Ashes and Memories (19 page)

Concern for her? He disliked her. Didn’t he? She was so confused.

He’d come after her. Yes, and his voice had soothed her and chased away the terror. She’d clung to him because she was afraid that if she let go she would be lost in the cold, dark place that beckoned to her mind.

“You said you wouldn’t get involved,” she murmured.

“I know what I said,” Reece replied. “And I meant it. “

“Then why?" She tried to block the memories, tried to focus on the present and not on that terrible moment when she’d made the decision to kill in order to save herself. Gazing into Reece’s upturned face, she felt a shiver of recognition that she hadn’t noticed before.

He’d killed many times. How did he go on living?

She shook her head to clear her thoughts. “Why did you come --?”

“Does it matter?”

“No,” she replied, swallowing the questions she wanted to ask, and with them the horror that still lingered inside her. “No, I guess it doesn’t matter.”

Reece released her hands, and it was all Emma could do not to reach out to him. She trembled as a chill crawled over her body. Suddenly she felt very vulnerable and very exposed, and very afraid. Clutching Reece’s duster closer around her, she drew comfort from the heavy garment, from its warmth and from the scent of him that clung to the fabric.

She wanted to let him take control, needed to lean on him and accept without reservation the comfort he offered. But despite the haze of pain and horror that dulled her mind, she remembered the sting of his rejection the last time she’d been foolish enough to trust him. She’d vowed never to make that mistake again, but how could she resist when she felt as if her world was crumbling around her head and clinging to him was the only thing that could save her from the darkness?

“Maybe you should lie down, try to get some sleep,” Reece suggested, resting a hand on her shoulder.

“I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again.”

“Then at least rest,” he said, his voice soft and filled with tenderness.

Emma closed her eyes, savoring the warmth of his touch. He hadn’t left her. She didn’t think she could bear it right now if he left her.

He understood. He’d killed before, and so he knew what she was feeling. Maybe he’d felt it before himself, this sense of loss as if the person she’d been before had ceased to exist and had been replaced by someone capable of killing.

“Tell me it will stop,” she whispered.

“It will,” he replied.

He hadn’t even had to ask what she meant. He knew she was talking about the pain, the guilt.

“How can you bear it?” she asked. “How can you keep on living and killing?”

“I am alive because I have killed other men. You learn to live with it, Emma. You have to.”

He handed her a glass of whiskey which she took with a trembling hand. The gesture reminded her of the last time he’d offered her whiskey to calm her. They’d been in her room. He’d been so sweet, so tender. They had been talking about death then, too, about her father’s death, about the horrors of war Reece had experienced.

Oh God, now she understood the demons that had stalked her father, haunting him to the point that he hadn’t been able to go on living. Now she understood what she hadn’t comprehended then. Nothing she could have done could have taken away that pain. Nothing.

She gazed up at Reece MacBride, into those eyes that seemed to reflect his every transgression, and she wondered if he’d become hardened to the killing, where her father could not.

“I killed that man,” she said, her voice full of tears.

“In self-defense,” Reece reminded her.

“He’s still dead,” she countered, daring him to contradict her or defend what she’d done.

Instead, he turned his gaze away with a sigh of regret.

“I wish....”

“What Emma?”

“I wish I hadn’t acted so quickly. If I’d thought about it, maybe --”

“God, Emma, acting quickly is the only thing that saved you,” he said.

The passion in his voice captivated her, and she sat transfixed as he hunkered down before her and took her hands again, his visage earnest and more open than she’d ever seen it.

“You don’t have time to think in situations like that,” he went on. “Someone attacks you, you defend yourself. That’s why you carry a gun.”

“Not anymore.”

Reece released a deep sigh, shaking his head negatively. “You can’t mean that. This is rough country. You don’t have a choice.”

“A lot of women don’t carry guns,” she reasoned.

“Because they have husbands or because no one ever took the time to teach them to use a gun. You’re lucky your father knew how important it was that you be able to protect yourself.”

