.
“Can I be honest with you, Lucy?”
“By all means.”
“To tell you the truth, my delay in coming out here was a combination of things, but mostly because I was traveling abroad and didn’t see Mr. Flint’s notices until my return. And by then…let’s just say I wasn’t eager to revive unpleasant memories of my uncle.”
Lucy had always been one to give a body the benefit of the doubt and she stared at Hezekiah to gauge how much of what he was saying was true and how much was just plain bull cocky. He did sound…sincere, especially when he’d confided about Rance. Had Rance…done something to Hezekiah in the past?
Lucy shook her head at the thought. Surely she’d heard the rumors during her and Rance’s entire marriage living in Elk Creek and she’d tried to ignore them. What had or hadn’t happened to Hezekiah in the past, however, was none of her business except maybe how far it would affect their marriage.
She looked at his face, surprised by the olive tone of his complexion. He didn’t seem like the sort to get out in the sun much, like, say, a cowboy, but he had the tan of a man who spent his days outdoors. Maybe it was all that “traveling abroad.”
Lucy could tell now that he regretted mentioning his uncle. Indeed, he looked a mite shocked that he had let slip what little he had to her.
She was about to open her mouth and say something when Hezekiah headed her off at the pass and said, “Ignoring you or your circumstances was never my intention, Lucy. Had I known about your plight, I would have made it my business to arrive here much sooner.”
He had arrived not too long after she’d sent her letter and she’d only had to send one letter where Mr. Flint’s office had sent several over the last several months.
Hezekiah proffered a hand and lifted his eyebrows, prompting.
Lucy’s stomach fluttered again, this time more intensely as the crotch of her bloomers became wet with her juices. She closed her eyes to fight the sudden vision of Prentice’s blond head between her legs as he’d lapped at her pussy. In her mind the blond head changed to light golden-brown and didn’t belong to Prentice anymore but to Hezekiah. Good Lord!
“Lucy, are you well?”
She licked her lips and opened her eyes to look at him. “I’m right fine and dandy.”
“That’s good to hear.” He still held his hand out, waiting for her to take it.
Lucy finally put her hand in his and let him shake it up and down once. His hand was warm, his grip firm yet strangely gentle—reminiscent of that other lost soul she had barely gotten to know and now never would get to know.
Briefly, she wondered what Prentice had been thinking about right before he’d died. Had he had any regrets?
Just the thought of that made Lucy speculate what regrets she would have when it finally came time to meet her maker and she hoped agreeing to marry Hezekiah wasn’t one of them.
Chapter 5
Prentice sat at the fancily-carved oak table in the Crawfords’ kitchen, trying to act like he didn’t notice his “momma and daddy” stealing looks at him as they determinedly dug into their evening meal and tried to act like they weren’t sitting at the table with a former corpse.
To say the silence was uncomfortable was an understatement.
These people were his family according to Thayne and Kelly, his “kinfolk,” yet Prentice felt absolutely nothing for them. Small wonder since he…was…not…Ethan Crawford!
He wanted to scream that statement from the rooftop of Clint and Kate’s dry goods store and mercantile, but he knew that wouldn’t go over too well with the natives.
In his last incarnation he had ruled the roost in this town. He’d used his powers to acquire the finances he’d needed, purchased the finest clothes available in the center of town and set himself up as a traveling “businessman.”
He’d made the connections he’d needed to locate and set up Thayne and Cade and had been well on his way to getting revenge on them for stealing his childhood when they’d hijacked his parents’ heartstrings and imagination as orphan boys.
Now he had no powers and he was stuck in this strange young man’s body, sitting and having a meal with said young man’s parents.
“You’ve barely eaten any of your stew, Ethan. Isn’t it to your liking?”
Prentice wanted to tell her the truth that the meat was greasy with entirely too much fat marbling its flesh and it wasn’t as tender as it could have been.
God, what he wouldn’t give for a thick, juicy, and tender steak from Cut or Smith & Wollensky, with a nicely aged brandy chasing it.
