Seduced (5 page)

Cole stood from the table. “You all right?”

“Fine,” she said, turning away from him as far as she could. “Fine.”

“Perhaps if you let me—”

“She said she’s fine!” Jimmy barked, his mean eyes only meaner after the whiskey. The brand the home guard had given him was seared right across the corner of his eye and cheek. It was amazing he'd kept his eye at all. The war had changed a lot of things and Cole wondered how this woman, with her china skin and ruined ball gown, had ended up with this man, who clearly relished her pain.

And then he told himself he didn’t want to know.

Everyone had their misery. This was hers.

“You a Yankee?” Jimmy pointed his fork at Cole. Cole had seen more than his share of men who still carried the war with them, constantly spoiling for a fight. Jimmy was nothing new.

“I was a soldier.”

“From where?”

“West Virginia.”

“The Georgia Fifth Infantry.” He pointed to his cheek. “This is what I got for my trouble.”

“That’s what you got for leaving before the end,” Cole said. “I was in Georgia. I saw my share of home guard brands.”

The woman put the pot down to cool away from the fire and stepped from the table as if getting out of range. She had good survival instincts, he’d say that for her.

“The war is over,” she said from the shadows. “Oil, gold, silver, it does not care which side you fought for.”

Jimmy stared at Cole. “You agree with that?”

“We all lost enough.”

After a long moment Jimmy grunted and went back to his whiskey.

The animosity seemingly settled, Mrs. Hurst returned to the fire. Crouching, she bent her head and Cole felt an odd inclination to rest his hand against her neck, at her shoulder where her hair curled against the faded red of the dress she wore.

It’s all right
, he would say.
You survived
.

“I don’t know.” Jimmy leaned back in his chair. He pushed away the plate but pulled the whiskey closer. His eyes were locked on his wife’s back, as if he could see that she was bothered, and that weakness incited his blood lust.

The genial tone of his voice was poisonous and the tension around the table was thicker than the steak. Cole leaned back from the table, his hand back on his gun. “I got myself a fine bride and a couple of quality horses. And her sister is a hard worker, only reason to keep her around. So I can’t say as I did too badly, did I, Melody?”

She turned, smiling as if he were talking about someone else.

“But Melody.” Jimmy shook his head. “She lost it all. Parents, dead. Brother, dead. Fiancé, dead. Land ruined and sold off.”

“And yet, here I am,” she said, lifting her hands as if she stood in paradise. “Others are not so lucky.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Jimmy said and took a long pull from the bottle.

“This is a pretty piece of property,” Cole said. “How long you been settled here?”

“A year,” Jimmy answered, but Cole was watching the woman, who jerked at the question, her back stiff with fear. Jimmy was lying.

“Indian trouble?”

“Some Utes, but they been moved west for the most part.”

“You plan on farming?”

“Not if you do your job and find the oil.”

“I'll do my job.”
I will shoot you through your black heart
.

“I’m going to go check on my sister,” Mrs. Hurst said, picking up her own plate and adding more beans and steak to it. “Take her some dinner.”

“Tell her to stay there tonight,” Jimmy said. “We don’t need no company in the cabin.”

Mrs. Hurst’s face went red at the implied message before she nodded and slipped out the door like a ghost.

ONCE SHE WAS outside Melody took great breaths of air to try and settle her stomach, but it didn’t work. Nothing would work. The simmering violence around that table had tied her in knots no amount of cold air would untie. Her wrist ached and she was sure Cole Smith was lying about more than just his name. Was there even such a thing as an oil prospector?

The war had taught her to be distrustful and perhaps it was the fact that he did nothing to try and engage her trust that left her off-balance. His poor conversation and rusty flirtation had done nothing to hide his suspicion.

Of Jimmy. Of her. Of the lies they told.

And suddenly she had the perception of that dark-eyed stranger, wearing his guns to the table, as being so much better than her. Lifted to heights simply by not trusting that part she'd played with such brittle and terrified force.

An act she'd nearly dropped when Jimmy had said
We don’t need no company in the cabin tonight.

