Savage Flames

That meant if he wanted a wife, he would have to go looking for one, and today was the first day of his search.

He would make certain the slaves were happy enough in their surroundings to remain while he was gone, even though there was no overseer. He had never given one thought to the slaves’ happiness before.

But now?

Now they were all he had to keep his plantation going. The tobacco fields were all but bare now, with the harvest almost complete. After he took the tobacco to market and got paid for it, he would decide whether or not to stay in that business, or sell the slaves off and try something else.

He would no longer think of Lavinia or the fact that she seemed to have chosen to give up everything in order to escape him!

“I don’t need her,” he grumbled. He slammed the bottle down on his desk. “With my money, I can get any lady I want.”

But he had one more thing to do before heading into town. He intended to put up posters letting the local women know that he was looking for a wife. There were many widowed women, and often they were left penniless.

Frowning, and cursing beneath his breath, Hiram took the stairs two at a time. When he reached the second-floor landing, he didn’t pause before going into Lavinia’s bedroom.

Just seeing her belongings made him angry all over again. He felt deeply hurt, too. He had wanted Lavinia as far back as when they were teenagers in Atlanta.

But his brother, with his sculpted face and suave manners, had been the lucky one. And now his brother was gone and Hiram still didn’t have Lavinia.

He couldn’t help it. Wanting her was eating away at him like a cancer. Even losing his eye had not been as devastating as knowing that he would never have the woman he loved, and had even killed for.

He went into a sudden fit of rage.

He went to Lavinia’s chifforobe and grabbed an armful of her clothes from it. He tore up what he could with his bare hands, then took scissors from her sewing basket and destroyed the rest. He continued until none of her beautiful clothes were left in one piece.

His heart pounding, his jaw tight, he went to a window and threw the shutters open, raised the window, then took the tattered remains and pitched them from the window to the ground below, all the while shouting obscenities.

He stopped and stiffened when he saw that the slaves had stopped working and were looking up at him with wide, frightened eyes. Surely they had heard his rantings and seen him throwing the clothes out the window.

“What’cha lookin’ at?” he shouted. He doubled a hand into a tight fist and waved it above his head. “Get back to work. Do you hear? Or I’ll bring my whip out and set your skin aflame with it!”

They immediately went back to work, and he began to regret threatening them. There was the harvest to consider. He certainly couldn’t do it all by himself.

But he still couldn’t contain his anger. He broke everything in the room that could be broken, then ran down the stairs.

Dripping wet with sweat, and stinking from the mixture of perspiration and rum, he continued his rampage throughout the house. He broke anythingthat reminded him of Lavinia…all the things she had loved and enjoyed.

Even though he didn’t expect her to return and see what he’d done, he still got pleasure from doing it. When he was finished, he stood back and surveyed the destruction.

He wiped sweat from his brow with the palm of a hand, smiling when he saw just how far he had gone. Nothing Lavinia had loved was left intact.

Nothing!

And after he found a woman he could bring into this house as his wife, he’d let

her choose pretty things of her own to decorate the rooms.

Wanting to get on with finding a bride, Hiram went to the kitchen and poured some fresh, cold water from a pitcher into a basin. He splashed his face with it, then straightened his back and ran his fingers through his hair.

He hurried to the gun cabinet in the front hall, grabbed his rifle, and ran outside with it. He already had his pistol holstered at the right side of his waist, and had sheathed a knife at the other side.

He planned to go to the newspaper office in the nearest town and persuade them to print some posters that he could tack up here and there in town. Surely, in time some pretty, lonely thing would see one of those posters and come to investigate. He knew that once she saw the huge plantation house, the fields and slaves, he would have himself a bride.

The woman wouldn’t even care that he had onlyone eye and that he sweated “like a pig,” as some had described it.

Yep, the woman would see how she would be coddled as his wife. He would give her all the pretty clothes her little heart desired!

He hurried outside to the fields. He told each group of slaves that he would be leaving, but he wouldn’t be gone for long.