Before the Dawn

by Denise A. Agnew

  “Don’t.” He shook his head. “Don’t ever think on it again. You were wronged by a man who ranks no higher than a buzzard. And that’s saying too much for the man. You deserve a man who cares how you feel, who makes love to you, not takes from you.”

  Then he closed his eyes for a moment, the harsh lines of anger still creasing his face.

  In the silence, her heart expanded, her feelings for Elijah deepening. “Like you care for me, Elijah?”

  His eyes popped open, and he shook his head. In his eyes she saw emotions flicker, but she could not define any single one.

  “Let’s finish our bath,” he said. “Wash my shoulders?”

  She frowned, puzzled at his change. “Of course.”

  Despite the heaviness of their conversation and situation, she could not ignore the physical and mental feelings he stirred within her. Confessing to him had done something she had not expected.

  She felt free.

  Truly free in a way she had never experienced before.

  Oh my.

  All the wantonness she had locked up and thrown away roared back to the forefront. She wanted to defy all the conventions, to throw away the binds that had restricted her for two months.

  She wanted to touch him with abandon.

  They changed places, and as he turned around, the incredible view of his back and buttocks caused her to sigh. His buttocks were firm and muscled, and for a wild second she imagined cupping each cheek in her hand. Warmth pulsed and tingled in renewed desire, and when he sat in the water with his back to her, erotic feelings reemerged. As her legs sprawled along his long thighs, she started washing his back. Soap slid over shoulders carved with muscle. Though his skin was pale from the long confinement of five years, there was nothing weakling about him.

  He moaned softly, and she smiled. She worked soap over his biceps and closed her eyes as she savored the power within his forearms. She should make conversation.

  “Tell me more about your life in prison.”

  “I’m not sure I should.”

  Determined, she pressed him. “Please. Tell me. I want to understand what you went through. I have learned so much about you already, but I feel there is a little piece I have not reached. You exercised and what else? What could you do?”

  As she dropped the soap and laced a teasing path over each ridge of muscle in his stomach, he sucked in a breath. “I couldn’t do much.” He took a deep breath. “You want to know right from the beginning what my prison experience was like?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very well, darlin’, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “I am not a delicate flower, Elijah. You cannot say anything at this point that will shock me.”

  “Really?” Doubt tinged his voice.

  “Really.”

  As Mary Jane continued her slow caresses over his body she wondered if he felt the same way she had when his hands had drifted over her.

  “So be it. Where do I start?”

  “What does the prison look like?”

  “It’s a fortress, like a picture you might see of a castle in Ireland. A torture chamber that started as a good idea and became a nightmare. It opened in 1829, founded on principles of penitence through solitude and labor. Several famous people like Benjamin Franklin thought prisons were horrible places that needed reformation, and they worked to build that place. They thought it would work, but little did they know…” He shook his head.

  She continued her soothing touch, hoping it would provide solace as he confessed what he knew. He dunked his head in the water so she could start washing his hair.

  “Governments around the world copied Eastern State Pen,” he said. “I heard Charles Dickens visited it in eighteen forty-two and called it cruel and wrong.”

  “Is it cruel and wrong for the guilty?”

  “A good question. I can’t answer for anyone else but myself.” She slowed washing his hair, and he continued his tale. “The place has a double gateway with a portcullis flanked by two towers. After your belongings and clothes are taken from you, you’re washed down with cold water. You’re given a pair of wool trousers and a long-sleeved top. They put a mask over your head so you can’t see where they’re taking you.”

  “You are talking about yourself in the second person.”

  He stopped. “Damned if I’m not. I guess it’s to forget what happened. The fear was…when I was riding the carriage to prison, I wasn’t afraid. When they put that hood over my head, though, that was it. I was damned terrified. As if they were walking me to the gallows right then.”

  She tried to imagine this powerful man afraid of anything. Yet his words whispered of fear and pain and genuine remembrance from within his soul. Her eyes filled with tears at what he must have suffered.

  “I forgot to mention a prisoner is given a number and photographed when they come into the pen. From that point on a man is his number and nothing else. I was eight, eight, eight. For the longest time my jailer called me eight man, but he knew my real name and would sometimes call me that.”

  “Your jailer?”

  “An overseer named Gulliver O’Toole. People called him Mouse. I couldn’t call him anything.”

  “Why?”

  “Solitude, remember? I was there for twenty-one years of solitude. That was my sentence.”

  She swallowed hard. “I cannot imagine five years of solitude much less twenty-one.”

  “Don’t try, darlin’. Don’t try.” He cleared his throat. “Mouse put my food tray through the slot in the iron door and let me into my exercise area. For a long time I had a garden, if you can believe that. Not exactly manly, as Mouse said over and over, but I didn’t give a gobshite. Pardon my language.”

  She shrugged. “I have heard cursing before, although yours is…different from most I’ve heard. Continue.”

  “I grew flowers in my garden my Ma would be proud of, if she’d ever seen them.”

  Loneliness echoed in his words, and she wondered how anyone could bear such a place. “What did they feed you?”

