Chapter 7
“You’re not dying on me.”
Shane heard the words from far off. They lodged in his mind and kept tumbling like dry brush balls on the open prairie: not dyin’ on me . . . not dying . . . He’d said them. He remembered saying them to someone he loved.
His head ached, and he had to fight to hold his breakfast down, but he knew he wasn’t going to die from a glancing blow to the head. He’d had worse done to him and survived . . . far worse.
Shane knew where he was. He knew his own name and what day it was. He even knew who was in the room with him. He could feel the mattress under him and hear what Caity and Justice were saying to each other. He was certain he could get up off the bed if he really wanted to. He could . . . It was just simpler to lie there in the warm blackness until this spell of weariness passed.
Caity’s hand felt good on his skin. It had been a long time since anyone had fussed over him. He didn’t want to worry her, but opening his eyes would take more effort than he wanted to give.
Just a little longer, he told himself. I’ll just rest a little longer.
The darkness enveloped him, and his surroundings faded, all but the words that kept coming back to haunt him. “You’re not dying on me.” His words, but not his voice. Whose voice? Not dyin …
Cerise felt so warm in his arms. She couldn’t be dying, not Cerise. Instantly sober, he cradled her against him while her blood ran over his hands and soaked her green satin dancing dress.
He couldn’t stop the bleeding. He pressed his palm hard against the wound under her breast, but blood just kept seeping through his fingers, and she kept begging him not to let her die.
“I’m scared, Shane. Hold me. Please . . . hold me. If I die . . . If I die, I’m going straight to hell. I don’t want to burn in hell. I’m afraid of fire.”
“You’re not goin’ to die, damn it!” he swore. “I won’t let you.”
“I’m cold, Irishman. I’m cold. It can’t be hell if I’m cold, can it?”
“No. No, sweet, it’s not hell.”
“Hold me. . . . Hold me.”
Light flared from a lamp as the door crashed open. A whore screamed, and the hall echoed with angry shouting.
“Oh, my God!”
“It’s Cerise!”
“McKenna stabbed her!”
“Somebody get Fat Rose, quick!”
Cerise sighed in his arms. Her dark, liquid eyes opened wide, and she gazed up into his face. “Justice. Take my boy, Shane. Promise me you’ll—”
“Promise?” Justice demanded.
The loud voices retreated into memory. Shane was suddenly conscious of how much his head throbbed and his body ached.
“Cerise?” Her name formed on his lips, and saying it aloud opened a cavern in his chest he’d blocked up a long time ago. For an instant, Cerise’s image—as she was that first night in Jefferson—rose in his mind’s eye.
Amid the smoke and clamor of Fat Rose’s whorehouse, a vision of fire and passion moved to the haunting throb of a Spanish guitar. A man couldn’t call what she was doing dancing, at least not dancing as he had ever seen it.
All fire and passion . . . flying night-black hair and come-hither eyes . . . Salome of the seven veils and all the wantons of Sodom and Gomorrah wrapped into one lush, copper-skinned body.
He broke into a sweat just watching her.
Around him, men clapped their hands and howled, but he didn’t hear them. Every fiber of his being concentrated on the woman in the green striped satin dancing dress as she whirled and thrust, stamped her bare feet, and parted her moist, red lips. Advancing, retreating, teasing, tantalizing . . . she made promises with heavy-lidded, almond-shaped eyes . . . and dared him with lush, heaving breasts and long, curvaceous legs.
Her pure sensuality stunned him as swiftly as the strike of a bolt of lightning, stealing his breath and scrambling his brain. He wanted her. God, how he wanted her!
He forgot he was a married man . . . forgot what she was, and knew only that he had to have her no matter the cost.
“Cerise . . .”
“Shane?”
The swirl of the music grew fainter, and the blackness threatened him again. Shane felt himself falling, and instinctively he tightened his arms around Cerise’s body.
And to his shock, he embraced thin air.
