“How’s she supposed to marry him if she doesn’t see –?” I started.
“Prior!” he spat on another shake.
“Stop shaking me!” I yelled and he did, only to get in my face again.
“You knew it’d bring on the curse,” he growled. “You knew and you just stood there –”
I interrupted him with, “I didn’t know!” and his scowl grew more ferocious. “I didn’t!” I yelled. “I’m an administrative assistant! I don’t know anything.”
His brows knitted dangerously over narrowed eyes. “You knew, Cora, you knew.”
“I didn’t!” I snapped. “And anyway, if he wasn’t supposed to see her, why did you all come riding up all fancied up in feathers and shit on the wedding day? That wasn’t too smart.”
“She wasn’t supposed to be there, you know that,” he fired back.
I blinked. “She wasn’t?”
“No,” he gritted between his teeth, releasing me and I stumbled back and hit his horse who moved slightly into me like it wanted to break my fall and if that was what it wanted, the horse got it for I didn’t fall. “She was to sleep at your parents’ and we were there to get your lazy arse out of bed. Rosa was not supposed to be at your home.”
Hmm. I wasn’t really fond of being known as lazy in this world. Sure, I could procrastinate with the best of them but I wouldn’t describe myself as lazy.
“But –” I began.
“And if she was there, which you knew she was, you should have kept her from seeing Dash. But you didn’t. You just stood there, gabbing at us like a fool, you didn’t warn us she was there and when she arrived, you let her see him. You know the curse. She did not.”
That sounded ridiculous.
“Why did I know and she didn’t? That’s ridiculous,” I informed him.
He glared at me a moment before he asked quietly, “What’s the matter with you? Have you gone mad?”
“I don’t think so,” I replied because I wasn’t certain. Everything around me felt mad but I didn’t feel mad.
Then again, I’d never been mad. How would I know?
Something about him changed and I watched it with fascination. He wasn’t any less scary; he was only a different kind.
“We’re not a love match, we both know this, but I would never have suspected you’d do that to your sister,” he said softly.
“We… we…” I couldn’t finish.
A love match? What was he talking about?
“You care for her, deeply, or so I thought. And if you didn’t care about her,” his face got hard, “we both know you care for Dash.”
Uh. What?
He kept talking. “Your feelings for them, my feelings for them, that was why we wed in the first place.”
Uh. What!
“Wed?” I whispered.
He glowered at me then warned, “Don’t try me, Cora.”
“We’re… we’re… you and me… we’re… married?”
He leaned his face into mine again and growled, “Don’t try me, Cora.”
Holy crap!
I was married to this guy?
“So… uh, where were you last night?” I asked what I thought was a pertinent question, considering he was my husband and I woke up alone, and his face got even harder.
“You’re trying me,” he stated.
Oh dear. I was trying him.
Damn.
I studied him. He was a big guy. Very big. Very tall. Very broad. He wore black. All black. He had a scar. His horse was enormous and powerful. He carried a knife on his belt. He scared me just the way he could look at me and he had no problem with shaking me so my head snapped around.
I was thinking I didn’t want to mess with this guy.
I was also thinking that maybe I shouldn’t tell him that I was actually not his wife but a single girl who worked for an ad agency and lived in Seattle. I was thinking that wouldn’t go down too well.
The problem was, I was in a fantasyland, he was the only human being around me, I needed him to talk to me, I needed him to get where I was coming from which was definitely not here and I didn’t know what to tell him.
What I did know was that it appeared he didn’t like me too much and so I figured my best bet was not telling him anything at all.
Which meant I was screwed.
Damn!
“I… I think I need a minute to, uh… get my head straight,” I told him the God’s honest truth.
We were just inside the mouth of the cave and the storm and trees outside meant the light coming in was dim but I saw his hard, glittering, dark eyes examine me, travelling down my body. They stopped midway and his jaw clenched.
I looked down to see the thin material of the nightgown, no matter that there was a lot of it, had gone see-through. I was, luckily, wearing a pair of what looked like loose, white shorts but up top, there was nothing left to the imagination.
Double damn!
I grabbed fistfuls of the material in both hands, pulled it around my breasts and looked back at his face to see his eyes shoot to mine.
“Uh –” I started but stopped when he took a step forward while dipping his shoulder. Then that shoulder was in my stomach and I was up. I grabbed onto his shirt at the back and shouted, “What are you doing?”
“Quiet,” he commanded.
I yanked on his shirt and kicked my feet. “Put me down!” I yelled, panicked and wondering what he was going to do next but thinking I wasn’t going to like it.
I wasn’t wrong.
I felt the crack of his hand on my ass, it sounded nearly as loud as when he slapped the rump of Dashiell’s horse but since he did it to me, it hurt… a lot.
“Quiet,” he growled but I had already quieted.
He hit me. He hit me, he yanked me off his horse, he shook me, he ordered me around, he called me lazy and, I will repeat, he hit me. So hard it hurt. A lot.
I didn’t like this guy. Not at all.
I felt the stinging in my nostrils that heralded tears.
Oh man, I needed to get home.
Chapter Three
Pure You
He walked me deeper into the cave, not far but where he took me was damper and darker.
Then he bent at the waist to drop me and my hands automatically circled his neck because I didn’t want to go down hard on the shards of stone and he’d drop me hard, I knew it.
Surprisingly, I needn’t have done this for his arms curved around my thighs and waist to lighten the fall and what he put me on was soft.
“You’ve gained weight,” he grunted as he was straightening away from me.
Great. Just great. In this world I was fat. Marvelous.
“I’ve got to see to Salem, get wood, find food. I’ll be back,” he informed me then with no further ado, he turned and left.
I lay on whatever I was on and looked at the dim opening to the space that he’d disappeared through. I heard the horse heave a mighty, shuddering breath through his horse lips and decided that was his greeting to his master.
My mind was blank. So blank, I had not one thought by the time he came back. I heard what sounded like wood crashing to the cave floor then he left again without looking at me. He came back three more times and there were three more wood crashing noises. Then he moved around, I heard more wood banging together, saw the strike of rock against rock and then there was a weak fire. He moved to the wall of the cave, pulled something down and went back to the fire. I watched him light a torch then take it back to the wall and affix it to something. He did this four more times and the torches, with the fire, meant the space was better lit. It wasn’t exactly blazing light you could read by but at least you could see.
And I saw that I was on hides, lots of them. That was when I realized I was trembling violently. I rolled, pulled a hide out, saw that under the top, dark hide there was a bed of what looked like fluffy, cream sheepskins. I crawled in and pulled the top hide over me and up high, wrapping its heavy weight clumsily around me as best I could.