And One Rode West (9 page)

“How dare you—”

“Take care, Christa. Get to know the enemy you’ve harnessed. I dare quite a bit. Let’s go. I’ll have the chemise—
Mrs. McCauley
.”

If she’d had a gun at that moment he was quite sure she would have shot him.

“Why, you—” she began.

He shook his head, his lip curling with dry humor. “Watch it, Mrs. McCauley.”

“Why should I bother?”

“If you act the dutiful wife, I might decide to go away.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Well, the dress is in tatters. The chemise can follow the same route.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t.”

“Want to try me? I am a Yank, after all. You need to keep that in mind.”

She lifted her chin. “You can talk that way tonight, but if Jesse or Daniel were here—”

There was nothing she could have said to quite test his temper so far. His hand shot out, his fingers winding around her wrist. In a second she was in front of him again. “Don’t threaten me with your brothers, Christa. Ever. Not unless you like the thought of more bloodshed. You married me. I warned you that you were selling both our souls to the devil. Jesse and Daniel are your brothers. Your name is McCauley now. I’m your husband. And so help me, Christa, you caused it, you’ll remember it!”

He didn’t mean to hurt her. He didn’t mean to be destructive. His fingers gripped the bodice of her chemise at the cleft between her breasts. Alarmed, she tried to wrench free again. The fabric began to tear and she stopped, furious, shaking. She wrenched the garment over her head, throwing it at him,

“Bastard!” she cried. “Take the damned thing!” He was blinded by a cloud of white fabric as she started by him.

He threw it savagely aside, long strides bringing him to her. He caught hold of her elbow, swirled her around, and swept her into his arms. He cast her, naked, defiant, and trembling, onto her bed. Before she
could think to spring to her feet he had straddled her, his weight bearing her down.

She was pure rebellion, staring up at him. A flush of color had risen to her cheeks, but her eyes were wild and furious and challenging.

Pure rebellion—and beauty. Her hair spilled about her like a black cloud, her lips were still red and moist from his kiss. Her coloring, even in moonlight, was glorious. Her naked breasts and flesh were radiant and beautiful. Heat cascaded from her in great waves. It seemed to touch him. To sweep into his body, constrict his muscles, quicken his pulse. The heat entered into his hips and his loins, and he was stunned by the savage and volatile way in which he wanted her.

He clenched his teeth hard together. He could walk away from her. Damn her, he could walk away from her!

She started to struggle. “Stop!” he warned her with a roar. He pushed back while she seethed, trying to remain still, her lower lip caught between her teeth, her breasts rising and falling with her exertion, her eyes alive with fire and vengeance.

He allowed his gaze to flicker over her. Not too slowly. A quick assessment.

“Well?” she flared. He could hear the grating of her teeth beneath the word.

He leaned close to her. “I think, Christa, that you are well aware of your own attributes. But are you payment enough for the price of a soul?” he murmured.

He felt her begin to tremble more fiercely. He pushed away from her, furious with her and with himself. He rose. He saw her eyes widen with amazement. She inched up quickly, grabbing for the coverings on her bed. He bowed to her. “My dear.”

“You’re leaving?” she said quickly.

“For the moment.”

“But what—” She paused, moistening her lips. He could see her pride battling with her absolute relief that he seemed about to let her be.

“You’ll do, Christa. But hell, I think I need a drink!” He turned and started for the door.

To his amazement, he was hit by a pillow. “Oh, you bastard!” she cried as he spun around. “This whole thing was just to torture me, to humiliate me, to strip me of my modesty—”

He walked back to her quickly, catching hold of her even as she shrieked, pulling her back up into his arms. “Christa, I can’t strip you of what you’ve already given up. You said you would have married the blue-belly who would have raped you, so don’t ask me to think too highly of your modesty. Maybe I did want to torment you.” And God alive! I tormented myself! he added silently. “But there’s more to it than that. You married me. You didn’t care to first find out what it would mean. Well, it’s done now. And you’re going to find out that it does mean something! But for the moment, good night!”

He set her down. She sank back to the bed, her eyes spitting fire.

But when he left her this time, she was silent. Hatefully silent. Even as he walked away, he could feel the fire in her eyes.

Just who had taken whom tonight, he wondered.

For Christa might well lie awake worried.

But he was suffering the tortures of the damned.

Four

Jeremy came down the stairway with tense, heavy footfalls, trying once again to ignore the numerous Camerons who seemed to be still staring at him from their frames with silent reproach. He didn’t want to see any more Camerons. The memory of Christa, naked and furious, seemed to be branded within his mind, and she was enough Cameron for him at the moment. He could still feel the sparks that had seemed to leap from her, like streaks of electricity. Christa in all her glory. All that magnificent black Cameron hair streaming down her back, every curve and nuance of her perfect young body.

Her eyes. Those blue fire-and-ice eyes. Revenge? Indeed, he’d had a taste of it. And it was sweet.

Then why was he the one so aflame now, the one suffering the pain of the damned? What a fool. How the hell could he want her so badly now? When there was nothing but hostility between them, after this travesty of a marriage, how could he have come to this position?

He reached the Camerons’ study and burst irritably into it, lighting the gas light above the desk and sinking into the chair behind that desk. He poured himself a brandy from the decanter on a side table, then leaned
back in the chair, swallowing it down, wincing at the fire that seared his throat. He didn’t dare close his eyes, and he didn’t dare open them. He saw her either way.

