His Heartbroken Bride (The Brides of Paradise Ranch - Spicy Version Book 4) (9 page)

“Libby.” Her name was half plea, half command.

He moved his hand away, taking her by the hips and lifting her to the edge of the bureau. On instinct, she spread her legs, lifting her knees over his hips. Mason didn’t hesitate. Arms strong around her, he guided himself to her entrance and thrust home.

She gasped. They were still standing up. They hadn’t made it to the bed. Their clothes were in a pile on the floor at their feet. She hadn’t even realized he’d stripped her bare while her thoughts where elsewhere, but there she was, breasts bouncing as he drilled into her over and over. She arched back, bracing herself against the bureau and nearly knocking over the chrysanthemum in the process. All she wanted to think about was Mason, hot and thick and demanding inside of her. She cried out with each thrust as if compelled by some unseen force to call for him. It was so good, so right. Each cry and build of pressure inside of her wiped away horrors she never wanted to remember again. She only wanted to feel the pleasure of being claimed by a man she’d said yes to, had always wanted to say yes to.

For the second time, he pulled away suddenly and eased her to her feet. “Still not ready to come,” he managed to growl. “I want to see you come first.”

She barely managed to gasp, “What?” before he took her hand and tugged her away from the bureau.

He led her to the bed, pulling back the bedclothes with one powerful tug. Libby slid into place, head on the pillow, but Mason had other plans. He crawled between her legs, grabbing hold of her ankles and pushing them apart.

“That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, eyes fixed on her most intimate parts.

Libby squirmed with the awkward deliciousness of being studied that way. Not even Teddy had looked at her so intently, the light of afternoon streaming in through the curtains. She tried to wriggle free, but Mason’s grip on her ankles tightened. He spread her legs as far as his arms would allow him to reach and still maintain his balance.

“Oh, no you don’t.” He teased her with a grin so filled with lust it made her squirm even more. “You had your fun with me, now it’s my turn to return the favor.”

She knew what he had in mind even before he bent forward, bringing his mouth to the juncture of her thighs. He didn’t tease or draw things out now, instead he parted her tender flesh and raked his tongue across her clitoris. Libby gasped and bucked against him. She gripped fists full of the sheets as he repeated his savage licking, circling his tongue down to taste the sweetness near her opening from time to time. The sensation was so intense that she gave herself up to it, crying out as pleasure crashed over her in throbbing waves.

“Sweet,” Mason whispered—as if part of some longer endearment—as her inner muscles pulsed and contracted. The orgasm was so powerful that it coursed through her, making her hands and feet numb. Mason slipped two fingers inside of her, stroking against her tremors to make the sensation last longer, so long.

Her body was limp and hot when the waves of pleasure finally evened out, but Mason wasn’t done. He rose above her, fitting his hips between hers. He rubbed his length against her inner thigh a few times before giving up on any pretense of prolonging the pleasure between them. He shifted and drove himself home, fitting tight inside of her.

“I’ve wanted you like this for so long,” he growled as he filled her again and again with long, powerful strokes. “I’ve wanted you in every way.”

His size alone sent the pressure building within her again in no time. “Every way?” she panted.

He surprised her with a laugh, then pulled all the way out of her. With a powerful grip, he grabbed hold of her and flipped her to her stomach, then pulled her back so she was folded double over her knees. He then lifted her hips and sank himself into her wetness again with a moan. Libby matched that moan with one of shock—shock for how good he felt inside of her that way, how sensuous it felt for her breasts to swing free as he began thrusting again, and how fast and hard he was able to plunder her from this position. She liked it. She liked it so much that—

A second orgasm crashed over her without warning and she cried out, “Mason.” He must have felt it as well. His thrusts became stronger, more masterful, until all of a sudden, he came apart with a feral cry. A few more thrusts, and he relaxed, sitting up and taking her with him. Her legs straddled his hips as she bowed against him. His hands sought out her breasts and kneaded them as he kissed the back of her neck. She held him firmly inside of her in spite of the awkwardness of their position. It was scandalous and sensual, and his hips continued to twitch against her, although with easing intensity.

