Willow: A Novel (No Series) Read online

  11

  The knob on Willow’s bedroom door turned sharply. With her heart in her throat, she snuggled down deeper in the blankets, waiting, her eyes on the brass key jutting from the lock.

  “Open the door, Willow,” Gideon commanded evenly, from the hallway.

  “No,” replied his wife, in a clear voice.

  “Do you want me to kick it in?”

  “You wouldn’t dare!”

  “Wouldn’t I, Willow?”

  “My father would—”

  “The hell with your father! Besides, he’s the one who sent me up here.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Fine,” he answered, from beyond the sturdy barrier that separated them. “Do you believe this?” There was a short, ominous silence, followed by a thundering crash that sent the door rattling against the inside wall, hinges whining.

  Willow sat up in bed, her eyes wide. “Gideon!” she gasped.

  He executed a mocking bow. “Good evening, my dear,” he said.

  Despite the violence of his action, Willow was not afraid of her husband. No, if she was afraid of anything, it was of her own vulnerability to him. “How dare you?” she breathed.

  Gideon shrugged, a shadow-draped giant, and began undoing the string tie he had worn to dinner. Then he unfastened the top buttons of his shirt and shrugged out of his suit coat. “How dare I what?” he asked, with a gruff insolence that chafed Willow’s pride.

  Willow ignored the question, since the answer was so obvious. “Get out of my room,” she said, through her teeth.

  As though she had not spoken, Gideon closed the door, walked over and sat down on the edge of the bed with a long sigh, and began pulling off his boots.

  “Gideon!”

  He smiled at her, his teeth gleaming winter white in the thick shadows. “Yes, dear?” he asked pleasantly.

  “I told you to get out!”

  “I know what you told me, hellcat,” he replied, without a whit of concern. “Move over, will you? I’m especially tired tonight.”

  “I will not move over. If you think you’re going to touch me, Gideon Marshall, after what you did tonight—”

  “I’ve no intention of touching you,” Gideon interrupted. “But I’m not going to ride out to the ranch tonight, either. Nor do I plan to sleep on that damn settee in the sitting room again.”

  “Sleep in one of the guest rooms, then!”

  “I’ll sleep here, thank you very much. Now, move over.”

  Outraged, Willow untangled herself from the covers and made to scramble off the bed, muttering about audacity and people who thought they ought to have their own way no matter what.

  Grinning, Gideon caught her arm in a light hold and eased her back onto the pillows.

  Willow glared up into his handsome face, her shoulders imprisoned beneath his hands. “If you don’t let me out of this bed,” she warned, on a hissing breath, “I will scream for my papa!”

  “That would be embarrassing for everybody,” crooned Gideon, his eyes twinkling with quiet merriment, “wouldn’t it?”

  “Most of all for you, I think!”

  Gideon arched an eyebrow. “Nothing embarrasses me, Willow,” he said. “And kindly stop acting as though you were still in pigtails.”

  Recalling Dove’s gentle reprimand concerning her tendency to behave like a little girl, Willow subsided. She rolled away from Gideon, pulled the covers up over her head, and bit back the screaming tantrum that was brewing on the tip of her tongue.

  Calmly, Gideon finished undressing and crawled into bed, stretching out beside Willow with a contented, husbandly sigh. “Good night,” he said.

  Good night? Willow fumed beneath her share of the covers. Good night indeed, when she could feel the length of him in every one of her senses, feel the hard, masculine prowess that summoned traitorous things deep inside her even though they weren’t touching at all.

  “Humph,” she said.

  Silence.

  Unsettled, Willow waited, then finally began to wonder if Gideon had gone to sleep. If he had, damn him, she would be even angrier than she would have been if he had made unseemly advances. After all, he owed her some kind of explanation for his behavior that night, if not a full and preferably abject apology, perhaps sweetened by a bouquet of flowers. “Gideon?”

  His breathing was deep, even. And he said nothing at all in response.

  “Gideon!” Willow repeated, with rising consternation.

  Nothing.

