Romance: JADEN: An MMA Fighter Romance (Bad Boy Tattoo Romance) (New Adult Pregnancy Short Stories) (56 page)

“No,” she said. “Not tonight.”

Edward stood and let go of her hand. His face didn’t change from that gentle look that it had, didn’t get angry. “Very well.”

As he walked towards the door, Rosaline felt physical pain. “Wait,” she called out as he put his hand on the knob.

“What is it?” Edward asked.

If she was never to see Adrian again, would she be happy with this man? She asked herself this in a final test before she spoke. The resounding yes made her sure. “Could you join me?”

The surprise was apparent in the way Edward tilted his shoulders back and glanced back at her. Then, he smiled, the surprised look shattering. “Of course,” he murmured, coming back over to her and placing a hand on her own, threading his fingers through hers and stroking a hand along her cheek.

Yes. She could get used to this. She would be happy here. Her heart condoned with ever fiber, and she smiled in spite of herself.

“Happy birthday, love,” Edward whispered to her.

THE END

© Copyright 2015 by April Jane - All rights reserved.

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by April Jane

1874

“Can I get another drink over here?”

The voice was slurred, nearly past the point of recognition. Candice had heard that tone too many times to count, however, and had learned it almost as another language. She sighed and leaned her hip against the counter, swiping a hand quickly across the gathering sweat on her brow. She could feel the hairs that had come loose from her bun curling around her temples and sticking in the sweat, and she wanted nothing more than to go outside and feel the cool breeze that came with Montana summers most days caress her cheeks.

Instead, she swept herself under the counter and hunted for whatever the man had to drink last and began pouring it as quickly as she could.

Candice knew that she should find a better job. It was not as if she was proud to exclaim that she just happened to be the barmaid at the local tavern. Most girls would scoff and call her names better left unsaid behind carefully gloved hands. She knew that she was talented; she could count numbers and run a cash register and return change, as well as sweet-talk a customer into buying just one more drink. She had other uses for her life, but it was her obligation to remain the barmaid of the saloon.

She had tried. Applying to the mail order bride catalogue had been one of her many attempts to get free of this miserable town, but so far no one had sent her a letter, not even a telegram to let her know that she was wanted outside of being a barmaid.

Her father would not have it any other way. If she dared try to leave, she would find herself without a home, and a name to boot, which ruled out simply leaving. The only thing that protected her reputation at the moment was the fact that her father was the owner of the saloon. One misstep without his name hanging over her head, she would be ruined for life.

Not that it mattered all that much. Candice was used to being looked over, sneered at, and even verbally criticized at times for her… extra padding, as she liked to think of it and call it. There had not been the opportunity for a misstep, and Candice was beginning to believe that there would not be one.

“Her face is pretty,” she had heard someone say once; she hardly remembered who anymore. “But the rest…” there had been the sort of implication that left Candice to her own devices, and her mind could be cruel.

With a roll of the eyes, Candice rotated her hips around the edge of the counter and poured a mix of the man’s favorite poisons into his cup.

“Thank you, love,” the man said, eyes glimmering with certain drunkenness. Candice flattened her lips in a dead smile and spun away before he could say something that would make her want to punch him. As she spun, a hard, bony shoulder slammed into her gut, causing her to slosh liquid out of one of the glasses.

“Watch it,” she snapped without thinking as the man stood up. By the time she got to his face, he was already done with his critical, sneering glare down her body. She blinked a few times. She was used to the somewhat-good-looking men that travelled through the tavern, but he was a rare pick. Face like one that should have been painted and hung in some high-class art gallery back East and clothes to match the probable wealth he had, he was everything that Candice had secretly wanted and would never have. And he was sneering at her. Brilliant green eyes rendered her boneless as he made his way back up her body to her face. They were almost dead, and Candice shivered. Such beautiful eyes should never contain such… nothingness.

But it was not the beauty that made her pause. She had seen this man somewhere before. Where, though? Surely she would remember such a striking face if she saw it on the streets of their otherwise dull and uninteresting town.

