Garner Townsend watched the misery in her face and, oddly, almost forgot his own. He kept recalling that she'd rather have been branded a harlot than speak these words with him. However clever or treacherous she was, he couldn't bring himself to believe she could have pretended the volume of pain in her face earlier, as she stood wrapped in a quilt, hearing him denounce her. And God help him, this very minute he wanted to pull her into his arms and comfort her. These vows were a punishment, and would undoubtedly ruin him forever in his family's eyes. But right now, all he could think about was that small dark stain on the ticking of his bed and his perverse pleasure in the fact that Charlie Dunbar had nothing to do with it.

Lord! he realized, she was making a sickening sentimental slur of his thinking again. Let him get within arm's reach of her and he couldn't reason, couldn't string a coherent sentence together! Good God-he was being yoked to her for life! He was doomed to spend the rest of his wretched life acting like the village idiot!

Suddenly it was over and he was advised to kiss his "bride." His guts contracted, his muscles coiled all over. She stood before him, her eyes wide and wary, looking like she would bolt at the slightest movement. No breath was taken or let in the silence that stretched around them.

Why the hell not, his baser self snarled; the damage has already been done! He tilted her chin up and held it while he placed a shocking, open-mouth assault of a kiss on her cherry red lips. Then he pulled away and did an abrupt about-face to wade through the crowd for the door.

Confusion erupted all around Whitney as she stood, feeling the angry heat of his mouth still burning hers. Tight-lipped Black wouldn't look at her and teary-eyed Aunt Kate hugged her and wept openly. The colonel placed a gentlemanly kiss on her hand, and Rapture's people crowded close to congratulate her on her clever marriage bargain. Uncle Harvey and Aunt Harriet and Aunt Sarah and the Delbartons acted as though she'd just made the deal of the century rather than been forced to wed an enemy to Rapture's way of life and to her own father's freedom! She was too stunned to respond on any level.

The colonel and his entourage of eight followed Townsend outside and called for their horses straightaway. The colonel pulled on his gloves and cast a satisfied glare at the gentlemanly Bostonian whose life he had gleefully turned inside out.

"I am willing to forget this incident, Townsend." He smiled coldly. "It need never be reported above myself, now that matters have been set to rights. Providing..."

"Providing what?" Townsend spoke through clenched jaws, physically fighting the urge to throw the warty little toad onto the ground and pound him into oblivion.

"Providing you complete your task here. Bring in the liquor and the distillers, as is your sworn duty. One more week, Major, that's all you have. Then you'll pull out and report to me and the rest of the division at Pittsburgh." He turned to his aide for assistance in mounting and stared tauntingly down at Townsend's fury. "One week, Major."

Garner stood watching them ride off, quaking with unvented rage. The nauseating little wretch breezed in to inspect, forced him to marry Whiskey Daniels, and breezed back out with a command that he- He froze.

Merciful Lord. He'd just married one of the distillers Gaspar insisted he arrest! And the kingpin of the entire illegal operation in the valley was now his bloody father-in-law! His entire body seemed to combust spontaneously... he was on fire! And there was only one way to put the inferno out- "Laxault!" he bellowed, striding through his muttering men, making straight for the center of camp. "Where the hell is that barrel of belch-fire stew we found?!"

The Iron Major spent the rest of the day and most of his wedding night getting drunk as David's sow, for the first time in twelve years. His men drank with him, though none quite matched his intake. His functional capacity for. the potent, water-mixed whiskey was nothing short of amazing considering his abrupt conversion from abstinence. The men of the Maryland Ninth watched with a growing reverence for the commander. He was a man's man, their Iron Major; worked the hardest, bedded the choicest wench, held the most liquor...

It was late in the night and most of the men had crawled off to their tents when Laxault and the lieutenant sobered enough to give the major an assist to his bridal bed. They found his upstairs room in the inn reclaimed by Dedham's children, snoozing peaceably, and they scratched their heads in bewilderment.

