Chase the Dawn (17 page)

Later this morning, Ben thought, he would make plans to return her home. Bryony would presumably be able to suggest a secluded spot at which he could safely leave her to make her own way to the house. What story she decided to tell, he would leave to her considerable ingenuity, and then they could both pick up the reins of the lives that had been postponed during this interlude. And he could concentrate with an untrameled mind on the pursuit of his vengeance, which he would achieve by the annihilation of Sir Edward Paget and his ilk and all that they stood for. It was not a goal compatible with the lusty enjoyment of Paget’s daughter, as he and she had discovered to their shared misery.

When Benedict woke, it was full day and his bedfellow had disappeared. He lay for a moment taking stock. His head was a trifle heavy, but nothing that dousing with cold water would not cure, and his mouth tasted foul, but that was as easily remedied. What was not as easily remedied was the heaviness of spirit that the night’s reflections had engendered. He went outside, to find the clearing deserted, his three visitors departed, and not a sign of Bryony. He stood for a minute, yawning and idly scratching his bare chest in the sun’s warmth, which was already showing signs of becoming uncomfortable. From the sun’s position, he judged the time to
be around nine o’clock. So, where, in the name of all that was good, was Miss Paget?

No attempt had been made to light the fire, judging by the stone-cold ashes, and the kettle stood empty and forlorn on a trivet beside the hearth. Fetching water was a task that fell to Bryony’s hand, as was the setting up and clearing away at mealtimes. There was no sign of platters, utensils, or ingredients for breakfast. Her attempts at fire-lighting tended still to be hit or miss, so he was not unduly surprised that she had neglected that chore this morning, but he would have welcomed the wherewithal to make coffee, even had she been unable to prepare it herself.

The dereliction did nothing for his temper. Bryony Paget was, when all was said and done, a rich little girl from the ineffably cushioned, leisurely background of the Southern aristocracy! He swung up the kettle and strode off to the creek. He had good cause to know the breed—the simpering, idle, petulant, pampered misses who could not bear the slightest thwarting of desire; whose mouths opened in wide wails of complaint when all was not as they wished it; whose eyes shone with vindictive pleasure when the offender paid the penalty….

God dammit! Bryony was not like that, as he knew perfectly well. She had applied herself with eager willingness to whatever task he had assigned her, her mouth set in a determined line as she struggled to master the unfamiliar. Ben smiled in spite of himself as he remembered the way she had fought with the fishing line at the expense of her hands. He filled the kettle at the creek and stood looking around for some sign that she had been there before him. The night dew had dried from the grass several hours earlier, so there were no
footprints on the bank—none, either, in the mud to indicate that she might have waded into the water for a bath. The reeds were not broken or bent to indicate human passage, and the bird and animal life along the creek showed no signs of disturbance as it rustled, flew, called, and scampered about its business.

He waded into the creek, plunging beneath the tepid water, which offered little refreshment but was better than nothing. Shaking himself dry, he returned to the clearing. There was still no sign of Bryony, and the first flicker of anxiety made itself felt. She just went for a walk, he told himself, firmly repressing the flicker. He laid and lit the fire, setting the kettle on the trivet above it. Coffee was his most imperative need at this point, and maybe the aroma would bring Miss Paget running. She would receive short shrift, however, he decided, pulling on his britches over his now dry limbs. She knew the rules: there were no handouts in the backwoods.

Coffee was made and drunk with gratitude, but the fragrant steam curling in the moist air failed to produce a breakfast companion. The flicker became a flare. Benedict stood up, sipping his coffee and listening. Bryony was not in the habit of disappearing alone into the woods—not after her last experience. He could hear nothing untoward above the shrill monotone of cicadas, the
rat-tatt
of a woodpecker, the scuttle of a squirrel. But as he stood still, allowing himself to merge into his surroundings, to become an integral part of the forest as his Indian friends had taught him, he felt the hairs on his skin lift. He was being watched, and not with the casual eye of a fellow woodland creature, or the fearful eye of a potential victim for the pot, or the hostile eye of a predator. Slowly, he put his beaker on the ground and
walked into the middle of the clearing. There he stopped and listened again.

