The Darkest Heart (23 page)

Candice fainted, hitting the ground with a thud.

Maria screamed.

Kincaid came running off the porch and swept Candice into his arms.

“I’ll get some cool rags and whiskey,” Maria said. “You take her up to her room.”

Kincaid didn’t need to be told what to do. He took the stairs quickly, impatiently. He kicked the door shut behind him, dropping Candice on the bed, staring. Her face was white. Her lashes moved.

He slapped her face, not hard or roughly, but to get her to come to. She moaned. Maria came running in with a pitcher of water, rags, and whiskey. Kincaid stood back to let er minister to Candice. Maria wiped her face, and as Candice moaned again, she lifted her slightly and poured a trickle of whiskey down her throat. Candice started sputtering, and her eyes flew open. She looked directly at Kincaid. “Oh, God, you’re not dead.”

He smiled tightly.

Candice suddenly closed her eyes, flooded with relief. She wasn’t a murderess. She hadn’t killed him.

“Are you better,
cara?”
Maria asked tenderly.

“Yes.”

“I’ll leave you two alone then,” Maria said, beaming.

As she left, Candice sat upright—all relief vanishing as she realized Maria and everyone in the valley thought Kincaid was her husband. Oh, God! She went white again. “Did you … did you tell them?” Her voice was hoarse.

The bed shifted under his weight.

“Tell them what,
cara?”
He smiled unpleasantly. “That you tried to kill me? Or that you ran off with me and we never married—that what everyone believes to be true is all lies?”

Lies. Oh, God, so many lies. “Virgil, please.”

She sat up, trying to control the panic engulfing her.

He smiled a thin smile, and it didn’t reach his eyes. “I owe you, my dear.”

She tried to twist away from his touch, but his hand
tightened cruelly around her face, and she couldn’t move. “I’m sorry,” she gasped.

“I’ll bet you are,” he snarled. “Sorry I’m alive?”

“Please.” She whimpered. “No, I’m glad, Virgil, glad you’re alive, I didn’t mean to shoot you, you have to understand!”

He studied her with a clenched jaw while Candice held her breath. “Did they rape you?”

She gasped. “Who?”

He grabbed her braid and pulled her head back. “Who? You were captured by Apaches. Did they?”

“No! They don’t rape women, they’re not like the Comanches. I was treated well. I mean I wasn’t beaten or anything.” She was babbling. “My captor thought I was rare, a prize. He was hoping to marry me off to someone in the tribe or many gifts.”

Virgil started to relax. “You look like some dirty, half-breed squaw.”

Candice bit her lip. “Did you tell them the truth?”

He understood perfectly. “Relax, dear, everyone believes you are still my wife.”

“What do you want?”

“Revenge,” he said, removing his Stetson. “And you.”

“What are you going to do?” Her heart thudded loudly, painfully.

“You’ve made it easy,” he said. “Telling everyone you are my wife.”

His hand touched her jaw, slid down her neck to her shoulder. Candice was frozen. He fondled her bosom. She pushed him away, leaping off the other side of the bed. “I’ll scream,” she said. She meant it. She would scream, as if bloody murder were being committed.

Kincaid smiled. “I had forgotten just how enticing you are, Candice. Do you know you make my blood race?”

Candice pressed harder against the wall. Why was he there? What did he mean—revenge? And what, in God’s name, could she do? And what about the rest of Tucson? He was supposedly her husband.…

Kincaid had removed his jacket casually. “It’s very convenient that you told everyone we were married, my dear. I think you are stuck in lies of your own making.”

“What are you going to do?”

Kincaid sat casually on the bed, pulling off his brocade vest.

“You can’t tell them,” she whispered, frightened. “Pa would kill me if he knew we didn’t get married. And the talk … he’ll kill you!”

Kincaid grinned. “You mean he’d
try
to kill me. Do you think any of your family has a chance going up against me?”

Candice was horrified. If they ever found out, they would go after Kincaid, and being fair men, they would give him a chance to defend himself. Kincaid would kill them all, one by one. She knew it.

“I still want you, Candice,” he said simply. “More now than before.”

She was sick.

“After all, it’s my husbandly right.”

