Lucas frowned, feeling a certain kinship with the fallen predator—except that the poor son of a bitch was out of his misery.
And the wolf had probably died from a nice, quick rifle shot... not from having his guts all torn up by what he felt for a female.
He turned and settled in next to the wolf, resting his shoulders against the rock, crossing his arms over his chest. He expelled a harsh breath.
“Tell me how it happened, Antoinette.”
“How what happened?” she asked.
“How you shot James. Tell me what happened that day.”
With a startled gasp, she looked over at him.
He held her gaze across the lamplit darkness between them. There was no taking it back now, no more ignoring the question that had been gnawing at him for so long. He wanted her answer. Needed to know.
But she shook her head. “You decided a long time ago what you were willing to believe. I tried to tell you the truth the day you arrested me, and you wouldn’t let me. You never even gave me a chance—”
“I’m giving you a chance now.”
“Why? All this time you’ve only cared about your version of what happened. And now you want the truth? Why does it suddenly matter to you?”
Lucas looked away. Because I can’t believe you’re a killer. Because you’re so dammed sensitive and delicate and softhearted. Because you are not capable of cold-blooded murder.
Because you’re not what I thought you were.
When he hesitated, she turned away. “You’re just like everybody else back in St. Charles,” she said bitterly. “Not one of them ever gave me a chance. Me. Annie Sutton. Never mind what my mother was—”
“I know you’re not your mother.”
For a moment, she seemed unable to speak.
Then she pinned him with a glare. “Really?” she asked sarcastically. “I’ve lost count of the number of times you’ve called me a whore—like you thought I was born and raised in a cathouse while my mama was between customers.”
He gritted his teeth. “I don’t know where you were born and raised. You never told me.”
“You never asked!”
“I’m asking now.”
“In a backwater cabin that wasn’t much bigger than this place.” She choked out the words. “In a patch of Missouri woods that couldn’t be called a town. I started out with a big brother and a papa who was a farmer and a mama who was the prettiest lady around. And all I remember is Papa grumbling about bad weather and bad crops, and we were all hungry a lot, and it was the happiest time of my life.”
She turned her back, her shoulders rising and falling rapidly as if she were struggling for breath.
Lucas didn’t know what stunned him more: that her childhood had been similar to his own boyhood days on his family’s farm—or that she’d grown up with a father and an older brother.
Men who should’ve taken care of her, watched over her. Protected her. “What happened to them—your father and your brother?”
“Papa left when the war started,” she said bitterly. “The militia came looking for recruits and he ran off. We tried to find him—Mama and me and my brother Rafe—but we never did. That was when Mama moved to St. Charles. And that was when everything changed.”
She reached down and picked up the empty tin cup she had washed, turning it around in her hands as she continued.
“We took rooms in a boardinghouse, an awful place down on the river, and Mama started getting lots of visits from what she called her ‘gentlemen friends.’ Yankees, Confederates, it didn’t seem to matter to her. Nothing seemed to matter to her after Papa ran off. Nothing and... nobody.”
Lucas felt sick, imagining what it must have been like: Antoinette couldn’t have been more than five or six, watching an endless stream of soldiers and river rats and other men “visit” her mother. She would’ve been too young to understand why the people of St. Charles scorned her. People she didn’t even know, who didn’t know her.
Not one of them ever gave me a chance.
People like him.
“As soon as Rafe was old enough, he left.” Her voice had become hollow. “Went off to make his fortune in the West so he could rescue us all. But he never came back either. He disappeared. Just like Papa.” She set the tin cup down. “After that, it was just Mama and me.”
Lucas studied her, understanding for the first time the flashes of steel he had noticed beneath her vulnerability. And her grit and stubbornness. Even her cooking ability.
She had spent years making something out of nothing, fending for herself, with no one to take care of her and a mother who didn’t give a damn about her. “Why didn’t you leave when you were old enough?” he asked, shaking his head.
Her eyes widened in surprise. “I couldn’t leave Mama. I couldn’t abandon her like everyone else.”
Lucas stared at her, astonished that she would be so loyal to her mother in spite of everything. It was beyond his comprehension that anyone could care that much for someone, flaws and all.
But she had stayed. Had sacrificed any hope of a normal life, of friends or a place in the community or a husband and children of her own.
Had chosen a far different life.
“And how did you meet James?” Lucas asked tightly.
She hesitated, walking over to the table, reaching out to grip the back of one of the chairs. “It was my seventeenth birthday,” she replied, looking down. “Mama gave me a pretty dress to wear—the first new dress I ever had. And she took me to one of the fancy new hotels in town for dinner. But everyone was looking at us, and whispering.” She shrugged as if it didn’t matter, as if she were used to it. “And they turned us away. But I didn’t really care. The dress was enough of a gift.”
A smile touched her lips—brief, fleeting—as if it were a favorite memory.
After a moment she looked up, staring into the darkness, into nothing. “The next morning, a gentleman in an expensive suit and a paisley ascot came to see us. He said he represented Mr. James McKenna, and he said Mr. McKenna had an offer for me. ‘A mighty fine offer,’ he called it.” A look of pain crossed her features. “I remember exactly the way he looked at me when he said it.”