“Lie still.”
Not Cerise’s whiskey voice with its faintly French accent . . . and not Cerise’s scent. She favored a heavy rose, and this woman smelled of heather. He wondered how—“Ouch! Damn it! Are you trying to murder me?” Shane’s eyes flew open as he became aware of a sharp, burning ache along the side of his jaw.
Caitlin leaned over him, a bloodstained cloth in her hands. “Welcome back.” Her tone was lamb gentle, but her ginger eyes radiated frost. “Congratulations. I won’t need to stitch your face.”
Dumbly he raised his fingers to his cheek and brushed a shallow cut. “My beard? What have you done to—”
“I had to shave around the injury to tend it,” she replied icily. He’d called out another woman’s name in his incoherent mumbling. Cerise. Justice’s mother.
A thin needle of pain pierced through Caitlin’s chest and into the pit of her belly. Such a small thing shouldn’t hurt. She knew it shouldn’t hurt, but it did. She turned away and rinsed the cloth in the basin to keep him from seeing the tears in her eyes.
Damn you to hell, Shane McKenna, she thought. Damn your black, cheating soul to everlasting flames.
Fool. She was the fool to expect otherwise when they’d been apart so long. Hadn’t he tried to tell her the truth? Said that he was no saint?
Ruthlessly she wrung out the washcloth she’d ripped from a worn cotton petticoat. How she wished that she had her sister Maureen or a woman friend here in Missouri she could confide in, who could give her advice. She was alone with no one to trust—least of all her husband.
She’d tried to ignore her suspicions about Shane and Justice’s mother, but her worst fears were probably true. She was sure that Shane had been intimate with Cerise, maybe even in love with her. Shane’s affection for another woman seemed worse to her than his committing adultery.
Caitlin wondered how many times Shane had made love to Cerise. Pricks of jealousy made her want to jab him with the needle out of pure malice.
She and Shane had known each other in the biblical sense only once. No, twice, she supposed, if she counted the hasty coming together just before he’d left her at daybreak on the morning after their wedding. She’d been frightened, and Shane had been awkward. She’d liked him holding her, and she’d loved the feeling of his bare skin against hers. But the actual sex had been . . . well . . . uncomfortable.
She’d often wondered if her innocence had been to blame. She wanted desperately to be a good wife to Shane, and she’d supposed that whatever had gone wrong with their wedding night could be corrected in time.
Still, the intensity of her resentment over Shane’s involvement with this woman Cerise shocked her. Caitlin thought that she was practical and not given to spitefulness, but it was a slap in the face to find that her husband expected her to raise his lover’s son as her own.
He’d asked a lot of her, damn it. Maybe more than she could give.
Shane sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. “Why the hell did you shave half of my face?”
Justice snickered and backed out of the room. “Told you not to do it.”
The wound on Shane’s head began to bleed again, and Caitlin sighed impatiently as a crimson drop rolled down his forehead and soaked into his eyebrow. “Now see what you’ve done. Lie down and let me see to that wound on your head.”
“What? And let you shave me bald?”
“If you can be difficult, you’re going to live,” Caitlin answered, fighting to keep her anger hidden. Berating Shane for what he’d done with a dead woman would only harm her chances of making the marriage work. And she desperately wanted it to succeed. She’d have to swallow the hurt and go on as if she didn’t suspect Shane’s relationship with Justice’s mother.
“My head doesn’t need sewing,” Shane said. “And it sure as hell doesn’t need shaving.”
“If you’re afraid of the needle—”
He glared at her but sat in the chair and let her wash and examine his head gash. “Do your worst.”
To Caitlin’s relief, the injury was not as severe as it had seemed. She poured a little of her father’s cherry brandy into the wound to prevent infection and tied the edges together using strands of Shane’s hair.
“This wouldn’t have happened if you’d kept Derry away from the bull,” he admonished.
