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“You loved him?”

“No! I’d sooner spit in his face than feel love for him. But my body wanted what he gave me. I don’t deserve to be your wife. There is nothing holy left of our marriage. You can take me back, but I refuse to lie with you. I cannot. You deserve a better woman.”

“You’re the only woman I want. What you’re feeling now is guilt. And there are remedies for guilt.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” she said dourly. She wanted to think so, but dared not.

“Oh, there’s a way. If I’m willing to forgive, you’ll be willing to be forgiven.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Although her feet were untied for the trip down the valley, her hands remained bound. Hannah didn’t ask why. She assumed it had something to do with the ‘remedy for guilt’. She was not yet resigned to anything but submitting to the man who insisted she do. She was wary of herself, unsure anything could remove the plague Cain had wreaked. She knew she’d still resist, but she was as captive to Daniel Crowe as she had been to Jarrett Cain. She again had no recourse but to submit, to yield and wait, nurturing the faint hope that what her husband vowed was possible.

Daniel didn’t even trust her enough to let her move freely about. The moment they arrived at the farm, he took her straight to the barn where Travis joined them minutes later.

“Mrs. Crowe will be sleeping here in one of the stalls until she regains her sanity.”

“This is NOT about my sanity,” she spit out. “I’m as sane as you are!”

“You suppose we should gag her too?” he said coolly to his friend.

Her eyes widened in shock. “How could you?

“Isn’t this what you deserve, Hannah? Hmm?”

She was speechless.

“Tell me otherwise and I’ll change my mind in a heartbeat.”

“You insult me.”

“It’s fine to say that, if you want. But you have a lot to settle. Until you do, I think the barn is the right place for a harlot like yourself.”

A strange sensation rekindled in her belly—it had hardly been three weeks since she was lying in a stall in Cain’s stable. The familiar feeling invading her body was reminiscent of that other time. Lust, unavoidable lust.

Hannah didn’t see Daniel for nearly a day. Travis served her needs. While she was embarrassed to reveal so much of herself to this platonic family friend, she quickly got used to it, including the times she undressed in front of him. The rock that he was, Travis showed no emotion in the face of her embarrassing exposure.

Hannah wondered if somewhere inside her she liked being treated more like an object than a person. Like that time before in Cain’s stable, her mind began to twist around a host of strange ideas. Her body reacted in curious ways, and the lust she’d tried to stamp out was only more titillated by the circumstances of this newest predicament. And wasn’t this of her own making? If she’d let herself be welcomed back into Daniel’s open, loving arms, she’d be

sleeping in her marriage bed with her husband at her side. But obviously, before that happened, if it happened at all, she had something to prove to herself and to him and could only wait out the result that now seemed hidden behind a veil of fog.

Late in the day, after Daniel’s chores were finished, he had Travis bring Hannah to the house. While she’d remained naked, clothed only in a blanket while she was in the barn, she was told to put on the blue dress she made for herself the winter before. Travis had brought it to her on Daniel’s orders.

Stepping into the farmhouse, she now had her first peek at her home in days, although it seemed like a lifetime. She was surprised to discover that it was as neat as a pin, no different from the way it was when she meticulously cared for it.

“You wanted to see me?” she asked her husband.

“I did.”

He was sitting at the kitchen table eating a plate of the same stew she’d just eaten a couple of hours before. He’d made it himself. After he sopped his last piece of bread in the gravy and ate it, he stood up and carried the plate to the dishpan.

“I want you to clean up the kitchen, tidy the house, things you usually do.”

“Yes, sir.” Feeling thankful for something useful to do, she quickly moved to the sink and began washing the dishes with great care, while Daniel plucked his hat from the hook by the door and moved out into the night—a domestic scene that almost made her forget the great impasse that still existed between them. Within a half hour’s time the kitchen was spotless, the dishes stacked neatly in the cupboard and the floor swept clean. Just as she was giving the drain board a final swipe of the dishcloth, Daniel returned from outside, stamping the dirt from his boots. She wanted to scold him for messing the clean floor, but didn’t dare to.

He hovered there silently for several moments, then finally spoke: “So Hannah, tell me something.”

“What’s that,” she said, her back still to him. A nervous shill dashed up her back.

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