“Bryony?” he called, softly questioning. There was no response, but he was certain that he was not alone in the glade. His eyes ran around the uneven circle, across the brown-patched grass, dried by the summer’s drought, up into the trees with their broad, gnarled trunks and the wide, dusty green umbrella of their foliage.

He called her name again, imperatively this time as annoyance swelled with his conviction that for some juvenile reason she was hiding from him, as if there was some amusement to be gained from such a prank, as if there weren’t tasks to be accomplished, a host of problems to be solved, as if the seriousness of the world could be dissipated by a tiresome joke. Miss Bryony Paget, like other young ladies of her world, had been so sheltered from the problems and seriousness of the reality lived by the majority of the population that she presumably saw nothing inappropriate in this piece of teasing mischief. Well, Benedict Clare had ceased to be amused by the game of hide-and-seek many years ago—at the point when the game had taken on for him the deadly purpose of life preservation.

There was still no reply. Hands resting on his hips, legs apart as he rocked easily on the balls of his feet, Ben declared in a soft yet carrying voice, “Bryony, if you have not ceased this childish game by the time I count to three, you are going to find yourself in some very childish hot water!” He had reached three when she dropped from the broad branches of a spreading beech tree at the edge of the clearing. Picking pieces of twig and leaves from her hair, Bryony walked slowly toward him.

“I fail to see why you should have to sound so schoolmasterly. Why should I not climb trees, if I choose?”

“I have neither the time nor the energy for foolish games,” he snapped. “You neglected to fetch water in your enthusiasm for pranks, so you will go hungry until noon.”

Bryony discovered to her dismay that being treated like a recalcitrant babe had the effect of reducing one’s temper and reactions similarly. “Since you are oblivious of my presence, it seems extraordinary you should find my absence remarkable, sir.”

“Now, just what is that supposed to mean?” He made no attempt to moderate the acerbity of his tone, the weary sigh that said all too clearly he was preparing for a familiar whinging complaint.

It was the last straw. For six days now, she had borne the indifference, the occasional disconcerting flashes of loving warmth, the prolonged absences, the irascibility, the blanket refusal to discuss anything beyond the practicalities of the immediate present. She
had
been playing a game, certainly, had enjoyed watching him go about his business when he did not know he was observed, had waited with considerable interest to see whether her absence would concern him. But there had been nothing malicious or even particularly juvenile about her behavior, and the Benedict of a week ago would have laughed and exacted a playful penalty when she had dropped from the tree.

“It means that I am sick to death of receiving less attention than a mosquito!” A bare foot stamped in the grass as she tossed her head in a swirl of raven-black hair.

Benedict inhaled sharply, his vision blurring as the
image of Margaret Martin transposed itself on the face of Bryony Paget, and he heard the former’s petulant whine demanding the intimate attentions of her father’s bondsman on a bright, sunny August afternoon in Georgia three years ago. He could feel the smooth wood of the ax handle in his palm as he stood sweating beside the woodpile, striving to control his anger at this insolent importuning of a Clare by an overindulged, ill-educated, ill-mannered, conceited miss who had neither birth nor breeding to her advantage, only the superimposed pride of the rich and the master.

“So, you lack attention, do you, miss?” he drawled, as he should have done that August afternoon—taken his revenge by giving Margaret Martin what she was insisting upon, instead of yielding to the temptation to send her about her business with all the contempt a Clare would show an importunate bawd. “Attention of this kind, I assume.” A hand caught Bryony at the nape of her neck, and he brought his mouth to hers. But what followed no more deserved the name of kiss than a blow is a caress. Bryony’s shout of outrage and alarm died, suffocated by the ferocity of the assault. Her neck, bent back under the pressure of his lips, felt as if it would snap, but then the hand at the nape moved up to palm her scalp, supporting her head even as it held her fast, making her unable to escape the ravaging tongue driving deeply within her mouth. Bryony reacted with unthinking terror. Her teeth sank into his bottom lip.

