Ashes and Memories (13 page)

He found himself caressing her silken hair where it had come loose from the tight bun atop her head, whispering words of comfort, rocking her to and fro as if she were a child. But she wasn’t a child. Her soft womanly body fit against his with frightening perfection. The sweet, feminine scent of her hair filled his ragged senses and caused his head to spin.

It was no use trying to keep his boundaries up, no use trying to pretend, even to himself, that he didn’t care, that he was comforting her out of some detached sense of gallantry. She wasn’t just a crying woman he’d come upon. She was Emma, and from the first time he’d laid eyes on her, she’d gotten under his skin as no one else had in a very long time.

Hers was the face of innocence ravaged by war, a face he had seen far too many times.

Oh, Emma, damn you, he thought. Damn you for making me feel this... for making me feel.

“It’s all right, Emma,” he whispered hoarsely.

Her sorrow filled him, and he opened himself to the pain, absorbing it as if by doing so he could alleviate her suffering. His strength flowed into her, leaving him drained and his own pain raw like a wound that had nearly healed, only to be ripped open again.

Torture.

They were very good at torture. They would let the wounds nearly heal and then they would rip them open again.

The sound of boot heels on the polished stone floor grew louder and louder, echoing through the cold, dark corridor like the crack of a whip. Closing his eyes, he struggled against the dread that pounded through his veins. There was nowhere to hide, no recourse, no means of defense.

The echoes of screams from somewhere beyond his thick cell door reached his ears, ricocheting off the walls and trembling down his spine.

The breath rasped in his chest as he beat down the memory, a nightmare he had not relived in years. He focused on the core of strength inside himself as he’d taught himself to do whenever reality became intolerable. In prison he had fixed his mind on a distant point of light -- Sarah, his home. But now he knew what he hadn’t known then. That light offered false hope. There was nothing to hold onto, nothing to believe in. He would never depend on anything outside himself again.

The soft sound of Emma’s unsteady breathing intruded on his misery. She pulled slightly away, turning her tear-streaked face up to look into his eyes.

Her soft lips trembled slightly, and it took every ounce of restraint he possessed not to touch them with his own, not to kiss her until she forgot the sorrow and clung to him for another reason.

He was damned. He was falling into hell, and he couldn’t stop. He couldn’t face her pain without risking opening the door to his own and being destroyed by it.

“It was the doll,” she said, her soft voice unsteady.

Reece breathed deeply, steadying his raging senses and his equally raging emotions. With those words that made no sense to his befuddled mind, she saved him from perdition and restored his sanity by giving him something else to concentrate on besides his own pain, by providing him an anchor in the present.

Whatever he was feeling would pass away in the night. Tomorrow morning he would be able to regain his equilibrium and his perspective. He’d suffered momentary lapses from time to time when something would spark a memory of Sarah’s smile or his mother’s compassionate eyes or Grandfather’s wise voice. This was no different. He would conquer the chink in his armor as he always had before.

She bent and picked up the old rag doll where it lay on the floor at her feet. “I found it in my trunk. It was the first doll, the only doll he ever gave me.”

“Your father,” he said, glad for something else, anything else to think about other than the blackness inside his own soul.

Emma confirmed his words with a nod of her head. “I was eight years old. It just never occurred to him before that I was a girl and that I might want dolls.”

She cradled the doll to her breast as if it were a cherished child. For once there was nothing prickly or hard about her, and her feminine beauty touched a deep yearning in his soul.

For the first time in their acquaintance, she wore a dress, a plain but attractive blue gingham that brought out the color of her eyes, eyes clouded now with remembered pain.

“You have to give yourself time to grieve and time to heal,” Reece heard himself saying. He was trapped in an untenable position between her pain and his own, between the danger of compassion and the horror of memory.

It had been so much easier when he could dislike her for her callousness toward her father. To see her like this, so grief-stricken, so fragile, tore down his every defense and forced him to accept the fact that she had only been in a state of shock when he’d come across her on the road. He found himself admiring her courage. She had controlled her grief as long as she could, and now it had overwhelmed her.

