The Bridegroom (23 page)

“It’s all just talk, young Yarbro,” he said. “Just talk, from desperate men.”

Gideon wasn’t convinced of that, and assignment or no assignment, he meant to warn Rowdy that the trouble brewing at the mine might be more serious than anyone—including the owners—had ever suspected.

After that, nothing more was said about shooting coolies, but Gideon stayed until Paddy finally drove them all away from the bar, claiming he was out of whiskey and wouldn’t have more until after tomorrow’s train arrived from Phoenix.

Cold sober, even though he’d never drunk so much at one time in his life, Gideon left with the others. Like before, the men broke off into smaller groups, even though they were all headed to the same place.

All except Gideon, that is. And Mike O’Hanlon.

“I’ll just see that young Yarbro gets home in one piece,” O’Hanlon announced to the departing company, though no one had asked.

“I’ll be fine, O’Hanlon,” Gideon protested.

But he couldn’t shake the other man.

“’Tis a fine house,” O’Hanlon said, when they reached Gideon’s front gate. “More of your rich sister-in-law’s doing, I suppose?”

Gideon sighed. “Something like that,” he said. O’Hanlon had already known, of course, exactly where Gideon lived. Suspicious as he was, he’d have made a point of finding out. “What are you afraid of, Mike? That I’ll slip over to my brother’s place, knock on the door, and tell Rowdy what was said tonight, over at Paddy’s?”

“Can’t stop you from doing that,” Mike said. “Tomor
row’s Saturday—a half day. I reckon the news will keep until after the whistle blows.”

Gideon waited.

O’Hanlon turned to face him, straightened Gideon’s collar in a way that was at once fatherly and threatening. It took all Gideon’s forbearance not to fling the other man’s hands away. “These are hard and perilous times,” Mike said. “Have a care, young Yarbro. Have a care.”

With that, and a sorrowful expression, the Irishman turned and walked away, whistling softly under his breath as he vanished into the shadows.

I
T MUST HAVE BEEN AFTER
midnight, by Lydia’s best guess, when she heard Gideon’s footsteps on the rear staircase, then moving slowly along the hallway. She waited, not even breathing, when he paused outside her door. Braced herself for the moment when he would certainly move on to the next room.

But the green-glass doorknob turned, rattling a little, and through her eyelashes, Lydia saw the outline of Gideon’s impressive frame, rimmed in the merest hint of light, the source of which she could not determine, since there were no lamps burning in the corridor.

“Are you asleep?” he asked, very quietly, and his words were clearly enunciated, not liquor-slurred as she might have expected. He’d been quite abrupt, telling her he’d be out late, and she’d naturally wondered if the “meeting” he’d planned to attend was being held in a saloon.

To offer any reply at all, Lydia sensed, would upset some precarious and inexplicable balance between them, so she didn’t answer.

Gideon sighed audibly—and came into the room.

Lydia’s heart shimmied up into her throat and flailed there. She wondered if Gideon had guessed she was awake, perhaps by the too-rapid meter of her breathing or some other sign she’d unwittingly given, but she still did not speak, or move.

He closed the door behind him, with a soft click, and crossed to the rocking chair. Sat down to begin pulling off his boots.

With a smile in his voice, and some gravity she had never heard before and found mildly alarming, he drawled, “I know you’re not sleeping, Lydia.”

Not willing to admit the game was up, Lydia raised herself sleepily onto her elbows. “What time is it?” she asked, with a feigned yawn.

“Late,” Gideon said. The second boot made a thumping sound as he tossed it aside.

“Are you drunk?”

He laughed, low and somewhat raggedly. “I wish I were,” he said, rising out of the chair, leaving it rocking a little in his wake.

“Why?” Lydia asked reasonably.

He didn’t answer, but crossed the room and leaned down, pressing his hands into the mattress on either side of her, to plant a smacking kiss on her forehead.

Her heart was still fluttering, still struggling in her throat, and she had to force her words around it, causing them to sound as if they’d been scraped from her vocal chords. “Is something wrong?”

Gideon sighed again, thrust himself upright again, pulled his shirttails from under the waistband of his trousers.
“Everything
is wrong,” he said wearily. But he continued shedding his clothes, and when he was completely and magnificently naked and turned back the covers to join her in bed, Lydia instinctively moved over to make room for him.

He’d washed up, perhaps downstairs in the kitchen, because he smelled of soap and well water, instead of sweat, like he should have after a day’s work at the mine. In fact, his hair and skin were still a little moist.

“Tell me,” she said, very softly.

