Ride the Fire (35 page)

“My God, Bethie! They begged me again and again to help them! They begged me to kill them, begged me to end their agony, but I was still bound and could do nothing. Nothing! I shouted to Atsan to take me in their place, to set them free, but he didn’t listen.”

He took a deep breath. “At dawn, they dragged the boys, horribly burned but still alive, outside, tied them to racks, burned them to death as a sacrifice to their god of war. I did not see it, but I heard it. Eben and Josiah died believing I had betrayed them, that I’d persuaded the Wyandot to spare me but had abandoned them to torment. They died cursing my name.”

Bethie knelt before him, tears wet on her cheeks, her violet eyes soft with sympathy. “It was no’ your fault, Nicholas. There was nothin’ you could have done.”

He took her face between his hands, all but shouted at her. “Are you sure of that ?”

She did not pull away or shrink from his anger. “Aye, Nicholas. You almost died tryin’ to save them. You did more for them than most men would have done. Can you no’ see that?”

He stood, afraid her compassion would shatter him, stalked back toward the window. “There’s more. You wanted the truth.”

She whispered. “Aye.”

He stared unseeing into the darkness. “I later learned Lyda had arranged for me to be spared for one reason: She wanted me to play the stud, to give her my get.” He heard Bethie’s gasp, forced himself to continue. “But, of course, I was badly burned, and the wounds quickly festered. Lyda and the women of her clan fought to heal me, kept me bound hand and foot to a berth in their longhouse. For the rest of the summer, I lay there, more dead than alive and out of my mind with fever, while they forced me to drink, forced me to eat, cleaned my burns.”

Bethie waited for him to continue, tried to comprehend what he’d already told her. She’d known he’d been tortured. But to hear him describe it, to imagine how much he had suffered, how much those two boys had suffered—it nearly made her sick. She wanted desperately to comfort him, to wrap her arms around him, but she sensed he did not want to be touched.

“The first time it happened was only days after my fever broke. I’d grown so accustomed to pain that it seemed a reprieve sent from heaven. I awoke to find myself already hard, already inside her. I was still tied to the berth, but even had I been cut free, I doubt I could have stopped her. I was very weak, and it had been so long since I’d felt anything but agony. It was over quickly. She walked away with a smile on her face, while her mother’s family watched and laughed. There is no privacy in a longhouse.”

Bethie listened, stunned and horrified, as he described how again and again Lyda had taken advantage of his bonds and his physical weakness to arouse him and use his body for her own ends. Bethie hadn’t thought such a thing could happen to a man.

“I tried to refuse, tried to keep my body from responding, ‘ but I couldn’t. Not until I was strong enough to stand and they cut me free was I able to keep her from taking what she wanted from me. But it was too late. She was already carrying my child. That fact kept her alive—for a while.”

Bethie could feel the tension inside him, his hatred for himself. She understood that hatred, that deep shame. “So you stayed with her.”

He nodded. “I hated her as I’ve hated no one, and I would not leave my child to be raised by her. I had planned to stay until the child was weaned, then escape with it back to Virginia. So I began to live as one of them. I ate with them, hunted with them, joined the fellowship of their warriors. Atsan accepted me as his son, honored me as a warrior. I smoked and drank and joked with him—the man who had ordered Eben’s and Josiah’s deaths.

“But I rejected Lyda utterly. I brought meat to her fire for the child’s sake, but I refused the other duties of a husband. Yet the more I turned from her, the more desperate she became to have my attention. Purely for hatred’s sake, I began to dote openly upon other Wyandot women, to bed them, to give them everything I would not give her.” Nicholas laughed, but it was not a pleasant sound. “Her own people began to reject her, even the men who’d once followed her like love-sick hounds. They felt she had become unnaturally attached to me and that if she were unhappy with me as a husband, she should divorce me in the Wyandot way by putting me out of her mother’s longhouse.”

“But she didn’t because she wanted you.”

“Aye. No man had ever rejected her, and she simply wanted what she could not have. She didn’t love me, if that’s what you’re thinking. I don’t know if she was capable of love.”

“If she had loved you, she wouldna have hurt you. She wouldna have stolen from you.”

“At first I thought she’d merely stolen a baby. By the end, she’d stolen my soul.”

Nicholas steeled himself for what he knew was coming, described how one afternoon in late winter, Lyda, her belly swelling, had come inside to find him buried between her youngest sister’s thighs. Aware she was watching, he’d taken that moment to plunge her sister into an intense orgasm. Lyda had turned and run out of the longhouse in tears. “It gave me pleasure to see the hurt upon her face. I was happy to cause her pain.” He could feel it as if it were yesterday—the rage, the hate, the urge for vengeance. “When she wasn’t back by sundown, I searched for her. I expected to find her pouting somewhere, or perhaps rutting with some young warrior still fool enough to fall for her pretty face.” Suddenly he found it all but impossible to speak. He’d known where telling this story would lead him, and still the lancing pain surprised him. “I found her in a ravine. She had slipped on the ice, fallen, broken her neck. She was dead. I touched my hand to her belly, but it was still. The night before, the women of her clan had been feeling the baby move, and then...”

He squeezed his eyes shut against the memory, felt Bethie walk up behind him.

Her small hand rested on his back. “You didna mean for either of them to die.”

He turned to face her, overwhelmed with hatred for himself. “Didn’t I? I took delight in humiliating her, in hurting her! If I had shown her the smallest kindness that day, if I had forsworn my lust for vengeance, she would not be dead, and the baby ...”

