Child Bride

by Suzanne Forster

  She could just make out a door that looked as though it might lead to some sort of underground storm cellar. The glint of metal that had caught her eye must have come from its padlock. Fascinated, she stepped into the room. Shadow, who’d been whimpering the entire time, immediately erupted into barking.

  “Hush, Shadow,” she said. “I only want to take a look.”

  She tried the padlock and was startled when it fell open in her hands. Either the rust had corroded its parts, or it hadn’t been locked. Whatever the reason, it seemed an invitation to investigate. Shadow’s barking became deafening as Annie tugged and heaved, forcing the heavy door open. Even if the dog’s reaction hadn’t frightened her, the musty gloom she encountered beyond the doorway would have. The tunnel, if that’s what it was, looked pitch-black and impenetrable.

  She crouched to quiet Shadow as she tried to decide what to do. Common sense told her to end her investigation right there, and the dog seemed to agree. But as her eyes began to adjust to the darkness and she was able to discern that it was a deep, rock-ribbed passageway, she knew she had to find out where it led.

  A moment later, using matches she’d found by the fireplace, she made her way through what seemed like a natural corridor into a larger limestone cavern. There were no signs of recent use or anything to indicate the cavern’s purpose, and Annie had decided to turn back when she noticed another tunnel branching off at a 45-degree angle.

  This time she resisted temptation. “Let’s go back,” she told Shadow. The dog’s nervous whine sharpened the eerie stillness. As Annie turned around, she noticed her match had burned down perilously low. Its heat seared her skin as she fumbled with the matchbox, trying to get it open. “Ouch!” she cried as the pain flared. The box tumbled out of her grip, and the match dropped with it, pitching the cavern into inky blackness.

  Panic gripped her as she knelt down, searching blindly for the matches with her hands. The earth was icy cold and damp beneath her fingers, and she had the horrible feeling she was going to touch something alive, something slimy. “Shadow?” she called out, unable to find the matchbox. “Come here, boy.” The dog could guide them both back.

  “Shadow? Where are you?” Annie groped the darkness with her hands. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong. Where was the dog? It was too quiet, and the dank smell of moldering earth was suffocating.

  “Shadow!” She could hear his bark, but it sounded tinny and distant. As she rose and stumbled toward the sound of it, she felt the clay give way beneath her feet. The crumbling earth pitched her forward into nothingness. Flailing the air, she stepped into a terrifying void and plummeted downward like a rock. “Chase!” she screamed, twisting, falling....

  Chase swore, jerked his shotgun from its leather scabbard, jammed the butt up against his shoulder, and pumped out four rounds in quick succession. He barely felt the powerful weapon’s recoil as it kicked through taut muscle and braced bone. As the last shell hit home, he exhaled, breathing out tension and frustration in equal measure. He’d blown all four empty beer cans to hell and gone. He felt a little better. But not much.

  Crying shame it hadn’t been a cattle rustler in his sights, he thought, reining in his horse as he shoved the shotgun back into the scabbard. He’d been three days on the trail without a sign of the slippery bastards. Whoever they were, they’d pulled off another vanishing act with a hundred head of cattle. “Rustlers, hell,” he muttered. “They’re magicians.”

  He spurred his horse toward the hills, and the big Appaloosa snorted and reared, bolting into a gallop. Chase leaned into the wind, letting the horse have his head and savoring the smooth jolts of motion that rocked through his body. The animal probably needed the release of pent-up energy as much as he did, and there was damn little Chase enjoyed more than the powerful, fluid surge of a horse beneath him.

  The pounding ride relaxed him, but despite his efforts to lose himself in it, to find temporary oblivion, his mind was riveted on his destination. He couldn’t rein in his thoughts any more than he could have reined in the snorting animal beneath him. They raced on ahead, Chase imagining the cabin he was headed for, and the woman waiting inside. He hadn’t been able to keep his mind off her the entire trip, wondering if she’d still be there after all this time. And how he would feel if she wasn’t.