  Willow twisted into a sitting position, her fists clenched. He had a nerve, forcing his way into this room and then just lying there sleeping, for heaven’s sake, leaving her to stew in her anger like a cabbage in a pot of soup. Now that he had proved his alleged dominance, Willow concluded, Gideon meant to rest as though nothing had happened.

  Biting her lower lip, Willow studied her husband. The things Dove had told her about “owning” a man sifted into her mind. Did she love Gideon enough to do that? Was she angry enough?

  Willow had affirmative answers for both questions, contrary though they were. “Gideon,” she whispered sweetly, pulling the blankets down to his waist, trailing feather-light fingers through the swirls of tarnished gold down on his chest.

  He groaned and stirred slightly. His eyes were still closed, but Willow knew that he wasn’t sleeping at all—he’d been pretending. Somehow, this made the prospect of conquering him all the more appealing.

  “Poor darling,” she crooned, “so tired . . .”

  A muscle in his jaw tightened, then relaxed again. Willow allowed her hand to stray lower, over his hard stomach . . . farther. She clasped him tight and knew sweeping satisfaction at the way he tensed involuntarily and grew to magnificence in her hold.

  “So tired,” she said again, slipping beneath the covers, trailing victorious kisses over his taut flesh as she went.

  Gideon made a strangled sound and arched his back when she reached her destination; in that wildly triumphant moment, Willow knew that Dove had been right. The dominion, always Gideon’s before, had shifted. His powerful legs moved in unqualified surrender and his hands were tangled in Willow’s hair, making a plea all their own.

  At the same time, hoarse, senseless words came from deep within him; Willow could feel them shuddering through his hard frame long before they reached his throat.

  On and on, she gloried in the knowledge that she was pleasing him, that she and she alone existed for him now, in this treacherous, excruciatingly beautiful moment.

  Gideon began to writhe and twist like a man in delirium, his fingers frantic in her hair, his cries oddly muffled. Finally, a great shudder racked him and he gave a guttural growl of mingled satisfaction and defeat. Again and again he tensed, gasping Willow’s name as though it were a chant for salvation.

  Flushed with the ferocity of her victory, Willow sat up and smiled down into his face. He was breathing very rapidly and his eyes were fixed on something far beyond the dark ceiling of that bedroom.

  Deliberately patronizing him, Willow reached up and patted his cheek. “Good night, dear,” she said. Now she would be the one to sleep, while Gideon lay wondering in the darkness.

  Except that he caught her wrist in an inescapable hand and his eyes glittered like a tiger’s in the silvery moonlight. “Where did you learn that?” he demanded.

  Willow executed a theatrical yawn. “Dove told me. Good night, darling.”

  “Good night nothing!”

  “I’m very tired, Gideon.”

  “You’re going to be a lot more tired before I get through with you,” he answered.

  Willow would have scooted away if he hadn’t held her so firmly. “What—don’t you want to sleep?”

  Gideon laughed low in his throat. “Sleep? After that? You must be joking.”

  “But—”

  He arched an eyebrow and held her wrist while his free hand came to the buttons of her prim flannel nightgown and deftly began to undo them. “But?” he mocked, in a drawl
.

  “Dove said you would sleep—”

  Again Gideon laughed. “Did she?” he teased, baring both of Willow’s breasts and tracing the nipples with the tip of one finger, rousing them to a hard, crimson response. “Well, my dear, Dove passes her evenings, you must remember, with a man almost twice my age.”

  Willow blushed hotly and swatted at his plundering fingers with her free hand. “Gideon Marshall—”

  In a lightning-fast grappling motion, Gideon caught both of Willow’s wrists in one hand and held them behind her. Then, slowly, gently, he drew the shoulders of her nightgown downward until they were tight around her upper arms. A calculated thrust at the small of her back made her captured breasts jut forward in proud surrender. He bent to take suckle at one peak, echoing the groan this brought from deep within Willow.

  When he had feasted at one brazenly beautiful fount, he turned to the other, plying it to obedience with his lips, his teeth, his tongue. The pleasure was so piercing that Willow had to bite down on a thick strand of her own hair to keep from letting him know the full scope of her need.