Most nights, in the year since her wedding night, she’d managed to ply her husband with enough liquor—and sometimes laudanum—that any thought of bedding her was drowned.

But it would seem her reprieve was over.

“Annie,” Melody whispered as she stepped into the barn, which appeared empty. She glanced behind her, half afraid that Jimmy or Cole had followed. But there was just the dark night behind her and the cabin across the clearing. “I’m alone.”

“Good.” Annie’s voice came from the cave.

Melody ducked into the cave to see Annie sitting beside Mr. Baywood. The lamplight was reflected on the stone walls and across the spring. He kicked at his blankets, thrashing against Annie where she held him.

“Oh, no,” Melody whispered. “Does he worsen?”

“No. I think he’s waking up.”

Melody groaned, falling to her knees beside her sister. “We do not need this complication.”

“What happens inside the cabin?”

“The prospector is not who he says he is,” she whispered. “And I really don’t think we should underestimate him.”

“What do we do?” Annie asked.

Jimmy. Mr. Baywood. The prospector. The specter of what Jimmy wanted to do to her. She could not handle all of these problems. But one of them—the worst of them—she could delay.

“Let me have a dose of laudanum,” Melody said. “I'll put it in Jimmy’s whiskey. And tomorrow, while Jimmy sleeps, we will send the prospector on his way.”

“Do you think that will work?”

“We've drugged him before.”

“Not that, sending the prospector away. Will that work?”

“Can you think of something else?”

“I can give you something to kill Jimmy tonight,” Annie said. “And we’ll be done with the whole business.”

Yes!
she thought, and not for the first time in her marriage. She was bloodthirsty and terrified, and she could not pretend that the thought of Jimmy dead didn’t fill her with a panicked relief. But she shook her head.

I will not make my sister a killer. I won't.

She thought of the way she'd considered that stranger at her table, with his guns and his cold eyes and his obvious lies, as better than her. How much lower did she have to sink? Could she sink?

Hate exploded out of her. Hate for that damn war. Hate for every man that left her to go fight it. Hate that Jimmy had turned her into this creature that lived in such a dark cage of fear, cringing and stooping because she couldn't remember how else to live.

Hate for herself because she suffered it. Day after day.

She blinked away furious tears, because this hate wouldn't solve anything. It only made things worse. It made her defiant when she needed to be acquiescing, and it clouded her thinking when she needed to be clear.

“What if the prospector tries to wake Jimmy tomorrow? What further problems will be created by the prospector realizing he’s dead? What if Jimmy owes him money? What if . . . “

“No. You’re right. Yours is a good plan.”

Good plan was a stretch. There were plenty of places this plan could fail her. Or she could fail the plan, and in not one of those places did she escape the consequences.

Annie reached into the medical bag and pulled out the brown bottle. “Use it all,” she said. “He will not die, but it will work quickly.”

Melody took the bottle and hugged her sister hard. “Try and keep him quiet,” she said. “The last thing you need is the prospector investigating a man shouting in the barn.”

Melody felt Annie smile against her shoulder.

After a deep breath, in which she thought all manner of cowardly thoughts, Melody pulled herself away and got to her feet, leaving the barn.

The moon was distant in a cold black sky.

Who was I to come to this? Drugging a man, contemplating murder. Lying and stealing and calling it survival.
Her stomach trembled inside of her skin.
Was I so sinful? My crimes of pride and vanity so great that this is the price?

She skirted the garden, unable to believe that they had been planning it just that morning. It had felt so good to be at the birth of something.

And now she had to talk her sister out of murder.

“Mrs. Hurst?” His voice came out of the darkness like a gunshot, and she flinched, stumbling.

“Mr. Smith,” she whispered, her hand at her throat where her heartbeat pounded. In her other hand she clenched the bottle of laudanum, wishing it were a gun. “You startled me.”

“I apologize.” He stepped closer, a shadow made real, and she couldn’t breathe.

“Do you need anything?” she asked, unable to keep her voice calm.

“No . . . I was just looking at the moon.”

“It seems very far away here, doesn’t it?”