  She’d tumbled into his life in such a lunatic way, he half expected her to make just as quick and unpredictable an exit. Imagining her gone should have filled him with profound relief, but now that he was headed back, there was a kind of anticipation building in him ... a desire, almost, to see her again.

  That kind of notion was dangerous, he knew, but it seemed that the harder he tried to hold his feelings for her down, the more they sprang back, resilient as a willow branch, like her. Crazy thoughts of her had been buzzing around in his head all morning, images he couldn’t extinguish ... of her unruly red hair and that strange little bend in the bridge of her nose. For some unfathomable reason he’d been taken with the idea of kissing her there, touching his lips gently to that tiny aberration in her fine-boned features.

  But the most vivid, torturous image was of her dripping wet in his hallway. That one had nearly destroyed him, cluttering up his head night after night. He was still aching inside, thinking about taking that transparent shift off her, about touching her damp skin and catching the soft swing of her breasts in his hands.

  Chase groaned as the sheer pleasure of it hit him. His thighs locked tight around Smoke’s quivering girth, spurring the horse on. Just one time he wanted to go all the way with Annie Wells. No fainting spells, no warning signals, no abrupt exits. Nothing to stop him! He wanted to hold her and love her and be as deep as he could get inside her. Was that too much for a desperate man to ask? Just once to rock in the fertile cradle of her hips, bucking like a crazed stallion, spilling his seed into her again and again until he was drained dry.

  He reined in abruptly, pulling the horse to a shuddering stop as the graphic force of his thoughts struck home. Dust flew as Smoke bucked and danced, impatient to be set free again, but Chase held the reins taut. “If there’s a God in heaven,” he said under his breath, “if there’s any mercy in this universe at all, Annie Wells will be gone when I get home.”

  The sun was peeking over the hilltops as Chase approached the clearing where his tiny cabin was nestled. He couldn’t see any signs of life inside as he neared, but it was possible she wasn’t up yet. It was still early.

  Or had his prayers been answered?

  The cabin door flew open, and Shadow bounded out as Chase dismounted his horse. He bent to greet the excited animal, trying to soothe him as he looked at the open doorway for Annie. There was still no sign of her, which was beginning to puzzle him. After he’d calmed the frantic dog a little, he rose to unfasten the cinch and pull the saddle off Smoke’s back. He would corral the horse and feed and water him later. Right now he wanted to get inside and check things out.

  “Ease up, Shadow,” he said, as the dog’s cries became piercingly sharp. “I’m going as fast as I can.” He threw the saddle over the porch railing and then removed the bridle, letting it lie where it dropped to the ground as he bounded up the steps and into the house.

  “What in hell?” He stopped dead inside the doorway, staring at the flowers and rugs and curtains ... at a floor so shiny it made him want to shade his eyes. A cold kind of anger surged through him as he realized what she’d done. She’d turned his place into a goddam funeral parlor. “Annie?” he called out, turning to Shadow. “Where is that woman?”

  The dog headed for the bedroom door, whining as he turned back to Chase. Chase hesitated, a laser of fear nailing him to the floor. And then he followed the pleading animal. The open vault door was the first thing he saw as he entered the bedroom. “Oh, God, no,” he muttered, his heart thudding painfully.

  Seven

  “ANNIE!” Chase shouted her name as he cut through the tunnel’s gloom with the high beam of his flashlight. His own voice echoed thunderou
sly, blocking out everything but the sound of Shadow’s frantic barking.

  The tunnel’s acrid air burned Chase’s nostrils with every breath he took, sharpening the urgency he felt. The cavern looked empty as he reached it and swept the flashlight beam around its circumference. But as the beam hit the cavern floor, he saw what had happened. The broken clods of dirt at the edge of the open pit confirmed his worst fears. She’d fallen in.

  Chase’s heart slammed against the wall of his chest. “Oh, God, Annie, no—” he said harshly.

  Shadow went crazy as Chase approached the edge of the pit, and it was all he could do to prevent the dog from leaping in. The flashlight beam flickered wildly as he tried to direct it into the murky depths of a deadfall that was over twenty feet deep.

