Code of the Wolf (25 page)

“Try me.”

A bird sang tentatively in the bushes nearby. Jacob smelled rain, maybe only a few minutes away. Down near the river, metal jingled. Jacob had heard the women coming with the horses and stop a discreet distance farther down the bank, but he hadn't wanted to wake Serenity.

Right now she was struggling with something—a secret, maybe—she wasn't sure she should tell him. If she chose to keep it from him, he wouldn't press her; he didn't have a right to ask anything more of her when they would be parting so soon.

Parting. Never to see her again. Never to kiss her,
hold her in his arms, feel her thighs gripping his waist as he took her again and again to joyous completion.

“I didn't know it was possible to feel this way,” she said. “To feel so good, so safe. It was like a miracle.”

Jacob felt humbled, but he sensed it would be better not to interrupt her with clumsy words of thanks he didn't know how to give.

After a moment she continued, speaking as hesitantly as if she were feeling her way through some vast darkness.

“You must have realized that I wasn't a virgin,” she said.

He'd known as soon as he entered her, but after that he hadn't been doing much thinking about anything. It hadn't shocked him then and it didn't now, but it meant something that she was telling him this. Something important.

“Before tonight,” she whispered, “the only thing I knew about lying with a man was ugliness. Pain and humiliation.”

Every muscle in Jacob's body tightened. He'd wondered more than once if a man had hurt her, but she'd absolved her late fiance with her loving words and never hinted at anyone else in her life.

“Who was it?” he demanded.

She turned her head swiftly, her hair swinging away in a silken arc, and looked into Jacob's eyes. “Does it matter to you that I wasn't…wasn't pure?”

In answer, he put both arms around her and pulled her against his side, pressing his face into her hair. “I wasn't exactly pure, either,” he said.

Her laugh was more of a hiccup than anything else.
“It's different for men. Didn't you know that? Not many men would think—”

“I don't give a damn about what other men think.”

Tucking her head under his chin, she curled against him as if she wished she could fold herself into his body and disappear. “I'm glad,” she whispered.

Jacob wasn't sure he could ever be happy about anything again. “Who was it, Serenity?”

She twisted in his arms to touch his cheek. “Is it so important, Jacob? I'm not who I was before you came to Avalon. The past is dead for me now. Last night took away all the rest of the pain.”

Serenity took his clenched fist and kissed his knuckles. “Can you be content with knowing that you have changed everything for me?”

Could he? Could he stop himself from imagining what she'd gone through, what pain she must have suffered to have completely cut herself off from male companionship?

Zora's words in Bethel came back to him then.
She has felt nothing but hate for any man since I met her. Since you came, she is different.

He'd been more than willing to accept her renunciation of her revenge against the Reniers, just as he'd renounced his own. Letting his anger keep the past alive would do nothing to change it. The Code had taught him that.

How much do you care for her? How much?

Enough to want to make her tormentor suffer. But not at any price. “Jacob?”

Her voice was very soft now, hardly a breath of air
grazing his chin. “I said I'd never ask anything of you again, but…”

He knew then that nothing she asked him would be too much. “What is it, Serenity?” he asked, pulling her close again.

“Will you…will you at least consider coming back to Avalon?”

Only a few hours ago he would have flinched at the question. It didn't seem so terrible now. Not after last night. Not after what she'd told him. She'd said he'd changed her life.

But he'd changed Ruth's life, too. He'd cut it short with his stupidity and neglect. Serenity had to know that, even if he never told her who had shot Ruth eight times and left her lying on the kitchen floor.

“There's something you have to know,” he said. “I was married once. Her name was Ruth, and I loved her.” He had to swallow twice before he could continue. “She was killed. Murdered, like your parents.”

He told her the rest, about how he'd spent so much of his time away with the Rangers, coming home for only a few weeks out of the year, taking her for granted in spite of her devotion and selfless love for him, or maybe because of it.

He didn't tell Serenity who had murdered Ruth. He couldn't ask her to share that burden now.

“I should have been there,” he said, staring into a darkness that no wolf's eyes could penetrate. “Ruth's dead because of me.”

“Oh, no.” Serenity dragged his head down to hers and wrapped her arms around his neck, rocking him like a motherless child. “No, it wasn't your fault.”

No one in the world could have told him that and made him believe it. No one but Serenity. Something happened to his eyes, something that spilled into his chest and dissolved the shame he'd carried with him ever since he'd found Ruth's broken body.

“It's all right,” Serenity whispered, stroking his hair. “It's all right to cry.”

The rain began to fall then, small, cool drops that blossomed into warmth as they touched Jacob's head and shoulders. He covered Serenity with his own body, lifted her into his arms and carried her into the shelter of the nest he had made for her the night before, easing her to the ground and lying down beside her.

They listened to the summer rain, accepting the gentle gift of moisture that nourished cattle and crops, bad and good men alike. Jacob closed his eyes and breathed in the new life coming. The new life he could have if he would only reach out and take it.

If he let the Reniers go and gave up the Code forever. Let them continue their depredations on behalf of powerful men who didn't want to get their own hands dirty, even after he'd finally decided he couldn't let that happen any longer.

You don't have to take them yourself.
But who else would? Other humans? The very reason men like the outlaw Reniers were still running loose was because they
weren't
human.

Serenity's warm, slender hand came to rest over his. “About what I said before…” she said softly. “You don't have to decide now. We can stay here for a few days. Do whatever you must to be sure of what you want.”

Did he finally know what he wanted? Was peace—
a final, lasting peace for him and Serenity—within his grasp?

