Page 31 of Moonshine Lullabies

Collier almost had me fooled. Almost had me wanting to believe…

He stared me in the eyes and I was transfixed, unable to look away if I wanted to.

“You sure about that?” he asked and all I could do was swallow hard and stare back into those icy blue eyes that searched mine out. I couldn’t find my voice. I couldn’t lie to him. I didn’t want to…

“It’s alright, honey, you ain’t gotta tell me your secrets,” he murmured, and his voice had taken on that same soothing quality as last night when he’d read my book to me.

Without thinking, I nodded, and he smiled some.

“Someday, I’d like to know them,” he said and my mind, it was like it glitched on me and I’d lost myself in his eyes and had forgotten what we’d been talking about.

“Know what?” I asked.

“All your secrets,” he murmured. He reared up, adjusting himself and the way it jostled the bed snapped me out of whatever kind of spell he’d had me under.

I choked on a laugh and said, “I don’t have any secrets.” I managed to look away, down into my lap at my hands, stiffly folded on top of my book.

“Oh, now we both know that’s a lie,” he said, his voice changing to lighter in tone, teasing in its chiding.

I frowned slightly and when I looked at him, my anger at being questioned disappeared. It was unnerving, how he saw right through me. How he saw more than anyone else.

“Trust me when I tell you, ain’t none of what I’m holding inside worth knowing,” I said, and just letting that little bit off my chest felt… nice.

He smiled, and it held an edge of something undefinable to me and he nodded once, slipping my book out from under my hands and opening it at the beginning, ignoring the bookmark in its pages.

“Now we gonna do this, we gonna do it right,” he said. “I think I’d quite like to start at the beginning.”

He cleared his throat and started…

“Agony lanced through me at even intervals. Rhythmic, plodding, grating fiery fucking agony as broken bones ground against each other and I watched as the red, red, blood pattered against the freshly fallen snow.

I stared at it dripping off of my limp fingertips as my arm swung with the jostling steps of the horse whose neck I hung over. I tried and failed to pull in a full lungful of frozen Virginia winter air to no avail.

I struggled to breathe and to push myself up and failed at both completely miserably.

“Hang on now, sir. We almost got you there. Just a few more steps now,” Tobias – fucked if I could remember his last name – but he was a man out of Tennessee, a good one. One of my men, and he was leading the mount I was draped over along the snow-lined edge of a muddy tract. I didn’t understand that… how he could be leading me. I should have been leading, I was their leader… but something – I tensed as another haze of pain washed through me and my poor broken mind tried to scramble at the slick surface of my pool of memory that’d suddenly become as hard as glass.

What’d happened to me?

I was only vaguely aware of the screaming, and further off, the crack of rifle fire and the sound of round shot buzzing through the air with the reverberation of angry bees.

The war was raging on out there –but what had happened to me and my men?”

I smiled some and settled back, closing my eyes to listen to him read the prologue of my book and the part of Cain Golden, a supernatural civil war soldier on the front lines of a story that was a sort of parallel history to what was real life.

It was nice, and he stopped at the end of the small chapter. When he turned the page, he said, “Oh, hey now… looks like it’s your turn.”

I opened my eyes and smiled, and said softly, “Maybe tomorrow night. I find myself more ‘n a little sleepy.”

He nodded and moved the bookmark to the front at the first chapter and asked me, “Alright with you if I stay in here?”

I thought about it and let the confession slip from my lips… “I think I’d like that. It’s, um, it’s been a long time since I’ve slept next to anyone but Tater.”

He nodded and his lovely eyes roved my face. He said with conviction, “That’s all it needs to be, you know. For now. Just sleep. I honestly can’t think of anything better to be honest, than sleeping with a beautiful woman in my arms.”

I snorted. “No need to lay it on so thick,” I said, and he shook his head, his expression dead serious.

“I ain’t laying anything on, and sure as hell if I was, I wouldn’t do it thick. You’re not that type of woman.”

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