“No, I suppose not,” she admitted reluctantly. “But it’s as clear as the nose on your face that you’ve had little experience with children.” Shane was right, and she knew it. Derry could have been killed, and it would have been her fault.
“I’ve done all right with Justice.”
“He’s hardly a normal child. And you’ve allowed him to use language that would shame a tinker.”
Shane nodded. “He’s like a wild bronc that’s never known a bridle. But the foul talk he picked up in his mother’s care. I’m trying to curb it. And maybe I should be harder on him, but it’s not easy.”
“Neither is being a mother.” She gave the last knot a hard tug and Shane winced.
“Why do I get the feeling you’re enjoyin’ this, woman?”
She tucked the silver flask of brandy back into her petticoat pocket and set about cleaning up. “I meant what I said earlier. You’re a brave man, Shane. A braver one I’ve never seen.”
He flushed a little under his tan and rubbed at his eyes. “My head feels like Goliath’s still in there and tryin’ to kick his way out.”
Caitlin turned her attention to Shane’s lacerated hands. He made no protest as she gently soaped first one and then the other. Next she opened a tin box and smeared his torn palms with a paste of comfrey root and goose grease that she’d brought from home.
“I suppose you think that no child has ever come to harm under the hooves of a bull in County Clare?” Caitlin demanded. “Derry was so frightened, I vow she’ll not go under any fence again.”
Shane’s eyes shadowed. “I was wrong to blame you. If one of the kids had been killed or crippled, the fault would have been mine. I knew the danger. You didn’t. Maybe I should have left you home with your father.”
“Small chance that,” Caitlin answered tightly. “My father’s dead.”
“Dead?” Shane’s shocked gaze met hers. “You mentioned the loss of your mother, but you didn’t tell me about him.”
“And you didn’t ask. We’ve talked of you and Kilronan and what you want, Shane McKenna. But you never asked me about those at home.”
“I’m sorry.”
She blinked away the stinging irritation in her eyes. “Sorry’s just a word. You and Papa were like fire and gunpowder. Don’t pretend what you don’t feel.”
That brought him to his feet. He enveloped her in his arms and pulled her against him. “Caity,” he murmured into her hair. “Your father hated the sight of me and with good reason.”
“He didn’t hate you,” she protested. “You were Catholic and poor and—”
“And the son of a penniless drunk who beat his wife and kids senseless whenever he got a belly full of whiskey.”
“It was unfair of Papa to—”
He raised her chin and looked down into her face. “It doesn’t matter anymore, Caity,” he said gently. “You loved him, and he was a good father to you. How did he die?”
“My mother caught a bad fever and the running flux from a cottar’s wife. We buried her on Christmas Eve, two years past. Papa lived until the following spring, but his heart was never strong, and he pined without her.”
Caitlin pushed free of Shane’s embrace and hurried to tell the rest before she lost her nerve and dissolved into a puddle of tears. “Only Maureen is left besides Derry, Maureen and the new babe she was to bear in April. I’ve not heard if they survived or not. Her husband was killed in the food riots last summer.”
“Food riots?”
Caitlin shrugged. “Lives go cheap in Ireland. Thomas was hired to protect the wheat shipment, but the soldiers shot him in the confusion.”
Shane reached out his hand, but she stepped back. She didn’t want him to pity her or her family. She only wanted fair treatment and a chance. “We lost the house and land. Papa was only tenant manager to Lord Carlston. The estate hasn’t belonged to our family in over a hundred years.”
“But your father was well liked by both the English and the Irish. He was a wealthy man in his own right.”
“Not wealthy, never wealthy, Shane.”
He scoffed. “My father kept his pigs in the single room of our cabin, before he sold them all to buy whiskey. You come from money, Caity, Protestant quality. You’ve never known what it was to go to bed with your backbone grinding against your empty belly.”
“It’s more of that old argument,” she flung back. “I am the lady of the manor and you’re naught but a poor laborer.”