Candice smiled sweetly at him and moved out of the way. He walked outside without a backward glance. She watched him go past the rest of the patrons for several moments in which she couldn’t remember how to move herself or tear her eyes away. His familiarity was like an itch that Candice couldn’t quite reach, and it niggled at her brain like some unsolvable riddle.

Finally, when another man bumped into her, apologizing profusely, she was shaken from the stupor the man had put her in with just a glance from his eyes.

Shaking her head to clear it, Candice moved behind the bar once more. She let out a sigh. Navigating the narrow, haphazard rows of the tavern was always one of her least favorite parts of working behind the bar. She did not mind being behind it nearly as much, but when she had to leave the comfort and safety of the barrier between her and the patrons it was an entirely different matter. If she had it her way, Candice would be behind the bar the entire time.

“A shot, miss?” Without even looking up, Candice nodded and flipped a glass over, pouring top-shelf whiskey into it and sliding it down the bar, stopping mere inches from the man’s fingertips. Five years had given her the ability to do that, and Father insisted that she show off whenever she could. It was good for business, after all.

As she picked up the cloth to begin cleaning glasses, Candice’s attention was drawn to the back wall. She had heard the sound of someone being thrown against the wall before; it was a common occurrence with drunks, and it was not uncommon that she was forced to remove them from the tavern and they would continue whatever disagreement they had begun outside. However, this was the middle of the day, and she had never heard this sound in broad daylight.

Candice set the glass she was polishing down carefully on the bar and held up a hand to hold off the next request for a drink and slid around the bar once more. The general noise of the tavern washed over Candice as she moved through the sea of the crowd. She ignored all of the voices, all of the conversations she would usually pay attention to, searching for hidden insults and slurs against her with the intensity of a bloodhound.

She slid between two men as she reached the doors, pushing out into the street. Candice squinted her eyes against the sudden light and gust of wind that carried the months-parched dust.

The street was empty, save a few parked carriages that were in various stages of decomposition. From one glance, Candice could tell who the visitors to their tiny, dusty town were, because their carriages were covered, with horses that didn’t look on the verge of dropping from exhaustion, from being used as both transportation and pulling the machinery that was the only thing that kept this town alive.

After the gold rush a few years ago, most of the people who had supported the town—the tavern and the rest of the stores—had left and moved on westward, to where the gold actually was. Unlike most of the towns that the people who so foolishly chased the golden nuggets, however, some people had chosen to stay in this town; Candice’s father one of them. After the death of her mother from travelling across the country, Candice’s father had thought it best to stay. Whether or not he feared for his own life or Candice’s, she would never know. He refused to talk about it.

He also would not approve of this. Candice turned to look over her shoulder in a sort of habit she knew that she would never shake. She could catch the glimpse of the stairs just before the door swung shut behind her. Candice nearly expected to see her father, lurking at the top, or observing the customers, eyes darting towards hers in the silent way that he managed to convey more disapproval than he could ever physically put into words, even though he would try, hours later. It would hang over Candice’s head for the rest of the day; she would silently hold her breath and wait for the other shoe to drop.

But he was not here today, was he? Candice’s father had been gone for the past four days on a supply run down in the southern part of their “state”, as the Government was now making them call what had previously been known as “territories” to them. He would be gone for maybe another entire day, but at least until later this evening. She did not have to worry about him disapproving of her going to see what was making such loud noises against the wall of the tavern. Not today.

Squaring her shoulders, Candice stomped down the board-lined porch to the steps. She steeled herself for whatever form of violence she would find on the other side of the building. Over her years, she had seen all different kinds, from drunken spats to people with nearly murderous intent, but she would never get used to the violence. It seemed to always surprise her, even to this day, even with all of the things she had seen.

Today seemed to be no exception. Even though Candice had braced herself, she was not expecting what she saw. She couldn’t help the sharp breath she drew in, nor could she stop the hitch in her step.