  But if she could control the cries that rose repeatedly into her throat, demanding utterance, she could not stop the primitive responses of her body itself. Each time Willow shuddered, Gideon grew greedier at her breast, renewing his efforts to drive her beyond the portals of paradise.

  Finally, however, his greed was sated. They knelt in the middle of the bed, facing each other, Gideon naked, Willow still imprisoned in her disheveled nightgown. The peaks of Willow’s breasts, moist, thoroughly tongued, and suckled, pulsed in the night air. She sat motionless as Gideon deftly pulled the flannel garment up over her head.

  Slowly, almost reverently, he drew her to kneel astraddle his lap, his lips warm in the hollow beneath her right ear. “Sweet vengeance awaits you, little pagan,” he promised hoarsely. “Sweet vengeance indeed.”

  At his entry, which was a gentle one, Willow gasped and let her head fall back, knowing that her passion was visible to him and beyond caring. “Oh, Gideon,” she choked out, already transported. “Gideon, Gideon!”

  “Soon,” he said, bending to attend one straining nipple even as his hands lifted Willow and slowly lowered her again.

  She cried out softly and tried to accelerate the motion of her hips, only to be held to the slower pace Gideon had set for them both. When satisfied that she would obey this meter, Gideon released her hips to catch both of her breasts in his hand and press their lush fullness together. Now he subjected both peaks to the searing forays of his tongue.

  “Gideon,” moaned Willow, “Gideon—please—I can’t bear any more.”

  He merely continued the sweet menacing, bringing his teeth and lips into play, too.

  Finally, driven by a force greater than her will and her pride combined, Willow began to move upon him. This time he permitted it, and their bodies left their minds far behind as they soared toward a ferocious release that encompassed them both and sent them spinning through a universe void of all but their own stifled, throaty cries.

  When she could coerce her lax muscles to move again, Willow fell back, ready to sleep. This, Gideon would not allow. He was insatiable and his tender vengeance carried them both to peak after breathless peak. Their fevered gasps and whispered pleas echoed far into the night.

  * * *

  Steven Gallagher sat back in the rickety wooden chair, his wounded shoulder and his mind aching in time with each other. Even though it would have been too dangerous to stay at Willow’s place, he’d returned to the hideout, a cabin way back in the hills, almost as soon as he could ride. He was getting too old for the outlaw life.

  The thought made him sigh.

  It wasn’t as if he had a lot of other choices.

  Behind him, at a small table, Coy and Reilly were engaged in a game of cards and yet another of their almost constant arguments.

  Steven sighed and covered his eyes with one hand. God, he was tired of them, tired of this life, tired of hiding and being hunted like a rabid wolf.

  And now there was Daphne. Since he’d met her, the bone-deep loneliness—as much a part of him as the color of his eyes or the pitch of his voice, it had been with him so long—had become almost unbearable.

  Stretching out his long legs toward the empty hearth, he remembered that dark-haired, violet-eyed wonder and, for the first time, wished that he had lived his life differently. If he’d been the upright and law-abiding sort, after all, he would be free to go to Daphne now, with flowers in his hand.

  Flowers? Steven lifted the back of one hand to his forehead to see if he was fevered. Next he’d be wearing suits and bowler hats, passing out calling cards.

  Devlin would like that, Steven told himself, but the old, bitter magic didn’t work. Spiting his father, always a major source of satisfaction, just wasn’t enough anymore. The hell of it was that Coy and Reilly had been dragged into a life that would, more than likely, get them killed one day, just because they were his half brothers.

  His head throbbing, Steven listened to the boys as they argued over a stupid turn of the cards. They weren’t children, as he’d so often reminded himself, they were men—Coy twenty-five years old, Reilly twenty-two. They should have jobs, homes, wives, children by now. Instead, by virtue of their association with Steven himself, they had prices on their heads.

  “Steven,” whined Coy, “two aces don’t beat three of a kind, does it?”

  “No,” Steven answered, too tired to grapple with his brother’s convoluted grammar. Chastity had taught Steven to read when he was little, from a stack of dime novels someone had left behind in one of the hideouts, and he’d devoured virtually every book he could get his hands on ever since.

