Siege of the Heart (Southern Romance 2)

He stared at her, his blood running cold. His instincts screamed that she was a predator, dangerous as a jungle cat and just as poised to leap. When she had told him that she used no feminine trickery, it had surely been a lie, for no man would smile like an angel and ask questions like a high inquisitor.

Surely she was no angel, but a demon such as he had never faced, for even as he stared her down and fought the urge to pull out his rifle and shoot her, he wanted nothing more than to crush her in his arms and kiss her. His blood was heating, his pulse racing, and it was all he could do not to think of her with that linen shirt torn open and his mouth on her skin, her moans in his ears.

He took a deep, shuddering breath, and had the sense that she knew exactly what he had been thinking. What he had not seen, for she was looking away now, almost demurely, unless one knew her, was whether there had been an answering spark in her eyes.

Really? Was that what she wanted to know? He wanted to laugh until he could not breathe any longer. She was his jailor, and she surely knew she was taking him to his death. Any woman who could take such joy in his presence as she seemed to must indeed be the devil. Never mind that he found more ease in her company than he did with anyone else.

Of course, it was rather distracting how he kept wondering about the curve of her hips, or whether he could circle her waist with his hands. Her legs, he noted with a shiver, were quite long enough to wrap around his waist...

He was going completely insane.

“Mr. Dalton?” she prompted him, and he tried to remember how to breathe.

“The answers to your questions will be given. As I promised.” He was trying to shut her away, and it almost worked, but even as he urged his horse forward, he could feel her curiosity surge in the air between them.

“I saved your life. You know my secret.” Her voice was soft, but he was damned if he could hear a single speck of coquetry in it. “All I want from you is the truth, Solomon. You have mine.”

“The truth is the only thing I have left,” Solomon said. He looked over at her, and saw her hazel eyes big with pity. He did not want pity, and he no longer wanted her suspicion. He took a deep breath. “I can swear to you, in all truth, that I never gave one single word of information to the Confederacy. No battles, no troop movements, no names. Nothing. I promise that, Amb—Violet.”

She looked ahead and urged her horse into motion with a quick snap of the reins, her jaw set. As he came up alongside her, he saw that she was shaking, and that in the shifting moonlight which filtered through the trees, her eyes were shining with tears.

“Thank you,” she said finally. “You owed me nothing, truly. I should not have asked.”

“If someone had killed Cecelia...” Solomon said finally. He paused. “It would drive me mad. I could not rest until I had vengeance.”

“The day comes,” she told him, “when you begin to wonder how long vengeance can carry you.” She said the words so softly that he might not have heard them at all, and he did not know what to say in response.

They rode in silence for a time, and Solomon could only think of the press of her body against his, her labored breathing as she took down the man who would have killed him. She had not been a creature of modesty and sweetness then, but neither had she shown the cunning of a temptress. She simply was, this woman, like Clara in her courage and yet utterly different.

He could smile, at least, to think of what Clara might say about a woman in pants.

The thought of Clara, waiting for Jasper and Cecelia to be returned to her, was almost too much to bear. Solomon’s hands clenched around the reins and it took all of his willpower not to yell his fury at the sky.

“We’ll get them back,” Violet said softly.

Solomon jumped. He had almost forgotten that she was there; she did not seem real, so how could she ride next to him in the darkness?

“You can’t know that.”

“No,” she agreed. “I cannot. But I can tell you that they truly wish your sister no harm, for if they did, she would be harmed already. I can also tell you there is a hesitation in them. They wish to hate your friend more than they actually do.”

“You saw all of that in the middle of a battle?”

“I’m a woman, remember?” Her voice was wry, and yet as cold as deepest winter. “I know what it is to be at the mercy of men. The very tall one, who had her on his horse, he keeps them in line, I think.”

“And the rest of it? Feminine intuition also?”

“I know how to see things,” she said stiffly. She had noted the bite in his tone. “I always have. I see the connections between people as clearly as if they were floating in the air. I have always heard the words no one said. What troubles me about you is that none of the jumble of things fits together. You are penitent, Solomon, as if you have something to atone for, and yet you carry yourself as a man of honor. It seems, from the stories they tell in the taverns, that you turned a Confederate soldier to the Union cause.”

She looked over at him, raising one eyebrow.

“Jasper Perry is a very stubborn man,” Solomon said finally. “I doubt any man could turn his mind unless he wished it to be turned.”

“I see.” What she made of this, and how she fitted it together with his guilt, he did not know.

“But he had seen too much,” Solomon said, knowing he was verging into dangerous territory and not caring. “Even a single battle is enough to shatter the world as it once was. And after being locked in that hell, to return to your home and find that the fires are still burning inside you, and there is another hell waiting for you at home, one made of helplessness and waiting and fear. They do not know what the soldiers endured, and we can keep them from knowing, but they cannot hide from us what they went through.”

He looked over at her, and she met his eyes, trembling. She, he thought, had also seen both. She knew the hells that raged inside for years after. She too had been scarred and remade by this war.