“I can’t,” he answered, but he took her into his arms, snuggled her close against the hard warmth of his torso, and gave a deep, almost despairing, sigh.

She could not help noticing the length and heat of his manhood pressed against her lower midsection, and the sensation forced a little whimper from some hidden, reluctant place within her. After a moment’s hesitation, she grew bold enough to slide her hand down over the stonelike, ridged flesh of his belly and take hold of him.

He groaned, but did not push her away.

By instinct, some fundamental knowledge bearing no relation to experience, Lydia stroked him, pulling her hand gently along his length.

“Woman,” he ground out, writhing slightly and uttering another groan, “if you have a shred of mercy in you—”

“Nary a shred,” Lydia said lightly; it was heady, she discovered, to be the one in control for once. The one setting the pace, making the rules, deciding what was enough. Who would have guessed it could be so easy to bring a strong, stubborn man so swiftly to heel? “You’ve shown me no quarter, Gideon Yarbro, and I’ll show you none, either.”

As she had in the kitchen that morning, she felt the struggle within him, knew he wanted to turn away, put a stop to what she was doing to him, but he couldn’t. His need was too great. His breath came in gasps, and his powerful hips rose and fell, causing the bedsprings to creak rhythmically, as she tightened her grip a little, and raised and lowered her hand more swiftly.

He rasped out some half-strangled oath.

“Shall I do to you what you did to me?” Lydia asked, dizzy with the power of
administering
pleasure, instead of yielding to it.

Her words wrung a muffled shout from Gideon, and then, in the space of a heartbeat, everything shifted. In one breathtakingly quick motion, he was on top of her.

The dimmest glow from the streetlamp nearest the house strayed through the windowpanes, caught in his hair and revealed the complex perfection of his features. “Unless you tell me to stop,
right now,
Lydia,” he warned, “I’m going to be inside you in about three seconds.”

She did not tell him to stop. Drawing on that strange well of wanton audacity that seemed to open and close inside her of its own accord, she reached down and took hold of him again. His flesh pulsed, slick, against her palm and the backs of her fingers.

His mouth fell to hers, exploring at first, then hungry, and then plundering. With one motion of one hand, he dragged her nightgown up to her waist. All the while, Lydia worked him into a greater frenzy, and returned his kiss with all the force of her most primitive, most unspeakable needs.

Their tongues tangled, did battle.

When Gideon tore his mouth from hers, he tried one last time to circumvent the inevitable. “This—is going—to hurt—”

“Shh,” Lydia said, still stroking him.

He gave a long, desolate moan then and literally tore her nightgown away, baring her to him. He slid down to her breasts, and thus out of Lydia’s grasp, then suckled and tongued her nipples until she was as lost as he was.

She finally closed her hands around the sides of his head, burying her fingers deep in his hair, and, with a strength she hadn’t known she possessed, drew him up again, and kissed him.

He used one knee to part her legs, and her eyes widened when she felt him at the moist portal of her femininity.

Resting on his forearms, he looked down at her, and even though his face was mostly in shadow, she saw a terrible quandary in his eyes and the set of his jaw.

“Quickly, Gideon,” Lydia whispered. “Do it quickly.”

The muscles in the sides of his neck corded visibly, so great was his effort at restraint. But then he drove into her, in one swift thrust that took him to her depths.

The pain was blinding—Lydia could not help crying out—but beneath it flowed an elemental passion, wild as a river at flood tide, a mysterious force born of nature itself, and utterly undeniable.

Gideon waited, far inside her.

And she began to move beneath him, carried, driven, by that unseen river, helpless as a leaf swirling on the surface.

Gideon, too, was lost. He nearly withdrew, drove deep again, and there was more pain, but Lydia’s need was stronger, ferocious and demanding, causing her to abandon all but the violent, frantic straining of her body to take more of Gideon inside her and then still more.

He covered her mouth with his again, muffling both their cries, and when at last release consumed Lydia, in a great, cataclysmic shift of Creation itself, Gideon, too, was consumed.

Amid all that, the straining and the gasping and the crying out, Lydia felt his warmth spilling into her, rippling with life, and she gloried in receiving him, cradling him and—please, God—his child, in the sacred shelter of her womanhood.

They were a long time recovering, lying there, entangled in each other’s arms and legs, Gideon’s face buried in the curve of Lydia’s neck. She soothed him, murmuring and stroking his muscular back, as tremor after tremor moved through him. Finally, again by instinct, she raised herself a
little on the pillows, and gave him her breast, smoothing his hair with her hand as he suckled, tentatively at first, and then with a hunger that soon had them both groaning again. Needing again.