The lieutenant, being the critical thinking sort, ventured the opinion that the major must be expected to stay with his bride and her family from now on. Laxault agreed it seemed reasonable. The major, who had just slid past the pale of consciousness, could voice no objection, so they loaded him across his horse and walked him the mile and a half to the Daniels farmstead. They banged loudly on the door and roused the household from their beds, though not actually from sleep, since no one had managed that. They teetered inside, under Black's furious glare, muttering: "He be a trifle jug-bit." Then they dumped him on Kate's French settee and tottered out, their duty done.

Whitney stood on the stairs, staring at her "jug-bit" groom, and didn't know whether to laugh or to cry. The stern, superior, abstemious Iron Major, drunk to insensibility on his wedding night. Her wedding night. He hated her so much. Her throat tightened and her eyes prickled and she fled back up the stairs to her room.

He was still there the next morning when a somewhat more controlled Whitney came downstairs to the aromas of bacon sizzling and coffee boiling. She stood in her womanly skirt and shirt, staring down at his handsome features, now lax and a bit gray from the combination of beard growth and overindulgence. She impulsively brushed a wisp of his dark hair back from his forehead and he stirred. There was confusion in his face as his bloodshot eyes opened and he saw her and his surroundings. But as he opened his mouth to speak, his shoulders twitched convulsively and his hand clamped over his mouth. He was on his feet in a flash, staggering toward the door. He managed to empty the contents of his abused stomach on the ground outside beside the stone steps.

Whitney watched him-there he was on all fours, suffering the humiliation and the agony of the drink's aftermath. His wretched state tugged fiercely at her heart. She stood by while he finished, then silently helped him to his feet. Drawing his arm across her shoulders, she put her arm around his middle, and led his tortured body up the stairs to her bed.

"You... ?" he rasped as he sank back onto the bed.

"Yes, me," she answered softly. "You're probably right, Major. A man who can't hold his liquor any better than that, just shouldn't drink at all." She watched his reddened eyes squeeze shut as though the sight of her only added to his agony. But she screwed up her courage and made herself stay, telling herself it was her fault he got married and then got drunk and sick. She owed him this much.

Through the day, she was there to hold his head as he heaved, and to periodically wipe his burning face with a cold cloth. By late afternoon his system was purged and he finally lapsed into a healing sleep. She sat with him in the waning light of evening, reading in his drained, miserable face the bleakness of the marriage she'd been forced to make.

Caught in her own trap, she sighed despondently. How could so much have gone so wrong with such a simple plan? It was a fiendish bit of luck that pa came home when he did and a pure conspiracy of fate that the major's commander happened to be there... with a nasty streak of righteousness in him that he insisted on inflicting on others. But the worst of it, by far, was her own wretched and incomprehensible behavior, starting with the way she'd allowed her brain to go to mush the minute the major peeled his coat from his broad shoulders.

Unbidden warmth welled in the center of her even as she recalled that stunning physical surrender. Salome's Sin-he was so big; it was like having a wall fall on her. Very softly. And who'd have guessed that the sensual motions of his hard body would be as gentle as they were powerful, that he'd be so tender and so careful in fulfilling a bargain with her?

A bargain. A deal between a man and a woman. It had always sounded so neat, so sensible... almost reassuring. And remote. But there was nothing sensible or orderly or remote in what she'd experienced in Major Garner Townsend's bed. It was hot and unpredictable and shockingly personal, as intimate as breathing. It was as though they had shared each other's very bodies for a time. The realization took her breath away.

That was exactly what they'd done; shared both bodies and feelings in the most powerful way possible. She'd looked into his handsome face and glimpsed a deep tenderness and a soul-deep hunger he kept caged inside his iron-clad being. And she'd revealed the vulnerable, inexperienced girl that lay at the heart of her, in a way she'd never done with anybody in her life, not even her pa. She'd never be able to look at him now without thinking of that tender, sensual man inside him, and wanting to experience him again. And after the terrible humiliation of being caught bedding her and being forced to wed, he'd never be able to look at her without seeing the scheming, conniving Delilah who had come to his bed to hold his pride for ransom. He would come to hate her more and more, while she seemed doomed to only want more and more of him.

