Lucy's Liberation [Elk Creek 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (11 page)

“You can use the storeroom,” Maia said firmly.

Ethan looked grim and resigned as he nodded and warily stepped into the shop to follow Lucy to the back.

“We’ll be here if you need us. Just give a holler.” Maia glared at Ethan as he passed her.

* * * *

Prentice had been avoiding Ginger all week. It hadn’t been difficult to do, as her father had tightened his reins on her since the dinner interruption incident.

Prentice, for his part, had been playing the dutiful, prodigal son working in Clint and Kate’s mercantile as if it was his fondest ambition. He needed a way to make money and without his powers, he had to do things the old-fashioned way. He didn’t have a problem with hard work. He’d worked his way up the ladder of his parents’ company from the ground up. There had been no nepotism or other crutch for him to fall back on. He’d just liked having that safety net his powers provided, that cushion.

Today, he’d decided he was going to have a go at some sight-seeing and job-hunting, see what was going on in Elk Creek’s other businesses and shops, specifically Healing Magick.

He had been building up his nerve all week at the prospect of being in the same room as the three people he had tried to kill in his previous incarnation.

Prentice had never considered himself a coward—there in the Old West or in the twenty-first century where he had prided himself for clawing his way to the top of the corporate world in his parents’ company. Guilt, however, was a strong motivating factor, as strong as pride, and one of the main reasons he had stayed away from Healing Magick for as long as he had—guilt and shame.

He had done Maia, Thayne, and Cade a great disservice, and he didn’t know if he could ever make amends to them for his actions. He knew somewhere down the line he would have to gird his loins to try though and that saying sorry just wouldn’t cut it. The conscience he felt slowly growing and filling in the previously empty spaces deep inside him called for nothing less than completely sacrificing all his previously held beliefs about justice to do the right thing.

Prentice hadn’t run into Thayne since the night of his resurrection and he hadn’t been looking forward to seeing him or his brother and their woman. He’d specifically avoided going into Peyton’s to look for work for exactly this reason when he’d found out that Cade was tending bar there.

To say he was desperate to see a friendly face was an understatement. To get to that one friendly face, outside of Ginger McCall’s, he knew he would eventually have to go through Maia, Thayne, or Cade at Healing Magick. He’d wanted to see Lucy badly enough to risk the encounters and finally talked himself into coming in.

“What is it you wanted to talk to me about?” Lucy asked.

Prentice smiled as he turned from the closed door to see her standing across the storeroom with her arms folded across her generous breasts. He’d always liked the way she got right down to business, even when she was obviously feeling out of her element.

Her nervousness made him feel less so, more like his old confident self, more like Prentice Teague and less like Ethan Crawford.

“It’s been a while,” Prentice opened.

Lucy frowned. “I guess.”

“You do recognize me?”

“Well, of course I do. I just don’t rightly know why you’re acting as if we’re old friends or something.”

Prentice realized then that she thought he was Ethan.

Damn this infernal body and damn Ethan for whatever he’d done or not done to Lucy.

“I mean if you pulling my ponytails and dipping them in the inkwell makes us friends, then I guess we were friends.”

So Ethan had been a bit of a jerk when he was a kid.

Prentice could see that, the sense of entitlement the younger Ethan must have had being a comparatively rich shop owner’s only son.

Then he saw them all coming at him in a rush, the faces of all those good-looking, mean and spoiled jocks from school who’d tormented and bullied him. His heart suddenly ached for Lucy’s obvious victimization at Ethan’s hands.

Okay, he had to try another tactic. “I need your help, Lucy.”

She peered at him, searching for Prentice didn’t know what, but he was sure she hadn’t found it when she said, “How can
I
help
you
? Seems to me you’d do better going to your Miss McCall for…
help
.

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m in a bit of a pickle myself. Not all of my own doing, mind you,” Lucy said, her fists now planted on her hips.

He smiled, unsure if she meant the pickle Rance had left her in or the one she had gotten into agreeing to marry this rich Easterner. “I heard about your…difficulties.”

“Difficulties? That’s a nice way of putting it.”

“I didn’t mean to trivialize your situation.”

She frowned at him again and Prentice was beginning to wonder if he was talking too highfaluting for her, too.

“Where exactly were you shot?”

“In the back. Why?”

“Well, why would you ask me such a fool question like whether or not I recognize you and then ask
me
for help and not your…girlfriend if you weren’t shot in the head?”

God, he had missed that sass, that fire. He hadn’t realized how much until this moment.

“And what in heck are you smiling about?”

“Forgive me. I…haven’t been myself since I came back.”

She frowned again and Prentice wanted to tell her to stop or she’d ruin that beautiful face of hers putting those furrows in her forehead, but he thought that might alienate her more than endear him to her.

“That’s for sure as shooting you’re not yourself.”

“So you do know me.”

“If you ask me that one more time…” Lucy sighed and Prentice could feel her exasperation filling all the spaces between them. “I grew up with you, Ethan.”

Ethan. Like everyone else in this dustbowl she believed he was Ethan.

He shouldn’t have been surprised that she didn’t actually recognize
him
. He had Ethan’s face, Ethan’s body. Why would she not see Ethan? Prentice had just hoped that she would, on some level, recognize
his
essence inside Ethan’s shell.

He was a little disappointed in her, disappointed that she was, at least in this, no better than the rest of the people in this town.

“Are you feeling all right? You want me to get Doc Malloy?”

