“The baby is growling?” Katrina asked, her voice sounding intrigued.
“No, silly,” her sister replied. “Babies can’t growl in their mommy’s tummy. All they can do is grow.”
Katrina pursed her lips and nodded. ‘“That’s something I’ve wondered about. How does it get started, Mama? What makes a baby start growing in the first place? Emma didn’t tell me that.”
Jenny sent Claire a panicked look, and for the first time all afternoon, Claire laughed. “Don’t look at me, she’s your daughter.”
While Jenny stumbled around trying to provide an answer appropriate for a seven-year-old, Katrina pondered her mother’s big belly, then switched an appraising glance toward Claire. “How about you, Auntie Claire? Do you have a baby in your tummy, too?”
Her gaze scuttled over Jenny McBride’s belly and yearning gripped her. A baby. Tye’s child.
Katrina said, “I want a cousin. I hope you do have Uncle Tye’s baby in your tummy.”
Tye, demonstrating his infinite ability for poor timing once again, walked into the kitchen just as Katrina made the last observation. His gaze flew to Claire’s, and the emotion lurking in the fathomless green of his eyes struck her like a fist.
Dread.
And that, Claire thought, dusting the longing from her heart like flour from her hands, was that.
Hours later, when they retired to their room for the night they lay side by side in the darkness without touching. Claire was tense, certain that at any moment he would speak, bringing up the subject of ending their marriage. Instead, he remained silent Even when he finally reached for her, pulling her into his embrace, he did it without so much as a word.
She sensed the war in him immediately.
This was no patient seduction, but a desperate claiming. His hands tore down her back, over her thighs and hips and buttocks. They swept up to her breasts, where he caught her taut nipple between thumb and forefinger, tugging it. Twisting. Sending pleasure spearing through her. His mouth plundered, teeth nipping and lips sucking. Demanding.
And Claire leapt recklessly into the chaos he created.
She matched him, frenzied movement for frenzied movement. Her hands stroking, pressing, possessing. Her tongue impatiently thrusting, spearing into his ear, licking down his neck, lapping at his small round nipples. They battled across the bed, every moan he uttered her victory, every cry he wrested from her a glorious surrender.
She rolled and writhed, losing herself in the wondrous war they fought. Desire consumed her doubts and passion devoured her pain.
At least for now, for tonight.
Spiraling rapidly to the heights, she gasped as his relentless fingers worked Tye’s own brand of magic, urging her higher, forcing her ever upward toward the climax. She hung there forever, sweetly suffering, while exquisite sensations teased her to the point of pain. Then she shouted and shattered, dying and flying in a shuddering free fall of pleasure. Calling out his name.
As she lay panting, gasping for breath, he claimed his prize. His growl of satisfaction as he filled her echoed in her womb, and when he drove himself hard and deep into her, she answered with a blissful moan. Eyes closed, he bent his head and savaged her mouth while his body took hers, plunging again and again. Mindlessly, she matched his pace and lost herself to the rhythm of movement as old as time.
Low groans escaped him with every thrust of his hips, driven by throbbing, elemental need. Then his muscles coiled, went taut. He thrust once more. Twice. He threw back his head and shuddered his release.
Grasping, Tye collapsed on top of her, his muscles quivering, sweat dampening his flesh. As Claire basked in the languorous afterglow, stretching sensuously against him, she thought she heard him whisper her name. She thought she heard the echo of love.
But she feared it was only a dream.
***
HELL WAS a cold place, Tye decided as dawn broke over the eastern horizon. A fellow always expected heat, but in truth it was a frigid, icy emptiness.
Seated in a wicker rocker on the veranda outside his bedroom, his bare feet crossed at the ankles, he held up the whiskey bottle and studied the rich, amber color of the liquid inside. Like a ghost from his past it called to him, promising warmth. Promising forgetfulness.
Tye had been to hell before; battle and its carnage playing gatekeeper for the devil. He hadn’t minded the actual fight so much; it was the stumbling over bloody pieces and parts of neighbors and friends afterward that had sucked the man right out of him, leaving behind the fear, the weakness, the grief.