At the root of that futile wanting was the drastic change that was occurring in her deepest self. Her body sprang to a life of its own whenever he was near. And her feelings ran strangely deeper and shallower, both in the unplumbed depths of her heart and just beneath her skin. And where was her Daniels gift of gab when she had needed it? Where was her uncanny trader's instinct for turning a profit in any situation? And how in Holy Ned was she going to deal her way out of marriage to the one man who knew how to make her forget her pa, her people, and everything she had ever learned about bargaining?

Broad-shouldered, gray-templed Black Daniels trudged up the steps that evening to peer, unnoticed, through his daughter's doorway. He watched her troubled manner and the tenderness of her touch with the arrogant easterner. Something in her movements, in the sweet pensiveness of her expression, spoke of his wife, Margaret, in a way he'd never seen before. Whit had always been the pure mortal image of him: brash and daring, and quick with her tongue and wit. She had his wide, heavily lashed eyes, his dazzling smile, his agile hands, and his straight nose with the Daniels dent in the very tip. She had his swagger, his explosive charm, his gift of gab. It was a pure shock for him to see her garbed as a young woman and to realize how very like her mother she was, down to the fierce loyalty of her heart and the stubbornness of her desires.

Kate was right about Whitney's womanly transformation he realized with an angry, gut-deep sense of loss. And she was probably right about Whit's weakness for the gentlemanly cur too, for he couldn't imagine any buck taking Whit's virtue by force without losin' a bit of blood. She was too dirty a fighter.

He quivered, stung by the implications of it. The handsome bastard had stolen his daughter and his partner and the second love of his life, all in one fell swoop. It was more than any man had a right to take. And he had showed just how little he valued that precious plunder when he stood there in Dedham's inn calling the pride of Black Daniels's heart a trollop. It made Black's blood boil and made his hazel-green eyes snap with flint-struck sparks.

Whatever a fellow took, he had to pay for, one way or another. Nothing was ever free in life. And as he stood there, watching his daughter's somber face, Black Daniels determined to make the fancy bastard pay, and pay well, for his foul bit of larceny.

Chapter Twelve.

Whitney waited that night until her aunt Kate and her pa had gone to bed before she pulled a quilt from her trunk and crept down the stairs to spend the night curled on the settee. They found her there the next morning, an exile from her own bed. Black heated furiously at the sight of her strained features and crumpled form, and he charged halfway up the stairs to evict his sponge of a son-in-law from his house before Kate managed to drag him to a halt. Their harsh words woke Whitney, and when she demanded to know what was amiss, both Kate and Black glowered and mumbled and retreated to the kitchen and barn to finish morning chores. Whitney watched them go and bit her lip, raising her eyes to the ceiling and the bed above it.

Upstairs, Garner Townsend stirred, confused by the softness and warmth of the bed around him. His tongue seemed to be several feet thick and some fiend had embedded glass splinters in his eyelids. When he raised his head to look around him, thunder exploded in his too-tight skull. He flopped back, grabbing his head between his hands in one writhing motion. After a few minutes of intense breathing, he managed to sit up and swing his legs over the edge. And he found himself in Whiskey Daniels's refined bed... bootless, shirtless, and with a taste in his mouth like the bottom of an old fish barrel. His belly was sore, his throat was dry, and he felt like he'd been pounded all over. He had no earthly idea how he came to be there.

His gaze fell on the basin on the floor beside the bed, and on the chair beside it. A folded cloth draped the edge of the basin and he had a quick flash of memory... Whiskey bending over him, touching his hot face with her cool hands. Recall slammed through him like a hammer, and his scratchy eyes closed. Oh Lord... he'd been stewed like a turnip. And sick. And married!

