Page 57 of The Scot Beds His Wife
Bennett Masters and his brothers, Boyd and Bradley, had showed up at the Smith ranch looking for work the year she’d turned seventeen. They’d been a lean, masculine trio with excellent demeanors and good teeth. Both of those virtues were in short supply thereabouts.
That Bennett Masters could charm a serpent out of his skin,Ada Smith, the second wife, had warned the girls.You avoid temptation, you mark me.
Samantha had listened to Ada, and really, she’dtriedto avoid temptation… but when the Masters brothers had returned the next year with the seasonal ranch hands, along with a balding man named Ezekiel, and a few gauchos from Mexico, Sam hadn’t been inured to the sparkle of mischief in Bennett’s eyes. Or the wickedness in his smile.
And when Mr. Smith informed her of God’s revelation that the sour, solemn, pious Ezekiel was to take her back to his cabin for his second wife, she’d run into Bennett’s open arms sobbing and panicked.
He’d offered her escape. Excitement. He’d plied her with all the foreign emotions never afforded her since her parents had died, and then some. Affection. Validation. Anticipation of a different fate. One that wasn’t breaking her back beneath the desert sun until exhaustion, illness, or injury put her in an early grave.
Samantha had always known she didn’t have the heart of a pioneer.
What she hadn’t realized was that her new husband and his family were not only orphans, they were outlaws, and the next four years had been a slow decline into infamy. She’d fought it, at first, like a weak child swimming upstream. She’d done her best to change him, to transform them all into honest men. But eventually an empty stomach, the fear of Boyd’s brutality, and the relentless desperate hope for a better life overcame her scruples.
That was, until she’d met Alison Ross.
Her conscience had settled for a thief as a husband, but never a cold-blooded killer.
Oh God, how could she have been so senseless? How could she have been so blind? She’d thought that shooting Bennett would be the absolute worst thing she’d ever done. The worst tragedy she’d have to survive. It would be the stain on her conscience she’d forever have to live with, but on the same hand, she’d thought the nightmare was over.
She’d assumed they wouldn’t find her here, perched on what had seemed to be the wild, untamed edge of the world.
She’d been a damned fool.
Now she knew the remaining Masters brothers had used their fortune to find her. That they’d sent those men after her, and once word reached them that they’d failed to do her in, they’d come for her again.
Boyd and Bradley wouldn’t stop sending people afterher until she’d paid for what she’d done to Bennett. She knew this with a zealous fervency.
“Shhhhh.” A soft croon whispered through her, vibrating in her ear and rippling down her flesh, creating goose pimples with a pleasant shudder. “Doona cry, bonny, I have ye. Ye’re safe.”
Would she ever be safe again? Who could protect her from vicious Boyd and his dead-eyed aim? Or cruel, simple Bradley with his heavy fists? Who would stand against men known to massacre an entire train car of innocent people?
Who would…wait… whose bed was she in right now?
Her eyes flew open, and the lone flame of a lantern assaulted her with light she’d not been prepared for.
Moaning her disapproval, she wrenched her neck to the side, and instantly realized her angel was not that of the avenging cast. Neither was he celestial in the least. Oh no. The handsome features hovering above hers knew nothing of grace, sacrifice, or piety.
This man had surely fallen from heavenly favor eons ago. His soul besmirched with sin, self-indulgence, and unrepentant wickedness.
Lord, but he was beautiful, though. She could imagine him a fallen angel, perhaps, with a span of long, powerful wings.
Never a halo, though. Never that.
Thorne. Her deluded memory whispered to her. He was Thorne. Or… a thorn… Was that what prodded against her backside even now? No… it was too blunt, too hot.
“Welcome back, bonny.”
Samantha blinked rapidly against the overwhelming devastation wrought within her by that smile, trying to regain her scattered wits. Everything was so muddled. Itwas as though the earth had sped in its orbit and she could not catch it up. Her tongue was heavy and useless in her mouth. She wriggled her fingers, only to establish that they remained attached to her hands.
“Wh-where am I?”
That smile again. It dazzled and infuriated her at the same time.
“Ye are in my bed at Inverthorne Keep, lass. A position coveted by untold throngs of women.”
Inverthorne Keep.Certainty permeated her untidy consciousness, dawning with slow degrees of mounting horror on the heels of each revelation.
The feather-soft floor of her cave had been the Earl of Thorne’smattress.The hard, warm, unyielding walls were, in fact, the lean muscles of his incomparable body, honed to obdurate swells by long months spent toiling in his brother’s barley fields.