Candice stiffened against the headboard. She was locked in this charade. She could not admit to the truth. She had no choice.

“I don’t think you will scream, my dear. In fact, I think you will act the charming, doting wife until we leave here.”

Her mind raced. “Leave?” And even as she said the word, she knew she couldn’t stay behind if he left, not if everyone thought they were married.

Kincaid stood and walked over to her. He slipped his hand in her hair. “I went to an inordinate amount of trouble to get you away from your family so you could be my mistress.” He stared, his dark gaze black and ugly. “Why do you think I went to so much trouble, Candice? Because I wanted you. I still want you, and you will be mine until I’m through with you. Do you understand?”

She understood.

The blow came so quickly, she never saw it, only felt it, as his hand struck her face, sending her head reeling against the headboard of the bed.

“Put it this way. I won’t even wait for that hot-headed brother of yours to learn the truth from you and call me out. I will kill him in cold blood if you so much as act like anything but an adoring wife.” He began to remove his shirt.

She nodded dumbly.

“Don’t worry,” Kincaid said conversationally, throwing
his shirt over a chair. His chest was lean and hard, packed with muscle. “The charade as my adoring—
adoring
—wife need last only until we reach El Paso. We will leave first thing tomorrow. But my threat holds. You will obey me until I send you away, at which time you may do as you please.”

Candice tried to get her mind to work. Once he tired of her she would be free to go home. She could say he had been killed. Again.

He sat on the bed and reached for her. He was powerful, she thought numbly, as he pulled her close, and she wondered, inanely, if he was as powerful as Jack.

“I may not have wanted to marry you, Candice,” he said, his face inches from hers, “but you’re an incredibly exciting woman.” He laughed huskily, his face coming closer. “The fact that you hate me seems to whet my appetite,” he said, kissing her.

Candice tried to turn her face away, tried to push him off, but it was useless. His lips ground into her brutally. He was hurting her on purpose, and she knew it. Instinctively she raked his cheek with her nails. His response was instantaneous. He smacked her across the face—hard, drawing blood from her mouth. She tasted it as tears welled up in her eyes. He stepped back, looking vicious. “Let me give you some advice, dear. I dismiss my mistresses when I’m ready. Don’t ever try to leave me again, because I will hurt you seriously next time.”

I could go to Jack for protection, she thought frantically. And knew that even if she could somehow send him word, he would not come to her aid. She was trapped, and there was no way out.

Kincaid was on top of her now, his body hot and hard, his manhood swollen and stabbing at her through his trousers. Candice struggled, but uselessly, and he laughed at her efforts.

It hurt. God, it hurt. He freed his manhood and was jamming it into her dry, tight flesh. He smothered her scream with his hand and paused abruptly to stare with disbelief and growing anger into her white, tearstained face.

“I’ve been dreaming of busting you,” Kincaid rasped, furious, “Damn you!”

Candice closed her eyes and bit her lip while his member throbbed inside her.

His fingers dug into her face. “You told me they didn’t rape you.”

Her eyes flew open and flamed with defiance. “They didn’t! I gave myself willingly to one of them!”

His face contorted.

And he slammed viciously into her.

He groaned.

He opened his eyes and tried to focus. The room was blurred, indistinct at first. He closed his eyes again against the bright, streaming sunlight, and felt the stab of pain in his temples, the unnatural thudding of his heart, the nausea welling in his abdomen. He needed water, desperately. As if he had been traveling across the Sonora Desert for days without a single drop. He opened his eyes and attempted to sit.

His head thundered between his ears.

Jack reached automatically for the pitcher on the floor next to the straw mattress, pouring a mug of the clear, cool liquid, then draining its contents. He drank another glass, then looked around. He was in a partitioned area of what was probably a one-room adobe house. A dirty blanket enclosed the small space he was in. He was lying on a filthy mattress. It was the only item in the room other than the cracked earthenware pitcher, the tin mug, and a looking glass that was propped against one wall.

He had on his pants, but that was it. Where was he and how had he gotten there? He didn’t remember retiring—in fact, the last thing he remembered was watching the moon rise through the open saloon door, while he drank himself senseless. He must be in a back room of one of the houses near the saloon. God, did he have a headache!