Lydia guided him to her that second time, arched her hips to take him in, and now they mated slowly, gently, and with a grace so beautiful that tears of absolute wonderment came to her eyes. But the end was no less strenuous, no less fevered, than the one that had gone before.

The pain, though milder, continued, but it was no more than a distraction to Lydia—she was wholly absorbed in receiving Gideon, and in giving herself to him, holding nothing back. By turns, she surrendered, and she conquered.

When exhaustion finally overtook them, Gideon succumbed first, literally awake one moment and asleep the next, and in the last moments before she tumbled into her dreams, Lydia wept. She wept in silence, but not restraint, without asking herself why, without trying to untangle the nearly overwhelming and utterly contradictory emotions knotted inside her.

And, finally, she slept.

G
IDEON AWAKENED JUST BEFORE
sunrise, and remembered.

Drawing back the covers gently to look at Lydia, sleeping placidly with a slight, faintly angelic smile curving her lips, he saw faint smudges of blood on her thighs, and more staining the sheets, and even though reason reminded him that this was normal, an instant of pure horror seized him.

What in the name of Christ had he
done?

He’d bedded a lot of women in his time, but never—
never
—a virgin. And this wasn’t just any virgin—this was Lydia.

In those moments, Gideon was profoundly glad she was
asleep—because tears came to his eyes, tears of shame, tears of awe and wonder. She’d given, and then given more, in the night, and it must have been agony for her; there was the blood, the damning evidence. Had she been
pretending
, clawing at his back, hurling her body upward to collide with his, bucking beneath him like a wild mare, when blessed release finally came?

Gideon saw her stir, dragged a forearm across his eyes just before she opened hers. When she smiled and slipped her arms loosely around his neck, he was completely confounded, and so overcome with wretched joy that he could not have spoken, even if he’d known what to say.

Sleepily, she kissed the cleft in his chin.

He swallowed hard—so hard that she noticed, and tilted her head back to look directly into his face.

“Gideon? What’s the matter?”

He shook his head, tore his gaze loose from hers. Thrust himself away, shifted to the other side of the bed, rose to his feet, sat down again.

He felt Lydia move, knew she was sitting up.

Her hand rested lightly on the middle of his back. “It’s the blood, isn’t it?” she asked, very gently.

“I’m sorry,” he managed hoarsely. “Dear God, Lydia,
I’m sorry.
”

There was another shift of the mattress, and then she was kneeling behind him, wrapping her arms around him, drawing her lips across the top of his right shoulder, the kiss leaving a trail of sparks behind as it passed over his bare skin.

“Don’t be sorry, Gideon,” she said softly, but with something nigh on desolation in her voice. “Please don’t be sorry.”

He let her know, with a motion of his body, that he was
about to stand, waited until he was sure she wouldn’t lose her balance when he did.

Then he got to his feet and, with effort, forced himself to turn around and meet her eyes. “
Shouldn’t
I be sorry, Lydia?” he asked miserably. He thought of Mike O’Hanlon, and the talk of taking over the mine by force, and holding it with guns. He thought of Rowdy and Wyatt and Owen and Sam O’Ballivan, imagined them under a hail of bullets. He thought of his ride to Flagstaff in the morning, the report he would make to some go-between who didn’t give a damn what the miners’ wives and children went without, or who got shot, as long as the copper ore kept flowing. “I can’t stay,” he told her, rounding the bed, picking up his scattered clothes, wrenching them on. “And what happened between us last night is only going to make leaving that much harder.”

At the edge of his vision, he saw that Lydia sat in the middle of the bed now, the covers drawn tightly around her. A single tear slipped down her left cheek.

“Go, then,” she whispered. “Just
go,
and be done with it.”

Furious with himself, not with her, Gideon grabbed up his boots and stormed out of that room, into the corridor. There, he leaned against the wall next to the door for a few moments, fighting to regain his composure.

When he had, he hauled his boots on, ran his fingers through his hair, and with that to suffice for grooming, took the front staircase, in case Helga was in the kitchen, and left the house.

The cool, early-morning air braced him, cleared his head a little.

Still, memories assailed him. He’d taken Lydia in a fury of need the night before, like a whore, not a virgin. God Almighty, the headboard had slammed against the wall fit
to crack the plaster, and the racket the bedsprings made would have awakened the dead, let alone a nosy housekeeper sleeping in the tiny nook under the main staircase. And he didn’t even want to
consider
what must have gone through the
aunts’
minds.