It was dinnertime when the Iron Major, gray-faced and granite-hard, ducked through the kitchen doorway to confront his bride and her hostile family. He'd spent the last half hour preparing, arguing with himself. It was untenable, unthinkable. The two of them, married!

Three faces turned to him as he straightened, but it was Whitney's womanly form that claimed his burning eyes. She was seated at the table, wearing skirts, her copper-kissed ginger hair combed and plaited neatly into a rope that lay on her shoulder. Her eyes were very green, her lips were cherry red, and her satiny skin was blushing apple pink. He'd never seen her looking more appealing, or dreaded the sight of her more.

"About time you dragged yourself out," Black Daniels lurched from his seat at the table and his square shoulders braced, his fists clenched. "Don't stop there, just keep on goin'," he flung a finger at the door, "out."

"Blackstone, remember-" Kate hurried from the hearth to catch his sleeve.

"Drunk as a slug on your weddin' night, so sick and disgustin' you drove my daughter from her own rightful bed. This is my house," Black jerked a thumb at his thick chest, "and she's my daughter. And you're not welcome in either."

"See here, old man-" Garner flinched privately at the charges, but his drink-pickled eyes were a fair counterfeit of bloodshot fury. "I don't know how I got to be in your daughter's precious bed, but I've a fair idea how she came to be in mine. Was it your idea or hers?"

"Out!" Blackstone roared. "And never show your randy hide around here again! You stay away from me and mine!"

"Yours?" Garner growled, shocked red rising up into his ears as he stalked closer, looming over Whitney's chair. He was being ordered out? Away from the woman who'd just violated his honor, his family name, and possibly his future to possess?!

"Yes, mine! My house... my daughter!" Black snarled, stalking to the other side of her chair, nearly nose to nose with the Iron Major, above her.

"Dammit..." Garner vibrated, his intentions whip-lashing at this unexpected turn. Now that he'd served his purpose, now that his military ambition lay in shambles and his name and honor were blackened, they would just dismiss him and go on with their precious dealing and distilling as though nothing had happened! He turned on Whitney with billowing flames in his eyes. Her! How dare she belittle and ignore what happened between them. He'd taken her blessed virtue, for God's sake! And how dare this scruffy, backwoods lot disregard something as momentous as marriage to a Townsend!

"Just leave, and let the two of you get on with your treasonous little enterprise, is that it?! Well, it was you who made my bed yours, wench, and by God you'll lie in it! I was forced to speak vows with you and like it or not, you owe me. You're coming with me!"

Whitney pushed up from her chair, surprising them both back a step. "Y-you can't be serious-"

"I may be yoked to her, Daniels," Garner turned on Black furiously, "but it doesn't change a thing for you. You're still a distiller and I'm still duty-bound to hunt you down. And I'll do it-see if I don't!"

He dragged Whitney all the way out the door into the cold, sunny yard, before she realized what he intended. Black jolted after them, with Kate hanging onto his arm, struggling to hold him back, begging him not to make things worse.

"Just what do you think you're doing?!" Whitney screeched, casting a frantic look back over her shoulder at Kate and her father as she tried to dig her heels into the dusty yard.

"I said, you're coming with me, wench." Garner turned and reeled her toward him, grappling for a firm hold on her other arm. "You're my wife, remember?!"

"You don't want me! You let me go!" She pried his fingers futilely and shoved at his hands, twisting and turning so that her legs tangled in her own treacherous skirts.

"Wrong, wench. I do want you... where I can see you every damned minute of the day for the rest of the time I'm stuck in this pest-hole valley! That way I'll be sure of what you're up to."

"No! You can't make me go!" She found herself clamped hard against him and scuffled wildly, panic rising, her heart thumping painfully in her chest. He was taking her by force-making her his hostage! She wrenched violently about in his arms, and in the frantic flurry of battle reverted to the defensive habit of a lifetime. She raised his hand near her mouth and sank her teeth in!

"YEOWWW!" he howled, releasing her and contracting around his throbbing wound. "Dammit!" She skittered back, glaring venomously at him, and when he raised his pain-shocked gaze from the savage teethmarks on his hand, he caught Black Daniels's wicked smile and vengeful sneer: "I taught her that."

Garner quaked for a moment, then exploded, pounding his shoulder into her middle and up-ending her across him. The blood raging in his head nearly obscured the sight of Black Daniels being restrained by Whitney's Aunt Kate, who had wrapped herself bodily about his middle and wouldn't be dislodged.

"I'm taking her, Daniels!" Garner out-shouted her screeches and dodged her thumps, clamping her legs tight against his chest to keep her from thrashing off his shoulder. "And there's not a damned thing you can do about it!"

People came out of their houses to watch as the Iron Major strode into Rapture with his bride of one day slung indecorously across his shoulder. His face was bloodred, he was panting and steaming, and the fire in his eyes was hot enough to light damp kindling.

Resistance had long since been pounded from Whitney on that furious trek, and as she glimpsed boots and skirts, and suffered up-side down grins and stares and the giggles and hoots of the local children, she clamped her hands over her face and wished she'd just die and get it over with. Such humiliation-she managed a groan- a Daniels in such straits!

He charged into the inn and up the stairs, kicking open the door of the room he'd used and dumping her on the bed. He stood over her, his fists planted on his hips, as she reeled and struggled to rise. He was panting, hot, furious... abashed and infuriated by his own possessive behavior. And a moment later, he was assaulted by waves of sensual memory and spurred mercilessly by pride- Lord!-he was in pure primal chaos!

She righted herself enough to realize where they were and that he'd forcibly claimed her as his hostage... or his property! "You... can't do this..." she protested.

"Do what, wench?" he snarled, thrusting the provocative picture she presented aside as though it were poison. "Can't haul your precious bottom wherever I please? Can't despise you for what you've done to me? Can't blame you for the disaster you've made of my life? Oh, I can and will, wench. You belong to me, now."

"B-belong to you? That's absurd!" She tried desperately to think, to find a way to explain, to reason with him. The weight of his anger settled on her heart, forcing the desperate truth from it. "Look- I never meant- I only wanted to make you leave Rapture. I never wanted to marry you! I don't want to be married to anybody!"

"You don't, do you?" he snorted a bitter laugh that stung something in the middle of his chest as it escaped. He watched her rise slowly and step closer, her eyes swirling with desperation as she gathered herself. He braced as she came closer... closer. He could feel the warmth of her invading him again and was helpless to prevent it. Some part of him ached for it, wanted it still, even after everything that had happened.

"Marriage wasn't part of our... bargain," she muttered desperately, meeting his eyes, searching his tightly guarded expression. She knew she risked much by recalling, by conjuring the stunning intimacy they'd shared in the sheltering darkness of his bed. His beautiful eyes suddenly bore traces of pain that had been etched by passion's burning passage. Her stomach slid toward her knees. How could he seem so fierce and yet so vulnerable with the same look?

The air charged between them as each relived the sweet, steamy moment when the conditions of their joining were agreed. He had wanted her; she had wanted him. There had been no more than that; a splendid simplicity of desire freely given and returned. No promises, no conditions, no entailments. That same compelling desire was exerting its pull between them now, somehow stronger for having been so briefly and so memorably freed.

But simplicity of desire was a pure deception, Garner managed to understand. In seizing that bit of paradise, he'd abandoned the rest of his world, his connections, his obligations, and brought chaos down upon himself in the process. Nothing was ever as simple and as wonderful as the joy he found in her arms. Everything, he was coming to see-including that earthly paradise-had its price.

Perhaps Rapture's folk weren't so far from the mark after all.

"This time it appears you got a bit more than you bargained for, wench." He reverted to harshness to hide his own turmoil.

"But-marriage-it's a bargain of sorts too." Her resistance to him was melting again, making it difficult to think. "There has to be something we can do, some way to undo it."

"Not unless you can persuade the Almighty to change his mind, wench. We swore vows before Him, and I've been given to believe He takes such things rather seriously."

Those words, ground from his iron-bound soul, were the final knell against her freedom; he was going to make her stay his wife! A shiver went up her spine. She could only begin to guess what being married to a man like the Iron Major entailed. But for starters, he seemed to think it gave him license to manhandle and humiliate her as he pleased.

She dropped her gaze, and her shoulders drooped as she turned away. The riot of feeling occurring inside her prevented her from seeing his exit, from hearing the latch jiggled and jammed from the outside. More than she bargained for. His words taunted her. She'd bargained for a bit of pleasure, a sweet bit of womanly joy. And she'd gotten... married. She'd forgotten her pa, her people, her pride, the minute he took her into his arms and worked his gentlemanly raptures on her susceptible body. She was probably getting just what she deserved.

She went to the window and threw open the shutters to admit the cold afternoon air and sun. Her eyes began to burn as they swept the symmetrical rows of blotchy canvas tents in the camp below. A movement at the edge of the camp caught her eye and she recognized Charlie as he stood up, facing her, his concentration focused on the sight of her in the major's window. His features were indistinct, but something in his rigid stance, the intensity of his searching look spoke his anger. His image swam before Whitney's eyes as she watched his shoulders round and his gaze drop. He turned away and shuffled slowly to the far side of the tree. She blinked hard and squeezed the burning tears from her eyes. ... more than she bargained for.

The tavern was nearly filled with his men when Major Townsend descended the stairs. They'd been there when he had carried his bride up the stairs, and they had drunk a rowdy round to his connubial bliss. Now every one of them stopped dead, staring at him. He was a very different man from the fancy gent who'd ridden imperially at their head and insisted that everything be done with polish and precision. His elegant coat was held together with bits of bone, his fashionably half-cropped hair was unkempt and shaggy, there was a dark, three-day shadow on his face. And there was a lean, hard look to him, a flint to his eye that spoke of hard times and even harder luck. Now here was a man they could understand, a man they could follow.

"Just what in hell are the lot of you doing in here?" he growled, facing them.

"We wus jus' havin' a tilt, Majur," Sergeant Laxault rasped, raising his tankard in evidence. "And we wus waitin'... fer orders."

Garner tightened all over, his eyes narrowing on the tin cups they held in their hands. "Having a tilt of what?" He turned on Uncle Harvey, who stood behind the bar with a cherubic deviousness to his little smile. "Where in hell did you get that swill you're serving, Dedham?"

"Oh, I ain't charged 'em nothin' fer it, Majur," Uncle Harvey's grin broadened. "It be jus' the dregs o' that barrel ye cracked open at yer weddin'. There were quite a little bit o' it left."

"The hell there was-" Garner sneered. He had no lucid recollection of anything past a third cup of the swill, but he was sure that, with all his men participating vigorously in his "bridal fete," there couldn't have been much left. The wiley little innkeeper had simply taken advantage of the situation to import some new brew... and they both knew it. And they both knew it was the major's behavior that gave him license to do it!

"Dammit! Get rid of the rest of it, Dedham, or I'll smash the barrel myself." Then he turned on his men. "Put that rot-and-ruin down and get back to camp. We have a job to do."

They looked at each other, grins aborning, and did exactly what they were told.

Everywhere Garner Townsend went that afternoon, he was greeted with muffled grins and terse nods that bore a knowing, conspiratorial air. Uncle Radnor called him "son" in passing, Aunt Harriet Delaney mentioned that she had made pies that morning and offered him one to take to his bride, and everybody punctuated their answers to his questions with a wink. The pattern that had developed over the last two weeks was utterly reversed; nobody stopped talking or withdrew when he approached, nobody hid what they were working on or what they were eating or drinking, and instead of avoiding Dedham's tavern, everybody made it a point to bring in something to swap and the trading was brisk and spirited all day long.