He flashed a hint of a wolfish grin. “You forgot unlettered papist. I can write my own name, Caity, nothin’ more. And I can’t even read the words on my own land deed.”
“Horsefeathers. If you’re ignorant of learning, then it’s up to you to set that right. You’ll get no pity from me. How many acres did you boast of owning? Six hundred? You may have come from a dirt-floored cottage, but you’re a great landowner now. You are the rich one, Shane, while I have nothing but the clothes on my back and the contents of my trunks.”
“You’re a lady, and that’s not something that can be learned or bought with a few acres of Missouri land.”
“What do you want of me, Shane McKenna?”
“What’s right for us and the children.”
“What’s right is our living like true husband and wife.”
“Maybe,” he said. “I’d like to think that.”
“You loved me once.” The words came softly, drifting up from a secret place where she’d treasured and protected them.
“That I did, but that was a long time ago. I’d like to think I could feel that way again, but I can’t lie to you. I just don’t know.”
Her chest felt so tight that she could hardly draw breath, hardly speak. “Since you’ve said it, so shall I. I’m as confused as you, but did we not agree to try to make this work?”
His features hardened. “I sent for you, didn’t I?”
“Is that all you can say?”
He shrugged. “I’ve no pretty words. We can try, but the odds are against us.”
“If I’d thought about that before I left home, I’d have stayed in County Clare. Sometimes a man or a woman has to take risks.”
Shane seemed to mull that over for a while. Then he nodded. “All right. I’m no stranger to risks. Finish what you started. Shave off the rest of this beard.”
Caitlin couldn’t contain a sound of amusement. “You sound like a convicted felon going to his hanging. Do you think I’ll cut your throat?”
“You might,” he grumbled.
“I used to shave Papa. He found it relaxing.”
“Don’t push your luck. Just shave the damned whiskers.”
She reached for the straight razor. “My pleasure, sir. When you ask so sweetly, how can I refuse?”
He turned his face so that she could soap his other cheek. “I’d do it myself, but my hand’s none too steady.”
Neither was hers. For all her bravado, she was nervous. Shaving Shane was nothing like performing the service for her father; this was strangely intimate. She kept remembering the feeling of his arms around her and how safe she had felt.
Shane was infuriating, insulting, and she was certain that he’d betrayed her with Cerise. Yet something drew her to him. In spite of everything, she wanted him to hold her again.
“Hold still.” Her fingers were trembling slightly, and she didn’t want to cut him.
“What are you doin’?”
She jerked back. “Stop yelling at me. You told me to shave—”
“Use the scissors first, woman. Cut the whiskers off close to my skin, then shave them.”
“All right.” He was impossible. What had made her think she could ever make her peace with such a demanding, egotistical man? She dropped the razor into the bowl and looked around for the scissors.
Soapsuds dripped down Shane’s neck onto his shirt, or rather what was left of his shirt.
“Could you take that off?” she asked, pointing to his ruined garment.
Groaning, he stripped the torn shirt off. She winced as she saw the purple bruising along his ribs.
“Satisfied?”
Taking a deep breath, she tried to ignore the wide expanse of heavily muscled male chest and began to clip away his chin whiskers. She worked cautiously, trying not to jump every time Shane complained.
“Aren’t you done yet?”
“If you’d sit still, maybe I could finish.” Caitlin gritted her teeth and rinsed off the razor. She finished the last of the shaving just as the sound of hoofbeats drifted through the open window. Caitlin went to look out with Shane not a step behind her.
“Look.” She counted no less than five men riding toward the house. “We’ve visitors.” She laid the scissors on the windowsill.
“Visitors, hell! That’s Earl Thompson, our nearest neighbor.” He started for the door. “Keep the colleen inside. There may be trouble.”
“But, Shane, you’re hurt. You shouldn’t—”
“Damn it! For once, Caity, do as I say!”