A sob escaped Emma’s tenuous control. She didn’t feel very lucky right now. In fact, she couldn’t ever remember feeling so wretched. “I don’t ever want to feel like this again. And I don’t want to get used to it so that the next time doesn’t hurt quite so much. That’s what happened to you, isn’t it? You’ve killed so many men you’ve gotten used to it.”

Reece’s jaw stiffened and he seemed not to see her for a moment, his gaze distant and intense. Emma waited for him to speak, knowing that whatever he meant to say would not come easy for him. She teetered between curiosity and dread as he drew a deep breath and focused on her face again.

“I hesitated once, Emma,” he told her, his voice soft, his eyes filled with the kind of pain she’d only glimpsed there once before.

“
It’s the wounds you can’t see that destroy a man
,” he’d said that night in her room when he’d comforted her, and she’d wondered then, as she did now, what demons haunted him.
 

“I paid a terrible price for my indecisiveness,” he went on.

“What happened?” she couldn’t help asking.

“It was during the war,” he said, coming to his feet. He crossed the room to the window and drew back the curtains to look out at the black night. “A man in my company turned traitor. When I found out, I decided to take him back instead of executing him on the spot as I should have done.”

“You did the right thing. Surely --”

“At the time I thought so,” he replied, his back to her. “I thought it was the right thing. But what appears to be the moral thing is not always the right thing. Corporal Prescott escaped. He brought the Union army down on us. A quarter of my men were killed, another quarter captured and sent to prison.”

Emma opened her mouth to speak, but the anger and sorrow in his eyes stole her words. The darkness in his gaze intensified, and she realized he was looking past her to a time and a place he couldn’t quite leave behind. He knew their names, saw their faces, the faces of men he must have felt responsible for. “You couldn’t have known --”

“I should have acted quickly instead of hesitating. “He turned to look at her, his eyes filled with a self-loathing he’d lived with for too many years. “Mercy is always repaid with treachery. Remember that.”

Emma closed her eyes against the coldness that reached her from where he stood across the room. “I don’t want to believe that.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, not looking at her. “It’s a lesson you never should have had to learn.”

“I feel like... like I’m no better than him now, like he took something from me.”

“I know,” he said quietly.

She wanted to ask him if he’d felt it, too, if he felt it now when he took a life, but a knock on the door stopped her. Reece opened the door and stepped outside.

“What is it?” Reece asked Wilson as soon as the door closed behind him.

“Thought you’d like to know it’s over,” Wilson told him.

“Good." Reece sighed in relief, gazing at the closed door and thinking of the distraught woman on the other side. The sooner things got back to normal the better for everyone, especially Emma. “What’s the damage?”

Wilson shrugged. “Won’t know for sure till morning. We suffered about half a dozen injuries, two killed. Doc’s set up a hospital over at the hotel. We killed five of Garrett’s boys. Three more are in jail.”

“Garrett?" Reece asked.

“He must’ve got away.”

“Damn,” Reece cursed under his breath. If Garrett was still alive, he might be able to reassemble his men for another attack. This might not be over yet. “Good work, Wilson. Keep sentries posted around the perimeter of the town all night. The men can work in shifts. What about Stanton and his men?”

“Ain’t seen the first sign of them.”

“That’s very peculiar. Send a couple of men out to look for him at first light, but only a couple. This town is still in danger.”

“Yes sir, Mr. MacBride.”

Reece waited until Wilson was gone before turning back to the office door. Emma waited for him inside. She needed him, and he couldn’t leave her, couldn’t hide from her pain as he had hidden from his own, not as long as she insisted on taking it out and examining it until she understood. And a part of him envied her ability to do so.

How would she react if he bared his soul to her? He immediately recoiled from his own thoughts. He didn’t want or need to bear his soul to anyone, least of all Emma with her perceptive eyes and her compassionate heart. Already there were times when he felt as if she could see into his soul, and what she might find there terrified him. He didn’t want her compassion or her pity. He didn’t want her to know his secrets, his shame.

He’d managed to lock his demons away and he’d been pretty damned successful in keeping them locked away until he’d allowed Emma to get under his skin. He just needed a little distance, that was all, a little perspective.