  “As I said, we ate well. Beef and pork, a pound of bread each day and as many feckin’ potatoes as I liked. You know, it may not be Irish of me, but I ate so many damned potatoes in the pen I don’t want to ever see another.”

  She laughed softly. “Anything else?”

  “We got coffee and tea and sometimes cocoa.”

  “It sounds better than what some poor eat on a daily basis.”

  “It is. The intention wasn’t to punish by starving. The solitude was to give us time to establish a relationship with our creator. Since I wasn’t guilty, I thought about everything but penitence. Four years along I wondered if maybe God had decided this was the best way to punish me for some unknown slight.” Those broad shoulders shrugged. “I heard many souls there asked to see a chaplain, but I didn’t want to see him. I finally knew what my worst sin was. I didn’t protect Maureen.”

  “Oh, Elijah. How could you have saved Maureen?”

  “I asked myself that day after day and never came to reasonable conclusion.”

  She wished she could remove his guilt as easily as taking the next breath. Whatever happened in the next few days or years, only Elijah could make total peace with himself.

  As she allowed her touch to linger on his lower back, he shivered.

  “Did your mother and Zeke send you letters?” she asked.

  “Not until I was almost out. They allowed me to send my Ma a letter right before I was released.” He explained his Ma’s desire that he not come and see her.

  Filled with an uneasy dislike for his mother, she said, “That must have hurt.”

  “More than you know.”

  Her hands settled on his trim waist. “Were you allowed any visitors?”

  “None.”

  “You talked about your cell but not what was in it.”

  “Not much. Indoor water closet, if you can believe that. My door was made of solid wood and metal. There was a good-for-nothi
ng air vent below the sill of my garden yard door and one in the skylight above. Didn’t get much air through that. I was there a year when I got a fever. I ignored it at first until…”

  She tightened her grip on him. “Until?”

  “I started coughing and couldn’t stop. My ribs ached, and I was weaker than I’d ever been. I passed out one day in the garden, and Mouse took pity on me, and with the help of another jailer they carried me over to the infirmary. Doctor Given was kind, and that surprised me. I had pneumonia.”

  “Oh, Elijah, that is awful. Did they put you back in the cell?”

  “I thought they would, but they kept me chained to a bed in the infirmary. It took me three weeks to recover. Sickest I’ve been in my sorry life. ”

  “You could have died in there.” Her eyes filled with tears, and she let them to drift down her cheeks, allowed what he once suffered to remind her of the privileged life she enjoyed.

  “I’m too tough for that.” The amusement in his voice lifted her spirits.

  “I believe you are right, Elijah McKinnon.”

  Once more she caressed his stomach, but this time her touch drifted lower. She stopped right before the thatch of hair encircling his manhood.

  His breath sucked in sharply. “Mary Jane—”

  “Were there women there?”

  “Prisoners? Not many, but they were kept near the administration offices mostly in block seven. The authorities probably thought they were even less use than the men. We were disposable people, Mary Jane. We were sinners or possessed.”

  “And you never spoke a word while in prison?”

  “Most of the time, no. I wasn’t allowed to speak to Mouse, but he talked to me. I talked with the doctor because he insisted on it, but that was it. Men who tried to break silence were normally punished.”

  “Simply for talking?”

  “Yes. There was this device…” His breath hitched.

  The suspense of not knowing forced her to say, “Tell me.”

  “It was called the iron tongue. They used it more in the early years of the prison, but they still used it from time to time while I was there. When a man talked or tried to communicate with other prisoners, the jailers could strap him in a chair.” His shoulders started to heave as he took one deep breath and another. “Then they put this…they put this damned thing in a man’s mouth that grabbed onto his tongue. If he tried to move his tongue it ripped into flesh.” His entire body wracked with a shiver, as if the device had once torn his flesh. “There was this man in a cell next to me who wept every day. I could hear him. One day they took him away. Mouse told me they put him in the tongue, and he choked on his own blood.”

  Her arms twined around his waist, and she placed her cheek against his back, hoping she could comfort him in some small way. “That is barbaric.”

  His shoulders heaved again. “There was more. Do you want to hear it?”

  No, I do not. “Yes.”

  “Other men they tortured by hanging them outside in the winter by their wrists. They poured water over their heads. Some were tied to a chair and left for days until their limbs turned black.”

  She stifled an exclamation of horror, her imagination lending a clear picture. “Did you…Elijah, did any of those things happen to you? Did they punish you?”

  His laugh was a bark of derision. “I was lucky I had Mouse for a jailer. He could have punished me at least once or twice, or just made up that I was talking when I wasn’t so he could punish me. He never did. Even after I…”

  “What?”

  “One cell next to mine had this man in it… Mouse said he was near fifty. The man had killed his wife and two kids and had been there seventeen years already. Anyway, I heard this horrible choking noise and pretty soon I realized that something bad was happening. On instinct I cried out for help. Jailers came running. The man died. He choked on his own meal.”

  “They did not punish you for talking?” she asked in amazement.

  “Mouse argued against it. I heard him telling the other jailers that I was only doing the decent, Christian thing trying to get the man help. Mouse was a piece of shite in a lot of ways, but he wasn’t all bad. Not all bad.”

