The Gallows' Bounty (West of Second Chances) (20 page)

T
HE NEXT FEW WEEKS
passed swiftly and the new hire, Henry James, had yet to cause any problems, allowing Willow to enjoy life on Boden’s ranch.  He worked alongside her, and instead of feeling like the weaker party, she felt like a partner.  He asked her thoughts on things and actually listened if she shared them.

She needed to explain to Boden about killing Roberts, but she had as yet been unable to get the words out.  That night had been dreadful. Roberts had forced himself on her, and she’d been physically unable to refuse him. The memories from four months ago threatened to steal the hope and peace she’d managed to scavenge for herself.

Suddenly, the pain became too much for her to take.  Thankful she was alone in the hayloft, she allowed herself to sink down on the fresh hay and cry.  She hadn’t cried for a long while.   Boden’s care had weakened her walls, torn down her defenses.

He treated her with such kindness, never asking anything of her in their bed.  During the day, he touched her, but in comfort or in passing, except for that kiss the day of the gunfight.  That kiss had left her shivering and wanting more.

And that terrified her.

She hardly knew what to do with the feelings she held for him.  In her experience, desire was synonymous with lust, yet with Boden she felt that it could be different; that desire could be associated with love.

Could she love a man like him the way he deserved?  Other men had tainted so much of her life.  She’d once been a young, innocent girl who’d dreamed of marrying a cowboy with a mischievous, gleaming white smile.

She feared she would erase Boden’s smile when he learned the remaining details of the life she’d led, of the secrets she guarded.   A man like him deserved so much better than a wife like her. She’d tell him everything and let him decide if he wanted her.

“Willow, are you all right?”

Boden’s voice called up to her from below, interrupting her thoughts.

“Yes. Yes, I’m fine.  I was just coming down.” She made to stand up, but his head peaked above the bales of hay.

“That’s all right, I’m already up here,” he said before crawling over to her and flopping down next to her.

“Come here.”

He gestured to her, his arm outstretched, and Willow scooted close and placed her head where he’d indicated.  He pulled her close and placed a kiss on her forehead.  His casual touch no longer caused her to stiffen.  She longed for it.

“Tell me what’s wrong,” Ezra encouraged her.  “It’s not something I did, is it?”

She shook her head, sniffling.

“Did one of the men do something?” He turned to look at her face, seeking the answer there.

“No,”
Willow answered.

“What’s the matter then?”

“I don’t think I can tell you,” she admitted.

“Why not?  Can’t you trust me?”  Ezra spoke frankly without animosity in his voice.

She did trust him and told him as much.  And realized just how true it had become.

“Then tell me what’s botherin’ you.  Talkin’ about it will help make you feel better.”

Willow doubted that, but it seemed the time had come to tell him at least one of her secrets.  “I have to tell you about Roberts, about what happened.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything,” Boden assured.

She almost gave in to the temptation to remain silent, but couldn’t. “I have to tell you.  I want someone to know the truth.”

“If you need to talk about it, I’ll listen,” he assented, evidently catching on to her desire to come clean.

She began without preamble.  “I thought Roberts planned to kill me for sure that night.  He came into the house so confident that what he wanted was what he would get.  And he wanted me to sleep with French.”

Willow
took a moment to collect herself when tears threatened and emotion clogged her throat.  Boden pulled her closer, one hand stroking her upper arm.  The close contact wasn’t helping Willow get her emotions under control.  His kindness made it all that much harder to confess.

She stood to her feet and took a few steps away from her husband.  “I was payment, nothing more, and I couldn’t do what he demanded of me anymore.  I gave up caring if he killed me.  He decided to prove his point; that I had to do what he wanted because I couldn’t stop him.”

Boden stood then, but he didn’t move close to her. He lifted a shaking hand and swiped it through his hair before jamming both hands in his pockets.  He looked ready to do battle.  The air in the loft tightened, intensified.

Willow
looked away from him and continued. “He pinned me to the floor and there was nothing I could do.  When he’d finished, he stood over me and said he was going to get the sheriff for his turn.  I snapped.  I stood and lashed out at him.  He drew his gun on me, and somehow I got a hand on it.  I surprised him, I think, and in that moment I shot him.”

She stopped.  She couldn’t bring herself to tell him the rest of it.  That Sheriff French had gotten what he wanted anyway when he’d arrested her.  That she probably carried his baby because Roberts had never gotten her pregnant.

Tears clouded her eyes, so she didn’t see Boden come close.  She didn’t even realize he was near until his arms were around her, his chin resting atop her head.

“It was self-defense,
Willow,” Ezra said, his voice sounding tighter than usual to her ears.  “The only thing that angers me is that I can’t kill the bastard again.”

She turned in his arms and looked Boden straight in the eye.  “I killed a man.”

“Willow, it was self-defense,” he reassured.

“Even though I’d wished him dead a thousand times?”

It was Boden’s turn to step away so that his emotions wouldn’t, couldn’t control him.  “You wouldn’t have been human if you hadn’t.  The bastard helped kill your family, took you against your will, sold you to other men.  He deserved to die a death worse than the one he got.”

Unexpectedly, Boden turned his back on her and stalked in the direction of the ladder leading down to the ground level.  He may claim she didn’t sicken him, but wasn’t it obvious he lied? She should have stayed quiet, kept her disgrace to herself.

She couldn’t look away from his retreating back, so she saw when he yanked a nearby pitchfork out of a bale of hay.  He lifted it high and threw it overhand, his arm stretching out and his body turning to the side with the effort.  The pitchfork sailed forward like an arrow from a bow.  It lodged twenty feet later into the wall of the barn and stuck.

