Chapter Fifty-Seven Nina
The men drank into the afternoon, and then the evening, in a nauseating display of masculinity.
There seemed to be a contest to see who could outdrink the other—the men from Kenton Hill, or the ones in Scurry.
By nightfall, most of them were falling off their stools.
More unneeded, restless miners had come to fill the empty spaces, and Harland demanded free beer for them all.
I could have retreated upstairs and spared myself this scene.
This was the same drinking hole my father had sat in.
These faces were the same gnarled second-shift men, stomping and seething and seeking out bluff.
They slurped at their free lager and threw vitriol at the barman when he lagged—a man who himself seemed moments away from knotting his noose.
I stayed and endured it, because there was no sleep to be found on the floor above while Harland lurked below.
I would stir and pace and imagine what words were being exchanged between him and Patrick.
What deals were being made. I couldn’t stand to think of Harland banding his arm over Patrick’s shoulder, of Patrick shaking his hand in camaraderie.
Harland Seymour had fed my father every dose of bluff. He’d pocketed our coin, watching his own sister try to fill the gaps with sewing and laundering. He’d see my mother in church with bruises on her jaw and still take her husband’s money on the next shift.
Patrick seemed strangely balanced for the amount of pints he’d pulled.
John, too. I wondered if they’d found a way to water it down.
Careful observation led me to believe they were tipping half their drinks into the Scurry men’s undefended glasses.
It was quick-handed. Blink and you’d miss it.
Anyone glancing would see a couple of drunks, sloshing liquor over their rims. But their eyes were too steady, while Harland’s turned glassy and reeling.
Patrick and John affected the posture and talk of the inebriated quite convincingly.
The Scurry men wilted, but Patrick and John kept their seats.
They traded covert glances with one another and took stock of these men who would soon delve into the earth with them.
Patrick looked at me most often, though. And he grew more and more agitated with each passing hour. Twice, he’d urged me to go upstairs, and twice I’d denied him. “I’ll leave when you do,” I said.
I’d succumbed to my own drinks. The beer was tasteless.
I had a mouth coated in venom and it dulled the flavor.
With every sip I grew more tempestuous. What right did Harland have, remaining fit and well in Scurry while my mother rotted in an unmarked grave, and my father faded between his four walls?
A witless, overgrown bastard, flouncing through this town as though he were its ruler.
He barked laughter into the air and shoved one of his men off a stool, puce-faced and pulsing with barely suppressed violence.
Lord, but I wanted Patrick to take out his legs.
But Patrick only laughed at his jokes, warned me away with silent glances. Harland crowed and scratched his balls and beat his chest. He spat on the floor and asked the barman for a woman good for cleaning it. He mimed, crudely, what he would do to such a woman if she were to materialize.
I downed the last dregs of my pint and stood from my corner, feeling full and lopsided. Equal parts hate and beer, just like a miner. I let all that blood and loathing in my head tip me forward in Harland’s direction.
I didn’t see Patrick stand as well.
He intercepted my warpath before I could collide with Harland, and I bounced off the wall of his chest. “Uh, uh,” he said, blocking my view.
I blinked stupidly at the buttons of his shirt.
He took the glass from my hand, and until then, I hadn’t been aware I was clutching it like a weapon.
“And just what are you gonna do with that, eh?”
I glared up at him. “I think I could get in a few good hits.”
Patrick’s frown faded into bemusement. “You think?”
“I know.”
“Three beers, and she thinks she can take on a pub full of miners,” Patrick scrubbed his face. “Nina, please. Go to bed.”
“Don’t fuckin’ tell me what to do.” I tried to skirt around him.
“Woman, I’m beggin’ you—”
“Hey!” I shouted to Harland’s back. He was singing uproariously with the rest of his crew. A Scurry limerick about a beggar and a prostitute. He didn’t notice my braying. “Harland! You hawkin’ piece of scum—”
Patrick’s arm closed around my waist like a vise, and I was immediately lifted off my feet. The room blurred, faces passing, my feet kicking. Seconds later, I was in the stairwell. The noise had dulled.
“Always promised I’d throw you over my shoulder, didn’t I?” Patrick said, and without further warning he hefted me just so, my view now upside-down, his arm banded around the backs of my thighs. I kicked to no avail, pushed at his back. “Put me down!”
“So you can scamper off and pick a fight?” he asked.
“Someone ought to,” I spat. “He has it fuckin’ comin’.”
“He does, but didn’t I tell you I’d do the fightin’?” I heard him kick open a door. “You can put that Scurry tongue away.”
I found myself flopping gracelessly atop a bed. The springs squeaked.
“You’re defendin’ him?” I spat, trying to get up. The room was distending. Beer retraced its path from gut to throat.
Patrick caged me in, kneeling on the floor at my feet, an arm either side of me.
His chest pressed against my kneecaps. No escape.
“He don’t need defendin’,” Patrick said.
“But if you slug him and he retaliates, I’ll be defendin’ you, and a brawl ain’t what we need.
” He was far closer than I’d bargained for.
Blue eyes, fans of lashes, the sharp line of his brow.
I tried to look menacing. “I don’t need you to defend me.” I swiped at his arm, but with startling speed, he caught my wrist. “Don’t mean I won’t do it anyway,” he said. “I’d cave in his head, and we’d be run out of town. We’ve got to keep the peace.”
“Why?”
His pupils flexed. “There ain’t another choice.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said, freeing my wrist from his grasp and pushing at his chest. I might as well have resisted a brick wall. “Why would you defend me?” My hands turned to fists in his shirtfront.
He frowned at me, seemingly oblivious to his proximity.
Or perhaps not. The tendons in his neck were visible. He seemed to be taking pains not to look at my mouth, not to touch my thighs. His hands fisted the bed linens. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because I broke your heart.”