  Thanks to Willow, who had no compunction about pilfering the judge’s fine library, there had been plenty.

  His younger brothers, by contrast, were practically illiterate.

  “I can’t stand this place no more!” blurted Reilly, out of the blue. “No women, no whiskey—I’m going to Mexico with Blanchard.”

  Steven let the front legs of his chair strike the floor. “What?”

  Both Coy and Reilly were glaring at him now, flushed, braced for some sort of challenge. “You done wrong, tellin’ him to ride out, Steven,” complained the latter. “Blanchard was a good man.”

  “Good?” Steven rasped. “He robbed the Central Pacific and they’re blaming us for it. He killed a man, for no reason—”

  “So what?” countered Coy petulantly. “Ain’t that what an outlaw’s supposed to do?”

  “My God,” muttered Steven distractedly. Look what you’ve done to them, said a voice deep in his mind. Look what you’ve done.

  “I’m leavin’ this place,” said Reilly, with unusual spirit. “You wanna spend your life plaguin’ your rich daddy, that’s your affair. I don’t wanna hide out anymore, and I don’t care to be all the time lookin’ over my shoulder for Vancel Tudd, neither.”

  “I feel the same,” said Coy.

  “Fine,” Steven said raggedly. “You’re men and I’m not about to tell you what to do. But mark my words, both of you—if you take up with Blanchard, you’ll get yourselves killed before you ever get as far as Mexico.”

  “You’re the one that said he could ride with us in the first place, Steven!” Reilly reminded him as he began gathering up his rifle, his bedroll, his few personal belongings. Coy soon followed suit.

  There was no denying Reilly’s remark, and Steven, still recovering from Red Eagle’s hatchet attack, didn’t have the spirit to argue with his brothers. Besides, where had his advice gotten them so far? “Go,” he said, “get out of here.”

  “We’ll find a way to send word when we’re out of the country, maybe through Willow or the judge,” promised Coy. “Okay, Steven?”

  The last two words echoed through Steven’s spirit like the toll of some grim funeral bell. We’re trusting you—okay, Steven? We’ll live the way you do—okay, Steven?

  “Good-bye,” he sa
id, closing his eyes.

  “You’ll be all right, won’t you?” Reilly asked, hesitating. “What’re you gonna do now, Steven?”

  He sighed, wishing they’d go, wishing they’d stay, wishing he’d done things differently after Chastity and Jay Forbes had died. “I can take care of myself,” he said.

  “Sure,” said Coy, like he really believed it.

  “So long, Steven,” added Reilly.

  And then they were gone, the shack door closing quietly behind them.

  After he’d heard them ride away, into the thick darkness, Steven got out of his chair, went to the small stove in one corner of the old cabin, and poured coffee into a chipped enamel mug. As he drank it, he pictured himself knocking on Devlin Gallagher’s door. Hullo, Pap, he imagined himself saying.

  The ridiculousness of that made him laugh ruefully. It was too late to go home. Maybe, despite Devlin’s constant pleas and protestations, it had always been too late.

  * * *

  Willow felt the sun touch her face and squeezed her eyes shut, at the same time flailing one arm in Gideon’s direction. If he was there, beside her, she would pretend to be asleep until he left.

  But the bed was empty and so, Willow soon realized, was the room. She felt mingled disappointment and relief as she yawned and sat up.

  She supposed Gideon was prancing about like a rooster, after last might. He’d be insufferable and pompous, probably, and just imagining the glitter of triumph in his eyes made her simmer.

  There was a knock at the door and Willow stiffened, thinking that she might have to face her husband after all. Then it came to her that, with his gall, Gideon wouldn’t have bothered to knock. “Come in,” she said, expecting Maria.

  Instead, Daphne swept into the room, looking insistently friendly. “About what happened at dinner last night—”

  Willow stopped her with an upraised hand. “If you want Gideon Marshall, you can have him,” she said. “With my blessings.”

  “But I don’t. Willow, you must know that Gideon put me up to that—he only wanted to make you jealous.”