The damp grass rustled as Serenity got to her feet. “The rain has stopped,” she said. “Caridad and the others must have set up camp by now. I'm going to dress and walk a little before I go down to see them. I won't stray far.”

Jacob was slow to rise himself. He waited until he heard Serenity finish dressing and walk away, then examined his ruined trousers. They were stiff and stained, almost unwearable, but his spares were in his saddlebags down by the river, so he put on what clothes he had and went to find the other women. He knew they would have plenty of questions for him, but it was up to Serenity to decide what to tell them.

Zora, Caridad and Victoria were down on the bank, Victoria examining one of the horse's hooves, Caridad wading in the river with a sharpened stick in hand, and Zora sitting on a bedroll mending a shirt. She heard Jacob before he left the tangle of bushes that screened the bank from the woods nearer the road and came to join him.

“How is she?” Zora asked.

Jacob didn't have to ask if she knew what had happened. Her wolf senses would tell her even if she hadn't already guessed.

“She's all right,” he said. “She went through hell last night, but it's over now.” He glanced over Zora's head toward the river and the women still intent on their work. “She wants to go back to Avalon.”

“She has chosen not to pursue the outlaws.”

“That's right.”

Zora didn't ask the obvious question: why Serenity had changed her mind so abruptly, abandoning the very thing that had driven her for as long as Zora had known her.

And Jacob didn't see the need to tell her. She knew Serenity as well as anyone; she could probably figure it out for herself. But there was something he very badly wanted to ask
her.

“Serenity told me something this morning,” he said, watching Zora's face. “She said the only time she'd been with a man had been bad for her. Do you know what she was talking about?”

Zora bowed her head and began to walk away. Jacob caught up with her.

“I need to know,” he said.

She stopped and swung to face him again. “Why?”

“Because she's asked me to return to Avalon with her.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I didn't. There are things I have to know about her past before—”

“Do you love her?” Zora demanded.

“I—”

“If you love her, then what happened long ago should not matter.”

“You were so damned worried about my hurting her. I don't want to risk hurting her again.”

“Whether you leave her now or later, you will hurt her.”

And that was the one bitter fact he couldn't escape. “I'm not judging her,” he said. “But I can't live with ghosts I don't know and can't fight.”

She weighed his words with a hard stare, and the wariness of one who knows all too well what it is to be scorned and abandoned. “If I tell you,” she said, “you must swear never to let her know what you have learned.”

“I swear,” he said.

Zora glanced toward the river. The other women might notice and wonder about her absence at any time, just as they must be wondering about Serenity's. Obviously the explanation would have to be brief.

“The Reniers,” she said. “You know them.”

It wasn't a question. She'd asked him something like that before. She'd guessed he had personal reasons for wanting to find them.

Zora had more than earned the right to the truth, or as much as she needed to know. “I know them,” he said heavily. “Their family and mine have been enemies for generations.”

Zora must have been surprised, and she was plenty justified in being angry, but she clearly realized that this wasn't the time to demand explanations. “You were not hunting them before Serenity hired you?”

“I couldn't. Not for a long time.” How could he explain the Code to anyone, let alone a woman who had been abused like Zora? “These men are vicious killers, used by more powerful men in the Renier clan to do their dirty work for them. I didn't want to continue a war that's brought nothing but misery as long as I can remember. I didn't want to become like them.” He looked away from Zora's quiet face. “Serenity's family never would have had a chance against them, even if they weren't Quakers. If she hadn't escaped…”

“But she did not escape.”

Jacob's heart turned as brittle as the skin of ice on a lake after an early-winter freeze. “What do you mean?”

“The men took her.”

Still he refused to understand. “As a hostage?”

“They had no need of a hostage. They had no reason for burning the farm or killing Serenity's family. They kept her alive because they had another use for her.”

It took all Jacob's effort to keep his howl of rage in his throat. “She told you?”

“Yes. She did not have to say much. Even when I first knew her, I could see how much she had suffered.”

“How long?” he said hoarsely.

“Nearly a year. She survived, and when the time came she escaped. She took some of their stolen money with her.”

Joseph remembered what Serenity had told him about buying the ranch in part with money “contributed by those who shared my hopes.” Had it also been bought with her suffering and ruination?

God help him, no wonder she'd wanted to conceal her femininity and distrusted, even hated, men. She'd been an innocent when they'd taken her. Even an experienced woman might not have come through such an ordeal with her sanity and will intact, but Serenity had done it. She'd more than survived. She'd made a place for women who needed a sanctuary, a place where women who'd suffered at the hands of men could be safe.

He swallowed. “Do the others know?”

Zora shook her head. “They might have guessed, but they would ask nothing. We—” She laughed under her
breath. “We were supposed to forget the past at Avalon.”

But that wasn't easy. Hell, in Serenity's case it would be impossible. She had tremendous courage to be willing to go after her tormentors at all, let alone face them directly enough to kill them. He realized just how much faith and trust she'd put in him, working at his side, asking help of a man of violence to find other men of violence.

How much faith and trust—and love—would it take for her to offer her body to a man when all she had known was pain?

Pain from the same men who had killed Ruth, who might have done the same thing to Serenity.

Jacob's vision went dark. He shoved past Zora and strode toward the riverbank. “Jacob!”

He stopped, but only because Zora's voice was filled with such uncharacteristic emotion.

“What are you going to do?” she asked, grabbing him by the arm.

“What I should have done a long time ago,” he said, shaking her off.

“You will kill these men.”

Yes, he would kill them. Slowly, if he could. All the hatred he'd kept in check for so many years, the vicious rage the Code had channeled into the search for justice, had broken loose from its chains. The wolf was in ascendance, the primitive half of him that didn't care about Man's law. Or what humans called love.