Her eyes met Lucas’s briefly before she shifted her gaze back to her hands, gripping the chair. “James had seen me from the window of his office,” she told him softly. “And after Mama and the man in the ascot went and talked, she came back and said... said...”
Her voice choked out for a moment.
“She said I would have a fancy suite in that very same hotel that had turned us away, with a feather bed, and a maid, and a big coal stove to keep warm in the winter.” She blinked rapidly, her dark eyes glistening in the lamplight. “And all I had to do in return was nothing, really. Almost nothing.”
Lucas felt the muscles in his jaw harden. Maybe it hadn’t occurred to Antoinette—maybe she was too innocent or naïve to see it this way, or too blind where her mother was concerned—but he would bet his last dollar that her mother had had a reason for dressing her up and parading her down St. Charles’s main street. And it hadn’t been a birthday celebration.
She had been advertising beautiful merchandise for sale. “Did James offer to take care of your mother, too?” Lucas asked tightly, already certain of the answer.
She nodded. “He gave her some money every month. I never saw her so happy. She was getting older, and—”
“And her beauty was fading and she wanted to make sure she was taken care of. Even if it meant making you pay the price.”
Antoinette’s head came up, her eyes narrowing. “That’s not true. She wanted me taken care of. She wanted me to have a better life than what she had, and she knew James would see to that.”
Lucas didn’t say any more, deciding to keep his opinion to himself. Any woman who would trade her own daughter for money wasn’t worthy of being called a mother—though he could think of a few other choice words for her.
“I could’ve said no,” An
toinette insisted, lifting her chin, clearly unwilling to spare herself any of the blame. “I knew it was wrong. But he was kind to me, from the first time we met. He was the first respectable gentleman who was ever kind. And Mama... she...”
Annie let go of the chair and turned away from him, wrapping her arms around her waist. “She said all I had to do was be... be careful not to make any... mistakes.” Her voice became hoarse. “You always said that my mama probably taught me a lot of tricks, but she only taught me one.” She hung her head. “How to be careful,” she whispered. “How to avoid having a baby. That was the only trick she ever taught me, the only advice she ever offered me.”
Lucas shut his eyes, wishing he could take back the brutal words he had flung at her so many times.
“So you see, it was my fault,” she continued unsteadily. “It was my fault that it all went wrong. After three years, I... I must not have been careful enough, because this summer I realized I was... carrying James’s baby.”
She pronounced baby as if the idea, the very word itself, held all the magic and mystery and joy in the world.
“I denied it for weeks.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “I made up all sorts of excuses not to see him because I didn’t know what would happen. Then I went to Mama—and she was furious. She told me I should just get rid of it, go to a woman she knew who would ‘help’ me. But I pushed her away when she grabbed my arm.” Annie rubbed her bicep as if it were still bruised. “I couldn’t do that to my baby, to James’s baby. So I left. And I went to the only other person I could turn to.”
“James.” Lucas steeled himself, half dreading this, half needing to hear the rest of it. All of it.
“It was raining that day.” She closed her eyes. “I was soaked through and covered in mud by the time I reached his house. I’d never been there before, but I was just so scared. I just kept thinking that it was happening all over again—that my child was going to grow up exactly like I did, poor and hungry and afraid all the time, with no father. No future.”
She was breathing hard, started talking more quickly. “I didn’t want to make trouble or cause a scene with his family. I slipped into his study, through the garden doors. He’d just gotten home from his office and he was putting something in the safe. He barely said two words before I just blurted it out. I told him I was pregnant.”
A shudder went through her. “He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he... then he told me it was over. He said he’d had time to think while we were apart, and his children were getting older, and the last thing he wanted”—tears shone in her eyes and she looked up at the ceiling—“was to have any bastards running around the streets of St. Charles. He tossed his pocket money on the desk. Fifty dollars and a few coins. He told me that should be enough to get me a ticket out of town.”
No. By God, that wasn’t possible. Lucas felt every muscle in his body clench tight. He couldn’t believe it, wouldn’t believe his brother could be that cold. Not to anyone—especially not to a woman who had shared his bed for three years. A woman who was carrying his child.
“I-I could see sacks of cash in his safe,” she whispered, tears sliding down her cheeks, “and all he gave me was his pocket change. That was all I meant to him, all I was worth.”
“And when did you decide to pick up a gun?”
His sharp tone brought her gaze back to his. “There was a gun on the desk, next to his briefcase and the other things he’d brought home from the office. It was sitting right next to the fifty dollars. I-I was in a daze, and I was reaching for the money. I was going to just take it and leave. And then my hand was on the gun instead—”
“Why? Because you decided you wanted one of those bags of cash from the safe, too?”
“No,” she retorted hotly. “I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t thinking of anything except the pictures in my head—pictures of my child going through everything I went through growing up, and me ending up just like Mama... and for a second, as I was reaching for that money, it just seemed like it might be better if... if...”