Shadows fell and retreated across his face as he glanced at the house, and the silence stretched so thin, so painfully thin, she cleared her throat just to break it. “He’s had a lot to drink,” Cole said. “And his mood is…unsure.”

He’s worried. About me.

Her vision glittered and her lungs shook as she finally forced herself to suck in a breath. She had to turn away from him, from the temptation of his worry. His concern. There had been a time when she’d had no serious worries of her own. Her father, her brother, Christopher—they'd taken care of her. All she'd had to worry about was how to best reflect them.

What a simple creature she’d been.

And, oh, to be such a simple creature again.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice shaking because she was unable, here in the dark, to clutch it all to her chest. “But I will be fine. I do not need you to save me, Mr. Smith.” She said his name with every bit of doubt she had about its authenticity.

She felt him as she walked past, the animal heat of him in the cool dark.

JIMMY SAT WITH his feet on the hearth, the bottle of whiskey on the table beside him, surrounded by the dirty dishes. Her hands were suddenly slick around the laudanum; if he caught her trying to dose him . . . She shook her head of the thought before she lost her nerve entirely.

He stared into the fire, and under the guise of cleaning up she walked behind him, pulling his whiskey bottle closer to her. Carefully, silently, she pulled the cork from the laudanum bottle and poured a thin stream into the whiskey.

“What happened to Baywood?” he asked.

“He died. At night on the . . . on the second day. Annie and I buried him in the woods.”

Jimmy smiled into the flames.

“What do you think of our oil prospector?” Jimmy asked, reaching for the bottle without looking. Melody jerked sideways, out of the way of his hands. She pushed the whiskey toward him and began to gather the dishes, hiding the laudanum. There had only been time to get about half into the whiskey.

“What do you mean?”

“Don't pretend you wasn’t flirting, Melody. I watched you flirt with my brother for years, I know what it looks like.”

“It was conversation.”

He glanced back at her and then into the fire. He tipped the bottle to his lips and guzzled. The knots in her stomach doubled and redoubled.

“Mama used to say you wasn't good enough for Chris. That you was a slut set out to trap him.”

She wished she had the courage to tell him he could not wound her with his words. She knew who she’d been and she did not care what he thought. But her opinions about him, should they be spoken, were not met kindly. Early in the marriage she'd learned at least that much self-preservation.

“Come over here, slut,” he murmured, the intent in his voice unmistakable. The fork she used to scrape what little food was left into the scraps bucket for the goat clattered to the ground from her shaking fingers and her head went cold.

“Let me finish cleaning up.” She managed to make it sound flirtatious, all the while her heart pounded in her head, in her stomach, her throat.

I hate you. I hate you. I hate you
.

“You’re mine, Melody. Mine. My brother, all them other fine boys you picked over me, they’re dead. And I’d remind you of that fact.”

She put down the plates and turned to him. His face was slack in the firelight.

It won’t be that bad
. Each time since her wedding night had been less . . . bloody. She wouldn’t fight. She would think of the garden. The seeds she and Annie had brought west. The rose bush root balls wrapped in burlap. She would think of next summer’s pink blooms.

He took another heavy drink of the whiskey and she fought the urge to ask for some for herself. But being drugged was like closing her eyes—it only made opening her eyes harder. He wrapped his fist in her dress, pulling her against him.

No.
The thought was a scream in her head.
No! No! No! No!

His hand slipped; his chin fell to his chest. His eyes closed and then popped open. The drink, perhaps the laudanum, were pulling him under. Relief buckled her knees.

“Let me help you to bed,” she said, praying that she had gotten enough into him. And that combined with the whiskey it would do the job.

“What did you do?” His eyes narrowed, his wet lips curled.

“I did nothing.”

“We . . . we talked about you lyin' to me.” He got to his feet, leaning hard against the table. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” she said, clutching the laudanum, trying to hide it in her skirts.

“Liar,” he said and lunged forward. She realized what he was about and tried to duck out of the way, but she was too late.

His fist caught her on the side of the face and she crashed against the hearth before falling to the ground. In blackness.