Bethie pressed herself against him, wrapped her slender arms around him. “You didna kill her, Nicholas. Twas an accident. How were you to know she would slip and fall?”

He cupped her face in his hands, forced her to meet his gaze, spoke between gritted teeth. “You don’t understand. I was an animal! I didn’t care about her! I didn’t care about any of the women I used! I gave no thought to the other children I might have sired! I didn’t care about anything!”

“Except for the baby. And your friends, Eben and Josiah.

You cared about them.”

Her words were a fist to his gut. He sat on the bed. “Aye, I cared about them.”

Bethie sat beside him, took his hand. “You did the best you could, Nicholas. You cannae punish yourself forever for wrongs you didna intend.”

Her words hung in the air for a moment, and Nicholas wondered what he had done to deserve her, this loving, giving woman. “I left the Wyandot village the next morning. It took me two months to reach Virginia again. My parents had thought me dead, so my arrival quite surprised them. Amid the celebration, I learned that Penelope, my fiancee, had married another. And then the nightmares began.” He told her how Eben’s and Josiah’s screams and curses had followed him into his sleep, how his sister Elizabeth had come to comfort him in the night, and how in his rage and confusion he’d almost killed her.

“I took only what I needed and rode west.” His voice betrayed him, caught in his throat as he struggled to choke out the rest of it. “I left my mother weeping... in her nightgown. She begged me not to leave, and still I rode away. I wanted to protect them from the man I had become.”

“You’ve a family that loves you, Nicholas. That’s somethin’ to be cherished, for certain, somethin’ I’ve never known. Why did you no’ go home?”

“Sweet Bethie, always so forgiving.” He sought for the right words. “I didn’t go home because I believed the man they loved no longer existed.”

She knelt before him, her eyes filled with tears. “ Tis no’ your fault that you survived and the others didna. You cannae give them back their lives by refusin’ to live your own, Nicholas.”

He pulled her against him, buried his face in the sweet smelling silk of her hair. “Is it really that simple, Bethie? And what of the animal I became? That creature is still inside me.”

“I know no animal, Nicholas. I know only the man who held my hand when I gave birth, the man who risked his life time and again to protect mine, the man who forgave my shame, the man who holds me in his arms and makes the world disappear. I know only the man I love, Nicholas. Only you.”

He started to tell her she bore no shame and never had, when her last words struck him. His heart seemed to stop.

Only the man I love.

She knew it had taken all his strength to tell her what he’d told her, and she tried to grasp it all. She’d known that he’d been tortured. She’d been able to see that for herself. But the horror of it…

She ran a finger over one puckered scar. Now that she knew what they’d done to him, she was able to read the strange pattern on his skin as she might the words in a book.

Her eyes, already sore from crying, pricked with fresh tears. She could not imagine how much he had suffered, nor how horrible it must have been to watch, helpless, as his two young friends were burned slowly to death. How desperate must he have felt to witness their torment! How it must have crushed him when, after he’d offered his life for theirs, they died cursing him! How alone he must have felt, tied up, in pain and sick with fever—as if even God had abandoned him.

Twas clear now why he’d understood her need to be clean after Richard had tried to rape her. He must have felt the same urge when they’d at last cut away his bonds and—

Then Bethie remembered, and regret sliced through her.
She
had tied him to her bed. She had drugged him, then bound him by wrist and ankle. He had fought like a wild animal to free himself—and had failed. She’d thought at the time he was simply angry at being bested by a woman, but it had been so much more than that. What terrible memories it must have stirred in him!

And when he’d first made love to her—hadn’t he forced himself to lie on his back, his fists around the bedposts, his submissive position an echo of that Lyda had forced upon him? Aye, he had—for her sake. Somehow he had understood her fear, had felt her hidden pain, and though he’d known nothing about Richard at the time, he’d found a way to soothe her, to show her that she could trust him. Tears blurred her vision as she realized the sacrifice he’d made for her.

His hands stroked her hair. “What’s wrong, love?” Startled, she looked up to find him watching her. “I thought you were sleepin’.”

“Just dozing.” He shifted his weight, held her closer. “Tell me what’s troubling you.”

She sat, looked into his blue eyes. “I’m sorry, Nicholas. I’m sorry for tyin’ you to my bed. I didna know—”

There was such anguish in her voice that Nicholas set aside the jest that had come to mind, wiped her tears away with his thumbs. “How could you have known? You did what you had to do to feel safe. So did I. I held a pistol to your head, remember?”

Her lips curved in a sad smile. “You’ve done so much for me. If no’ for you, Belle and I would have died a dozen times over. If no’ for you, I wouldna be able to read. If no’ for you, I would never have known how precious a man’s touch can be.”

“I assure you, love, there was no suffering involved, either in teaching you to read or in showing you the pleasures of lovemaking. Besides, you’ve saved my life, too—once when I would have bled to death, and again when I would have been shot in the back.”

She had saved him in other ways, too, but Nicholas did not yet know the words to tell her exactly what she’d done for him.

God, she was beautiful. She sat, looking at him with doubt in her tear-bright eyes, her hair in glorious disarray around her shoulders, the pink crests of her breasts peeking through the golden strands, tempting him. “Of course, there is a way you can repay me . . .”

She ran her fingers through the hair on his chest, stopped to tease one flat nipple, her lips curved in a seductive smile. “And what would that be?’

“Marry me.”

Her smile vanished, and she shook her head. “You would come to regret it one day. And your family—”

“—has no say in this decision.”

Her answer was not what Nicholas hoped to hear. “I’ll think on it.”