“Gentlemen, welcome to Kilronan.” Caitlin stepped out the front door and smiled at the men on horseback. She’d miscounted from the window. There were six strangers, all carrying weapons strapped to their saddles, and all scowling like Satan’s imps at Shane and Gabriel and Justice.
Her men stood shoulder to shoulder; Shane cradled his rifle casually in the crook of his arm.
“I am Caitlin McKenna, Shane’s wife,” she said graciously. “I’m happy to meet you, Mr. Thompson.”
She didn’t need Shane to point out which man was Earl Thompson. He was the stocky, no-neck figure on the tall gray horse. Thompson’s hair was white, and his face weathered by wind and sun, but he was still in his prime. Caitlin decided that he was a force to be reckoned with.
“Mrs. McKenna.” Thompson touched two gnarled fingers to his broad-brimmed hat. “I thought McKenna’s wife was in Ireland.”
“So she was, sir,” Caitlin answered, “but now she is here.”
“What happened to you, McKenna?” Earl Thompson asked. “You look like you’ve been trampled by a herd of buffalo.”
“I had a difference of opinion with my bull,” Shane said.
A slighter figure chuckled, and Caitlin glanced at him. The young man was clean shaven and wore a hat that obscured most of his face. His hands were small and dirty, and he wore a leather vest over a baggy shirt.
“McKenna’s wife, are you? More’s the pity.” He reined his bay closer to Thompson, and Caitlin noticed a leather whip coiled over his saddle horn. “You’ll not last long out here.”
Caitlin flushed as she realized the person wasn’t a young man, but a female wearing men’s trousers. She seemed a few years younger than Caitlin, but it was hard to tell with her dusty face partially hidden and her hair jammed under the worn felt hat.
Caitlin refused to let this bold upstart get the better of her. “Welcome to you, too, Miss . . .” She glanced at Earl Thompson and sensed his amusement. “Miss Thompson, is it? Or is it Mrs. Thompson?”
The woman spat a wad of chewed tobacco on the ground near Caitlin’s feet. “Rachel’s good enough. Rachel Thompson.” She tilted her chin toward the older man. “Big Earl’s daughter.” She shifted in the saddle and pointed to a sullen-faced man with small eyes and a sparse mustache. “This here’s my brother, Beau.”
“Enough socializin’.” Earl Thompson turned his attention to Shane. “Heard you had a mare foal last night.”
“What if we did?” Shane replied.
“Mind if we take a look at it?”
Shane’s eyes narrowed. “Make your point, Earl.”
“If it’s black with a white star, we aim to claim it,” Rachel Thompson said.
Justice balled his fists and stepped forward. “The hell you will.”
Gabriel laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder.
“My mare, my filly,” Shane said quietly. “You got a problem, I’d take it kindly if we’d settle it man to man.”
“What?” Rachel demanded. “You don’t want her to know that you bred your mare to our stud without paying the stud fee?”
“Shut up, girl,” Earl Thompson snapped. “This is between McKenna and me.”
“Don’t want your woman to know you’re a thief as well as a murderer?” Beau taunted Shane.
“Not my woman, my wife.” Shane glanced at Caitlin. “Go inside, Caity. Now.”
Gooseflesh rose on her arms. Twice before she’d heard that soft tone, once just before Shane had attacked the drunk in the City of Jefferson and again before he leaped a six-foot fence and confronted Goliath. She suspected that it wouldn’t take much for Shane to lose his temper and drag Beau Thompson off his horse and pound him into the dirt.
Shane was in no condition to fight. She didn’t know how he was staying on his feet.
Caitlin could see that Thompson and his minions carried rifles. Maybe they were the ones who’d shot at Shane, and now they’d come here to finish him off.
“In the house, Caity,” Shane repeated quietly.
“She don’t look much like a wife to me,” Beau crowed. “Sure she ain’t another fancy woman like—”
Shane slammed his rifle into Justice’s hands and lunged at Beau.