Lucy's Liberation [Elk Creek 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (23 page)

Margaret gave Lucy and Ethan a pointed look when they returned to the dining room a few minutes later wearing the same clothes they had arrived in, but she didn’t address the faux pas. What she did do was pick up the previous conversation as if there had been no interruption. “So, Lucy, you’ll still be working at this shop in town I’ve been hearing so much about, this Healing Magick?”

“I certainly will.”

“I don’t see why a woman in your station should work at all. Ki has more than enough money at his disposal and is perfectly capable of providing quite handsomely for all your needs.”

“I like working at Healing Magick and I like providing for my own needs.”

“Hmph, that may be so, but you should be spending more time at home taking care of your husband and your house.”

“I take care of those things just fine. I haven’t had any complaints yet.” Lucy gave Ki a sideways glance and Ki coughed into his fist when a piece of steak went down the wrong pipe.

His mother patted him on the back. “Are you quite all right, dear?”

“Yes, quite.” Ki gasped and cleared his throat. He felt like prey caught between two lionesses fighting over territory.

His mother pointedly put down her knife and fork and folded her hands on the table beside her plate before turning in her chair to face Ki.

He could have been wrong, but was that a grin and a wink she gave him?

“Is this true, Hezekiah? You have no complaints?”

Oh, he had complaints, but they had nothing to do with his mother or how well Lucy cooked in the kitchen and cleaned the house and everything to do with his sexual frustration.

“Mother, Lucy is an exemplary wife and I’d appreciate it if you’d stop passing judgment on a woman you’ve only just met.”

“I had no idea that’s what I was doing, but if I have concerns about the woman you’ve chosen to take as your wife, I feel it’s my duty to voice them.”

Lucy abruptly stood up and threw her napkin down on the table. “I’m sure we’re all well aware of your concerns by now, Margaret, as you haven’t been shy about voicing them since I arrived. I, however, have a few concerns of my own that I will, out of respect for my husband’s relationship with you,
not
voice. Now if you’ll excuse me, I fear I’ve suddenly lost my appetite.”

Ki watched as Lucy left the table, shoulders straight and head held high. He felt like applauding her restraint and was on his way to follow her up the stairs when his mother caught him by the wrist and jerked him back down to his seat.

“Well, she is a spirited one. I’ll say that for her.”

“I need to go up and speak with her.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort.”

“But Mother—”

“I’ll go up, since I’m the one who made such a mess of things.”

His mother was intimating that she was wrong, even a little bit?

Ki gaped as she rose from the table, delicately patted at her mouth with her napkin before placing it on the table beside her plate and smoothing her hands down the front of her dress. When she turned to leave, Ki caught it again, a tiny wink.

Ethan laughed before raising his cup to his lips to take a sip of his coffee.

“What is so funny?” Had Ethan caught the grins and winks, too?

“Your mother and your wife are a handful. I don’t envy you, my man.”

Ki didn’t envy himself either.

* * * *

Tarnation, why had she let that highfalutin woman make her lose her temper?

After the fight with Cody at Winchester’s, Lucy felt totally justified for her moment of weakness and her desire to not want to deal with another unpleasant situation by telling off Ki’s mother. She still felt a mite of a coward for throwing up the sponge and letting that woman run her out of her own kitchen with her uppity manner.

The minute Ki had introduced her with her four hoity-toity names Lucy had known she was in for a rough ride.

Times like these Lucy wished she was more like Maia, Sabrina, or Rebel. Those women wouldn’t have had a qualm about telling Mrs. Benjamin-Sachs exactly where she could go. Lucy didn’t even think it was a matter of them all being older than her. She could picture all three of her friends acting the same way as girls, always out front in any group, the leader of their packs. Not like her, who had turned into a wimpy mouse of a woman who wouldn’t stand up for herself.

There had been a time, back before her momma had died and her daddy had sold her down the river, when she had been bold and wild. There had been a time when she had, in her matchless tomboy way, challenged boys to games of skill and agility, usually coming out the victor. She had just as easily turned around to ask one of those same boys to a dance when it hadn’t even been a leap year. There had been a time when she hadn’t cared a lick what anyone thought of her or the company she kept.

Lucy jerked up her head at the sound of a sharp knock on the door.

More than likely it was Ki coming to beg her forgiveness for allowing his mother to run roughshod over her, although he had stood up for her right nicely, if in his calm and proper citified way.

She was staring at the door, trying to decide whether or not to let him come in, when another knock sounded on the door.

Lucy sniffled and blew her nose into her hanky. “Please go away, Ki.”

“It’s not Ki. It’s his mother…the ogre. May I come in?”

“Haven’t you done enough damage for the evening?” Lucy asked before she had a chance to think about it and heard a resounding laugh on the other side of the door.

“Apparently not, which is why I’ve come to finish the job.”

Lucy watched in disbelief as Ki’s mother opened the door, stepped into the room and closed the door behind herself as if she had been invited.

“Please, do come in.” Lucy smirked.

“I do believe I will.” Margaret crossed the plush-carpeted floor to Lucy’s and Ki’s large four-poster bed and Lucy begrudgingly admired the woman’s tall graceful figure as she approached and sat on the bed beside Lucy, again uninvited.

She had to be in her early fifties, yet her skin had the well-preserved suppleness that made her look no more than thirty-five. Lucy put it down to tame living in the Old States.

Despite Margaret’s dark-brown hair and green eyes, it was still evident that she and Ki were related. Ki had inherited her long lashes, dimples, and full lips. In fact, Margaret could have easily passed for Ki’s older sister if one ignored the tiny crow’s-feet.

