Chapter 21 #2
“Come in,” she told him. “Come tell me just how well you know Laird Douglas. And if you know,” she whispered, “for the love of God, please tell me where he’s had Danny taken.”
Sabrina felt as if she were on fire.
Life was not fair in any way, shape, or form.
She had just come from a tomb, for God’s sake. She deserved some reprieve. She needed peace and quiet, healing time. She needed to elude Sloan, but now, Shawna and David—having tossed Sabrina’s world into chaos— had gone to fight their own battle, and Skylar and Hawk had deserted her as well.
The others had just left. Sabrina stared at the closed door, painfully aware that Sloan was behind her.
“How can you be here?” she whispered, leaning her forehead against the closed door.
He didn’t reply to the question. “Sabrina, get back into bed before you fall down, will you. Please?” he added.
She didn’t move. She should have. She felt his hands upon her shoulders. His grip seemed as hard as steel. There was no way to escape it.
Just as there had been no way to escape Sloan at the inn when she had inadvertently discovered his room while trying to hide from her stepfather, just as there had been no way out of playing the role that was to doom her to him tonight.
It was all laughable, really. Upon just which occasion—out of two—had they managed to bring about her condition—the first time when she’d been so afraid, realizing far too late that she should have just told him the truth?
Or the second time, the following morning, when she had awakened, seduced? In no pain whatsoever, other than that of all but dying of humiliation.
“I’m all right.”
“Indeed?” he queried, his voice husky at her earlobe. “It appears that you are trying to claw your way out of this room. The door opens freely enough, but there is really nowhere for you to go.”
He suddenly swept her up into his arms.
“I can walk!” she cried in alarm, meeting his fathomless, dark mahogany gaze.
“You could fall.”
“I won’t.”
“You could hurt yourself.”
“But I won’t.”
“You could hurt our child.”
“But—” Staring into his relentless gaze, she fell silent. They had already come back to the bed, and he set her down upon it, her back against the pillows plumped up at the headboard.
“Are you so terribly dismayed?” he asked her, sitting by her side.
His hand lay upon the whiteness of the sheet, seeming very darkly bronzed.
She felt a flush of fever within her. His fingers were very long.
His hands were rough and calloused from the days he spent on horseback riding across the plains.
But she knew their touch could be oddly gentle and rough…
“Dismayed?” she repeated in an incredulous whisper.
Was she so dismayed? In the endless hours in the tomb, she had prayed to live. Because of the child.
“Sabrina, we have to discuss this situation.”
“Discuss the situation? Ah!” There was a bottle of brandy on her bedside table. “Major Trelawny, shall I pour you a drink? I think that I would like one myself—”
He caught her hand when she would have reached for the brandy bottle.
“Sabrina, you’ve just been rescued from vicious kidnappers who left you in a tomb and intended to kill you,” he said.
“All the more reason I should have a drink!” she whispered.
She tried to free her hand from his to reach for the brandy bottle.
“Sabrina.”
She bit into her lower lip, staring down at the white sheets. She slowly brought her eyes to his, feeling a rush of color flood her face. She looked to the door longingly again.
“Sabrina, you can’t run away. I would think you’d realize,” he said with a trace of humor, “since I am here, in a Scottish castle, that there is nowhere you can go where I cannot follow.”
She stared into his eyes. “I really would like a drink.”
“For courage?”
“I’ve plenty of courage.”
“Reckless courage. No drink. Sabrina, you’ve taken Edwina’s potion of herbs and such. You don’t need brandy now.”
She did—desperately. But she knew she wouldn’t be able to get her hands on the brandy bottle.
“Right. I need—sleep?” she said hopefully.
He smiled. She wondered how he could become so arresting with that smile when at times, he looked so very…
Savage.
“Sloan, I—” She broke off. So much for courage. She pulled her hand from his and leaped from the bed. A mistake. She had moved too quickly. She only made it as far as the foot of the bed before she began to feel terribly dizzy.
“Oh god!” she breathed.
But he was there.
And she was not able to withhold a gasp when, once more, he swept her up into his arms. “No!” she whispered fervently, but he wasn’t going to let her fall.
He held her, and, as he stared down into her eyes, she could feel the warmth of his breath, the strength of his arms, and the inner fire of his determination.
“Why are you trying to run away from me?” he demanded.
“Why are you here?” she cried desperately in return.