Finally, neither of them could hold the position any longer. Mason let out a breath and flopped to the side. Libby sank down next to him, body hot and damp and loose with elation. In spite of the almost blinding heat, she pressed herself against Mason’s side, curling an arm and leg over him. She had wanted every moment of what they’d done, and she’d enjoyed it. For her wounded heart, that was a victory beyond measure.

“That’s just what we needed to start this marriage off right.” Mason could breathe heavily.

“Yes.” It was all Libby could manage. Her guilt was still there, but it’d been superseded by pleasure and satiety, and the promise that there was so much more to come.

A few minutes later, their breathing had steadied, and Mason reached down to pull the covers over them. He closed his eyes, and so did she.

Libby was convinced Mason had fallen asleep, right up until he said, “We’ll find a way to get rid of Hector, once and for all. Immediately.”

It didn’t take a spectacular afternoon and magical night of making love to his new wife—a woman he’d loved for years and now felt comfortable admitting it—to underscore Mason’s decision to do something about Hector. Whoever that man thought he was, he’d hurt Libby. Mason didn’t believe for a moment that the situation his wife had found herself in after Teddy’s death had been as cut-and-dry as she claimed it was. No man worth his salt would make those kinds of advances on a new widow—or any sort of good woman—without marrying her. Libby had turned down Hector’s marriage proposal, so there was no excuse for any part of his behavior.

Which was why the man needed to be dealt with.

Mason stepped up to Haskell’s jail, knocked on the door, then let himself in. “Morning, Trey.” He took off his hat and nodded to the sheriff.

Trey Knighton had been Haskell’s sheriff for the past two years. He was young, muscular, and had a scar that ran from his forehead across his eyebrow, then down over his cheek. Whenever anyone asked about it, Trey just shrugged and said he was lucky he hadn’t lost his eye. No mention of the circumstances that had led to that almost loss. Mason had the feeling Haskell’s sheriff might have been on the other side of the law at one point, which was why Mason was at the jail now.

“Mason.” Trey pushed his chair back from the jail desk where he’d been doing paperwork. He smiled as he stood, and stepped around to shake Mason’s hand. “What brings you out here today? I usually only see you when you’re bailing Cody out after a night at The Silver Dollar.”

Mason snorted and shook his head, grinning. “Yeah, and Travis has bailed us both out plenty of other times.”

Trey laughed, then stepped back and crossed his arms, sitting on the edge of the desk. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

The corner of Mason’s mouth twitched. “How far could I go to put the fear of God in a man, as it were, before crossing the line into illegal assault?”

Trey’s grin dropped. “What’s going on?”

That was the other reason Mason headed straight to the sheriff the morning after his wedding night. If anyone in town would back him up in his efforts to get rid of a man who had hurt a woman, it was Trey.

Mason shifted, rubbing the back of his neck with his free hand. “You know I married Libby Sims yesterday, right?”

“I’d heard.” Trey nodded. “Also heard she’s newly widowed. I can’t lie, Mason, it seems a little sudden. A couple other folks think so too.”

“Yeah, well, you’d understand why it had to be sudden if you knew what Libby has been through.”

He fixed Trey with a stare meant to communicate how bad things were without words. Trey narrowed his eyes and nodded slowly, understanding at least a little.

“There’s a man in town,” Mason went on. “Showed up on the train yesterday. Name’s Hector Sterling. Former logger, but he wears nice clothes. His family has money.”

Trey’s gaze lost focus for a moment as he thought. “I might have seen him over at the hotel. Said he was looking for gainful employment.”

Mason hoped that much wasn’t true. If Hector had it in his head to get a job in Haskell, then he was serious about pestering Libby.

“I don’t know all the details,” Mason went on, voice low, “but the bastard hurt Libby.”

Trey jolted to his feet, jaw hard.

“He showed up right after the wedding claiming Libby was his fiancée. When he saw that Libby’d just married me, he called her names, made threats.”

“And now he’s trying to get a foothold in this town.” Trey hissed, shaking his head.

“I won’t have it,” Mason said. “I need to know how far I can go without breaking any laws.”

Trey studied him, then began to pace. He rubbed his jaw, the wheels of thought turning so hard in his head that Mason could practically see them. Not for the first time, he thanked God that Haskell had a clever man for a sheriff.