“No!” He realized how hysterical he sounded and tried to tone down his voice and response. “That won’t be necessary.

Lucy peered at him long and hard then shook her head.

Had she seen something? Was there a flash of realization?

Prentice was beginning to wonder if telling her the truth was really such a good idea, but he needed some allies in this friendless and godforsaken town. He needed someone to have his back and Lucy had been the closest thing to a confidante that he knew.

Prentice had slept with plenty of women, but none who had touched his soul the way Lucy had with just one sexual encounter, and none that he truly considered a friend afterward, not until Lucy. He supposed he had Rance to thank for throwing Lucy his way and selling her services to Prentice. There was more to their connection than just sex, Prentice knew, though he would have been hard-pressed to say exactly what had anyone asked him. He just felt something for Lucy in his gut—protective from the first moment he’d met her—the same way he felt guilt and regret for what he had done to Maia, Thayne, and Cade.

“Maybe you need to sit for a spell and get off your feet.” Lucy came over to him and took him by an arm, leading him over to the ladder where she directed him to sit on a rung.

Prentice gladly sat, enjoying the feel of her hand on his biceps. It was the first touch outside of Ginger’s that he’d experienced since he’d come back from the dead that wasn’t purely clinical or spurred by curiosity and fear. “I’m not who you think I am, Lucy.”

“Well, I can imagine coming back from the dead the way you did would change a man, at least his perspective.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. I mean…I’m not Ethan.”

“I know you said you’re not yourself, but—”

“Ethan didn’t come back from the dead.”

“And who, pray tell, are you, if you ain’t Ethan?”

“I’m Prentice.”

“Prentice.” She took a step back, shaking her head. “Why would you say something so hurtful, Ethan?”

Prentice stood. “Because it’s true.
Look
at me.”

He didn’t know if it was the command in his voice or his words, but Lucy stopped backing up and stared at him again, not looking away this time.

She took a few steps forward until she was standing just an inch in front of him, tilting back her head to look at his face.

He didn’t remember her having to tilt back her head so far to look at him before. Then he remembered that Ethan was a couple of inches taller than he had been, which made him half a foot taller than Lucy’s 5’5” instead of just four inches taller.

It wasn’t his height that preoccupied her now though, he knew, but his eyes, his face.

She raised her hand and froze. “Prentice?”

“Yes.”

She slapped him, hard.

“What the—?”

“Do you have any notion what I’ve been through since you’ve been gone?” She shoved him in the chest with both hands as if her slap hadn’t been an indictment enough.

Prentice caught her by both wrists and pulled her close. “Pardon me?”

“I’m all but destitute! You promised to help me. You said—”

“Seems to me you didn’t do too bad for yourself.” He sneered and immediately regretted his accusation when he saw the tortured look in her color-change eyes. “I’m sorry that Rance screwed you in his will, but would you rather he was still alive to screw you literally
and
figuratively?”

“Well, no, but…dang it!” Lucy jerked her hands free and covered her face.

Damn it, was she crying? What was it about him and women lately where they just had to cry around him? Was it something he’d said?

Prentice watched her shoulders shake and thought she was sobbing before she took her hands away from her face and he saw that she was…laughing. “What is so funny?” She was taking his life being on the line mighty lightly and he didn’t appreciate it.

“Nothing’s funny. I just rightly realized you’re telling the truth.” She smiled and shook her head. “Ain’t a person around these parts that talks the way you do, Prentice. Screw me?”

“Well, yes. That’s what he did to you, isn’t it?”

“I suspect it is.” Lucy sat on the rung of the ladder recently vacated by Prentice.

He got on his haunches in front of her and took both of her hands in his.

“Ever since you were lynched I had this feeling that you weren’t really dead. I thought I was going crazy.”

“You’re not going crazy. It’s really me.”

“It is but it isn’t.”

She had hit the nail right on the head.

Even though Lucy accepted him and knew who he was now, he was only Prentice to her and no one else. The only other people that would believe him were people he could not make himself vulnerable in front of because Thayne, Cade, and Maia probably wanted him dead more than whoever wanted Ethan dead.

“What are we supposed to do now?” Lucy whispered.

Prentice saw the expression on her face and his heart dropped. Had he made a mistake in confessing to her? “Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“I’m not the monster you’re thinking I am.”

“And how would you know what I’m thinking?”

“Easy. I can see it in your face.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I do, better than you think. But before you judge me, why don’t you ask Isaiah how he feels about me killing Rance? Ask the kid if I saved his life. Cade may have found him in that mine, but I’m the one who got him away from your sick, pedophile husband.”

“I know you did all that. You saved me and Isaiah from Rance and…” She shook her head and smiled. “Ki said the same thing to me the other day. He told me he wasn’t the monster I was making him out to be.”

“Ki?”

“Hezekiah. My fiancé.”

Oh yes, the infamous fiancé. And what a cute nickname he had.

Prentice grudgingly appreciated that he and this fiancé had something in common where Lucy was concerned, but wondered what Mr.
Hezekiah
had done to deserve Lucy’s verdict. “I think we can both agree that you can’t tell your fiancé about this.”

“Can’t tell me about what?”

“Ki!”

He watched Lucy jump away from the dark-haired young man and balled his hands at his sides at the flush of color suffusing his fiancée’s cheeks.

If he wasn’t the civilized man that he was, he might have challenged the mystery man to a duel, but not with guns. No, no, he would use his rapier and take pleasure in running the scoundrel through.