Page 56 of The Scot Beds His Wife
Of something—someone?—both disquieting and captivating.
Samantha fought the pain with all her might as it triedto pull her away from her cave. First, when pressure winched at her thigh and liquid lightning had lanced through her calf with indescribable pain. She’d struggled and sobbed until her body had been seized by bands of iron, and crushed into stillness by warm, iron shackles.
The void had reclaimed her for a time, until she’d surfaced with her muscles seized in great, bone-rattling tremors. Her core had become ice, and her skin pricked with fire laced with a thousand needles. And still, her arms remained secured to her sides, her body locked against a hard, blazing heat.
It had frightened her at first, being unable to move, unable to speak through a jaw incapable of doing anything but grinding her teeth with involuntary shivers.
But she’d had no strength left to struggle, and moving had become an agony that began in her calf and radiated up her leg. Finally, she’d given in. The fear and fight drained out of her, and she’d sagged against the hard walls of her cave, allowing them to curl around her. To pull her in with warm rumbles of strange masculine whispers that reminded her of ancient prayers.
A gentle rhythm vibrated against her ear, like the sound of hoofbeats on the marshy earth of Erradale. A rhythmic lullaby punctuated by a warm breeze tickling errant hairs at the top of her head.
She should have known she’d not be allowed to stay here. That the dark wouldn’t remain peaceful, that demons and memories would find her and yank her back to face the cold light of day.
For this place—this cave—was not somewhere she belonged, nor did she deserve to remain. It was safe here. A place where she wasn’t a liar. Where she wasn’t a murderer.
Where she wasn’t a mother.
The word “mother” pulled her from where she’d floatedin weightless obscurity, and dropped her into her body with jarring, unceremonious brutality. This new place met her with a plethora of merciless particulars. Her left calf throbbed. Her mouth tasted of the sun-baked desert. Her bones seemed to have melted, no more able to lift her limbs than she could a one-ton cow.
But she was finally warm. Utterly, deliciously, languorously warm, and… oddly comfortable.
Unable—or unwilling—to return to the land of the living just yet, she sank into the heat, luxuriated in the cocoonlike sheath that seemed to coil around her in just the right places.
But for the dull ache in her leg, she’d have thought it all a nightmare. Some drink-addled dream she’d regale Bennett with upon waking. About the train robbery gone wrong, forcing her to shoot him. About a harrowing journey across the Atlantic, and a slice of land that might as well be heaven but for the treacherous cold. A cold Samantha hadn’t known existed until now. A cold that reached through the layers of her clothing, through her flesh and sinew and bone, until it chilled even her marrow.
Even her soul.
His coffee-colored eyes would crinkle, and he’d quirk that half-smile which seemed to have vanished once they’d married. He’d tease her like he used to, in the early days, saying that a girl so small shouldn’t drink bourbon before bed.
Squeezing her eyes tighter, she sniffed at the sting of tears searing across the seam of her lids and escaping down her temple into her hair.
The rasp of a thumb against her skin, smudging the damp path of her tear, both soothed and vexed her. She turned her face toward the sensation, her thoughts swimming in nebulous clouds just beyond her reach.
“Why do ye weep, bonny, are ye in pain?” The concerned question filtered through the distance in dim echoes, as though reaching her from above the surface of a bath in which she remained emerged. “Do ye need another dose of laudanum?”
Bonny. “Bonny” meant beauty.
How did she know that?
“I—I deserve… pain,” she rasped through a throat made of sandpaper and blocked by tears. “I shot him. Ikilledhim.” Maybe it was best her eyes never opened. That she joined her degenerate late husband in hell.
Except… she had more to consider now than just her own sins.
“Nay, lass, doona fash yerself over what ye had to do. Ye did what ye must to protect what was yers. No man could have done better.” A gentle hand settled in her hair and stroked through the strands with a tender strength that opened an aching void in her chest. “Had ye not shot them, a quick death would not have been a mercy I granted them.”
Who was this being with a fierce, beautiful voice? An avenging angel, perhaps?
“You don’t understand,” she whispered. How could he? She wasn’t talking about the men who’d burned down Erradale and wounded Calybrid. She’d killed them both and she’d do it again. She’d been referring to her husband, the man she’d shot little more than a month ago. How could she recount the strange and terrible decisions that brought her to this moment, to the burly angel with the lovely voice and brogue both foreign and familiar?
She’d have to start at the beginning, with the death of both of her parents. Smallpox. She’d had it too, and had recovered. The Smiths, ousted Mormon ranchers who’d maintained the outlawed practice of polygamy, had taken her in as an orphan under the guise of good, Christian duty.
They’d worked a seven-year-old girl as hard as any ranch hand. Though, she had to admit, it hadn’t been because she was not their own. They’d treated their thirteen natural children—born of the three various Smith wives—with the same expectations of strenuous duty.
Idle hands were the devil’s workshop, and bleeding hands reminded you of the divinity and sacrifice of the Lord.
By the time Samantha had turned sixteen, she could ride, shoot, herd, rope, and brand cattle just as well as any of the Smith boys.
She’d casually thought she’d marry one of them, as well, though they’d grown up close as siblings. Northern Nevada wasn’t exactly known for its populace, and she’d been one of the only girls within a day’s ride that didn’t share the last name of Smith.