“The trouble is,” Trey said as he reached the far end of the room and turned, “
any
kind of assault is illegal, even if the bastard deserves it. A fair fight is another story, but I still don’t know if I can look the other way for that.”

“I’ve got to do something,” Mason insisted. “Libby is in a bad spot with this whole thing. She thinks she’s at fault for some reason.”

Trey rolled his shoulders, eyes still fixed on the floor, as he headed back to Mason. “Any chance what this Hector fellow did to Libby was itself illegal?”

A sick, shivery feeling passed down Mason’s spine. An ugly word came to his mind—a crime and an abomination. He hated to think that that crime had been committed against his sweet Libby, and at a time in her life that was already traumatic, but he answered, “Yes.”

Trey’s expression pinched to regret. “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “That’s something no woman should ever have to go through, and something that warrants ripping the bastard’s balls off.” He sighed and shook his head. “But without proof or a trial or, I don’t know, a confession, there’s no way to bring him to justice.”

“A confession?” Mason blinked and frowned. He thought back to the ease with which Hector had blurted out everything that had happened between him and Libby at the church. Under the right circumstances, would he blurt out more?

Trey sat on the edge of his desk again with a shrug. “No man who’s done what that bastard has will walk into a jail and confess to his crime.”

The gears were already turning in Mason’s mind. “But what if he confessed it somewhere else, to someone else?”

Trey winced as he thought about it. “If they were reliable witnesses and he confessed under, let’s just say, sober circumstances, then you might be able to build a case against him for the next time Judge Pilfrey comes through town.”

“Then that’s what I’ll do.” Mason slapped his hat back on his head. “I’ll catch Hector unawares and get him to confess where people can hear it.”

“Hold on there.” Trey raised his hand. “There’s a little something called ‘entrapment’ that you have to watch out for.”

“Entrapment?”

“Any confession the bastard makes might not hold up in a court of law if he can prove that he was strong-armed into confessing. If you’re going to do this, it needs to be of his own free will and without anyone holding a gun to his head, literally or figuratively.”

Mason could have punched his way through the wall. “Why does the law make it so damn difficult to catch criminals?”

Trey let out a breath and shook his head. “If you’d ever been falsely accused of a horrible crime, you’d know.” He got up from his desk and came over to slap Mason’s back. “Let me know if you need any help nailing the bastard.”

Mason nodded in thanks and turned to march back out onto the streets of Haskell. He was fuming now. As much as he’d wanted it to be simple to take out Hector, the truth was that he would have to step carefully. There didn’t seem to be much justice in him having to be careful about how he dealt with a man who’d hurt his wife. A well-placed bullet would have been the best solution, but even that would carry consequences he wasn’t ready to face.

By the time he looped around Station Street and started up Prairie Avenue to Josephine and Pete’s house, he’d forced himself to calm down a little. Libby had driven back into town first thing that morning to help Josephine out around the house and to spend time with her boys. Until their house in The Village was finished, she would continue to do the same every day. Mason couldn’t blame her at all. Family was important, and as much as he loved her, he was a new addition.

“Hey, Mason,” little Petey called out from Josephine’s porch as Mason approached. “Wanna play catch?”

Something about the youthful enthusiasm in Libby’s boy’s face and the fact that he’d asked Mason to play struck a chord deep in Mason’s heart. It soothed his anger by a hair.

“Sure, son.” He smiled and strode up to the porch. Matthew was there too, and together the two boys scrambled down to the yard to meet Mason. “Uh, do you mind if I call you son like that?” he asked with a burst of awkwardness.

Petey scrunched his face and tilted his head to the side. “Well, sir, I’m Theodore Sims’s son. But you’re married to my mama now. So I don’t know what you should call me.”

The innocent wisdom of the boy’s logic squeezed Mason’s heard harder. He ruffled his hand over Petey’s already boyishly mussed hair. “I tell you what. How about whenever I call you ‘son,’ we think of it with a lower-case S, but whenever we talk about you being Teddy Sims’s son, we think of it with an upper-case S?”

Petey grinned. “Okay. I like that. Wanna throw the ball?”

“Me too,” Matthew piped in. “I want to throw the ball too.”