“Well, I didn’t know that I’d arrive to discover that you’d been kidnapped, so I can hardly say that I rushed across a raging sea to rescue you,” he murmured.
“I’m here because Hawk has been my friend all my life, and because James McGregor told me the extent of David’s problems here. And I’m here because—” He broke off.
“Why?” she whispered.
“It doesn’t matter right now. The child matters.”
Her lashes fell again. “Look, Sloan, what happened was an accident. Sloan, please…”
“Put you down? You need only ask.”
She found herself seated against the pillows on the bed once again.
“Go away?” she suggested softly.
“Not on your life.”
“You said that I only need ask—”
“That was the wrong question.”
“Sloan! You don’t have to—”
“I don’t have to what?” He reached out, lifting her chin to study her eyes.
She shook her head. “You don’t have to be responsible.”
“How do you ask someone not to be responsible for a life?” he demanded.
“Sloan, I don’t need your help—”
“I’m not offering my help.”
“No? I do need a drink!” Sabrina insisted.
“No,” he said firmly.
“I’ll not be told what to do—”
“You need to be told what to do. You think you’re a cat with nine lives, but you’ve used up several that I know about already.”
“Damn you, Sloan, will you please leave?”
“No.”
“Then truly, I need a drink. Just a small brandy. Some doctors suggest that a small amount is actually good for women—women in the family way.”
She reached for the snifter. He took it smoothly from her fingers.
His eyes moved over her in a way that made her entire body seem to burn again.
“Not that I didn’t enjoy you when you had imbibed whiskey so heavily, but this doesn’t seem the time…
Alas, my dear, you need to learn to be careful with liquor.
Too often your goal is to drown yourself in it. ”
“How can you be so wretched!”
Sloan’s dark eyes grew very serious. “Drinking isn’t good for expecting women. I’ve heard it from many wisewomen.”
“What women? Sioux women?”
He arched a brow. “Yes,” he said simply.
She looked down quickly at her hands. They were still trembling. This was all so absurd. She and Sloan had met under such awful, hostile circumstances.
And maybe she was just a little bit afraid.
Afraid of the night she had been with him, afraid of his strength, afraid of the way he’d made her feel.
And truthfully, mostly, she was afraid because he might be US Cavalry, but he was also Sioux, and he was very dangerous, and what he wanted, he would take. What was right, he would demand.
She closed her eyes, casting a hand against her forehead. “I really can’t talk about this right now…”
His laughter infuriated her. She sat up, staring at him. “I shall throw something at you in a minute!” she cried, aggravated.
“You really do a wonderful Southern belle, but I can’t begin to imagine you with the vapors, Sabrina.”
“What vapors! I was cruelly kept a prisoner in a tomb.”
He sobered. “Indeed, you were. You can’t seem to stay out of trouble.”
“I certainly didn’t ask for this trouble—”
“You did, if I remember your words correctly, go wandering off into a cemetery alone in the dead of night?”
The way he put it, she felt like a fool.
“I heard a child’s voice,” she reminded him with defensive anger.
“How encouraging. You’re going to make a wonderful mother.”
She looked down at her hands again. “Sloan, I want you to realize, you are not obligated in any way,” she told him, still looking at her hands and not meeting his eyes. “I don’t blame you for anything—”
“Blame me?” he queried, a brow arched very high. “Since you didn’t speak a word of truth the night we met, you most assuredly should not.”
Sabrina gritted her teeth, fighting the rise of her temper.
“You’re not obligated to me!”
“But you are obligated to me,” he told her very softly. “I know that you need sleep, and I intend for you to have it, after you’ve listened to what I have to say. You won’t be having my child without me, despite the fact that your journey here implies that you meant to disappear.”
“That’s not true—” she gasped. Was that what he believed?
“Nor, Sabrina, will I allow you to endanger your own life in any attempts to rid yourself of an infant with Sioux blood.”
She gasped, staring at him at last with incredulous anger. “I—I never suggested such a thing, you—bastard!” she breathed.
“In the white man’s eyes, that is probably exactly what I am, no matter my grandfather’s standing in the States. No matter, Sabrina, you may marry a bastard, but you’ll not have one.”
She broke off. She was shaking, completely unnerved by not just his appearance here, but the fact that…
He knew! Oh god, he knew. And she couldn’t deny what was happening to her, the life taking root inside of her, any longer.