Lucy wondered what Mr. Benjamin had looked like, and was sure Ki had gotten his light, golden-brown hair, blue eyes, and sculpted jaw from his father.

“You may not believe this, but I was you way back when,” Margaret said.

No prelude, no apology, just right to it. Lucy couldn’t help but respect someone who just got to the point of the matter the way Ki’s mother did. Was this where Ki got his arrogance and poise from? “I find that hard to believe.”

“Believe it. It’s true.” Margaret reached over to pat Lucy’s hand.

“Then why were you so…” Lucy wanted to say mean, but she refused to be the whiner that Margaret already surely thought she was.

“Mean?”

“I was going to say unpleasant.”

“You say tomato.” Margaret waved an imperious hand in the air. “I had to be sure that you were strong enough for Hezekiah, that you could deal with his ambitions, that you could handle the stress of being a wife to someone as charming and demanding as him without melting like an ice cream cone in the sun. He’s not the easiest person to know or with whom to live.”

Aside from always expecting to get his way, Lucy didn’t think he was all that difficult, but she could still see what Margaret meant. She had seen peeks of his “strong personality” in the lawyer’s office. He wasn’t a man it was easy to say no to, which made her wonder all the more how she had so far gotten away with not letting him bed her yet. Not that she could talk to his mother about this latter tidbit. “I think I can handle Ki.”

Margaret’s smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. “I thought I could handle his father. For a while I did handle him and his demands. I gave up school, put my career on hold to marry him because I wanted to be a good wife and support him.”

“But you loved him, too, didn’t you?”

“Our love for each other was never in question. Love, however, isn’t always enough. It isn’t the end-all and be-all fairy tale we women have been led to believe. And the handsome prince with the larger-than-life personality that swept me off my feet and refused to take no for answer wasn’t exactly prepared to handle the routine minutiae of our day-to-day married life.”

What was Margaret trying to say? That Ki was like his father, and was going to be a pig-headed, selfish husband? He
couldn’t
be worse than Rance. Lucy didn’t think anyone could be.

“I know Ki’s faults and strengths better than anyone. He’s honest and thoughtful, stubborn and impulsive, and as passionate and driven as his father ever was.

“I just don’t want you to get swallowed up by the glamour of your husband’s desires and lifestyle like I did. I don’t want you to forget that you’re an individual with desires and wishes of your own. You have opinions that you shouldn’t keep to yourself, not when to be silent would be to your detriment.”

Lucy looked into Margaret’s earnest green gaze, shaken by her intensity, hearing the wisdom that came from experience and age.

When Ki knocked on the door and came in a few minutes later to switch places with his mother on the bed, Lucy looked into his heated sky-blue eyes and shuddered with the knowledge that her moment of truth had finally arrived and she was helpless to resist him.

Prentice thought he heard someone outside whispering his name right before pebbles striking the mullioned front door became a distinct clatter.

Dinner had been finished a while ago, at least by him and Margaret.

Ki and Lucy hadn’t reappeared since the earlier fiasco when Margaret and Ki had gone up to smooth Lucy’s ruffled feathers. Prentice had thought about going upstairs himself when Margaret had come back down, but two was company and he would have been a third wheel had he gone to join Ki and Lucy. Besides, those two had some serious issues they needed to iron out privately, the least of which was how to handle a third party in their bed.

“Ethan!”

Someone
was
out there urgently whispering his name.

Prentice closed the book he had been reading and got up to go answer the door.

He should have been upstairs in bed by now, but had been too wired. Not to mention he hadn’t wanted to be in the immediate vicinity when Ki and Lucy finally got it on. He knew it was a way overdue inevitability and judging by the look in Ki’s eyes when he had left the dinner table earlier, Lucy had been about to get her world truly rocked.

That absurd jealousy that had been arbitrarily assailing him since he had taken up residence under the same roof as the objects of his desire, struck him now. The idea of Ki making love to Lucy and not him, the idea of Lucy feathering light kisses down Ki’s lightly furred chest to Ki’s cock and not Prentice’s cock, left a bad taste in his mouth. He felt like the unpopular kid in school, the only kid who hadn’t been invited to the coolest party of the century.

Prentice opened the door and froze when Ginger flung herself at and wrapped her arms around him in a fierce, tight hug.

“Oh, Ethan! I’ve missed you so much.”

Prentice recovered from his initial shock to finally grasp her by the biceps and drew back to look at her. “What are you doing here this time of night?”

“I couldn’t wait another minute, and when you didn’t visit or come by to talk to me like you said you would, I just figured something was wrong, that you had been turned against me or something, and then when I went by your house and your mother told me what had happened, how you had left and come here to live, I finally got up the nerve to come see you, so here I am.” Ginger took a deep breath and smiled.

Well, if that wasn’t the longest sentence he had ever heard!

“You can’t be here, Ginger.”

“But—”

“C’mon.” Prentice came out onto the porch, closed the door behind him and caught her by the arm to frog march her down the steps.

“Why can’t I come inside?”

“It’s way past any decent hour for visitors to come a-calling.” Damn, he was talking like the natives now. “I’m sure you snuck out and your mother and father don’t know where you are.” The idea unsettled him, especially since he had learned that Kurt McCall was the town’s gunsmith. Knowing the man had all those weapons at his disposal was not comforting in the least. Prentice did not want the guy assuming he had kidnapped his precious daughter. He did not want the guy to have a reason to come out here for a visit looking for Ginger or to go postal on the first people he came across—namely Ki, Lucy, Margaret, and him.

For the first time since the newlyweds had taken him in, Prentice began to realize that his uncertain circumstances and presence might be putting them in real danger.

He quickly shook the thought and what it might mean from his mind. He had something else important he needed to handle first and continued.