Page 122 of The Scot Beds His Wife

“Wait.” She scurried back, placing Boyd’s corpse between them. “Let me explain.”

“Ye had my letter to Alison. All the correct papers. What did ye do, steal them from the real Alison Ross?” His eyes glinted with cruelty and suspicion. “Was she the one ye kidnapped? Did ye hurt her to take them? Did yemurderher?”

“No! I would never hurt anyone. Not unless I had to. Bennett forced my hand!” She held up that ineffectual hand against him. Against his suspicion and the violence gathering in his eyes.

“Who forced yer hand against me? Against us?”

His question landed like a cannonball in her gut. “Just listen,” she begged.

“I’ve heard enough of yer lies. Ye’ll be having that baby in a prison cell if I have anything to say about it.” When he made it clear he would advance on her, she acted out of sheer desperation. Scooping down, Samantha snatched Boyd’s pistol and levered it at the man she loved.

Again.

“I saidlisten,” she cried. She knew he acted more out of hurt than hatred, and she prayed her words would reach him. Reach all of them.

“Sam,” Calybrid wheezed. “Doona do this, lass. Put the gun down.”

If Gavin had seemed furious before, there wasn’t a word in Samantha’s repertoire to describe the way he was looking at her now. Murderous, maybe.

But worse.

“I was a nobody. An orphan. Raised to do nothing but work on a desert ranch until my foster family informed me that they were forcing me to become the second wife of an old pervert.” When Gavin’s features didn’t so much as flicker, she swallowed a growing sense of doom and forged ahead. “Bennett was my way out of that predicament. I was young, and desperate. I didn’t know what I’d married into. What evil the Masters brothers were capable of until it was too late for me. You know something about that, don’t you, Eleanor?”

“Aye,” the lady whispered, as Eammon wiped tears from beneath her sightless eyes.

“Ye leave her out of this,” Gavin warned.

“Alison and I made friends in a railcar that day. She was coming to seeyou,to stopyoufrom stealing Erradale from under her.”

“Don’t ye fuckingdaremake me the villain here.”

“I’m not. You aren’t.Theyare.” She gestured to the remains of the Masters brothers. “They were just after government payroll on that train. No one was supposed to get hurt in the robbery. No one had before… but then something happened, gunshots everywhere, and then Bennett…” She forced herself to sniff back tears and swallow bile, lest she humiliate herself further. “I told you the truth before. He burst into the car, shot a man, and put a gun to Alison’s head. He was going tokillher. He said she’d seen too much. There was no talking him out of it so I—I—shot him.” Here a ragged sob escaped her, and she forced herselfto pull together once she noted that Gavin had inched closer. If he disarmed her, all hope was lost.

“Sending me to Erradale was all Alison’s idea,” she continued.

When he snorted his disbelief, Samantha truly fought hysterics.

“Shegave me the papers. Your letter. She gave me her name and her blessing. She even wrote and told me that I could work Erradale indefinitely. That I could buy it from her if I wanted. All I had to do in return was to make certain that no kin of Laird Mackenzie ever took the land your father coveted.”

“Horseshit!” Gavin snarled.

“She said she owed me her life. Because I’d saved her. She called it… She called it…” Samantha bit out a harsh sound of frustration as she desperately searched for the word, gasping it out when it finally came to her. “Comraich. She called itcomraich. Sanctuary.”

At this Eammon took a deep breath. “She knows the sacred word, lad. Not many do. Perhaps there’s something to her story.”

“She could have heard it somewhere. She’s a liar, a con artist. Why the fuck would I believe you?”

“The letter,” Calybrid suggested. “Ye could show us the letter from Alison.”

The bottom dropped out of her stomach. “It’s gone. It burned when Erradale did.”

“We could hold the lass here,” Eammon recommended. “Could summon Alison Ross to give her account.”

“You could try,” she said hopefully. “Though I don’t know if you’d find her. Last I heard, she’d left on her honeymoon. And… I don’t know where.”

“Fucking convenient, wouldna ye say?” Gavin’s vitriolic growl shivered over every hair on her body, liftingthem painfully with pure, desperate anguish. “And here I am again, staring down the barrel of yer pistol, wondering if ye’re worth the trouble.”

“It’s not like I planned this! I tried to stay away from you. To keep to myself.”