Rebel (53 page)

She wanted him, oh, God, she wanted him. She was touching his hair, tearing at his shirt until it was peeled from his shoulders, and she pressed her lips against his flesh with equal hunger. She whispered no words of longing, said nothing of her emotions, for she didn’t know what would be believed.

And if he thought that she made love in order to save her own life, it didn’t matter. Having him mattered. Feeling him touch her mattered. The caress of his tongue against her belly and thighs, his weight atop her, his hands, fingers stroking, the feel of him beneath her touch, the shiver and convulsion of his muscles when she captured and stroked him. His violent shudder when she slipped low against him…

With barely tempered violence, he was within her, and she cried out, clinging to him. It was a tempest, a storm, sweeping with unbearable sensation and staggering, engulfing speed. She soared fiercely, violently to an apex, and felt the power and force of him as he reached a climax as well.

Then it seemed that the weight of his body fell flat against her own. His flesh was slick as hers, his breathing as labored. Yet she couldn’t regain her breath beneath his weight, and he shifted from her, sitting at the foot of the bed, his back to her.

She watched him for several long moments, wishing she could still the silent, wet tears that came to her eyes and streamed down her face.

“Ian…” she tried, but speaking was so painful. “Ian, I know that this sounds absurd now, but… oh, God, Ian, I do love you!”

He didn’t reply, and she closed her eyes, lying there in simple misery.

“It’s amazing,” he murmured after a long moment, naked back and broad, bronzed shoulders straightening. “There have been so many times when I wished that I’d
never seen your face. And there are times when I remember Teddy telling me that he was only sorry about our marriage because ‘she is the South’! And then there have been so damned many times when I’ve fought this war never sleeping, because I’ve been so damned afraid of what you might be doing. And after it all, the fear was for one reason. Damn you, I don’t want to love you. But I do.”

She wanted to touch him. She knew by the way he sat that she shouldn’t dare.

“So where do we go from here? What do we do?” she asked him softly.

He turned to her at last. “Well, my love, according to my orders, we are to go to the center of the copse come the morning—and I am to hang you. Without mercy.”

“You can’t hang me, Ian.”

“Why? Because you’re my wife?”

She shook her head. “No. Because I’m carrying your child.”

Ian didn’t sleep with her in the cabin that night; he didn’t dare.

He left his men on guard, well aware she could very easily escape, and returned to his own cabin.

He paced for an hour, then tried to sleep, then drank half a bottle of whiskey, and tried to sleep again. Nothing seemed to help as he battled for a solution as to what to do with her.

Sam came up at dawn.

Ian let him in, then sat at the foot of his bed, his head between his hands.

“The way I see it, Major,” Sam told him, “we caught the Moccasin—and the man’s already dead.”

Ian stared at him, skeptical.

Sam lifted his hands with a grimace.

Ian allowed a rueful smile. “Well, Sam, obviously you can see that I can’t hang or shoot the Moccasin. And neither can I turn her in.” He hesitated just a moment. “We’re going to have another child.”

“Ah, the trip into St. Augustine!” Sam murmured. “You definitely can’t hang her, Major.”

“But how do I keep her from getting involved again—
and hanged in truth by some other Yankee commander? Not to mention the fact that she has admittedly been a thorn in our war effort? How can I make sure that she doesn’t betray the Union—and me—again?”

Sam smiled. “I think I know a way,” he said.

A
laina didn’t think she’d slept at all, but she must have, because someone had come in for her clothing, and when there was full light in the cabin, she realized that it had been washed and returned to her, sun-dried.

She washed and dressed quickly, extremely nervous as time passed and no one came near her.

Then finally there was a tapping at her door, and Sam came in bringing a cup of coffee, which he handed to her.

“The major’s waiting to see you, ma’am. Whenever you’re ready.”

She looked surprised, but it seemed he intended to say no more. He led the way down the ladder to the center of the copse, where Ian waited. He was mounted on Pye, and held the reins of another horse at his side.

He nodded gravely to Alaina. “Let’s take a ride.”

Naturally, it occurred to her instantly that she could escape. Slam her heels against her horse’s flanks and streak off into the trails…

No, she couldn’t escape. She couldn’t escape the fact that she loved her husband, no matter what battles raged between them.

