Lucy's Liberation [Elk Creek 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (7 page)

He
had
arrived not too long after she’d sent her letter and she’d only had to send one letter where Mr. Flint’s office had sent several over the last several months.

Hezekiah proffered a hand and lifted his eyebrows, prompting.

Lucy’s stomach fluttered again, this time more intensely as the crotch of her bloomers became wet with her juices. She closed her eyes to fight the sudden vision of Prentice’s blond head between her legs as he’d lapped at her pussy. In her mind the blond head changed to light golden-brown and didn’t belong to Prentice anymore but to Hezekiah. Good Lord!

“Lucy, are you well?”

She licked her lips and opened her eyes to look at him. “I’m right fine and dandy.”

“That’s good to hear.” He still held his hand out, waiting for her to take it.

Lucy finally put her hand in his and let him shake it up and down once. His hand was warm, his grip firm yet strangely gentle—reminiscent of that other lost soul she had barely gotten to know and now never would get to know.

Briefly, she wondered what Prentice had been thinking about right before he’d died. Had he had any regrets?

Just the thought of that made Lucy speculate what regrets she would have when it finally came time to meet her maker and she hoped agreeing to marry Hezekiah wasn’t one of them.

Prentice sat at the fancily-carved oak table in the Crawfords’ kitchen, trying to act like he didn’t notice his “momma and daddy” stealing looks at him as they determinedly dug into their evening meal and tried to act like they weren’t sitting at the table with a former corpse.

To say the silence was uncomfortable was an understatement.

These people were his family according to Thayne and Kelly, his “kinfolk,” yet Prentice felt absolutely nothing for them. Small wonder since he…was…not…Ethan Crawford!

He wanted to scream that statement from the rooftop of Clint and Kate’s dry goods store and mercantile, but he knew that wouldn’t go over too well with the natives.

In his last incarnation he had ruled the roost in this town. He’d used his powers to acquire the finances he’d needed, purchased the finest clothes available in the center of town and set himself up as a traveling “businessman.” He’d made the connections he’d needed to locate and set up Thayne and Cade and had been well on his way to getting revenge on them for stealing his childhood when they’d hijacked his parents’ heartstrings and imagination as orphan boys.

Now he had no powers and he was stuck in this strange young man’s body, sitting and having a meal with said young man’s parents.

“You’ve barely eaten any of your stew, Ethan. Isn’t it to your liking?”

Prentice wanted to tell her the truth that the meat was greasy with entirely too much fat marbling its flesh and it wasn’t as tender as it could have been.

God, what he wouldn’t give for a thick, juicy, and tender steak from Cut or Smith & Wollensky, with a nicely aged brandy chasing it.

Then he lifted his glance from his overflowing plate to see the anxious look of anticipation on Kate Crawford’s face and lost his train of thought completely.

She was a handsome woman with a slim shape that belied the fat content of all the food on her plate. He didn’t know how she kept her figure since most of her work day consisted of helping the customers in her and her husband’s store, no heavy lifting required. Not like some of the women from the surrounding homesteads and farms who came into town with their husbands to purchase their supplies—robust and stout women the better to survive the harsher elements of the Wild West no doubt.

She wore her dishwater-brown hair pinned in a bun at the nape of her neck and the style accentuated the angles of her face, giving just a hint of striking cheekbones and the pretty young girl she must have been in her day.

Prentice could see himself—Ethan—in her face.

He didn’t know what to make of his tender feelings for the woman. He barely knew her, but something about the grief-stricken expression in her sunken hazel eyes when he’d arrived on her and Clint’s doorstep with Thayne and Kelly made his heart thump with longing.

She had missed her baby boy greatly and rejoiced at his return. How could he tell her that he wasn’t her son, that the Ethan Crawford she knew was well and truly dead?

She deserved better. Prentice just didn’t know how
he
was supposed to give it to her.

Did Brielle and Caith really expect him to make amends by being a good and obedient son to Clint and Kate with his second chance? Did they really expect him to accept his fate dutifully and without question?

Prentice cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, Ka—Momma. I suppose I’m not very hungry.”

“Well, that’s just plain nonsense! After dy—after what you’ve been through you should be starving. Besides, you’ve always had a healthy appetite for my beef stew.”

“Things change,” he murmured then snuck a peek at Ethan’s father to gauge his reaction to the exchange as the man hadn’t stopped eating since it began.

Clint glanced up when he felt his wife’s and Prentice’s gazes on him. He silently sat back in his high-back oak chair and wiped his mouth with his napkin. “Your momma’s worried about you, Ethan. That’s all.”

A man of few words since Prentice had met him, Clint Crawford reminded him of the cowboys of yore—chiseled jaw, cleft chin, and heavy-browed dark eyes that all went along with his solid, rangy build. He had seemed as out of place working in his store with his apron on over his clothes as Prentice had felt.

Prentice could see where Ethan’s features were a melding of Clint’s and Kate’s.

He knew he was being a little narcissistic, but he took pleasure in knowing that Brielle and Caith had sent him back in the body of someone who hadn’t been beaten with an ugly stick.

Prentice had prided himself on his looks in his former life and what Mother Nature hadn’t given him he’d perfected in the gym and with a healthy diet. He’d done anything and everything he could to look good and feel good but in the end, it had gotten him a one-way ticket to the Summerland and a trip back to hell on earth.

This place, Elk Creek, Oklahoma, was his worst nightmare and Prentice didn’t know how he was supposed to get out of here, but he planned to do so as soon as humanly possible.

Someone knocked at the door and Prentice exchanged looks with Ethan’s parents who both raised their brows at each other.

“Well, I just can’t imagine who that might be this time of evening,” Kate said.