He turned back to
Willow, his brown eyes shooting sparks.  She stumbled a few steps backward.

Schooling his expression, Boden clarified, “I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m angry, but I’m not angry at you.” He walked her way.  “I suppose for a minute there the barn wall was a good substitute for Brett Roberts.”  He finished with a sheepish grin, evidently embarrassed by his show of emotion.

Willow looked from Boden to where the pitchfork quivered in the barn wall.  “I also have a good imagination,” Willow commiserated, cocking her head to the side, envisioning Brett Roberts somewhere between the pitchfork and the wall.

Boden took
Willow into his arms. He drew her down onto the hay with him and onto his lap. The smell of the freshly baled hay soothed her senses.  She’d always liked the fresh, earthy scent.  Quiet ensued as both of them contemplated their own thoughts.

Boden broke the silence.  “Willow, one question.”

Willow’s chest tightened.  What would he ask her?

“Did French take what he wanted once he’d arrested you?”

She couldn’t look him in the eye and answer him, so she nodded against his chest.

“I definitely have some unfinished business,” Boden stated ominously.

Willow stayed quiet though she understood what he meant.  What could she do, beg him not to kill French?  She supposed she could, but she wouldn’t.  The man deserved whatever punishment Boden dealt him.

Boden spoke again.  “I don’t understand why French orchestrated that contest if he was so dead set on seeing you punished.”

“Hate.  Lust.  French knew how much I despised what Roberts had made me.  He rightly guessed I’d rather die than face life in a man’s cruel hands.”  Willow looked up and watched her husband’s face burn with anger.  It made it harder to continue her explanation, but she did.  “He expected me to fall into the hands of another man just like Roberts or worse.”

“There aren’t many men worse than Roberts,” Boden stated derisively.

“French evidently thought you would be,” Willow stated.

Willow
felt Boden’s chest move in ironic laughter.  “Wouldn’t he be surprised to know Butcher Boden hasn’t harmed a hair on your pretty little head?”

“I guess the joke is on him,”
Willow replied, enjoying the irony.

“And it will continue to be,” Boden claimed, his eyes sealing the promise.

They were quiet again, and Willow enjoyed the comfort of resting in Boden’s arms. However, she wondered at how long it had been since Boden had done nothing more than hold her. He hadn’t kissed her since they’d faced the gunmen. She wondered if her sordid past disgusted him. Was that why nothing had gone further than a toe-tingling kiss?

Willow broke the silence.  “Do I repulse you?”

“What do you mean?”  Boden said, pushing her back just enough to look her in the eye.

“Are you simply being a gentleman, giving me space, time, or are you repulsed by me?  It’s been a long time since you’ve kissed me.”

He began to explain that he found her desirable in the extreme, but she was already out of his lap and walking away from him before he could.  He rose to his feet as well, and in one long stride he wrapped his arm around her waist and turned her to face him.  He looked down at her and said, “You don’t repulse me.”

She tried to draw away from him, “You haven’t kissed me since I saved your hide.”

Boden smiled tenderly.  “I’ve been biding my time.  You’ve been hurting, and the last thing I want to do is add to that hurt.”

“I see,” she said, lowering her head.

“I don’t think you do” were the last words he spoke before his lips fell to hers.

Evidently, if he couldn’t prove it with words, he could prove it with actions.  She rather liked his new tactic.  She wrapped her arms around his neck and returned the kiss.  It felt nice to taste his lips again.  In his kiss, she felt his protectiveness and caring.

The kiss melted Willow’s defenses, and she experienced none of the feelings she’d felt in any other man’s arms. Ezra Boden took the time to kiss her properly. She’d never been kissed by anyone else so well or so caringly or for that matter, really at all. She drank the kiss in, and with it the comfort, the caring. She ached with the tenderness of his touch and knew she hungered for this man. She had never hungered for a man before.

A while later, Ezra drew himself away from her, slightly out of breath. “You, repulsive?  Not hardly.”

She thought he was finished, his point having been made, but he surprised her by kissing her again.  Where his other kiss had been tender, this kiss was full of desire and heat.  When she thought her knees would buckle from the intensity, he lowered both of them down into the hay.  Willow tensed a bit.  She wasn’t ready for more than a kiss.

He didn’t take it beyond a kiss.  He merely lay pressed against her side, his lips lowered to hers.  The embrace allowed for more intimacy, but more importantly it allowed
Willow an escape route. She harbored no doubt that if she chose to roll away from him that he would let her.  It was a powerful feeling to know that even though a man desired her, he still cared more for her than satisfying his own desires.

And he desired her.  The evidence flashed there in the urgency of his kiss, in the way his hands kept wandering before he pulled them back to safer territory, in the way his lower body pressed against her hipbone.

Willow lifted a hand to the back of his neck and caressed him there. Her own daring surprised her, and she pulled her hand back down to her side, only to have him put it back where she’d dared to touch him.  The intensity of the moment increased until Willow feared she’d allow him the liberties he wasn’t taking, and she wasn’t ready to give.

She pulled back a bit, and he finished the kiss with a feather-light touch of his lips to hers.  He drew his hand down the side of her face in a gentle caress.  “Does that answer your question?”

She nodded.  “It’s just that I’ve never met a man with your–“ she searched for the right word–“control.”

“Willow, I meant what I said about waiting until you’re ready. When the time comes, it will be up to you to let me know.”

“I’m not sure I want that responsibility,” she murmured.  Could she ever willingly take that step with a man?

“You will when you’re ready,” Ezra said as he tucked a stray tendril behind her ear and plucked a few pieces of hay from her hair.

He stood and offered a hand.  “Well, let’s get those chores done, so we can get to supper.”