  She rubbed his shoulders and sat up straight, her tears still a slow trickle. “How did you manage to survive thinking you would be there twenty-one years?”

  “Why didn’t I rot? I thanked God every day I wasn’t dead, that I had a chance to kill Amos when I got out.” In an achingly raw voice, he said, “Rinse my hair, please.”

  She climbed from the tub and used the bucket. A dark lock fell over his forehead, curling in the middle with roguish impudence. She almost reached out to touch it, to explore the masculine lips that evoked sensual promises with a kiss. Feeling a bliss that perhaps had no merit in the situation, she climbed back into the water and proceeded to lather the soap over his chest. What she couldn’t see, she could feel. Oh, how she could feel. Every ridge, every slab of hard muscle teased her. When her fingers lingered over his nipples, he gasped, and the flesh peaked just as her nipples did. Ah, another feature of his wonderful body she loved exploring.

  “That place was like a castle,” he said suddenly.

  “What place?”

  “Eastern State.”

  Elijah’s voice retained a husky flavor that teased her senses. Right now, in her frazzled state, it didn’t matter what he said, but how he said it. Somewhere in untouched recesses within her heart, she hungered for the passion that rumbled in his tone and betrayed the condition of his soul.

  “You never should have been in there.” What words could she use that wouldn’t sound unequal to the enormity of his experience? “Never.”

  “It was as awful as I let it be.”

  His words rang with conviction, as if the stone walls of Eastern State had imbedded into the fabric of his skin, his mind, his heart. The strange, rough sound in his voice, overlaid by his accent, sent swift and soft reaction over her skin.

  “How can such an experience ever be escaped?”

  “Can’t. And I don’t plan to forget it, darlin’. It’s one of the reasons why I’m alive right now. Maybe, if they hadn’t thrown me in that devil’s hole, I’d be dead.”

  The thought of him dead ate away at her like a disease. “Why?”

  “Because when I found Maureen, I was damned tempted to jump off a bridge.”

  She wanted to offer the comfort a mother offers a child who has fallen. At the same time, her body yearned for another connection she did not dare identify. “What truly kept you alive in there?”

  “Like I said before. Revenge. Amos murdered my woman. He didn’t spend five years in that prison. He didn’t rot every day he couldn’t speak. He didn’t live with the fear of wondering if he might go mad every day with nothing more than his garden to keep him from thinking too much. He didn’t have to wonder what it might feel like to taste a woman again, to sink deep and find release inside her. Even the most pious man imagines that once or twice.”

  Her pulse raced, her heartbeat quickening in a race to overtake her breath. Heat warmed her face at his audacious statement. “Did you wonder about it once or twice, Mr. McKinnon?”

  “Oh, I imagined it more than twice. And I’m imagining it now.”

  Mary Jane wondered, with painful clarity, how it would feel to learn someone precious had been torn from her arms. What would it feel to be loved as fiercely as this man had cherished his Irish Maureen?

  He chuckled, and his throaty laugh echoed with deliciousness in her belly and lower. Rasped over her senses like a warm blanket on the coldest night. Inside her the wanting started again, a thrilling, aching call to sin.

  She longed with her heart to know a man’s love this profoundly. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. It happened and it can’t be taken back.”

  Despite the horror of what he told her, she wanted more than ever to give him solace, to mend yet a meager portion of what the prison experience had done to him. S
he curled her body closer around his, until her femininity pressed into him, her breasts touching his back. She reached down and clasped the base of his manhood.

  He jerked in surprise and curled his hand over hers, holding her fingers over his smooth heat. His breath sluiced in and out. She closed her eyes and felt his power pulse beneath her fingers. “Elijah, tell me what to do to help you forget.”

  Elijah’s fingers tightened around hers. Wordlessly, he gave Mary Jane an answer.

  His hand moved hers up and down in a slow rhythm. Up. Down. Up. Slowly down. After he released her, she continued the movement, soap lathered in her hand aiding the motion. His thickness swelled beneath her ministrations, the power and mystery of his pleasure revealed to her one exhilarating minute at a time. Emboldened by her desire to wipe bad memories from his mind, she increased the pace.

  Elijah’s breath hissed through his teeth, and his head went back as he shook in her grip. Her other hand braced on his chest, and she felt his breathing come faster as she increased the pumping motion. She sensed there was more she could do to bring him additional pleasure, but he did not demand more. Caught in his obvious pleasure, she kissed his back and caressed his stomach. White-knuckled, he gripped the tub and a moan left his throat. His hips moved with her motions.

  “Mary Jane,” he managed to gasp.

  How long she pleasured him, she couldn’t say, but his body told her how much he loved what she did. His head went back again as he stiffened all over and groans strangled in his throat. His manhood throbbed in her hand as his hips jerked and twitched. Something hot and wet spurted over her hand again and again.

  He trembled and shook, each panting breath declaring his pleasure. “Oh God, darlin’.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Amos stared at the snapping, dancing campfire and a curse burst from his throat. “Damn it. Where is that flea bitten, no-account brother of mine?”

  Varney took a huge bite out of his jerky and chewed. “Keep your voice down. It’s enough to wake snakes.”