Perhaps it was just sympathy that made it impossible for him to turn his back on her. Things hadn’t been easy for her. In their short acquaintance, her father had committed suicide, she’d had to start over on her own in a strange place and she’d been attacked by a man she’d been forced to kill. Yet she held up to every challenge, and he knew she would pull through this one, too. But he also knew it wouldn’t be easy.

How well he knew that.

Bracing himself, he pushed the door open and stepped inside to find Emma asleep in the chair where he’d left her. He slipped the whiskey glass from her hand and placed it on the sideboard.

Kneeling before her, he gently slipped her boots off. Careful not to wake her, he drew her to her feet, supporting her scant weight as he slipped his duster from around her, then lifted her in his arms and carried her to his bedroom.

She never stirred, even when he laid her on the soft mattress and maneuvered her so he could turn down the covers and tuck them around her. When he had her settled in, he stood for a long moment, gazing down at her sleeping form.

“The first time is always the hardest, Emma,” he told her, though he knew she couldn’t hear.

“
You will never be the same again if you kill this man
." Reece staggered as if he’d taken a blow to the chest. The voice reached out to him from the past, a voice he hadn’t heard in a very long time.
 

“
This is senseless, can’t you see that?
”
 

He squeezed his eyes shut, struggling to push the voice and the memories that came with it out of his head.

“Leave me alone, old man,” he said aloud, as if his grandfather could hear him.

“
Call this duel off
.”
 

“
And have him call me a coward?
" Reece heard his own voice, the voice of a young man who knew nothing of life or death or tragedy.
 

“
There are worse things
,” his grandfather had assured him. “
Far worse things.”
 

With a deep breath, he forced the memories from his mind and gazed at Emma where she lay against the crisp whiteness of his sheets, her brow furrowed in restless sleep.

She’d collapsed in his arms from fatigue and reaction the minute they’d reached the saloon, as if she’d held on until she reached safety. He’d had to carry her up the stairs to the office.

Did she feel safe here? He wasn’t sure he wanted her to. She might come to depend on him, trust him.

Reece ran a hand through his hair as he went to stand at the window that overlooked the street. What the hell was happening to him? Her trust was exactly what he needed to earn. If she trusted him, he would be one step closer to controlling her and her newspaper.

Who was he fooling? That newspaper was a minor nuisance, nothing more. He could shut it down tomorrow if he wanted to. There was no need to deal with Emma Parker and her ideals, no need to earn her trust or attempt to control her or her
Providence Advocate
.
 

There were at least a dozen ways he could destroy her. But he’d opted to play this cat and mouse game long enough that now she had a foothold in the town. People liked her, respected her damned newspaper. But even that wasn’t much of an obstacle. He could easily turn public opinion against her and force her out of business and out of Providence. She might be clever and resourceful, but she was not ruthless. And ruthlessness, true ruthlessness, the kind that knew no boundaries or ethics, the kind that would crush dreams and destroy innocence to have its way, was something he was sure she’d never had to deal with.

Emma moaned softly, and Reece rushed back to the bed. She tossed her head from side to side but didn’t open her eyes.

“It’s all right, Emma,” he murmured, unable to resist taking her cold hand in his, fighting the urge to put his arms around her and hold her, to take away her fear and her pain.

Damn it, he was comforting her. This was the second time in their short acquaintance that he’d found himself in this situation, and he didn’t like it any better this time than he had the last. But somehow he just couldn’t help himself. She looked so fragile, so vulnerable lying there in his bed, her auburn hair tumbling over her shoulders.

And that was another thing. He liked the idea of Emma in his bed more than he wanted to, more than he should.

Why the hell had he brought her here? Why couldn’t he have just stayed out of it? Why couldn’t he leave her alone now?

Reece had no answers. He wasn’t sure himself what had prompted him to break his own vow, something he never did. He reminded himself that Emma Parker was the last person on earth he should have helped. Yet, like the fool that he was, he’d risked his own life to make sure she was safe.