Chris looked down at the picture and smile to himself. She was the one that got away and it had kept him up at night. Now he was going to find her. The boat that he was on was a lot bigger than the one that she had traversed the distance from. He was there early the next morning. Chris didn’t know about her husband and was quite surprised when it was a large guard that answered the door instead of the curved raven-haired beauty that had ran away.
“What?”
Chris took a step back from the door. “I am here to take Callie back.”
“Callie back?”
Chris was not sure why the man was looking at him in such a way, but Thomas didn’t like the few words that he had caught. Callie wasn’t going anywhere.
“Yes, I own her and she ran off, so now I am here to pick her up.”
“You own her?”
The other man nodded and put out a piece of paper that Thomas was to look at. “As you can see, the paperwork is all right here. She is my property and I am here to pick her up. I was given this address and I am here to collect her.
“You don’t own her. I don’t care what your papers say. This is Scotland and you are not taking her anywhere.”
Chris was still not sure why the tall guard was upset. It was like he knew her personally, but he knew that she had been gone less than a week. Surely she had not made connection so quickly. He pulled his coin purse out and handed Thomas some money. “Here, for your help.”
Thomas still didn’t move to take the money. “I am not going to help you. You need to leave now.”
He went to shut the door and he was stopped by a hand on it. Thomas was not even fully awake, but he knew that whoever the man was, it didn’t matter. No piece of paper was going to make him lose his wife. She may be a little hard to understand and deal with, but he had fallen for her and she made everything smoother in his life.
Chris tried to reason with him, but in the end he threatened to get help from Lord Farish, the landlord. It wasn’t something he wanted to do, admitting that he had lost her, but he would if he had to. His revenge was fueled and burned far hotter than anything else in his life at the time. He couldn’t just let her and her family get away with it. She had offended him and he could not let it go. He meant to have the guard fired as well, maybe even hung for daring to stand in his way. When Chris left the small house, he was in no mood. What he had thought would be so easy was getting more and more complicated by the minute. He didn’t know what to say, but he knew that his revenge wasn’t going to happen that day. He would have to get the Lord Farish to agree to see him and then ultimately help him get her back.
Callie had been woken up from the loud noises in the front. When Thomas shut the door, shaking his head, he stopped when he saw Callie sitting there. “I take it you know him?”
She shook her head that she did, but didn’t say anything else. He was there a lot quicker than she thought he would be and Callie had to wonder how he found her.
“So are you going to tell me what is going on and why he thinks he owns you?”
Callie was still wearing her night gown, yet she had forgotten. Her mind was on other things besides clothing. He noticed though, watching her move around the room as if she wasn’t sure what she was doing. “He bought me, if a person is really meant to be bought and I didn’t want to give him what he wanted, so I left.”
Thomas didn’t have to think hard to know what the man wanted. It was what any man would want from such a beautiful woman. It was hard to want anything else but that. He couldn’t even say it out loud in his head, afraid that he wouldn’t be able to stop the need that welled up inside of him. He needed her badly and the idea of another man laying claim to her made him even more upset. There was innocence about her that most men would give their right eye for the chance to pluck from her. Thomas was just as guilty as all the rest. All he had wanted to do since meeting her was pull her down underneath him so he had ravage her.
She was getting red faced and looking away before Thomas realized that he was staring. It was really hard not to, considering. “How can you be sold?”
Callie sighed and shrugged. “It’s a long story.”
“So you didn’t want a husband to take care of you?”
“Well, yes. I didn’t think he would find me here. I don’t know how he did honestly.”
Thomas wasn’t prepared for that and he worried about leaving her there while he patrolled. The idea of something happening to her was not something he was prepared to think about. He had to feel like he was set up in a way though, like she knew what was going to come. Even he didn’t know how much of the man’s threat he was going to go through with.
“I won’t let anything happen to you, Callie. This I promise.”
He left her to think about all of it and she hoped he was right. Chris had wanted her and when he had offered such an insane price to her father, he had taken it. She would wonder if there was drunkenness involved, but it didn’t matter. In the end she was sold like she was livestock and woken up in the middle of the night to go with her new owner. Callie had been scared and instead of going with the man, she had run for her life, only going back to her mother to get a plan of where to go. That was where she learned about Spurgis and getting married. At least she wouldn’t be owned, she had reasoned to herself and Thomas had ended up being even better than she could have imagined.
***
Callie had thought about it all day. She didn’t answer the door when someone knocked later, afraid that it was Chris coming back to take her away. She wasn’t sure if everything in her marriage was perfect, but she knew that she needed Thomas to want her to stay. There was one thing that she could think of to endear him to her and she made plans for when he came home later that evening. Callie just hoped that he wouldn’t stay out again. The idea of him with someone else was not something that she was prepared to live with though, so she knew that she had to fulfill all of his needs, even the more basic ones.
When he got home later, the house was cleaned and there was food on the table. He had become accustomed to it and there was a fear that it was all going to change if she was taken away from him. It was the last thing that he wanted to happen and Thomas knew that he was going to have to fight for her. It was all he could think about until he saw Callie come out of her bedroom. She was wearing a blue dress that made her eyes sparkle and she had a look in his eyes that he had seen from the most erotic women. His wife had never looked at him like that and Thomas was finding it increasingly hard to keep his needs separate.