16. Cara
16
CARA
T he second we stepped outside, my heart lifted. The simple act of letting fresh air touch my cheeks and feeling the warmth of the sun did so much to restore my soul.
It was dreary. Clouds hid the sunshine. Dampness hung in the air, courtesy of the storms and rain. But I was out. He’d let me come explore, and it felt so damn good, I lost sight of my guardedness for a moment.
It felt so invigorating to move and walk over the grass that I let go of my suspicion.
He didn’t speak after I told him where I wanted to go. Being out of the castle was an improvement, but I didn’t want to be confined to the formal gardens up here.
I missed the smells of hay and fur. Of oats and even manure. My eyes needed to find pitchforks and saddles, stalls and reins. Everything that I used to surround myself with at the farm back home. I doubted Declan and his staff kept sheep up here. The landscape wasn’t ideal this far north, but that big building back there had to be a structure intended to store animals. Any form of animal husbandry would do. It was part of who I was, what I did. Out there, I would feel like a semblance of my former self.
My single, unmarried self.
We walked side by side in the open, and I marveled in the vast reach of the Sullivan lands. Our shoes squished in the wet grass, and I wished I could’ve been wearing sandals instead, to better feel the cool dampness of the rain soaking the lawn.
Over a manicured, trimmed field that extended from the formal gardens that hugged the castle, we took a maintained path leading to the barns. Not one, but a few.
Amazing. An entire outfit waited out here. A full operational business, and I couldn’t help but envy it all. No busted walls or chipping paint on the outbuildings. All the windows were intact, the trims matching. Even this lane we walked on, it was smooth and free of mud and ruts.
Declan’s family could afford anything, inside the castle and out. I’d never come close to having that sort of financial freedom and success at Mom’s sheep farm. Seeing the evidence of the Sullivans’ wealth and success burned a fire within me.
I want this. I want this for Mom. One day, I’d make it happen, where Oscar wouldn’t harp on me to hire help and afford all the bucket-list items that would make our workdays better and more productive.
Even though this barn and the route to it showed signs of established and older stables and barns than what I’d left at home, it reminded me of it with such a deep, piercing slice of pain that my heart could barely take it.
Over two weeks now, I’d been away. Swept from my life and thrust into a very different existence. Hearing the distant sounds of horses soothed me, serving as a pointed connection between my past and present.
All those long days and nights, I’d suffered alone and without any direction in my life.
And now I was rewarded with this visit to the stables.
I narrowed my eyes. “Why are you pretending to be so nice to me?”
Declan didn’t answer, seeming to prefer the quiet of this walk. After a long moment, he shook his head. “I don’t pretend.”
“But you are. If you’re not, then you want something.”
Before we could enter the stables, he guided me to the exterior wall and caged me in. One muscled arm lifted as he braced his hand on the surface, and with the other, he gripped my waist and squeezed.
Once again, he trapped me to the wall. I saw now how it was a demonstration of his dominance. He liked making me feel small, like he could position and keep me wherever he wanted.
And, once again, it turned me on so quickly that I fought the urge to cling to him, to pull him closer until his mouth could tease my skin.
“You know what I want,” he growled. His sinister, smoldering gaze lowered over me in a slow, lusty drag. “And you will give me what I need.”
A baby? I licked my lips, uneasy. Actually… I won’t. I can’t.
“You kept me inside like a prisoner all this time. Now you’re pulling a one-eighty on me, letting me outside and showing me the stables. Why?”
He narrowed his eyes, staring at my lips. “Are you trying to suggest that you’d rather stay inside?”
“No.” I frowned. “You made it clear that what I want doesn’t matter.”
“Perhaps I’m trying to understand who you are.”
I huffed, rolling my eyes and glancing away. “Why bother?”
So you can know how to manipulate me even better?
“Are you always this prickly?” he taunted.
“Only for you,” I retorted, lifting my chin. “I don’t trust you.”
He gripped my face, keeping my chin between his thumb and forefinger. “That’s the first smart thing I’ve heard out of your fucking mouth.” He moved his thumb higher, cupping my jaw as he dragged his rough thumbpad over my lower lip, tugging it down slightly in a light massage.
I couldn’t look away. He’d snared me again, body and mind. I ached already, my blood rushing through me with a trace of desire infused in it. My thoughts scattered. Lusting for my husband, I tried to refrain from letting him see how badly I wanted him to push me. To claim me.
To kiss me.
“Are you saying I shouldn’t trust you?”
He smirked. It was such a devilish almost-grin that made him even sexier, more untouchable somehow. “Not when you look at me like that.”