Then he lifted his glance from his overflowing plate to see the anxious look of anticipation on Kate Crawford’s face and lost his train of thought completely.
She was a handsome woman with a slim shape that belied the fat content of all the food on her plate. He didn’t know how she kept her figure since most of her work day consisted of helping the customers in her and her husband’s store, no heavy lifting required. Not like some of the women from the surrounding homesteads and farms who came into town with their husbands to purchase their supplies—robust and stout women the better to survive the harsher elements of the Wild West no doubt.
She wore her dishwater-brown hair pinned in a bun at the nape of her neck and the style accentuated the angles of her face, giving just a hint of striking cheekbones and the pretty young girl she must have been in her day.
Prentice could see himself—Ethan—in her face.
He didn’t know what to make of his tender feelings for the woman. He barely knew her, but something about the grief-stricken expression in her sunken hazel eyes when he’d arrived on her and Clint’s doorstep with Thayne and Kelly made his heart thump with longing.
She had missed her baby boy greatly and rejoiced at his return. How could he tell her that he wasn’t her son, that the Ethan Crawford she knew was well and truly dead?
She deserved better. Prentice just didn’t know how he was supposed to give it to her.
Did Brielle and Caith really expect him to make amends by being a good and obedient son to Clint and Kate with his second chance? Did they really expect him to accept his fate dutifully and without question?
Prentice cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, Ka—Momma. I suppose I’m not very hungry.”
“Well, that’s just plain nonsense! After dy—after what you’ve been through you should be starving. Besides, you’ve always had a healthy appetite for my beef stew.”
“Things change,” he murmured then snuck a peek at Ethan’s father to gauge his reaction to the exchange as the man hadn’t stopped eating since it began.
Clint glanced up when he felt his wife’s and Prentice’s gazes on him. He silently sat back in his high-back oak chair and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Your momma’s worried about you, Ethan. That’s all.”
A man of few words since Prentice had met him, Clint Crawford reminded him of the cowboys of yore—chiseled jaw, cleft chin, and heavy-browed dark eyes that all went along with his solid, rangy build. He had seemed as out of place working in his store with his apron on over his clothes as Prentice had felt.
Prentice could see where Ethan’s features were a melding of Clint’s and Kate’s.
He knew he was being a little narcissistic, but he took pleasure in knowing that Brielle and Caith had sent him back in the body of someone who hadn’t been beaten with an ugly stick.
Prentice had prided himself on his looks in his former life and what Mother Nature hadn’t given him he’d perfected in the gym and with a healthy diet. He’d done anything and everything he could to look good and feel good but in the end, it had gotten him a one-way ticket to the Summerland and a trip back to hell on earth.
This place, Elk Creek, Oklahoma, was his worst nightmare and Prentice didn’t know how he was supposed to get out of here, but he planned to do so as soon as humanly possible.
Someone knocked at the door and Prentice exchanged looks with Ethan’s parents who both raised their brows at each other.
“Well, I just can’t imagine who that might be this time of evening,” Kate said.
If they had been in his time, Prentice figured it would have been the paparazzi trying to sniff out the real story of Ethan Crawford’s resurrection.
Even if there weren’t exactly paparazzi in this time, there was certainly the garden variety curious who couldn’t wait to see the man who had come back from the dead.
Prentice couldn’t count the number of people who had come into Crawford’s mercantile today on the pretense of buying something only to leave empty-handed after they’d browsed around for a while to see if he was in the store. If half the people who had come into the store that day had actually purchased something, then Clint and Kate could have retired.
Another knock sounded on the front door.
Whoever was out there remained persistent and wasn’t going away.
Clint sighed as he pushed his chair back from the table and tossed his napkin on the table top. “Guess I’d better see who it is.”
Prentice didn’t know who was at the door, but he did know that he had never been more thankful for an interruption at dinner in his entire life. The atmosphere in the kitchen was nothing but stifling.
“Ethan!”
“Now wait a minute, young lady…”
It was too late.
Before Clint could do anything about it, a petite figure with flowing, shiny copper-red hair, and the widest, brightest gray eyes Prentice had ever seen shot past Ethan’s father and rushed over to Prentice.