He’d warmed up with whiskey then—or tried to, anyway. The bottle hadn’t rescued him from hell, just took him to a different level—one just as cold. Trace had been the one to rescue him the first time. Yanked him out of the cold amber ocean, dried him out, and bullied him into wanting to live again, until Constance McBride led him back to the devil a few years later.
Katrina, or more specifically, the lie that he’d fathered a child, had made him claw his way out of his whiskey-walled perdition. Then Trace disappeared with the baby, the daughter Tye had thought was his, and anger had kept him warm for years.
Finding out it was all a lie had been tough, but it had also been a relief. Fool that he was, he’d thought he could start over. He’d thought the slate had been wiped clean, that redemption waited just around the corner.
But the goddamned cold simply wouldn’t go away.
He held the bottle by the neck and turned it in a circle, until its contents swirled in a little whirlpool of manmade misery. He could dive in so easily, drown himself. Fill the hollowness, the emptiness inside him with liquid death.
But however appealing, whiskey was a coward’s way to hell. If this was his existence, he should at least attempt to accept it like a man. Claire deserved that much.
Claire deserved so much more, which was why he was getting an up-close, personal look at Hades all over again.
For a brief shining moment he had thought it might happen. Claire his wife. A home. Someday maybe even a family.
With that thought, Tye brought the neck of the bottle up to his nose and inhaled the malty scent.
He’d been working on his redemption, thinking he could earn back the right to be happy.
“Bullshit.” He licked the mouth of the bottle and the taste of whiskey stung his tongue. He’d finally learned the truth. Trace was wrong. He hadn’t done enough. Yes, he’d rescued Jenny. Yes, he’d protected the children. But that hadn’t done it. Nothing would ever be enough. Nothing absolved him of the deed. No atonement was powerful enough.
He had betrayed his twin brother by bedding his wife and making possible the lie Trace ran from for seven years, the lie that Tye was Katrina’s true father. Actions beyond redemption.
Tye’s grip tightened like a vise around the bottle. He rose to his feet, reared back, and flung the whiskey as hard and as far as he could. It crashed against an oak tree. Shattered.
Shattered. Like his heart.
Waves of pain rolled through him as he finally admitted the truth. He loved Claire. He loved her with every fiber of his being. He loved her too much to condemn her to an icy cold pretense of a life with him.
His knees turned to water and he grasped the veranda’s railing, breathing hard. After a moment he chuckled, the ugly sound grating against his ears. God, McBride. Aren’t you wallowing in a slop of self-pity. Guess it’s too much to ask a pig like yourself to act like a man.
“Shut up,” he said to himself. He could still act like a man. For Claire’s sake, he would.
He walked back into his bedroom, where his wife lay peacefully sleeping, a heart-wrenching, contented smile on her angel’s face. Reaching down, he lifted a silken lock of her fiery hair and allowed it to slide through his fingers like tears.
God damn him, he had failed to protect her last night. Again. Caught up in the moment, in his own anguish and pain, he had acted the irresponsible fool and left the goddamned condoms in the goddamned drawer.
Bracing himself, he laid his hand on her shoulder and shook her. “Wake up, Claire. We need to talk.”
Bury a tear-soaked handkerchief beneath a cottonwood tree during a full moon to have good luck.
CHAPTER 20
CLAIRE WOKE, TOOK ONE look at her husband, and felt as if the temperature in the room had dropped thirty degrees.
This Tye was a cold, forbidding stranger. His eyes were flat and empty, his jaw hard. He made her want to shrink back into the mattress.
“We need to talk,” he said, his gaze flicking imperviously over her nudity.
A chill shuddered down Claire’s spine. She sat up, gathering the sheet and her composure to her breast. “All right. What is it you wish to talk about?”
Had she not been watching closely, she wouldn’t have seen him flinch at the sound of her voice. So, he wasn’t as unaffected by her as he let on.
