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“I have never really belonged anywhere. Though I spent years at boarding school, I did not belong there either. The friends I made there were reclaimed year after year because their families missed them. Mine never missed me, Elijah. Not my father, my brother, nor my step mother.”
He fingered the silky softness of her hair that pooled in damp wavy curls against his stomach. “They were fools,” he murmured.
“When I met Thomas, it was an easy feat for him to sweep me off my feet,” she admitted blushing. “I was stupid, but I do not think I can hate him. For if he never deceived me, I would not have found my home here. I love it here, the sense of growth and peace. Here I am excited about the future.”
Her face took on a look of passion he only saw when he was buried in her. All for this land. He understood more than she knew.
“Don’t you dream of more than being tucked away in the mountains?”
He didn’t allow himself to dream…not anymore. “No.” Her face softened. Before she could speak, he continued, “To survive here you will need to have a fighting spirit. The West has broken many men, and what it does to a woman is unspeakable,” he sighed, “out here it is savage, Sheridan.”
“You have told me I am a lamb amongst coyotes. I do not want to be a lamb forever. I do not want to leave here, Elijah. I said so because I fear…fear you will be hurt, that I will be hurt. But what if everywhere I go there is trouble? Do I run each time? I do not want to be that woman who runs from her fears and problems. I want to fight. Who the bloody hell are they to demand what is mine, and then use brute force to cow me into submission?”
“You’ll keep the Whispering Creek,” he promised.
She nodded, biting her lip nervously and he knew he would not like what she had to say. She hesitated, and then seemed to shore up her courage. “I am still courting you.”
“Sheridan—”
“Let me finish, Elijah.”
He nodded and she exhaled smiling that sultry smile of hers. She relaxed further on him and her wet heat pressed into his abdomen. He restrained the groan and the urge to tumble her and bury his cock deep in her.
“I am still courting you. I have given you flowers. Ordered the housekeeper to prepare your favorite dishes, mended the shirts you damage on the range and tried to tempt you to my bed…where I have some success.”
Her face got redder and he couldn’t help but smile at her discomfort.
“Now it occurred to me that I was going about it the wrong way. The cowhands I overheard talking about girls in town they are interested in, their lady loves, they gifted them with presents, what they felt the women wanted. I gave you flowers because I would love lots of flowers. I sang for you because I would love for you to sing for me.”
Elijah raised his brows sharply, Sing for her?
“I realized I would need to give you the things that would attract you. I would need to give you things that would make the nightmares flee.”
All humor fled from him and he went cold. “You know nothing about my nightmares.” He made his tone harsh and forbidding.
She pressed on determinedly, her nails biting into his chest. She looked at him with large serious eyes. “You want a woman to walk beside you, not behind you. You want a woman of strength where even if you are not there, she could hold her own against the savagery of this land. I can be that woman, Elijah, not only because it is what you need, but I too want that for myself. To be happy, to be secured. I can give you babies, and I would protect them in the face of anything. And I would endure anything while I waited for you. And even if you never came I would fight until the end. That was what made me hold on today without panicking. I knew I had to be strong until you found me. Even when I thought it would be days before you found me, and that I would have been…raped repeatedly. I resolved to not give up because you would have found me, or I would have found a way to escape them.”
Everything inside of Elijah shut down at her declaration.
“I know you would have come for me Elijah. I knew you would protect me.”
He lay quiet for a long minute staring after her. It was a strange feeling to be trusted so implicitly.
“I know how your wife died and—.”
Ah fuck! He spun with her swiftly, sliding her underneath him. “No,” he growled. “We do not discuss them.”
“Elijah, I—”
“Damn it, Sheridan. Learn to leave some things alone.”
Her eyes rounded with anger. “How can I when her actions are the reasons you push me away?”
He dipped his face so that they pressed nose to nose. The nightmares rose and he buried them. That was not what he wanted her to see. “I push you away, Sheridan, because I do not trust you. Not because of my wife.” He kept his voice low and firm.
“Now you are the one lying, Elijah. I know I lied to you. I was young and scared and so lonely, but I cannot regret it, for you would never have been with me otherwise. But that is not why you push me away, so do not pretend. You want me Elijah, and I am here.”
She was damn close to the truth. Nothing was worth going through that pain again. Losing Emma and Nathan had killed something inside of Elijah. And he knew what exactly had been killed, hope and dreams. He would not love her to lose her to the savagery of the west. He would not hope now with Sheridan. He closed his eyes, praying she wouldn’t be able to see the stark hunger in them. Before she could speak further, he swallowed whatever she had to say. With a small hungry sound she responded to his kiss with a voracious appetite, and he allowed himself to drown in her passion. There was a niggling inside him that she was right, but he pushed it away. He was not cut out for what she wanted. The only thing he could give her was the passion that burned between them. She made him feel too raw. He needed to deal with Sullivan so that he could retreat into the mountain away from the temptation she presented.