“You’re too little,” Petey told him. “You can’t catch it most of the time.”

Matthew lowered his head in a pout.

“Well, that’s why we need to teach him the right way to do it,” Mason said. “Us being bigger and all.”

Again, Petey tilted his head to the side in thought. “I guess you’re right.”

When he glanced up to Mason with a smile, a burst of pride unlike anything Mason had ever experienced filled him. Was this what it was like to be a father? If it was, he wanted more of it.

“Right. You go stand at that end of the yard, and Matthew and I will stand at this end.” He took Matthew’s hand and jogged to the row of Josephine’s rose bushes, while Petey dashed to the far side with the boxwood hedge.

In no time, the baseball was sailing across the front yard. Mason was able to give Petey a few pointers about his throw while showing Matthew the best way to hold his hands to make catching easier. Ever the baseball player that he was, he caught himself thinking that Petey would make a first-rate pitcher for one of Haskell’s teams someday, and if they worked at it, Matthew would be a great player too. Spending time with the boys pushed his anger at Hector to the back of his mind, which was where it needed to be if he was going to get on with things.

“You look like you’re having fun.”

Mason wasn’t sure how long they’d been playing in the front yard before Libby stepped out onto the porch. It had only been a day, but to Mason’s eyes, Libby had changed in so many ways. She wore the same, simple blue dress she’d worn the day before the wedding instead of the black she’d arrived in Haskell wearing. Her thick brown hair was caught up in an unassuming bun. But the smile she wore when her eyes met his was as different as summer was from winter. So was the hot, pink flush that came to her cheeks. If it wasn’t for the boys, Mason would have rushed to her, pinned her against Josephine’s porch railing, and kissed her senseless.

“Mason is teaching us how to catch and throw the right way,” Petey reported. He left his spot at the end of the yard and went to give his mother a hug. “I said he could call me ‘son’ with a lower-case S.”

Libby’s face pinched with emotion, and her eyes went bright. “How lovely,” she whispered, rewarding Mason with a smile.

“Me too,” Matthew declared, running across the yard to hug Libby the way Petey had.

The picture they painted—so innocent and happy—etched itself in Mason’s soul. He would stop at nothing, no matter how clever or drastic he had to be, to get rid of Hector Sterling once and for all.

“Mr. Gunn is expecting you two over at the hotel,” Libby went on in a more motherly tone of voice.

“Mr. Gunn?” A grin twitched at the corner of Mason’s lips. “How’d you two get an appointment with someone so important?”

“We’re going to learn painting,” Matthew declared. He jumped from the second porch step, arms spread wide, to show his enthusiasm.

Libby laughed. “Mr. Gunn kindly offered to host an art lesson for some of Haskell’s children in one of the hotel ballrooms. Mrs. Corva Haskell is coming to teach it.” She shepherded her boys onward, down the front path and out to the street. “Mr. Gunn says children can get restless when the weather is colder, so he’ll be hosting these Saturday lessons until spring.”

Mason grinned, taking Libby’s hand. “Theophilus Gunn is a man among men.”

They walked on together, Mason feeling like the king of the world escorting his queen. If he had his way, he would give Libby every good thing in the world. And the boys. They deserved every good thing too. The two of them darted ahead, investigating some plant or odd rock or another every couple of yards, then rushing back to report their findings. As Mason and Libby reached Elizabeth Street and turned to head on to the hotel, the two of them ventured further away.

Elizabeth Street was far more crowded than Prairie Avenue. It was where Mason began to notice the looks. He didn’t think anything of it at first, but when Mrs. Plover went so far as to turn her nose up and deliberately look away from Libby as they crossed the street, his back began to itch. When Mrs. Kline snorted as they passed and turned to whisper to the old biddy walking with her, Mason knew something was terribly wrong.

“They know.” Libby winced and tried to let go of Mason’s hand. “Hector got to them. He must have told them.”

Mason refused to let her extract her fingers from his, like he might be embarrassed to be seen with her. “Maybe they weren’t talking about you,” he said, though he knew it wasn’t true.

Libby sent him a look that was both stern and mournful to show she knew he was being too optimistic. “He said I’d regret it. He said I would know that I belonged to him.”