The Darkest Heart Read Online Free PDF

and snarled into her face. “I think you have one hell of a preoccupation with my raping you,”
    She blinked. His breath was warm on her face, and her heart was beating thickly.
    “Does it excite you, the thought of my raping you while you slept?” He shook her once. “Does it?”
    “No,” she whimpered.
    He tilted her chin up until it touched his. His beard was rough and scratchy. His lips, up close, were beautiful. “Does the thought of a half-breed taking you, driving his shaft into you, deep, hard”—his hand slid into her hair and anchored itself—“does that excite you?”
    “No.”
    He abruptly released her and stood. “When are you going to figure it out?” His tone was disgusted. “This breed isn’t going to rape you, and he’s not going to scalp you, and he’s not going to kill you.”
    She sat trembling, still feeling his hurtful touch on her bare skin, the tingly warmth of his breath. When she looked up, he was gone.
    Stunned, she sat very still, then carefully looked around. He was gone. She choked on a sob—of rear and despair. Then she hugged her arms tightly over her bosom. He hadsaid he wasn’t going to rape or kill or scalp her. That should have been reassuring. It wasn’t.
    What ugly things he had said.
    Her heart still hadn’t slowed its tempo. If he wasn’t going to use her or kill her, then what did ne have in store for her? She froze up thinking about her only other possible fate. Maybe, being a half-breed, he was one of those men who sold white women to the Indians, into slavery. It really didn’t matter that he himself wasn’t going to rape her; what mattered was that if he wasn’t going to kill her, it meant he was going to pass her along—in one way or another. She thought of the woman who had had four half-breed children. She would die before bearing a half-breed, or any bastard, for that matter. She would die before submitting to multiple rape.
    A horse snorted.
    Candice whirled to see his stallion nosing the dry gama grass, hobbled with twisted rawhide. She couldn’t believe her luck.
    She yanked on her clothes frantically, as fast as she could, stumbling over her pant legs. She shrugged on the boots and ran to the black horse, breathless, managing to restrain herself when his head shot up and his ears went back. The whites of his eyes showed. He bared his teeth.
    “Shhh, shhh, good boy,” she crooned softly. The stallion seemed to have the same temperament as his owner. Like his owner, he was also big, and although Candice was an expert horsewoman, she felt a shiver of apprehension. She ignored it. She reached her hand out slowly to stroke the thick corded neck. The stallion swung his hindquarters away, moving awkwardly because of the hooble, but then he began to relax.
    “Good boy,” she whispered. “Good, good boy.”
    She grabbed the red saddle blanket and swung it on, then the forty-pound saddle. The stallion had lost interest in her, fortunately, and was nibbling on the grass as she cinched up the girth. She was panting from her efforts, from the hurrying, from the fear. She threw the reins over his neck, crooning nonsense softly, and bent and untied the hobble. She tossed it aside, threw a nervous glance over her shoulder. Thank God,
he
was nowhere to be seen. She lifted one leg to put one foot in the stirrup and swing up.
    “Don’t get on that horse,” Jack warned from behind her.
    Her foot found the iron, and Candice grabbed the pommel desperately. His hands closed around her waist, and she felt a vast despair. He set her on the ground and she twisted around, furious with frustration, her fists coming up to bang against his chest. He grabbed her hands and stilled them. Behind him, the stallion shifted uneasily.
    “Are you a horse thief, too?”
    “I wasn’t stealing your horse!”
    He yanked her hard, pulling her up against him, thigh to thigh, chest to breast. “On, I see. You were in the mood for a ride in the park?”
    “Let me go!” she