She followed silently as he led his mount from the camp. They rode perhaps half a mile, coming to a pine bog very near the bay. Ian dismounted, pacing a few feet to a tree. He leaned against it, one booted foot raised up on a root, his eyes focusing like knives upon her own.

“Obviously, I’m not going to hang you.”

She lowered her lashes and shook her head. “I wish I could make you understand how I felt.”

“Felt. Is that past tense?” he inquired.

Alaina hesitated. She shook her head. “I don’t know what I feel anymore. Tired.”

“What should I do, Alaina?” he asked her very softly.

“I was going home,” she told him, looking at him. “I swear to you, Ian, I was going to go to Belamar, and I’m not sure what from there, but I had decided … I had decided that the Moccasin had to slip away.”

He lifted his hands to her. “Go.”

“What?” she demanded.

“You’ve got the horse; you’re a mile from Belamar. Go home. And decide what you really want. And when I come for you, you can let me know then.”

She stood uncertainly. Of all the things she might have expected, this was the last.

“Ian—”

“Alaina, go now. I mean it. Go. Unless you’re ready to swear an oath of allegiance to the Union this minute, go to Belamar.”

She felt ill, faint. She realized suddenly that she didn’t want to be sent away. She wanted to be held.

He strode to her. “Let me help you.”

Before she knew it, he had set her upon her horse, and he looked up at her, eyes shaded by his plumed hat. “Of course, I’m taking quite a risk here. You know where our camp is now.”

She started to answer him, but he slapped her horse’s flanks, and her mount bolted forward, cantering down the trail.

Numbly, she rode.

She rode for at least fifteen minutes before she abruptly pulled back the reins.

She couldn’t do it.

She couldn’t part with him this way.

She turned her horse back, racing to Ian. She leaped down from her horse, hoping against hope that he might still be there. But she didn’t see him; he was gone.

“Ian!” she cried out desperately.

Of course he was gone. He had let her free, and now he had other things to do.

“Ian!”

He came around a pine, hat still low over his eyes. She ran toward him, throwing her arms around him. She
kissed his lips, and then she tried to talk, jumbling her words.

“I can’t say that I’ve changed sides, Ian, because I haven’t… actually. I mean, I think we’re all wrong now to be at war, and I don’t know the solution, but… at first I wanted revenge for my father. And I did believe very much in the simple right of states to be free. But then there were other things….” She hesitated. It didn’t seem the right time to mention Peter O’Neill’s name. “There were troops ready to burn out a woman with four children because her husband had been killed fighting for the Union. And when the Yanks came to St. Augustine I began to realize what I hadn’t wanted to see. It is about slavery, and slavery is wrong. Lilly is so many colors—black among them. I couldn’t imagine someone owning her, whipping her, and it can’t be right that white men can sell mothers and fathers and children just because they’re black, and …”

She broke off, running out of words.

It didn’t matter. His arms came very gently around her, and he was kissing her. And there was passion in his touch, and no anger now, and he was sensual and tender and forceful without being brutal in the least….

And though they were in the middle of a pine copse, they’d had so little time together. In a matter of minutes, their clothing was in tremendous dishabille and they were entwined down on the pines, making love.

The sun broke through the branches of the pine above them. Alaina shielded her eyes. His mouth moved teasingly over her belly, planting small kisses. He commented on the baby, that he should have known… there was a slight swell about her. She grimaced ruefully and admitted that she hadn’t really known herself until quite recently.

“You were too busy spying to pay attention,” he told her.

“You could have come more often and made me so nervous I didn’t dare spy,” she told him.

He grinned at her. “Would it really have worked?”

“You can be very intimidating.”

He soon found the fang marks in her calf, and she told him what had happened. Then she demanded to know, “Did you send Risa down to watch me?”

He shook his head after a moment. “I knew she was going South; she wrote to me. She really is a better friend than you can imagine.”

“You’re still a little bit in love with her.”

“Only a little bit,” he told her, then added sternly, “But Alaina, throwing yourself in front of a rattler even if you believed you might have an immunity—”

“I didn’t intend to get bitten, and I’m really fine.”

