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JUST AHEAD, EBEN COULD SEE Raven’s slim form, darting through the wooded copse. The forest was thinning and the cliffs lay a few hundred yards ahead, a sheer drop of a thousand feet to the river below. “Raven! Raven, no!”

Rather than slow her sprint toward disaster, his shouts seemed to give her wings. She flew into the open, tall grass catching at her trousers and the hem of her coat. He saw her stumble, then right herself again, and he redoubled his pace, finally gaining on her on the grassy promontory. “Raven! For Christ’s sake! Stop!”

Fear and dread and desperation congealed in his guts, and Eben ground his teeth and made a wild leap, grabbing for the hem of her woolen coat, jerking her back against him. Off balance, he went headlong, carrying her with him, twisting at the last second and landing on his shoulder in the tall grass, Raven pinioned against his chest.

“Stay away from me! I do not need you, or your silly clothing, or your dictates, or your jealousy! I hate you!”

Still rattled from her narrow escape, Eben held her fast, his fingers digging into the flesh of her shoulders. “Enough!” he said, giving her a small shake. “Enough.”

She lunged for his wrist, and would have bitten him if he hadn’t pulled back fast enough. “All right! I get it! You hate me.” Some of the fight went out of him then. This wasn’t at all what he wanted. Her animosity. Her hatred. “I suppose it’s my own damned fault.”

“At last you get it!” She stopped struggling, but her anger boiled. “Yes! It’s your fault! You don’t own me, Eben!” she said, and it hit him like a slap. “I am not a horse, to be trotted out when you feel like it, and stabled away when you don’t. And I’m not your possession!”

“You don’t have to run from me.” Eben loosened his grip on her and sat up. “You can hate me if you need to, but please, lass, just don’t run from me. I couldn’t bear it if something

happened to you.” He brushed the hair back out of his face with an unsteady hand. “I suppose it’s why I’m such an ass around you. I can’t seem to help myself.”

“He didn’t intend to hurt me,” she said.

Eben raised his gaze to hers. “I know. But neither did I, and look at how that’s turned out.”

Raven swallowed hard. The hurt on his features was hard to bear without wanting to soothe it. What had caused it? Surely, not her angry words? “I don’t hate you,” she said. “But I don’t want to live like this anymore.”

“Then, come back to me,” he said on a ragged sigh. “I don’t give a damn what anyone says. I miss you. I miss waking with you sleep-warm against me. I miss the way you respond when I love you. My bed is empty and cold without you in it… as hollow as my heart.”

Raven was afraid to get her hopes up. She didn’t want to be disappointed again. “But you said we couldn’t go on as we’d been.”

“The hell with what I said. That was not one of my finer moments. I’ll try for your sake to overcome my tendency to put my foot in my mouth, but it may require some patience on your part. I’ve had years of practice, it seems.”

She gazed at him, her heart in her throat. “Eben, I’m not sure I understand. Precisely what are you saying?”

“That I’m yours—if you want me.” He sighed, and reaching out, tucked a brightly colored maple leaf into the tangled tresses by her left ear. “I love you, lass. I tried very hard not to

—it just didn’t work. I can’t get you out of my head, or my heart, and I don’t want you out of my life. Would that I’d kept my freaking mouth shut the night we arrived! The last thing I wanted was to set you aside. Jesus, I’m sorry. Can you ever forgive me?”

“You love me?” Raven said with wonder. She’d been so caught off guard by his admission that she only knew he’d said something about screwing his head and his heart. There was no telling what he meant by that, but he would no doubt tutor

her if she allowed it. “Did I hear you correctly? You really love me?”

“My God, yes,” he said. “More than I ever imagined I could love anyone. More, certainly, than is prudent.”

“And what comes next?” Raven asked innocently. “After that?”

“This?” He took her by the shoulders and pressed her back into the tall grass, unbuckling the belt that held up her old trousers, and eased them down. At the same time, her hands were slipping into the waistband of his trousers, sliding over his belly. She found him quickly, the turgid flesh that throbbed in her hand, and felt so wondrous filling her. The part of him that had helped her to create the life stirring inside her.

Eben was helpful, unfastening the flap that gave her free access to every inch of him. His words of love and his willingness to surrender surprised her, now it was her turn to surprise him by taking the lead, only this time, she was far more experienced, more adventurous, than she’d been in Pittsburgh. She rolled, taking him with her, so that he lay on his back beneath her. Then, she kissed him, thrilled when he slipped his big, hard hands down her spine. His palms came to rest on her bare ass, fitting to her cheeks and bringing her tightly against him. He stretched upward, seeking entry, and she pushed him back down, into the grass once more. “Be patient, m’sieur. Your friend will leave us alone. I saw him walk back into the trees.”

“The asshole’s probably watching.”

“That’s your jealousy talking. He did not strike me that way at all.” She kissed him, her tongue briefly toying with his, teasing, taunting, until she was on to other more fascinating places. She kissed and nipped her way down the rugged column of his throat, down the center of his chest, to his belly and beyond. She trailed the pointed tip of her tongue down the dark strip of hair arrowing downward from his navel, then teasingly ran her tongue around the head of his maleness. “Does that please you, m’sieur?”