If they had been in his time, Prentice figured it would have been the paparazzi trying to sniff out the real story of Ethan Crawford’s resurrection.

Even if there weren’t exactly paparazzi in this time, there was certainly the garden variety curious who couldn’t wait to see the man who had come back from the dead.

Prentice couldn’t count the number of people who had come into Crawford’s mercantile today on the pretense of buying something only to leave empty-handed after they’d browsed around for a while to see if he was in the store. If half the people who had come into the store that day had actually purchased something, then Clint and Kate could have retired.

Another knock sounded on the front door.

Whoever was out there remained persistent and wasn’t going away.

Clint sighed as he pushed his chair back from the table and tossed his napkin on the table top. “Guess I’d better see who it is.”

Prentice didn’t know who was at the door, but he did know that he had never been more thankful for an interruption at dinner in his entire life. The atmosphere in the kitchen was nothing but stifling.

“Ethan!”

“Now wait a minute, young lady…”

It was too late.

Before Clint could do anything about it, a petite figure with flowing, shiny copper-red hair, and the widest, brightest gray eyes Prentice had ever seen shot past Ethan’s father and rushed over to Prentice.

She paused just long enough to bend and throw her arms around his neck in a chokehold.

Who knew someone so small could have such a powerful grip?

The strange girl pressed her cheek against his and he was briefly enveloped in soft skin and the sweet delicate scent of flowers and young woman.

Prentice closed his eyes and lost himself in the warm sensations flowing through him—chaste and platonic rather than the sledgehammer-like lust that had struck him with Lucy.

He wondered what she was doing at that moment.

Prentice had heard the town gossip about how Rance had treated her in his will and swallowed a tight ball of anger that he hadn’t punished the bastard more when he’d killed him.

The fact that Rance was such a prick had made the kill even more gratifying, not like when he had killed Aura. The whole point of him taking out Rance, however, had been to protect Lucy and get her out of a horrible situation, not put her in more of an untenable one.

Prentice had not realized that Rance was so diabolical and manipulative. Yes, he had been smarmy. Yes, he had been a serial-killing pedophile and an all-around piece-of-shit, abusive husband. Prentice just didn’t think Rance Peyton had been shrewd enough to structure the terms and stipulations of his will the way that was alleged. Of course, he would have had to be cunning and Machiavellian to get away with what he had been doing to so many boys for so many years without anyone being the wiser. When Prentice thought about it, Rance’s last will and testament was exactly something that a man like him would compose.

The girl pulled away slightly, dragging Prentice back to the present. “When they told me you were alive I didn’t believe it,” she whispered, her voice reverent, as if speaking too loudly might make him disappear and the thought of losing him scared her beyond reason.

“We’re having dinner, Gi—”

“I know, Mrs. Crawford and I’m powerful sorry, but I just had to come and see him for myself and make sure it was true.”

“Yes, well, your daddy wouldn’t be too happy about your sneaking over here in the middle of dinner.”

“I didn’t mean to be rude and interrupt. It’s just that…”

Prentice opened his eyes at the sob in her voice, looked in her too-close, glistening gaze.

Oh hell, was she about to cry?

“My daddy’s been keeping me busy all day, making sure I didn’t leave the store or the house to…to come over here.”

“And I’m sure your daddy had a very good reason to do that,” Kate said, her face pinched as if she didn’t quite agree with “daddy’s” reasoning.

Was there some kind of Hatfield-McCoy feud going on here that he didn’t know about? Had he been dropped in the middle of a tragic Romeo and Juliet affair? It wasn’t as if he didn’t have enough to worry about.

“Ethan?” The girl cupped his cheek and suddenly he was altogether self-conscious about the day-old whiskers on his jaw. “Honey, you’re looking at me like you don’t know who I am.”

That’s because he didn’t know who she was. At least he wasn’t a hundred percent sure.

The town’s people had revealed so much when he had kept quiet, blending into the scenery and acting like he hadn’t been listening or paying them any attention.

When he hadn’t been accepting the town’s people’s well-wishes at the store and their pleasure at Ethan’s “recovery,” Prentice had hung back unobtrusively and kept his eyes and ears open. Doing this, he’d picked up that Ethan had just had his twenty-third birthday a month before his parents had given him an ultimatum—straighten up and fly right or get out. Apparently, Ethan had taken up company with some unsavory character out of town a few months before and had strayed from the straight and narrow path his parents had guided him down.

Ethan, for whatever reasons, chose to leave his childhood home, go out on the road and get in touch with his wild, bad boy side. Not until recently had some young girl in town helped to turn him back to the path of his upright-citizen roots.

Ah, now he knew who this chit was—Ginger McCall.

Prentice could see why Ethan had been on the verge of coming back to the family fold. A young woman like this was enough to make any man want to be a better man, at least someone like a young and still-impressionable Ethan. Prentice wasn’t too sure that any woman in the world had the power to change
his
mind about the general and inherent worthlessness of man and society. He was glad that Ethan had found someone, although it hadn’t done the young man very much good except that were it not for Ginger’s concern, who knows what would have happened to his body had the sheriff and his deputy not been summoned to find him?

“Of course I know who you are, Ginger.”

He still didn’t know who the “unsavory character” was—which was a more pressing matter to Prentice than Ginger and Ethan’s grand love affair—and evidently no one else in town knew either. Maybe out of respect for his parents, Ethan had kept that side of his life private.

Ginger frowned at him as if he had insulted her.

“What is it?”

“Why do you sound so…so highfaluting?”

Prentice laughed at the absurdity of the situation, couldn’t help himself. Was he supposed to speak like a country bumpkin while he was in this body? Well, Brielle and Caith had another thing coming if that’s what they expected of him to make things work. “I’m sorry. I haven’t been myself since…since my return.”