  A soft moan of sound caught Chase’s attention. He began a search for the source, and as the light finally illuminated Annie’s slumped body, he dropped to his knees in relief. She was huddled in a corner of the pit, her arms hanging limp at her sides, her knees drawn up tight.

  “Annie? Are you all right?”

  She stirred slightly, as though summoning the energy to move. “Chase?” she said, lifting her head. When she looked up at him, her face was as pathetically dirt-smudged as the day she’d tumbled down the hill and landed at his feet.

  “Listen to me, Annie. Are you hurt?”

  Tears sprang to her eyes as she tried to speak. “No,” she said in a hoarse, broken voice. “Nothing fractured, I don’t think—just cuts and bruises. Oh, Chase, where have you been? I was afraid you weren’t coming back.”

  Chase’s heart felt as though it were going to twist out of his chest. He couldn’t even answer her, he was so shaken. He’d had a moment of near panic thinking she was dead or badly hurt. Now all he wanted to do was get her out of the pit.

  Moments later he had her cradled in one arm and was climbing up a rope ladder he’d secured with metal spikes. When he reached the bedroom, he settled her on his bed and sat next to her, brushing hair from her face, drying her tears with his fingers. A tenderness flowed through him that might have been the most powerful thing he’d ever felt. He was so damn grateful she was okay.

  “I seem to have a talent for falling on my head, don’t I?” she asked after a moment, her blue eyes even more vibrant against her smudged, tear-streaked skin.

  “But you bounce good,” he said, trying not to smile.

  She smiled for both of them, ruefully. “Where does that man-eating tunnel go? And what is it for?”

  “It was there when I bought the place. According to local legend, this cabin was once a hideout for a gang of horse thieves. The tunnel was their escape route if things got tight, and the pit took care of anyone who tried to follow them. Pretty good snare, huh?”

  He found himself wanting to smooth her hair again, and say things to her that he’d never even thought about saying to a woman before. Silly, romantic things that might have worked for matinee idols in the movies but would have sounded awkward and foolish coming from Chase Beaudine.

  “Do you hate what I did?” she asked suddenly.

  “What you did?” She looked so expectant. Chase knew she couldn’t possibly mean falling into the pit.

  “The house, the way I fixed it up? Do you hate it?”

  “No ... ” He loathed it—flowers and frilly curtains were probably the two things Chase hated most after cattle rustlers. But now didn’t seem the time to tell her.

  She caught hold of his hand, squeezing it with surprising strength. “You mean you like it?” Her voice was soft, hushed, confessional. “Really?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “But you don’t hate it. You said you didn’t hate it.”

  He nodded reluctantly, and sat back as she pushed herself to a sitting position, wincing and making little noises of distress at the apparent twinges of her body. “What are you doing now?” he asked, not bothering to hide his confusion, or his fraying patience.

  She didn’t answer immediately, apparently concentrating all her energy on the struggle to get around him and off the bed. “Come with me,” she said when she’d finally reached her feet.

  “Where?”

  “I want to show you something.”

  He got up with the groan of a man who’d been on horseback too long, pulled off his leather vest, tossed it on the bed, and followed her, wondering what in hell was coming next. By the time he reached the kitchen, she was standing there with every one of the kitchen cabinets thrown open, looking like a hostess on one of those TV quiz shows.

  “I bought us some dishes, Chase. Look.” She reached into the cabinet, pulled a dish off the stack, and held it up for him to see. “They’re glaze-baked and hand-painted. Aren’t they beautiful?”

  “Dishes? For us?” As Chase repeated the words, certain disturbing possibilities began to dawn on him. “Where did you get dishes, Annie? And all the rest of this stuff? You must have gone into town.”

  She returned the dish to the stack with exceeding care. “Only a quick trip.”

  Chase could feel his disbelief beginning to heat around the edges. “How’d you get there? Oh, hell! Not my Bronco?”

  She looked up at him, guilty as charged, but apparently unwilling to accept the condemnation in his tone. “Well, yes ... I couldn’t very well walk.”

  “What were you thinking about, woman?”