“He never came back to me,” she said, her eyes taking on a faraway glint. “I needed him so much, but they took my father away from me and sent me a stranger, a broken man who was too needy himself to be a father to me.”

Reece reached into his coat pocket and drew out a handkerchief. She took it with a shy smile that tugged at his heart and sent the blood coursing through his veins at the same time.

“He wasn’t a killer,” she went on, her voice small and heartbroken. “He was an advocate, a voice for people too weak to speak up for themselves. He never should have gone to war. He never should have gone.”

Reece turned away, ignoring the lump in his throat. She was probably right, her father was probably one of those men who shouldn’t have gone. Some men just made bad soldiers. Perhaps their consciences weren’t as easily subdued. War hardened some men, it broke others. But no man emerged unscathed.

He went to her bureau where he found a glass and filled it with whiskey from the flask in his coat pocket.

“He must have felt he had no choice,” he said, holding the glass toward her. “Perhaps he felt honor-bound to --”

“I am sick to death of honor!" she declared.

Reece stiffened at the sting of her words. How could she ever understand? Honor was the only thing that really mattered -- death with honor, defeat with honor. How could a man ever live without honor?

“What honor is there in killing?” she asked bitterly, her eyes challenging him. “The killing left shadows in his eyes." She paused, her brow furrowing, her eyes filling with an unspoken pain. “But I think it was prison that finally broke his spirit.”

The floor seemed to drop out from under Reece. He struggled to think clearly, clutching the glass in his hand in an effort to stop the trembling before she noticed, before it spread throughout his body.

His usual effortless control over his thoughts and emotions was slipping by degrees. Somehow this woman managed to pierce the defenses he’d built between himself and his demons. She laid bare the worst experiences of his life, and she wasn’t even aware that, for him, being near her was like having the flesh flayed from his body.

He had to get away from her before the shadows overtook him, but he couldn’t leave her like this. He couldn’t stay and he couldn’t go.

Her father had been in prison. He wondered where, for how long?

“Drink this" he said when he could trust himself to speak, to hold his hand steady. “It will settle your nerves.”

Obediently, Emma took the glass, staring into the amber liquid as if mesmerized. “All those weeks, locked away in a prison camp with nothing to think about but the men he’d killed. He said he could see their faces, every one of them.”

He covered her hand with his and pressed the glass toward her lips, urging her to drink, as much to silence her as to soothe her.

She lowered the glass with a quiet gasp, and Reece could almost see the whiskey spreading warmth through her. Her cheeks turned pink, and a rush of goose flesh ran down her arms, and she shuddered slightly.

“You fought in the war,” she said. “What was it like? Is that where you learned to kill without remorse?”

Reece winced at her judgment. War hadn’t taught him to kill. He’d killed his first man before the war in an illegal duel over honor. Without remorse? No, he’d rarely killed without remorse. That was the hell of it.

He could see faces, too, but not of the men he’d killed. The killing had come easier to him than perhaps it should have. It was his duty and a matter of survival, of pride. For him the faces of the men he’d killed had been overshadowed by other faces, laughing faces, hate-filled faces, faces of men who had despised and brutalized him.

The shadows stalked him, voices reaching out to him from the past. “
Where are your guerrilla friends now, MacBride?
”
 

His every muscle taut, his heart pounded as Reece tried to concentrate on the present, on the clean, sweet face before him. There had been a time when he’d wondered if he would ever see anything beautiful again.

“I don’t think you really want to hear about war,” he told her. He knew beyond a doubt that he did not want to talk about it or think about it.

“I want to understand,” she insisted. “I was only a child, but I saw what gunfire and cannon can do to flesh and bone, but --”

The shadows came closer. He closed his eyes to force them back, but it was no use. The walls closed in around him, not the wood paneled walls of a room in a small mining town, but thick, impenetrable stone walls, walls that echoed with pain and hopelessness.