Benedict tasted blood, felt the piercing pain in his lip…. He had bitten through his lower lip that long-ago afternoon, had tasted the salt taste of his own blood as he’d fought to keep back the screams clogging his throat under the torture of the lash. But they had broken out
eventually, the inhuman screams of a man entering the dark world beyond endurance. And Miss Margaret, who, denied her stud, had transmuted the private complaint of neglect to public complaint of assault by her father’s bondsman, had watched and heard the agonies of his degradation, soothing the savage soul of the scorned.

He thrust a hand upward between the thighs of the woman he held, probing with rough intimacy, as the lines between past and present blurred and he relived the horror, intending at last to exact the brutal and appropriate revenge on the one who had delivered him to the whip.

For a moment Bryony was paralyzed, disbelief and incomprehension warring with the physical reality of those delving fingers whose skillful play was a hideous mockery of the glories of their lovemaking. Somehow the knowledge came to her that Ben was living in one of the dark corners of his past to which hitherto she had been denied entry. Now she had strayed inadvertently across the boundaries and was playing a part in the living memory. The paralysis passed and she writhed violently, trying to twist away from the dreadful skill of that hand, which knew her yet denied her. Her bare foot kicked against his calf, her hands punched and pulled at whatever part of his body they could reach. With a muttered expletive, he freed her head, seizing her flailing fists at the wrists.

“Ben!” Wrenching her head away from his mouth, Bryony yelled his name with all the force of which she was capable.

Ben stared down at the face, white beneath the light suntan; the deep blue eyes, enormous with distress; the soft mouth, bruised and swollen as if it had been repeatedly
struck. A deep shudder went through him as the fearful blackness retreated, returning the nightmare memories to that corner of his mind to which he had relegated them two years ago, when sanity had finally come back to him. “God in heaven!” he groaned. “What have I done?” Taking her face between his hands, he visited her lips, her eyes, her deathly pale cheeks with the tender healing caress of his mouth as his hands spread across her back, holding her against the warm support of his body. “As I have wounded you, sweeting,” he whispered, “let me salve your hurts.”

Bryony could only shiver in his hold as he drew her down to the grass, her head cradled in the hollow of his shoulder. The power of speech seemed to have deserted her under the shock of a rapine assault delivered by a stranger in familiar guise, then this sudden volte-face, the intensity of his remorse, the exquisite gentleness with which his hands returned to the sites that they had ravished, bringing first a healing peace to the sore, throbbing flesh—a peace that finally yielded to the sweetness of arousal.

With lips and tongue and fingers, he brought her to the soft, verdant fields of release; in penance, he denied himself the union that would heal his own hurts, concentrating only on the giving that would make her whole again. Bryony was wandering so deeply in the realm of pure sensation, gulping the ether that anesthetized the pain of the past, that she simply received and failed to notice that the giver did not also take his due.

Much later, as she still lay cradled in his arms, she whispered, “Why? Why did that dreadful thing happen, Ben?”

“I cannot tell you, love.” Laying her gently on the grass, he got to his knees, leaning over her to brush the tumbled hair from her brow, to pull down the tunic over her bare thighs, which were gleaming pale against the green-brown ground. “You must put it behind you and try to find it in your heart to forgive me.”

“I have done so long since.” She sat up, reaching to touch his face. “But it is so hard to be denied understanding.”

The black eyes became opaque in the way that she knew and dreaded. “Do not persist in this, lass. It will serve no useful purpose.” He rose to his feet in one easy movement. “Are you hungry?”

Bryony shook her head, trying to hide the disconsolate bleakness that had replaced the ephemeral serenity of physical release. “No, I do not find that I am.” She watched him go into the cabin and return with his musket. “You’re going hunting?”

“No. I must go to Joshua’s to meet with the others.” He looked down at her and offered a smile where apology mingled with regret. “I cannot take you with me, lass. They would take ill to your presence at a planning discussion.”

“Yes, I understand that.” Bryony extended a hand for him to pull her to her feet. “How long will you be?”

“Three, maybe four hours,” he said. “We have to plan for the removal of the weapons from the armory. They have lain beneath the straw in Joshua’s barn quite long enough.”