Rexanne Becnel (49 page)

“Run, Abby!” Tanner’s order came out as a harsh grunt.

But there was no way she would leave him. This was
their
fight, not just his.

While the two flailed about, struggling for the gun, her searching eyes spied a length of wood—a leg from the bench. With a cry of triumph she grabbed it, then whirled to help Tanner.

Her knees nearly folded at the sight of them. The two fought wildly on the floor, but across one part of Tanner’s jacket a glistening stain spread, dark and insidious. Blood. He’d been shot!

Even as she watched, horrified, Patrick struck his fist against Tanner’s bloodied shoulder. With a cry of pain Tanner’s fingers loosened from around the weapon they fought for. Patrick wrested the gun free, then shoved the muzzle against Tanner’s head.

The rest seemed to occur in slow motion. Patrick’s finger squeezed. The skin over his knuckle thinned and went pale with the pressure he put on the slender metal trigger. At the same time Tanner’s knee came up. Patrick screamed in excruciating pain. Once again the gun exploded, but Tanner’s blow to Patrick’s groin had jarred the weapon just enough to send the bullet crashing into the latticework instead of Tanner’s skull.

Then someone screamed again, a high-pitched cry that subsided abruptly into a weak gurgling sound. It was unlike anything she’d ever heard before.

But that wasn’t true. Visions of Tanner’s fight that night in the prairie made her legs go weak. She’d heard that sound before!

From off in the distance she heard raised voices and anxious cries. Of course. The gunshots had raised an alarm. But if it was too late …

She stumbled over to Tanner, who had collapsed on top of Patrick. They both lay so still…

“Tanner. Tanner,” she repeated his name over and over again in a desperate whisper. She fell to her knees beside him. Should she turn him over? Would that only make things worse?

Dear God, don’t let him die. I’ll do anything …

She eased him over with one hand on his side and the other cradling his head. When he groaned in pain, she wanted to die. Yet she also rejoiced, for that groan meant he was alive.

As he rolled off his adversary, however, it was obvious that Patrick was dead. The carved hilt of Tanner’s hunting knife projected sharply from a spot just below Patrick’s breastbone. Though the stain of blood on his finely tailored waistcoat was not nearly so large as Tanner’s, Abby feared she knew the reason. The stab wound had killed him almost instantly. He didn’t bleed because his heart no longer beat.

She stifled a shudder of horror, then focused back on Tanner. Though his eyes were closed, he gripped his upper arm, trying in vain, it seemed, to stop the blood that seeped from the gunshot wound.

“Oh, my love,” she whispered, wadding the hem of her skirt to press against the wound. “Oh, Tanner—”

“Is he dead?”

She nodded, unable to speak.

At that moment her grandfather burst into the pergola, now a shamble of broken wood and broken bodies. “What in God’s name—Abby! Abby girl, are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Fine. But Tanner—”

“Oh, my God. Patrick!”

“Patrick tried to kill us. Both of us,” Abby managed in a strangled tone. “Get a doctor for Tanner. Hurry! He’s bleeding to death!”

In the crush of people beyond the pergola the cry went up for a doctor. Willard crouched beside her, his face ashen and confused.

“But why would Patrick … ?” He trailed off.

“Because he was your heir before Abby came along,” Tanner said. “Or at least he expected to be. He was the one behind the attacks.”

“But that’s preposterous. He’s rich in his own right. I’ve seen to that. And he wanted to marry her,” Willard protested. “He meant to take her to Europe to keep her safe.”

“As my husband he would have controlled my inheritance,” Abby stated, anger slowly taking the place of horror. “That’s all he ever wanted. While I … I’ve never wanted it at all.”

“Let me through. I’m a doctor.” A man pushed through the crowd.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Tanner protested as Abby and the doctor helped him to a sitting position. “It’s only a flesh wound.”

Abby watched as one of their guests, a Dr. O’Shaunessey, cut off Tanner’s coat and blood-soaked shirt, but she held on to his hand all the while.

Tanner suffered the man’s ministrations in grim-faced silence. Once cleaned, the wound was revealed as only a small round hole—or rather two small round holes in the fleshy part of Tanner’s upper arm. But Abby never once broke the connection to him as the doctor applied an ointment, then bandaged him securely.

Someone covered Patrick, then had him carried away, while her grandfather’s other servants kept curious onlookers at bay. But Abby cared only for Tanner’s wellbeing, and when the doctor closed his bag and departed, leaving her, Tanner, and her grandfather alone in the wrecked pergola, she knew what she had to do.

“I’m marrying Tanner,” she stated flatly, though whether her challenging words were directed more at Tanner or at Willard was hard to determine. “I’m marrying him and going off to live with him. You have Cliff now.” She turned to face her grandfather. “And with any luck we shall provide you with a houseful of great-grandchildren. Isn’t that right, Tanner?” She turned back to him.

For all Abby’s confident words, as she stared into Tanner’s face, she was more frightened than she’d ever been before. Not Cracker O’Hara nor even Patrick Brady inspired so much terror in her as did the thought of Tanner turning her down.

He’d said he loved her. Or at least he’d started to. But he hadn’t agreed to marry her. A lady wouldn’t force the issue this way, she knew. But she didn’t care about being a lady. She only cared about being Tanner’s wife.