How many times had he wished they would just kill him and be done with it? And the only thing that had kept him from giving in to despair was the thought of seeing Longwood again, of sitting on the verandah with Grandfather again and talking about the moral lessons of life. But there was only one lesson life had to teach, and he had learned it well. Never care about anything so deeply you couldn’t bear to lose it.

“It’s the wounds you can’t see that destroy a man,” Reece said and immediately wished he could take the words back. He didn’t want to discuss this with her, didn’t want to think about war and its aftermath, and he would not allow himself to think about prison, to imagine what her father must have gone through. He didn’t have to imagine it, he’d lived it, and he would not live through it again, not even for Emma.

“You weren’t destroyed,” she pointed out.

The memory struck out of nowhere, paralyzing him with its intensity, its stark clarity.
His body jerked against the blinding, all-consuming pain that tore through his body until he was nothing but pain. Laughter - he heard laughter from somewhere beyond the haze of pain and agony.
 

No!

He wasn’t sure if he’d spoken the word aloud or just thought it, but in either case, it was sufficient to close the door to the past that had been opened so suddenly. The breath rasped in his lungs, and a fine sheen of perspiration covered his brow.

“Don’t you bear any wounds?" Emma could almost feel the pain shudder through him, and a perverse part of her actually enjoyed it because he had survived and her father had not.

But when she glimpsed his bitter smile, she was instantly sorry for her intentional cruelty. Tonight she’d seen a side of him she suspected he didn’t show to many people, a compassionate side he kept locked away beneath that hard, ruthless exterior. And the fact that he’d shown it to her filled her heart with hope. Maybe she was right in believing that he had once been very different from the man who stood before her now, a man driven by ambition and running from whatever demons were stalking him.

He’d been so kind, so tender, and she sensed that the gesture had cost him emotionally. To deliberately cause him pain was ungrateful and petty.

“Imagine if everyone in this town suddenly went insane and started trying to kill everyone else,” he said softly, turning to face her again. “You can’t survive in a world like that without doing some things you never would have thought yourself capable of under normal circumstances.”

Emma swallowed hard. He stared, transfixed by something only he could see, something that deepened the shadows that always clouded his eyes. A tremor racked her body as she wondered if he were talking about himself. What things had he done in order to survive?

Yes, he bore wounds, she was sure of it. He hid them well most of the time, but they were there, in his eyes, in the tautness of his jaw. He was very good at control, but she couldn’t help wondering what he thought about in the dark. Was that when the demons attacked?

It had been so much easier when she could believe he was nothing more than an arrogant scoundrel. His genuine concern for her broke down the fragile barriers she’d been able to hide behind.

The depth of his understanding terrified her. She remembered what he’d said that night in his office before they’d been interrupted.
“...I know what it’s like to be stripped of everything so that all you have left is your dignity....”
 

He comprehended her pain because he’d experienced the pain of loss himself, and by his very understanding he made her anguish almost bearable.

“Was it so terrible?” she asked tremulously, and she knew immediately that she had said the wrong thing.

The desolation in his eyes pierced her heart before he managed to hide his momentary lapse of control. A protective wall fell over his features. His eyes lost the hard edge of torment, and he forced a negligent smile.

“Let’s not talk about war anymore tonight,” he said lightly.

Emma glanced away nervously. She drank the rest of the whiskey in the glass he’d given her, taking a moment to rein in her emotions. “Thank you,” she murmured.

Reece smiled wryly, some of his natural charm returning. “I am glad to be of service.”

“Always the gentleman, Mr. MacBride,” she said with a smile.

“I really must insist that you call me Reece,” he told her, “now that you’ve cried all over my best suit.”

“I’m sorry,” Emma replied, embarrassment spreading warm color up from her throat. She touched a hand nervously to a tendril of hair that fell across her temple. “I feel so foolish.”