  “No one knew who I was. I disguised myself as a man.”

  “Oh, great,” Chase said, trying to picture that spectacle in his mind. “A redheaded female cross-dresser driving my Bronco. That must have been quite an eyeful for the townsfolk.”

  She drew in a breath as though losing patience. “I hid the car in an alley. No one saw me driving it.”

  Chase swung around, growing more incredulous with every passing moment as he took in what she’d done to his home and hearth. Not to mention his life these last days. She was a human wrecking ball, shattering everything he thought was important, breaking down the walls of his fortress. “I told you not to mess with this house, didn’t I? I told you not to mess with my things. What in hell did you think you were doing?”

  “I only wanted to brighten it up a little. I thought once you’d seen it, you’d like it—”

  “Like it?” He turned on her. “Don’t you know you can’t just traipse into people’s houses and rearrange their lives? Dammit to hell, woman, you had no right.”

  She began to shut the cabinet doors, slowly at first, and then more quickly. When she turned around, tears were sparkling in her eyes. “I worked all day and night fixing this place up, and you don’t appreciate anything I’ve done, do you? Do you?”

  Her soft, hurt voice tugged at him, but he shook his head, refusing to be drawn into any more of her emotional traps. He was getting angry again, and dammit, he liked the feeling. It was a helluva lot better than the fear she’d struck in his heart when he’d thought she was dead. Or those stupid romantic notions he’d had in the bedroom.

  “Appreciate it?” he said slowly, trying to track her thinking. “You steal my car, drive into town in drag, stink up my place with flowers so I don’t even recognize it. Then you nose around in my bedroom, poking into places you have no business, and wind up nearly killing yourself. Call me an insensitive beast, but no—I don’t appreciate that.”

  Annie tried to quiet the emotional tumult rising inside her. He did have a point, after all. She had done all the things he accused her of. She’d even expected him to be angry. What she hadn’t expected were those moments of tenderness after he rescued her from the pit, that catch of emotion in his voice when he’d asked her if she was all right. If he hadn’t been so concerned about her, so unaccountably gentle with her, then maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much now that he hated everything she’d done. But it did hurt. God, it hurt.

  “What you really want is to be rid of me, isn’t it?” she said, turning away from him. The tears burning her eyes made her feel as foolish and inept as he obviously thought she was.

&
nbsp; “Rid of you? That’s putting it mildly, Missy. If I could toss you out of here on your fanny this minute, I’d do it without blinking.”

  “Well, then, why don’t you?”

  “Because you’ve got a piece of paper that says you’re my wife, that’s why. It’s the slickest piece of emotional blackmail I’ve ever come up against.”

  She caught her breath, anger sharpening the pain as it hit her what he was saying. “Blackmail?” she said, whirling around to confront him. “Is that what you think I’m doing? Blackmailing you?”

  “What do you call it?”

  Annie was struck to her soul. She stared at him helplessly as the horrors of the last five years began to assail her, flashing through her unguarded mind so vividly that she didn’t even attempt to stop them. She’d thought them buried, those excoriating memories, buried under her savage need to survive, but they’d only been hiding, festering. “Blackmail?” she said, barely able to get out the word. “I went to prison because of you!”

  “Prison? What are you talking about?”

  It tumbled out of her uncontrollably, like poison from a ruptured wound. She couldn’t stop herself from telling him all the brutal things that had happened to her after their car wreck, flinging the details at him like knives. “The secret police found me unconscious with our marriage certificate in my bag. They took me in for questioning, and when I couldn’t tell them anything, they tried to make me believe that you’d saved yourself and left me for dead. They said you were an agent. They charged me with conspiracy and subversion.”

  “I didn’t know!” Shock tautened Chase’s voice. “I was told you were dead. What happened to you?”

  She turned away again and closed her eyes, the rupture ripping apart like an old, tough scar. The hot pain that filled her was excruciating at first, flaring up as if to scald her alive, and then finally, mercifully, it was numbing. “No, I didn’t die,” she said softly. “But I didn’t live either.”