“Oh, Jesus, aye. It does.”

“And this?” She pressed a kiss upon its pulsing length, then accepted him into her mouth. She wanted to please him. She wanted to pleasure him as he had pleasured her all of those weeks ago, using this very same method of kissing. She wanted to claim him. She wanted him all to herself. He was hers, now and forever, for love was surely eternal, and binding, and sacred.

Eben’s body was suddenly flooded with sensation. It was not a gently rising flood, but a raging torrent of unbearable sweetness springing from Raven’s hot mouth and surging outward, into his belly, his torso, curling around his lungs and heart, racing along his limbs. In all of his years of whoring, he’d never been loved like this. With such wild enthusiasm.

He’d never been this blessed.

Sex, even with Ivory, had always been perfunctory.

Something she’d bestowed upon him when his need had become too great, and when she feared he’d stray. Whores were honest, at least, and focused solely on the coin the act put in their purses.

Raven, however—well, Raven was stunning in her enjoyment of this oh so intimate act. The silken heat of her mouth seared his manhood, wet, and delicious. Within the space of a few moments, she’d transformed him from a hardened adventurer into an untried thirteen-year-old boy. He would have loved to have spoken, to have found words eloquent enough to explain to her exactly the effect she was having on him, but his suddenly immature brain was so intently focused on the pleasure careening through his system that his ability to form coherent speech seemed to have abandoned him completely.

“Eben?” she said sweetly, then bent to her wondrous task again. “Does this please you?”

He opened his mouth to say yes, but the first two letters of the word floated off into his pleasure-soaked brain and all that came out was a tortured hiss.

“Eben?”

He caught his breath, totally distracted by the flicking roughness of her tongue, and realized with horror she was waiting for him to answer. “Uhhhhhhh?”

Watching him, she bent to kiss him again, then seemed to discover his balls in their—at the moment—firm little sack. She petted and played and jostled, ran a firm finger beneath and tickled and he thought he would die from the sheer magnitude of his arousal. His heart would spasm and stop, and he would be found here in the morning, still stiff as a post and standing erect, an idiot grin on his face and his britches around his ankles.

She paused for a half-beat and that was worse. “Eben?” she said, sweetly, then dove down again, taking him fully into her mouth, caressing him with her tonsils.

“Uh—” he managed. Then tried again, desperately wanting to please her. “Awww! Rrrrr!”

“I love you, too.” And as she brought the matter to an explosive conclusion Eben’s ecstatic haloo echoed throughout the valley.

A COACH PULLED BY A high-stepping gray rumbled along the last slope then rolled to a stop outside the inn. The brougham’s black lacquered finish was splattered with mud halfway up the doors, its wheels caked with it. Even so, it created a stir. It was not every day that well-to-do outsiders stopped by the tiny village. “You’d think that by now they would have constructed a decent road,” one of the passengers complained to the other. He was a large man and made up in girth what he was lacking in height, leaving no doubt as to his station in life. Patrick Wharton wore his prosperity like a placard, for everyone to see. He was dressed in dark satin the color of overripe plums, with a canary-yellow waistcoat that stretched over an enormous belly, and a shirt and cravat that was starting to wilt. “It’s a pain in my arse, coming back here again.”

“Your language, Patrick,” his wife said. Her gloved hands were braced on either side of her narrow hips in an effort to

soften the jolts. “We haven’t been to visit Daddy in more than two years.”

“And for a very good reason,” he said, careful to mumble the words. At the moment, she was as cool as a brook in the dead of winter, but cross her, and her temper could strip the flesh from a man’s bones.

A boy came around the corner of the building at a trot, and wordlessly opened the door for Patrick to alight. He did so carefully. The leg didn’t always want to support his weight, so he used a cane, and grasped the edge of the coach frame as he stepped down. Allowing himself a few seconds glance at the old place while jerking his waistcoat into place, he finally turned to hand Ivory down. The boy almost trod on Patrick in an effort to reach the boot and the trunks stowed there. “Damned rustics. Look there, what he’s done to my shoe. I took special care to avoid the mud, and now it’s splattered over the tongue and onto my stocking.”

“Bother your stocking,” Ivory said, cutting him with a look. “At least try to be civil in front of Daddy. Senators are concerned with more important matters than mud on a stocking. Now, wipe that scowl off your face, and attempt to look pleasant.”

Civil? She wanted civil?

Had the visit been a mutual decision, he might have managed a modicum of civility. Instead, she had nagged him until he’d begun having dreams where he tore her wagging tongue from her head and threw it into the street for mongrel dogs to fight over. Then, he had told her precisely what he thought of her. On more than one occasion, he had waked and looked at his hands, disappointed that they were not stained with her blood.

Nagged, and nagged, and nagged. And all because of a letter she’d received from her father informing her that that ill-bred, ill-tempered savage was home from his roaming!