She paused just long enough to bend and throw her arms around his neck in a chokehold.
Who knew someone so small could have such a powerful grip?
The strange girl pressed her cheek against his and he was briefly enveloped in soft skin and the sweet delicate scent of flowers and young woman.
Prentice closed his eyes and lost himself in the warm sensations flowing through him—chaste and platonic rather than the sledgehammer-like lust that had struck him with Lucy.
He wondered what she was doing at that moment.
Prentice had heard the town gossip about how Rance had treated her in his will and swallowed a tight ball of anger that he hadn’t punished the bastard more when he’d killed him.
The fact that Rance was such a prick had made the kill even more gratifying, not like when he had killed Aura. The whole point of him taking out Rance, however, had been to protect Lucy and get her out of a horrible situation, not put her in more of an untenable one.
Prentice had not realized that Rance was so diabolical and manipulative. Yes, he had been smarmy. Yes, he had been a serial-killing pedophile and an all-around piece-of-shit, abusive husband. Prentice just didn’t think Rance Peyton had been shrewd enough to structure the terms and stipulations of his will the way that was alleged. Of course, he would have had to be cunning and Machiavellian to get away with what he had been doing to so many boys for so many years without anyone being the wiser. When Prentice thought about it, Rance’s last will and testament was exactly something that a man like him would compose.
The girl pulled away slightly, dragging Prentice back to the present. “When they told me you were alive I didn’t believe it,” she whispered, her voice reverent, as if speaking too loudly might make him disappear and the thought of losing him scared her beyond reason.
“We’re having dinner, Gi—”
“I know, Mrs. Crawford and I’m powerful sorry, but I just had to come and see him for myself and make sure it was true.”
“Yes, well, your daddy wouldn’t be too happy about your sneaking over here in the middle of dinner.”
“I didn’t mean to be rude and interrupt. It’s just that…”
Prentice opened his eyes at the sob in her voice, looked in her too-close, glistening gaze.
Oh he
ll, was she about to cry?
“My daddy’s been keeping me busy all day, making sure I didn’t leave the store or the house to…to come over here.”
“And I’m sure your daddy had a very good reason to do that,” Kate said, her face pinched as if she didn’t quite agree with “daddy’s” reasoning.
Was there some kind of Hatfield-McCoy feud going on here that he didn’t know about? Had he been dropped in the middle of a tragic Romeo and Juliet affair? It wasn’t as if he didn’t have enough to worry about.
“Ethan?” The girl cupped his cheek and suddenly he was altogether self-conscious about the day-old whiskers on his jaw. “Honey, you’re looking at me like you don’t know who I am.”
That’s because he didn’t know who she was. At least he wasn’t a hundred percent sure.
The town’s people had revealed so much when he had kept quiet, blending into the scenery and acting like he hadn’t been listening or paying them any attention.
When he hadn’t been accepting the town’s people’s well-wishes at the store and their pleasure at Ethan’s “recovery,” Prentice had hung back unobtrusively and kept his eyes and ears open. Doing this, he’d picked up that Ethan had just had his twenty-third birthday a month before his parents had given him an ultimatum—straighten up and fly right or get out. Apparently, Ethan had taken up company with some unsavory character out of town a few months before and had strayed from the straight and narrow path his parents had guided him down.
Ethan, for whatever reasons, chose to leave his childhood home, go out on the road and get in touch with his wild, bad boy side. Not until recently had some young girl in town helped to turn him back to the path of his upright-citizen roots.
Ah, now he knew who this chit was—Ginger McCall.
Prentice could see why Ethan had been on the verge of coming back to the family fold. A young woman like this was enough to make any man want to be a better man, at least someone like a young and still-impressionable Ethan. Prentice wasn’t too sure that any woman in the world had the power to change his mind about the general and inherent worthlessness of man and society. He was glad that Ethan had found someone, although it hadn’t done the young man very much good except that were it not for Ginger’s concern, who knows what would have happened to his body had the sheriff and his deputy not been summoned to find him?