“Our situation. Obviously, with Trace and Jenny’s return, it has changed.”
“All right,” Claire said cautiously, trying not to get angry. In her opinion, a woman—especially a wife—deserved more…softness from a man on the morning following a night like the one they’d just shared.
He wouldn’t meet her gaze, looking past her, instead. “If we’d known Trace would come home so soon we could have managed all this a little differently. Not that I regret helping your family. The factory will be a good investment. But we could have avoided this other…uh…trouble.”
“Trouble?”
“Marriage.”
“Oh.” Claire’s heart pounded. “Our being married is trouble.”
“Yeah.”
She reached for her robe lying at the foot of the bed, no longer trying to hold back her anger. The man certainly hadn’t had a problem with being married to her last night.
Knowing well the value of silence in an argument— her mother was a master of the technique—Claire said nothing more as she slipped into her robe and calmly knotted the sash. Then she sat on the edge of her bed and looked up at her husband, waiting. Showing no sign of the temper and hurt building within her.
He dragged his fingers through his hair. “You’re a nice girl, Claire,” he began.
A nice girl? Her fingernails dug into her skin as she clenched a hidden fist. That one got her good.
“You’re beautiful, funny, and talented. You’ll make a man a good wife someday. But that man…well…it can’t be me. I told you that going into it. We need to get this marriage annulled.”
An invisible weight on her chest forced her to take shallow breaths, and her anger suddenly went cold. “Annulled.”
He still wouldn’t look at her. He walked over to the vanity, where he lifted the silver hairbrush and started flipping it around and around in one hand. “Yeah. It’s been such a short time. An annulment shouldn’t be a problem.”
An annulment. A rejection. He didn’t want her. The chill spread like a cancer through her body.
“An annulment.” As she repeated the word yet again, she felt a sudden surge of anger. Hot anger that battled the iciness of her pain. “But we consummated our marriage.”
He shrugged. “You and I are the only ones who know it I won’t tell if you won’t tell.”
She wrenched to her feet. “You’re asking me to lie?”
“I thought it would be easier that way.” He set down the hairbrush and picked up the comb. He ran his thumb along its teeth as he casually added, “We could get a divorce, instead. Divorces are easy to get in Texas, and it doesn’t matter to me one way or the other. I just thought you’d prefer an annulment.”
She was breathing hard. An annulment rather than divorce. How considerate of him. Wasn’t it his good luck she had no weapon at hand at the moment.
He continued in an offhand manner. “Well need to do it in a way that won’t play in to the townspeople’s superstitions and hurt your business at The Confectionary. I’m sure if we put our minds to it we can figure a way to prevent another Bad Luck Wedding Cake disaster.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” she agreed, her voice rapier-sharp.
He darted a quick glance her way at that, but his gaze remained unreadable. “I’ll come up with something. I just need to think on it a bit. But other than that I don’t see any problems. Do you?”
Problems? Oh, maybe one or two. Little things, like the fact that she loved him. And the fact that she might even now be carrying his child.
Faced with his outright rejection, that alone, she could not ignore. Fury bubbled like chili on the stove as she asked, “And if I’m increasing?”
The comb slipped from Tye’s grasp.
He started pacing the room, muttering in a low, angry tone. “I can’t believe I did this to myself,” he muttered. “Knew better. Went to all that trouble to buy the damned sheaths then didn’t have the patience to stop and put one on. Got the self-restraint of a randy rabbit.”
“Oh, be quiet.” Claire reached the end of her patience. She was dying inside and he was being such a…man. “And don’t curse at me.”
“I’m not cursing. I cussed and that’s different and I was doing it to myself, not you, anyway.”
“You you you.” She threw out her arms, anger and anguish adding fuel to her temper. “What you are, Tye McBride, is the most selfish man I have ever seen.”
That brought him up short. They stared at each other, his face going red, her chest heaving. “Selfish?” he repeated, bracing his hands on his hips. “Me? Honey, I’ll own up to a whole buckboard full of bad traits, but I’ll be damned if selfishness is one of them.”