“If you picked up the gun and demanded more than fifty dollars?”
“If I ended it all,” she said in an emotionless voice.
Lucas stared at her, his jaw going slack with shock.
She had been thinking of shooting herself?
“But when I picked it up...” A sob tore from her and she covered her eyes with one hand. “James reached across the desk and tried to grab it from me. And it went off. It just went off.”
Lucas turned away, bracing one arm against the wall, the stone rough and cold beneath his palm. Part of him still couldn’t believe it. Didn’t want to believe any of it.
“It all happened so fast,” she said brokenly. “There was a sound like an explosion, and he fell backward. The servants came running. They were pounding on the door. I tried to help him, but it was too late. He was already... he was already gone.”
Her voice dissolved in tears for a moment. “I was kneeling over him, covered in his blood. And they were pounding on the door and I knew what it would look like. Nobody in St. Charles would believe that it was an accident. I was his mistress. The girl from the boardinghouse down by the river. The whore’s daughter—”
“So you ran.”
She nodded. “I looked up and saw those sacks of money in the open safe—and all I could think about was my baby, giving my child what I never had. A home, a future. So I took one. I took it and ran. I didn’t even know how much was in it until later.”
She seemed spent.
Lucas couldn’t stand to watch her cry, but he couldn’t make himself turn away from her again.
“I didn’t mean to kill him.” Her voice was less than a whisper. “He was the only person in my life who was kind to me.” She sank forward, her head in her hands. “I didn’t know anything about having a baby,” she sobbed. “Mama only told me how not to have them. I didn’t know what I was risking when I got on that stagecoach. I didn’t want to lose my child,” she choked out, “like I lost everyone else.”
She buried her face in her palms and sobbed.
Lucas walked over before he was even aware of it, reached out to her before he could stop himself. Touched her arm.
She turned with a start, looking up into his face.
And he saw no deception in her eyes, only pain and loss.
“I didn’t mean to do it,” she said, her voice edged with anguish. “I only went to him that day because I was just so scared and... and alone... I wanted... I needed...”
He drew her into his arms.
She stiffened immediately.
“Shh,” he whispered, his voice strained as he tried to convey that he wasn’t coming to her out of vengeance, or anger. “Shh.”
He just held her, somehow knowing instinctively what she had wanted from James that rainy afternoon and never got.
Strength and comfort and reassurance. She began to cry into his shirt.
And he felt burned by each salty tear.
Chapter 13
Annie couldn’t stop crying as he held her in his arms, enfolded so securely against his broad chest. Her cheek rested against the rough fabric of his shirt and she let out all the pain that had been tearing at her heart, surrendering all of it to the warmth of his embrace, to his gentleness, to him.
And as the anguish poured out of her, a new emotion slowly filled her like a glimmer of light breaking through the darkness. Of all the ways Lucas could’ve reacted to what she’d told him, this was the last she had expected. But he understood. He understood.
Never had she believed he might be capable of such tenderness and caring—for her of all people. But he was a man like no other she had ever known. Fierce and strong, gentle and protective. A tough-as-iron hero... who also had a heart.
When she finally managed to get her tears under control and pull away from him, he let her go as carefully as he had taken her into his arms. As if she might shatter.
And a long, awkward silence fell betwee
n them.
They just stood there, staring at each other as if they’d never met before.
His eyes were dark, his expression strained. Unable to find words, she reached up, her fingertips brushing his stubbled cheek. And he cupped her face in one broad, callused hand, his thumb whisking away her tears—just like he had last night. So gently, so careful of her.
Neither of them said a word. He just drew her close, and she leaned into him, trembling with emotion as his mouth covered hers.
Annie’s lashes lowered and she met his kiss with a sigh of longing. His lips molded to hers and she moved closer, needing his comfort, his strength. Needing him. His arms came around her, his hands tangling in her hair. She breathed in and he filled her senses with heat, and hunger, and the spicy, masculine taste of him.
His tongue parted her lips, his kiss filled with passion that sparked an answering ache deep inside her. A wave of unsettling heat poured through her. Her body melted against his.
Never had she been kissed the way Lucas kissed her—with such power and possessiveness. As if he were binding their souls together. As if there were no more yesterdays and no tomorrows... no one but the two of them in all the world. Her hands settled on his shoulders, slid around his back to draw him in tight, her fingers grasping his shirt.
When he finally lifted his head, her lips felt swollen, bruised—and her whole body felt burned. The sound of their breathing made harsh noise in the darkness.
He buried his face in her hair. “Annie.”
The sound of her name on his lips brought fresh tears to her eyes. She didn’t let him go. “Lucas.” Her voice came out as a husky whisper.
Suddenly, his hands were fumbling with the buttons on her dress and her fingers were tugging at his shirt. Warm, soft kisses brushed along her throat, her bared shoulder. She tangled her fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck. He was all lean muscle and molten gold in the lantern light, his arms rippling and hard, his flat chest covered with a mat of crisp, black hair that narrowed over his ribs and disappeared into the waistband of his trousers.
After Sundown Page 22