“And the baby?”

“I pray the baby survives me!” Alaina admitted.

On an elbow, staring at his wife, Ian wondered if they could possibly have reached a point where they could survive. She had been so impassioned when she had been speaking to him. No, she couldn’t suddenly become a flag-waving Yank.

And yet…

She was so, so beautiful. So delicate, stretched at his side, dressed only in her long man’s shirt, her bare legs sprawled across the ground beneath the pines. His own clothing lay in a tossed heap several feet away, his scabbard and sword under his breeches.

She smiled, her topaz eyes smoky against her porcelain complexion, her hair a tangle of sunlight and dappled shade. Then suddenly her eyes widened.

Too late, he heard the footsteps.

He, Ian McKenzie, the Panther, had failed to hear the approach of the men standing behind him now.

He stared into her eyes and was suddenly certain that she’d ridden straight to her Rebel contact. He knew by the silence of the men behind him that they had come to snatch a panther from a trap.

Bitterness assailed him, and he stared at her with an anger and hatred so intense it was nearly blinding. Then he rolled in a split second.

A pistol was already aimed at his head. A shotgun, held by none other than Peter O’Neill.

“Well, will you lookee here, boys, what do we have? A naked panther tangling in the grass with a snake! Guess who wins that fight? Get up, Alaina, good work!” Peter said.

She gasped, drawing her white shirt closed, leaping to her feet. Ian, tense upon his haunches, felt the knife of her betrayal work more deeply into his back. There were
three men with Peter, all of them armed, aiming their guns at him. And he was naked on the ground, his sword and Colts a good ten feet away.

“This is like Goddamned Christmas!” Peter breathed, looking down at Ian. “I’m so excited, I just don’t know where to start. I’m going to kill you, of course. You’ve needed killing for a long time. But how? Shoot you, hang you? Shoot your kneecaps out first, of course, but … I think I should tie you to a tree, let you watch me make love to your wife. What do you think, McKenzie?”

He thought he was in a damned wretched position. But he’d be dead a hundred years before he said such a thing to Peter O’Neill. The bastard had been warped to begin with. The war had given him a chance to become a monster.

And yet…

Alaina.

He was on Alaina’s side.

“Peter, you are sick!” Alaina suddenly cried out. She stared at the men with him. “What’s the matter with you all? You’re Rebel soldiers. Peter doesn’t have you fighting a war—he has you helping him with his personal revenge!”

Ian gazed at his wife.

She flashed him a furious look; she was well aware that he believed she had betrayed him. “’

“Get up, McKenzie,” Peter said, “Alaina, shut up and get over here. My men and I are rescuing the Moccasin; we are heroes to the Cause, and that’s a fact. Get over here!”

She stared at Peter, and Ian’s heart nearly sank—because she moved. She moved to obey Peter.

But as she moved, she came upon the pile of his clothing and shoved his guns toward him, through the pine needles, still beneath his clothing. Then she pretended to trip against Peter, aiming his shotgun into the ground.

In those brief seconds, Ian rolled and caught up his guns. Peter’s men both fired; Ian shot off defensive rounds without thinking, killing one of Peter’s men, disarming and wounding the other two in a hail of gunfire. But when he rolled to Peter, he saw that O’Neill had
taken Alaina, and that he was better shielded by Alaina’s body than he might be by a steel fortress.

“Shoot him!” Alaina demanded.

She knew damned well that he couldn’t.

Peter smiled, his colorless eyes hard on Ian. He started to lower and aim his gun again.

“No!” Alaina shrieked, slamming an elbow back against Peter.

She was good; she was tough. Ian knew that well enough. And Peter lost his gun. But before Ian could leap to his feet and tackle the man, Peter had whipped out a razor-honed army-issue knife and set it against Alaina’s throat.

“She comes with me, and you stay there. Right there, where you are,” Peter said. “Jarvis, Tatum?”

“Yessir!” One of the men replied, pain clear in his voice.

“Dammit, move on out ahead of me, get the horses. Is Pazinsky dead?”

“Yessir,” the other man said.

“Stand still until we’re out of here, McKenzie,” Peter O’Neill warned him. “Dead still.”