“Well it’s one of those ‘s’ words then,” she shot back, blinking away furious tears. “Scheming, or scurrilous. Spineless, perhaps? No, I know. It’s stupid. You are stupid, Tye McBride. Your head is full of stump water instead of sense.”
She had captured his total attention now. Exaggerating his drawl, he said, “Not that I can argue with you, sweetpea, but I admit to being curious as to how you reached that particular conclusion.”
Her heart pounded. Her mouth was dry. Grief rolled over her in waves. How could he do this to her, to himself? It was so needless, so wasteful, so…stupid. “Lord, I hate stupid people. You want to know? Fine, I’ll tell you. It’s because you could have had so much and you are throwing it away. You’re throwing me away. And that, McBride, is completely, totally, absolutely, stupid because…because…”
“Why, Claire?” His gaze burned into hers. “Why?”
Too angry to control herself, she shouted it on a sob: “Because I love you!”
He took it like a lance, closing his eyes, flinching as if in pain. He took two heavy breaths, exhaling them audibly, sounding like he’d just run a mile long race.
“Then God help you, Claire.”
Suddenly weak, she sank down upon the bed.
Tye’s chin came up, his jaw hardened. He met her gaze with flat, emotionless eyes. “We’ll wait on the annulment until you know whether or not you are carrying my child. At that point we can decide how best to proceed. In the meantime, I’ll move into another bedroom.”
It would have been kinder, Claire thought, for him to use a real sword to slash her heart into shreds rather than the weapon of words.
He turned to go, but the thought of him leaving before everything was said drove her past reason. She stopped him at the door by speaking a single word, proudly stated, that demanded so much: “Why?”
As if against his will, he made a half turn. His voice ragged, he said, “I’m not the right man for you. My sins are too big…I’m not…I’m too…” He mouthed a curse. “You’ve offered me a gift I can’t in good conscience accept, Claire. No matter how much I…” his voice trailed off.
Something—the light in his eyes, the pain in his voice, the tension of his body—something gave her hope. “How much you what?”
He opened his mouth. She held her breath.
Then he shifted his gaze away from her and in that instant she knew the words he would speak were not the w
ords he originally intended.
“How much I enjoy you in bed.”
The door slammed behind him, leaving her with the impression of a man running for his life. Claire would have been insulted had the realization of the truth not burst upon her like a cloud of smelly, half-cooked Magic vapor. She wrinkled her nose. “Why, that fraud. That big, tall, strong fool.”
A slow smile tilted the corners of her mouth. Her husband didn’t want to throw her love away. He was too scared to keep it. His excuse of sins too big to be forgiven was just that, an excuse.
Tye McBride was afraid to be happy.
She thumped her lips with her index finger as she thought. Tye McBride was afraid to be happy. It made perfect sense. Stupid, but she understood why he might feel that way. That old “Constance” wound again.
So Claire McBride needed something to conquer his fear. Some strong medicine. Something sweet and soothing and strengthening. Something tasty. Something spicy. Something irresistible.
The perfect treatment came to mind.
She felt better, rejuvenated. He thought to push her away, but she refused to accept it. She wanted this man, and she’d fight for him. Walking to the wardrobe to select a dress, she spied her reflection in a mirror and said, “That’s a good thing about being a baker. Always have a recipe or two up my sleeve.”
After washing and dressing, she headed straight for the kitchen. She crossed to the cupboard, removed a bottle from the shelf, then dabbed a little Magic behind her ears.
Then, a woman on a mission, Claire went off to find her husband.
***
“THAT WOMAN is driving me crazy,” Tye said to his twin a little over a week later as he burst into Trace’s office and dropped into a chair.
“Tell me about it,” Trace replied, tossing down his pen and glancing up from his latest architectural drawing. “I guess I shouldn’t have teased her so. But in my defense, she had just referred to herself as a whale, so why did my comparison to a circus elephant send her into such a torrent of tears?”
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