She waited for Tanner’s response. She waited for a nod, or a smile, or some word of consent. God forbid that he should frown. Then his hand tightened on hers, and she knew.

If he smiled or nodded after that, she didn’t know, for tears of happiness clouded her eyes.

“Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch,” she heard her grandfather mutter. But there was a wondering sort of acceptance in his tone.

Tanner brought her hand to his lips for a kiss, and with a gasp that was half sob and half laugh, Abby wiped her tears away. She met the dark stare of the man she loved, the intense blue gaze that was unclouded now, no longer shuttered, but clear and shining with the love she’d always hoped to see there. Then he shifted his eyes to her grandfather.

“Sir, I know this comes as a surprise, but I love your granddaughter and she loves me.” He looked back at Abby, a smile on his dear, handsome face. “I want to marry her and care for her every day of the rest of our lives. I’ll work my tail off to give her everything she wants. I hope you’ll give us your approval and your blessing.”

Willard Hogan ran a hand across his brow, quite at a loss for words as he stared at the hopeful faces of his granddaughter and the man she loved. Once more his plans were falling apart.

He blinked when Abby’s face blurred and her mother’s face—his dear Margaret’s face—appeared instead.

Perhaps you
could
make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, he realized. Perhaps he’d already done it and never recognized it, first with his lovely Margaret and now with Abby. She was beautiful, cultured, well educated. Everything a lady could hope to be. Marriage to a certain sort of man couldn’t improve her; she was already perfect.

Slowly he pushed to his feet. “My approval
and
my blessing?” He studied them both a moment, then smiled. “You have it. But only if you let me throw you the biggest, grandest, most spectacular wedding this town’s ever seen.”

They agreed. But then he’d known they would.

The McKnight Horse Farm

Iowa

1859

A
BBY’S TOE PUSHED AT
the earth, and the wooden swing began its slow, lazy rhythm. Tanner paused at the corner of the house and for a long moment he just stared at her. Little Will was dozing off against her side. Every now and again his big blue eyes would open. But Abby’s singsong telling of another of her Tillie and Snitch tales was drawing the three-year-old off into peaceful story dreams of his own.

Abby lay the latest of her published books down on her lap, then ran her fingers through Will’s dark curls. She smiled—the most beautiful smile in the world, Tanner thought. And as he had done a million times, he marveled that she could actually be his. His wife. His lover. The mother of his child.

As if she sensed his presence, she lifted her head and met his devouring gaze. Her smile changed then, becoming no less tender and loving, but adding a certain womanly awareness, an appreciation and an invitation.

Fighting down an urge to make love to her right then and there, he moved forward.

“Would you carry Will upstairs for his nap?” she whispered.

He bent down to kiss her, and the swing’s pattern altered. “Sure.” He started to pull away, but her hand curved around his neck and tangled in his hair.

“Hurry back,” she pleaded. She kissed him, then darted her tongue against his lips. Tanner deepened the kiss until Will squirmed between them. When he drew back, his breath was coming faster.

“Your grandfather and young Cliff are due in sometime this afternoon,” he reminded her.

She smiled in that sweetly wicked way she had. “Then you’d better hurry, hadn’t you? I’ll be in the barn.”

Tanner hurried all right. He carried his precious young son into the child’s bedroom and tucked the boy beneath fresh-smelling sheets. He ran his hand once over the tousled curls and down the faintly flushed cheek.
His
child in
his
house. And
his
wife was waiting in his barn for him.

As he took the stairs three at a time and strode impatiently across the yard to the barn, he thought, not for the first time, that he was the luckiest man in the world, and the happiest.

The barn was dim and cool, and the smell of horses and straw was familiar and yet erotic. He and Abby had played this game before, and he knew all her favorite hiding places. As he searched, growing more and more eager for her, he heard a muffled laugh.

In a moment he had her, soft and warm and firm beneath him. They lost track of time in the barn and were oblivious to anything but each other. Horses nickered in the corral outside. The wind sighed in the maple tree just beyond the barn door, and somewhere a mockingbird trilled. But Abby and Tanner were oblivious to it all.

Above them, scampering across one of the barn’s hand-hewn beams, two mice paused and stared down at the people embracing in the haystack. But the mice had other things on their mind, things much more pressing than the goings-on between humans. For there was that little pile of corn set out for them each day, which had to be brought back to the nest for their young ones. And there were other adventures to be had: an old wagon covered with a tarp that must be explored, an abandoned rabbit hole in the yard. The cat to tease. Ah, but life was good.

Rexanne Becnel is the author of more than twenty historical romance and contemporary mainstream novels, many of which appeared on the
USA Today
bestseller list. With the publication of her first novel,
My Gallant Enemy
, Becnel won the Waldenbooks Award for Best First-Time Romance Author and the Romantic Times Award for Best Medieval Romance by a New Author. While growing up, Becnel lived for a time in Germany and England, where she became fascinated by medieval history. After studying architecture at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, she worked as a building inspector for the Vieux Carré Commission, the agency of the City of New Orleans charged with protecting and preserving the distinct architectural and historic character of the French Quarter. Becnel lives in New Orleans with her husband and two children.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1995 by Rexanne Becnel

cover design by Julianna Lee

978-1-4804-0958-3

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com

FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA