Elizabeth Lane - Her Dearest Enemy

“And if I refuse?”

“Then I’ll rip my clothes and go to the sheriff.” Harriet could scarcely believe her own wild words. “I’ll tell him that I came here looking for my brother, and you dragged me up to your room and tried to have your way with me!”

“Oh, good Lord!” Brandon’s hands released her wrists and dropped to his sides. A muscle twitched at the corner of his grimly drawn mouth. “You’d be a fool to try it. Nobody in his right mind would believe you.”

The implication of his words was all too obvious. Only a depraved man would make indecent advances to a priggish old-maid schoolteacher like herself, and Brandon Calhoun was one of the town’s most respected citizens. His arrogance stung Harriet like lye in a cut, but she masked the hurt with defiance.

“Wouldn’t they?” She hurled the words, wanting to shock him, to hurt him. “Maybe the story wouldn’t hold up in a court of law, but I have your nightshirt, and I can describe your bedroom down to the last detail. That should be enough to smear your precious reputation with mud.”

Silence quivered between them like the hanging blade of a guillotine. Harriet’s audacious threat, she sensed, had hit its mark. Brandon’s livelihood depended on the trust and good will of the townspeople. Lose that and he might as well pack his bags and move away.

“You wouldn’t dare!” he snapped.

“Wouldn’t I?” Harriet’s eyes narrowed in what she hoped was a menacing look. “You don’t know me well enough to predict what I might do, Mr. Calhoun. Can you afford to take that chance?”

He groaned, looking as if he wanted to strangle her with his bare hands. “This is blackmail, Miss Harriet Smith. You know that, don’t you?”

“Absolutely.”

With a muttered curse, he snatched up the pistol from the floor and jammed it into the holster. “Let’s get moving, then,” he growled. “Come on, we’re wasting time.”

* * *

Brandon peered over the backs of the horses, into the stinging blizzard. The hood on the elegant black landau was fully raised, but the windblown snow peppered his face like buckshot. He could barely see the ears of the two sturdy bays, let alone the familiar road that wound north along the creek bed toward the county line.

Harriet huddled beside him on the seat, wrapped in his long woolen greatcoat. A thick shawl, belonging to Helga, swathed her head and shoulders. The shawl’s edges were pulled forward, hiding her stoic profile from his view. And that was just as well, Brandon told himself. The less he saw of the insufferable woman, the better.

Had he gotten away alone, he would have saddled one of the horses and ridden through the storm. But Harriet was not dressed for riding. Moreover, after her performance in his bedroom, Brandon was ill-disposed to trust her. Put her on a horse and there’d be nothing to stop the fool woman from bolting after the runaways on her own. The landau was slower, but it would be safer—and as long as he held the reins, he would be the one in charge.

“How can we be certain they came this way?” She leaned toward him, raising her voice to be heard above the storm.

“We can’t be certain. This is just a likely guess.” He shot her a sidelong glance and met the flash of her coppery eyes. Framed by the shawl, her pale, classic features reminded him of a Madonna’s. A Madonna with the scruples of a whore and the disposition of a bobcat, Brandon reminded himself. And he had already felt her claws.

Would she have carried out her threat to ruin his reputation? Brandon huddled into his hip-length sheepskin coat, the pistol cold against his leg. Hellfire, he knew nothing about the woman—where she’d come from or what she was doing in a remote place like Dutchman’s Creek. For all he knew, this show of concern for her brother could be an act. She could have encouraged the boy’s relationship with Jenny, in the hope of snagging him a rich, pliant little wife that the two of them could control.

Whatever her plan, he swore it wasn’t going to succeed. Once Jenny was safely home, he would get his lawyer to annul any marriage that might have taken place. Then he would go ahead with his plan to send the girl back east to have her baby.

Her baby .

The images hit him like a barrage of body blows. Jenny—his sweet, innocent Jenny, her body swelling with child; Jenny giving birth in agony, screaming, bleeding, maybe even dying in the process. Lord, she was so small. The birth was bound to be horren-dously difficult for her.

And if Jenny died, Brandon vowed, God help him, whatever the consequences, he would hunt Will Smith down and send him straight to hell where he belonged.

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