The man, the one who she had thought looked so beautiful—nearly angelic—was the cause of the noise. Not the victim, as she might have thought. No, he was the one that had the other man on the ground, knees digging into the man’s arms, one blood-whetted fist cocked back to hit the face beneath it once again.

It was only in and amongst this violence that Candice recognized him, recognized where she had seen him before. Perhaps it was the fact that he was in such a violent situation, unlike before, and that was why Candice’s mind was able to link him to the wanted poster.

It had decorated the wall of nearly every store in their little town that had never had a name and never would. Candice had seen it every time she paid for more flour at the general store, every time she sent a letter to her brother, whose intellect had managed to get him away from the utter stagnation this town seemed to bring to everyone who resided within its dead walls. That face, those eyes, had looked at her for every day for nearly a year.

William Smithson was wanted in five states for the murder of almost half a dozen women. It was the kind of violence that Candice had never witnessed. She had never witnessed murder, not once in her life, despite all of the times she came close. Death was another matter, but murder… she was foreign to the level of violence it required.

William had not simply murdered the women, either. Candice had read the reports quickly, before her father snatched them away, saying that a young woman of her taste should not be interested in such macabre things. Those poor women, only scant years older than Candice had been torn into like wild animals, ripped into pieces.

In this moment, Candice could believe that this man was capable of it. His eyes shone with a violent delight that Candice could not fathom, nor did she want to.

What struck her as odd, in the small part of her brain that managed to stay calm and detached from the shock, was that the man underneath William did not struggle a single bit. He simply sat there, as if he knew that it was futile to resist.

In the few seconds it took Candice’s mind to wrap around what was happening outside of her father’s tavern, she realized that she could very well be the next victim and quickly back-pedaled. Not fast enough, however, as her foot struck a rock that skittered across the dusty road, creating a sort of racket that such a small thing should not be capable of. Candice winced and froze, her eyes snapping up from her shoes to the cool, emotionless eyes of the killer. In a flash, he was off of the man beneath him and coming towards her.

Candice opened her mouth to scream but not a single sound came out, and she simply gaped at him as he stalked nearer and nearer, like a lion closing in on its prey.

“Why are you here?” William asked as he came towards Candice. She expected him to come right up to her, perhaps wrap his hands around her throat and squeeze until she saw stars, but he stopped three feet away. It still felt too close.

“I…” Candice’s voice sounded feeble and more like a wheeze than any semblance of sound. She sucked in a deep breath and looked away from William’s eyes. They were dead pools of nothingness that seemed to nearly suck her into them. “I came to see what the noise was,” she managed. Her voice still sounded faint, but at least it had some substance to it now.

When she dared to look back, William had raised a solitary eyebrow, the motion moving no other part of his face, and those eyes were still exceptionally dead. “And are you satisfied with what you have found?” he asked.

“Satisfied?” Candice asked, her voice now coming out in an indignant huff. “With what, you murdering someone else in the alley behind my father’s tavern? I am most certainly not satisfied.”

William’s eyes sparked, and Candice wished that they would have stayed dead, because they were much too beautiful. It was the type of beauty that burned, like a raging fire. “I have murdered no one,” he said evenly.

“What?” Candice asked, wondering for a brief moment if he did not know that taking someone’s life was considered murder. Did he not see those women as people? “You…” she gestured vaguely at the general store. “Your face is everywhere. And I have read about what you did,” she added defensively.

William cocked his head at her, the movement so utterly inhuman that it caused a shiver to go down Candice’s spine. She felt her heartbeat, which had slowed to something close to normal, skip a beat and then restart double. She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry, and took a step back.

What was she doing talking to him of all things? She should be running, she should be--“Help,” she said, but it was more of a rasp than anything else. She took another step back, and her feet were even with the edge of the tavern wall. “Help!” she repeated, this time raising her voice. It cracked on the single syllable, and the voice sounded high and reedy; most definitely not her own. But it had been heard, she knew that much. She knew just how far a voice could carry from the door of the tavern, and just how far she had to stand to avoid being caught by her father or mother, as she had when she had been a child and playing with the other children rather than doing her chores.