It worked on him as he went about the settlement, the sly knowing quality of their actions, their new casualness with respect to him. By dusk, he was in a ripe mood, growing inversely more surly as their spirits rose. Lieutenant Brooks was more than happy to lead out the first patrol that evening, and at dusk, he watched with a sour expression as they tramped off into the woods. He knew they'd find nothing. He turned back to the camp and strolled through it, steeling his nerve before going inside to face her. He soon found himself near the far edge of camp, feeling Charlie Dunbar's resentful stare like a physical prod.

He stopped, staring at the strapping, muscular buck who had hoped to make Whiskey Daniels his wife. Charlie had wanted what he himself had taken, her virtue, the legal rights to her sensual, unpredictable person. Something in the bleakness of Charlie's resentment struck a resonant chord inside him. Would he have felt the same way if Charlie Dunbar had been the one to bed then wed her? A long, suffocating moment later, he was calling Charlie's guards, instructing them to remove the shackles and set Charlie free.

Tension settled on the camp in the closing darkness, and as word of Charlie's release spread among the men, they raced to witness it. Charlie's gaze never waivered from the major as his bonds were loosened and removed. His muscular arms flexed as his fists tightened and his brown eyes heated so that they glowed like living coals of resentment. He knew why the major was setting him free, just like he knew the real reason the major had kept him in chains these last two weeks... and he hated it.

They faced each other briefly and Garner jerked his head toward the clearing path. Charlie strode for his home without looking back. Garner watched until he was out of sight, ignoring the hushed talk around him, then headed for the tavern.

But he stopped short of going inside, leaning wearily against the wall, looking about the placid clearing. He dreaded facing her, especially since he had locked her in his room for the afternoon. Not an especially bright thing to do, he realized. She'd be venom-spitting furious by now and he was in no mood for one of their volatile confrontations.

He finally surrendered to the urge to think about her and about what had happened to him. He had wanted Whiskey Daniels with every straining sinew of his man's body. He had ached to possess those saucy lips, that sun-kissed ginger hair, those sleek muscular legs, those rosy,responsive nipples, that firm, rounded bottom. And he'd finally had them. Lord, how he'd had them! He'd never experienced such sensual delight with a woman-never gone to sleep in a woman's soft, silky arms before.

He tried to shake off a sudden and very unwelcome arousal. He'd been foully seduced, then generously pleasured straight into paradise. He'd been ruthlessly driven to drink, then tenderly nursed back to health. He'd been forced to marry a backwoods wench who strutted and bargained and bit him, and who brought him to full, crowning tumescence every time she came within three feet of him! He'd wanted her; well now he had her. What in bloody hell was he going to do with her... for the rest of his natural life?

The sound of his name roused him from such dread reflections. He looked up to find young Robbie Dedham staring at him with another of those worrisome grins he'd been seeing all day on the faces of the local folk.

"Where'd ye want yer supper tonight, Uncle Townsend? That Benson o'yers sent me to ask. Up in yer room or down in th' tavern wi' the rest of us?"

"Uncle Townsend?" he stiffened, looking at Robbie's guileless countenance.

"Uncle Townsend?!"

"Wull, I don' rightly know yer Christ-un name," Robbie read his shock with a puzzled frown.

Garner stared at him stupidly; unable to summon a single thought.

"Ain't Uncle Townsend all right?" Young Dedham took a wary step back. "Uncle Majur sounds kinda odd."

"Dammit." Garner merely breathed it. He was one of the "uncles" now, at least to young Dedham and Rapture's juvenile set. They'd accepted him into their midst, into their society as if... as if he'd married into the bloody family!

Good God. That accounted for the strange tenor of their interactions with him all afternoon, accepting and even discounting his presence, going on about their lives with an air of relief. They'd included him, accepted him into their midst, into their bizarre communal family. Those grins and winks and little offers of pie and small talk were all gestures of inclusion!