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Elijah did not hesitate. “No. She has a son. Nine months old. He’s a Kincaid.”
He watched the knowledge dawn in his brother’s eyes and Joshua froze, his face paling. He stumbled almost weakly toward a stump and sat down. Elijah followed him silently.
“Thank you for telling me.” His brother’s voice was hoarse and Elijah knew how much he had shaken him. Joshua was not the kind of man to show a lot of emotions.
“Do you know his name?”
“Grayson.”
Joshua nodded grimly and then changed the subject. “The threat to your woman?”
“She is not my woman.”
Joshua grunted and looked at him with mocking eyes.
Elijah stooped beside him. “I am going into town.”
“For Sullivan?”
Elijah nodded. “I won’t kill him. He will be in his saloon or the hotel and I am going for him. They took Sheridan at his orders.”
“Are you going to call him out?”
“No,” Elijah mused. “He fancies himself a big man in these parts. He likes the power and the idea of being invincible. He likes being followed by a lot of tough riders, with people stepping out of the way. We have seen men like him before. We know how to bring them down. He is nothing more than a vicious bully.”
“He will not forgive you for the humiliation,” Joshua said. “It would make sense to kill him.”
“I promised Sheridan no more deaths.”
He smiled. “And Sheridan is important?”
Elijah gripped a fistful of the earth and threw it at him.
Joshua chuckled. “Sullivan was a little gutsy ordering her to be taken in the middle of the day.”
Elijah agreed. “He’s a little insane, I think. Drunk with power.”
Joshua scrutinized him shrewdly. “Whatever you do, don’t underrate him. Do you ride tonight?”
“No. He will be on edge waiting for my return, surrounded by his men. I will keep Sheridan here for a few days, then I will make my move.”
“You don’t have to,” Joshua offered. “I could pay him a visit at his outfit. He would never know what hit him.”
Elijah considered it briefly. Joshua was a man of violence, even more so than himself. He was more lawless and brutal, but completely protective of the frailer sex. He believed women should be pleasured and cosseted, which was why Elijah could not believe Joshua would have hurt Beth.
“No. For what Sullivan has sanctioned for Sheridan, anything that befalls him will be by my hand.”
His brother was silent for a moment. “So you have forgiven her?”
“There is nothing to forgive.”
Joshua laughed low in the darkness. “It seems as if you cannot resist her lure, brother. Because of her you broke your friendship with a man who you had called friend for twenty years.”
The memories washed over Elijah and he leaned back against the tree, gazing in the star-studded sky. He had broken Thomas. More than his body he had severed the friendship they had. Thomas had been demented with rage and possessiveness at the thought of his wife with his best friend, but it had been unconscionable, the way the whip had darted and lashed, biting into her delicate skin.
Elijah had lost rational thought and he had broken every finger on Thomas’s whip hand. Elijah had been calm and methodical when he took each finger, staring into his eyes while breaking them one by one. Each snap had severed the final ties to their friendship. “I broke our friendship because he took a whip to her.”
Joshua flinched. “You had not told me that part. I thought you took her maidenhead?”