Patrick shuddered at the thought, and his bad leg throbbed, keeping perfect time with his heartbeat, a painful, persistent reminder of that goddamned St. Claire.

The boy slammed the coach door. Patrick jumped, the noise becoming something else in his mind—a door slamming against the wall as it was flung forcefully open. In the back of his mind, the scenario played out vividly. The murderous expression on St. Claire’s face as he loomed in the bedroom doorway. A cold sweat had begun as Patrick hurriedly found his clothing, holding his shirt and trousers before him like a shield. It hadn’t helped, and he was quickly seized and propelled out the second floor window… .

There had been nothing to break his fall, and he’d landed awkwardly, breaking his leg in three places. Had St. Claire not disappeared that night, Patrick would have had him charged with attempted murder. But he’d set out before first light, and Ivory had been there to put him back together again. They’d married quickly to quiet the scandal, with Patrick barely on his feet again, and the judge had helped finance his in his political ambitions. Fool that he’d been, he’d thought he’d won the prize—until he discovered what the woman he’d married was truly like.

In private, Ivory was full of venom, a contemptible, heinous bitch. In public, she portrayed her role to the hilt, the perfect politician’s wife, supportive, the soul of decorum. She suited his purposes, but at what cost? Nevertheless, he was shackled to the woman, and there could be no easy escape. The knowledge that he’d clamped on the irons himself made the imprisonment no easier to bear.

“You can get those later,” Ivory said to the boy, who jostled the trunks from the boot and dumped them on the ground. “Run and tell Judge McAllister that Senator and Mrs. Wharton have arrived.”

MEG WAS BASTING A HAUNCH of venison when Nan came into the kitchen. She ladled the pan drippings over the leg and the aroma of the roasting meat filled the kitchen, making her mouth water. “Well, what is it? We’ve a hundred guests that will be here in a few hours, and you can’t find somethin’ to do?”

“More like a hundred and two,” Nan said. “There’s a fancy- ass coach out front. And some gent and a lady just got out.”

Meg frowned, her brow corrugated with concern. “It’s too bloody early for the locals. I suppose you got a look at them?”

“Hard not to notice. Looks like a fat yellow bird, he does.

And she’s dressed fit for the ball—though it’s hardly middle of the morning. Red-haired, she is. I heard her tell Jacob to run and fetch the judge.”

Meg narrowed her eyes at Nan. The girl might be a slattern, but she was a slattern who missed no small details. “Did you happen to hear this fancy woman’s name?”

“Senator and Mrs. Wharton.” Nan bridled, obviously pleased with herself.

The ladle fell from Meg’s nerveless fingers, clattering to the flagstones and making a mess. She squeezed her eyes shut. “Lord, you couldn’t have given us another month or two? You had to bring that vindictive, trouble-making bitch to our doorstep, now?”

The girl fingered the edge of her bodice, a habit she sometimes had when nervous. “You want me to tell ‘em we ain’t got no rooms left?”

“It ain’t gonna work,” Meg said, dismissing the idea off- hand. “That’s Zeb’s daughter out there, and that fat yellow bird is her husband. The old man sets a store by her, and you can bet we’ll be killin’ the fatted calf in her honor by noontide.”

“We ain’t got no calves,” Nan told her, until Meg lost patience and gave her a shove.

“Go ready a room for her highness!” she said. “I haven’t the patience to deal with your brainless chatter right now! Not with the world perched on a powder keg and that bitch holding a flaming faggot. God,” she said. “Now, what?”

As if on cue, the back door opened and Eben walked in with Raven. Meg took in her boy’s clothing and shook her head. “I’m not even going to ask, because I don’t think I want to know.”

“Well, at least I know you weren’t privy to it,” Eben said, helping himself to some coffee. He held the pot aloft and Raven shook her head.

“I think I’ll lie down for a while,” she said. She got up and went to him, and he held her close for a moment, whispering something that made her giggle. She was smiling when she went out and up the back stairs.

“Well, now,” Meg said. “What was that all about?”

Eben shot her a look and sipped his coffee. “Aren’t you going to ask about the kill?”

“I’d rather you explained what I just saw. You’ve been avoiding that child for weeks. Suddenly, you’re very cozy. Why am I suspicious?”

“Stop calling her a child,” he said. “She’s a woman. And we’re not going to talk about this. Why don’t you ask me about the kill?”

“Go on, change the subject.”

Eben set down his cup with a sigh of capitulation. “Things are changing, all right? I finally know what I want.”

“And you want Raven.”

“Why is that so bad?” he wondered. “I might be a little hardheaded, but I’m not Satan. Granted, I’ve not spent much time building churches, either, but a man can change. And before you say it, I’m not that old.”

Meg crossed to his chair then and bent down, kissing him on the cheek. “Old enough to be having thoughts about settling down,” she said. “I’m so glad to hear it.”

He finished his coffee and went about his business, leaving Meg to her work. It was good news, him finally coming around. And the baby would change everything, as soon as Raven told him. It was going to be okay. It was.

So, why did she still feel so much dread?