Christa. Naked. Maybe emotions didn’t mean anything after so long a war, and so long a time since emotions had meant something. Maybe the wanting was just enough. Christa was perfect. Tall, slim, a little bit too thin, but not even the war could have taken too much a toll upon the natural dips and curves of her body. Her naked flesh was a beautiful ivory shade and it had the sweetest scent and the most inviting appeal.

He exhaled on a long groan.

He should have left her the hell alone.

He didn’t know what force or demon was driving him tonight, he knew only that she had goaded him to a point where she was going to pay a price for what she had forced upon them.

If Christa Cameron thought it was an easy thing to twist and bend people to her will at her convenience, he was damned sorry, but she was going to have to see that her actions had serious repercussions.

Marriage. It had come so easily to her. Just a slip off her tongue. No more than a trip into town, an afternoon’s escapade, easily done, easily forgotten.

In truth, she hadn’t cared. Hadn’t given a damn about his situation, just so long as she had gotten what she wanted, to protect the sacred halls of Cameron Hall.

Not that he resented having done something to salvage the place. Perhaps Christa had been right about one thing. The Hall was history. It was beautiful, gracious, a monument to centuries of a family that had found roots and flourished in a new world. Now Cameron Hall had weathered revolution and civil war, and all the trauma in between. It deserved to stand. He could understand her desire to save it, even if he was
infuriated by the way she was willing to use him to do so.

Although he had fought all the long years of the war, although there had been times when he had watched his men fall and die and in his heart he had hated all things Rebel, he was disgusted with the way things were being handled in the South. Power was being put into careless hands. Lincoln had wanted peace. But Lincoln was dead, and Johnson’s administration was determined not on peace but on punishment. Elections were being rigged, and half the men who had been in politics before the war—those who were still living—were being barred from office for having served with the Confederacy. Daniel Cameron had yet to receive a pardon from the United States government because of his high rank in the military service, and as things stood now, some men wondered if Jeff Davis might yet meet a hangman. But beyond the blatant abuses of power, there were smaller struggles going on. Officials—many of them opportunists who had come down upon the South like locusts—were taking all manner of bribes, selling out to the highest bidders. Such had been the case with Cameron Hall.

Jeremy liked his brother-in-law, Daniel Cameron, just fine. Daniel had been a Virginian born and raised, and there hadn’t been a lot of help for the fact that he’d been a Reb. He’d just followed his own conscience. The war hadn’t given them a lot of time to deepen their acquaintance, but from what they’d come to know of one another, they shared a common way of looking at the world, at responsibility, at life. And Jeremy’s sister, Callie, loved Daniel. That said a lot for him, right there.

Jeremy was glad to have done anything that might have helped Daniel.

He lifted his brandy glass. “To you, Daniel!” The first time he had come here, looking for Callie, he had
wound up in this room, drinking brandy with Daniel Cameron. It had been a strange day. He had come here ready to do battle for his sister’s sake. He had come here an enemy. He had left here his brother-in-law’s friend, even if neither of them had changed his colors.

Then there was Jesse Cameron. He’d had several occasions to get to know Jesse—they’d fought on the same side. Jesse was the finest physician and surgeon he’d ever come across. The war had taken a hell of a toll on him as he’d patched up his friends and old acquaintances—from both sides of the fighting field. In the regular cavalry, Jeremy had ridden in by the hospital tents often enough to see his sister-in-law’s elbow deep in the wounded, that anguished look on her face that Jeremy could read too clearly.

Jesse Cameron was always afraid that someone would be bringing his brother in to him.

But the war had ended. Jesse and Daniel had both managed to stay alive.

Jeremy liked them both. It didn’t matter which side they had fought on, he had no problem with the Cameron men.

It was the Cameron woman he longed to throttle.

Christa!

Damn her. Men knew how to fight, and they knew how to surrender. For Christa, the war would never be over.

Nor, he thought soberly, would she ever realize that she wasn’t the only one to feel that she had lost a love, lost everything, in the carnage. For a moment the pain returned to him, though he thought that he had learned to suppress it a long, long time ago. It returned, harsh, brutal, tearing into his heart.

It had been one thing to see soldiers die. That had been anguish enough. But sometimes fire went awry. Sometimes cannonballs tore up far more than fortress walls or other cannons or fighting men …

Sometimes fire killed the innocent. Old men, children.

Women, trying to shelter little ones.

He grit his teeth. Jennifer Morgan had been killed during the long, awful shelling of Vicksburg, Mississippi. It had been over two years ago now. He could still remember how he had found her when the ragged, bone-thin little blockade-running urchin had brought him to her when the city had fallen into Yankee hands. She’d been in the caves beneath the hills. They’d folded her hands over her breast, and she might have been sleeping except for the clot of blood he found at the base of her skull when he’d tried to move her.

Jenny. He hadn’t known her a year. He had first met her when his troops had encamped on her farmland and he’d gone to make what restitution he could for the destruction that his men were causing with their tents and multitude of horses. He had expected a haggard farm wife, but that wasn’t what he had discovered at all. Jenny had been beautiful. Blond, green-eyed, delicate, and lovely. So very proud, but so sweet and soft-spoken. Three little children had clung to her skirts, and all were threadbare and thin-looking.