He exhaled heavily. “Yes,” he said slowly. “You did.”
My chest was on the verge of splitting. I twisted his shirt in my hand, hardly aware I was doing so. “You should hate me.”
“No one should hate you.” He said it so forcefully, I was taken aback. My breath stalled.
He closed his eyes as though he were banishing something, a thought. He untangled my hands from his shirt and stood upright.
“No more talkin’. You’re goin’ to sleep.”
I blinked a few times. The ceiling and its water-damaged paint loomed above me. “I’m not at all tired.” In fact, I was thrumming with something no longer violent, but urgent all the same.
Patrick sighed. I sat upright to see him collapse back into the same chair he’d attended the night before. “Well, I am.” He groaned. He turned the chair to the door, and settled back into it. “And the longer you resist sleep, the longer you keep me from my own. Do us both a favor, Scurry girl.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “You’re my warden now?”
He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, resting. “You’re entitled to your fantasies.”
I huffed. “You’re the one who insists on watching me sleep.”
“Right now, I’m watchin’ you prattle.” He slitted his eyes open. He must have seen the heat in my cheeks, because a grin found its way onto his face. “You need a lullaby?”
I groaned. “I need another fucking drink.”
“That, I cannot accommodate,” he said. “You’re a violent drunk.”
I let out a noise of frustration and threw myself back onto the bed. Better than seeing his smug, handsome, infuriating face.
“Handsome, eh?” he murmured. “Yeah, well. At least there’s that.”
I threw my forearm over my eyes. Did I say that aloud?
“You did,” Patrick answered. As though he weren’t just in my chest, but in my head, too. “You’re also a ramblin’ drunk.”
“You could always leave.”
“I could, but I’d need to put a bell round your neck,” he said. “And somethin’ tells me you wouldn’t be willin’.”
I was fuming. I made a break for the door.
He caught up to me, of course, closing his hand around the doorknob before I could, once more caging me with his body without taking hold of me. I whirled around, my back pressing into the door, and was immediately overwhelmed by the nearness of him.
“Nina—”
But I was hitting him now. Blows that didn’t make a dent.
I pushed and shoved and growled at him, that void in me yawning wider and wider.
And I was as much taken by the anger as I was the comfort of him.
I wanted to fall into something, to find some kind of cliff I could throw myself off.
When he trapped both my hands against his chest, having finally grown weary of the assault, I pressed my mouth to his.
There was a moment of shock, his lips unmoving beneath mine, and then he disengaged. He pulled away as though he’d been stung.
He cursed beneath his breath and looked up at the ceiling as though summoning restraint from it. “Now, Nina,” he muttered slowly, closing his eyes. “Don’t do that.”
“Why?” I asked, my voice too loud and too urgent.
He was tortured now. Praying. “I’ve told you why.”
“Because you’re afraid?” I asked. “Of falling in love with me again.”
He laughed, exasperated. “Again,” he murmured as though he were tasting the word. Inspecting it. “Nina, it’s lookin’ like all the men who love you once are cursed with it for the rest of their lives.”
I went slowly to him and took his jaw in my hand, pulled his gaze down from that ceiling and back to me. “Is that so?” I asked.
The cerulean of his eyes whirled and whirled. “Aye.”
I swallowed. “Then you might as well surrender now—”
“Nina.”
“—because I’m cursed, too. I love you, Patrick Colson.”
He seemed to quake, that shield of his cracking. “You’re drunk.”
“Then I’m drunk, and I love you.”
His chest deflated beneath my hand—a yielding. I was somewhere in the deepest blue of his eyes, already under. He said nothing, just stood with my hand running over the rasp of his stubble, the last of his restraint twitching in his jaw.
My fingers went unbidden to my own shirt, unbuttoning the front, my fingers sliding down to my belly.
The tendons in his neck tensed, but he didn’t stop me.
I pulled my arms free of the sleeves and let the blouse fall between us.
Then, I tugged the strings of my bra loose, and with deliberate slowness, I pulled the material down over the hills of my breasts, inhaling as it caught on my pebbled nipples.
It was a disciplined thing. Measured. I wanted to see the shadows descend over his eyes when he saw me baring myself to him.
I wanted to see the familiarity in his eyes, the memories of my body imprinted in his irises, in his hands when they clenched.
And as that hunger washed over him, something in my chest exulted.
He stepped forward, perhaps without meaning to; it was difficult to tell which part of him ruled the rest. I felt the door against my back once more, but still, he didn’t touch me. He only watched, warring with himself.
I didn’t take my eyes off his. I wouldn’t be the one to break.
I pulled at the ugly trousers, let them bundle at my ankles. I stepped out of them in the little room I had, my knee sliding between his legs. I revealed that I had no underwear beneath.
His tongue ran over his bottom lip, the muscles of his shoulders contracted. I was melting into the door behind me, my body sinking into it. Candlelight flickered along the edge of his cheekbone, the rim of his ear, the column of his neck.
And I was losing whatever battle we were trapped in.
Unraveling. Something thrashed in my core and bid my fingers to slip over my pelvis, to touch the space at the apex of my thighs, to cup the ache.
I rubbed the pads of two fingers over that tight bundle of nerves and still, I didn’t look away. I was awash in him. A moan escaped me.
He watched, hypnotized it seemed. Tormented and enraptured all at once.
His hands flattened to the door either side of my face, and he watched my fingers slide in and out and over, slowly at first, then faster.
It was too much—the expression he wore, the reverence in it.
The pleasure and pain coalescing. My hand moved of its own accord, quite apart from my mind.
I whimpered, and he watched the sound leave my lips. “Patrick,” I whispered desperately.
He exhaled, and it was more a growl than a breath. “Fuck it.”
He took my mouth, and he was not gentle.