“I’m not looking at you like anything,” I argued, hearing how lame and stupid I sounded. It was the weakest lie I’d ever tried to stand behind, and he lost his hold on his lips. Smiling freely, I knew he’d won this round.
“No?” He stepped back, depriving me of the proximity of his body heat. “Then what are we waiting around out here for?” As though he were a gallant gentleman, he gestured for me to come with him into the stables.
He was right, though. I had no business even considering trusting him. Not with the rabid desire he caused me to feel. Not when my body could betray me with this urgent lust for him.
Because he’s just playing games, you idiot.
It stung when he rejected me. I’d stood there, taking off my damn clothes, and he’d passed on my offer. It wasn’t an offer. I was living in that house for him to fuck me, and I’d beaten him to the punch, taking the initiative to remove my clothes. I’d offered, and he didn’t want to take me.
As I walked with him through the well-maintained and kept-up stables, I revisited the pang of hurt and bitterness. The moment he told me no, I realized how badly I wanted him to take me and fuck me hard, like he had before. While I was dismayed over my thoughts of desiring him, I faced the reality that something was seriously wrong with me.
To lust for my controlling husband. To ache for the roughest man’s touch.
I’d lost my mind, convinced that I wanted this monster I married.
If it wasn’t sorcery, it sure as hell felt like stupidity. And if I could remember that, I would do well to forget about this physical need to scratch an itch with him.
“Does your mother have horses at your home?” he asked.
We’d fallen into that strange companionship of walking and not talking. By now, we’d covered every avenue and length of stalls, but I liked it better when he wasn’t speaking. Broody, maybe, but it gave me a chance to really look around and let all the details sink in.
“What?” I asked, flinching at the surprise in my tone.
“Does your mother have horses at home?” he repeated.
Why would he ask that? “Yes.”
“And she is still single?” he asked.
I furrowed my brow, looking up at him. “Yes. Why? What’s with all these twenty questions?”
He and his brother already asked me about my mother and my grandparents. This felt like a second fishing expedition for answers, but I wouldn’t provide any. It felt too weird. My guard was up. It seemed like he was trying to figure something out, but I doubted he’d ever come out and ask me directly.
But I didn’t offer up anything. I was too scared, too wisely defensive about his interest in my mother. I wanted to shudder at the thought of telling my husband about her illness and her need for that kidney surgery.
He couldn’t actually care. Since he’d transported me here, he gave me no signs and he made no moves to make me feel like family mattered. Sure, his brother seemed to always be with him, but I hadn’t known another family member lived here until the other day.
Declan didn’t value family, not if he didn’t want to introduce me to the little family he had. His idea of family values seemed more like addressing obligation and fulfilling duties, like filling me with his cum until I was pregnant.
If Declan actually cared about my mother’s situation, should I tell him, and if he had a single iota of decency, he wouldn’t keep me locked up in his castle.
“I told you. I want to get to know more about the future mother of my children.”
I glanced up at him. “Like you were last week at dinner?”
He sighed, looking serious again. “Partly. But I’d also like to figure you out too.”
“Yeah, right. Good luck with that.”
He hummed. “Because you’ll only let me see what you want me to see?”
Maybe.
“My mother never married. She never even dated anyone after I was born.”
Nodding, he slowed his walk to match mine as I glanced again at a horse in a stall down this way. It was agitated, and I instantly wondered why.
“What does she do?” he asked.
Lie in bed and rely on medications to make her feel slightly human again.
“She…”
I lost my train of thought, wondering how little I could tell him and not invite any trouble to come back to my vulnerable parent. The less Declan knew, the safer she would be.
Right now, though, all I could focus on was how the burly stable hand whipped the horse in that stall.
I ran. My feet carried me faster without any conscious plan to intervene. It was imminent. If I witnessed animal cruelty, I would react.
“Stop it.”
“Ah, fuck you, lassie,” the drunk man slurred, sneering at me as he lifted his arm to bring the whip down again.
Without my boots on, I was at risk of being stomped on. Those huge hooves could slam down on my feet. The agitated horse could trample me. Kick me. Any number of injuries, but I didn’t consider any of that.
After I threw open the latch to the stall door, I ran inside the space and lifted my arm. Holding it up in a deflecting stance, I put myself between the horse, a mare that likely had just given birth with the size of her teats.
“Stop it!” I ordered, talking back again to the drunk who thought it was acceptable to use a whip to the point of streaking a bloody line on that magnificent equine’s back.
“No!” Declan roared it, rushing in after me as the stable hand released the crack of the whip he intended to strike the horse with.