The blanket moved and Jack tried to sit up. He stared with shock at the familiar face of the half-breed girl who worked in the saloon. She was so pitifully thin and dirty, so lifeless and young. He didn’t remember bedding her. He prayed he hadn’t.

She didn’t say anything, but she smiled slightly and offered him a cup of steaming coffee and a fresh pastry. He wondered how she had gotten the money to pay for it, and felt sick as he understood what must have occurred between them last night—for her to offer him food, for her to smile.

Jack groaned and grimaced, filled with self-loathing. “Do you have any whiskey?” he said, as the pain he had been
trying to escape yesterday came flooding back. “What time is it?”

She made signs with her hands, and he remembered that she couldn’t talk—someone had cut out her tongue—and he felt nausea rising hard and fast. She set down the coffee and doughnut and turned to go. He grabbed her wrist, his fingers closing over skin and bone. “Wait.”

She stopped and looked at him.

“Last night,” he said slowly, making sure she understood. “Did we …?” He motioned to the bed. “You and me, did we sleep together?”

She smiled again, and for that instant he thought he couldn’t bear himself, not for using some poor abused child, but then she shook her head. She made signs that he had been sleeping next door, his head on the table. She was telling him that he had passed out.

“Thank you,” Jack said politely, flooded with relief. He wondered how he had gotten there, to her bed. She left and he rubbed his face. When the blanket moved again, he looked up into the eyes of a heavy Mexican woman.

“You pay for last night,” she said in broken English, holding out her hand.

“I didn’t bed her.”

“No matter. You too drunk is not my business. You sleep here, you pay.”

“How much?”

“One bit.”

Jack reached into his pocket for a coin and found it was empty. “Damn.”

The matron folded her heavy arms across her even heavier bosom. “You have no money?”

“Apparently not.”

She scowled, furious.

Jack got to his feet unsteadily. He was sick with a hangover. But at least this novel situation was keeping him distracted. “Look,” he said. “I’ll bring you a deer.”

She stared, unbelieving.
“No stupido
, señor.”

“You obviously could use the meat. I’ll bring you a deer,” he repeated.

She narrowed her eyes suspiciously.

“I give you my word,” he said, looking into, her eyes.

She smiled. “I believe you. My daughter tell me with sign—you are not bad like the others in that saloon. When?”

“Tomorrow.”

She nodded, satisfied. “Maybe a chicken too?”

He almost smiled. “If I can. How did I get here?”

“We wake you with water. You try to walk. You talk loudly about Candice Carter. You are the breed she left Kincaid for, eh?”

“What?”

“I know the story, don’t worry, señor. It is all over town. She elope with Kincaid, but she come back with you. She leave Kincaid when she meet you, eh?” The woman laughed. “Now she leave you for Kincaid. The woman cannot make up her mind.”

“What do you mean?” he asked, confused. “What do you mean that she left me for Kincaid? He’s dead.”

“Oh, no, señor. Kincaid ride in a few days ago looking for his wife. Very upset.”

Jack leaned against the rough wall. “What? Kincaid’s alive? Here?”

“Here,
sí.
With his wife.” She jabbed her thumb behind her.

“They’re here now, together, in town?”

“Waiting for the stage,” she said.

He was reeling despite his numbed mind. Jack felt his heart pick up a heavy, thudding beat. She was here, in Tucson.
With Kincaid
. Could he never escape her? Where were they going? It was none of his business, he didn’t care. She was no longer of any concern to him. Were they leaving on the noon stage west, or the 3
P.M
. stage east? Both lines ran late—sometimes by a few hours—but usually by half a day, or even days.

Damn! Where were they going?

And why did he care?

He reminded himself that she had made her choice.

He thought of her in Kincaid’s arms.

Had their reunion been joyous? Had she wept with ecstasy because her husband was alive? How would she explain her loss of virginity? Viciously he hoped Kincaid would make her suffer for it.

“You have any whiskey around here?” he managed, focusing
on the woman, who was watching him with careful interest.

He tried not to think as he belted down the shot she brought him. He was getting drunk again. After last night, it wouldn’t take much.
Where were they going?

Why couldn’t he stop thinking about that heartless bitch?