Lily's Secrets [Elk Creek 1] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) Read Free

had enough aches and pains with which to deal.
    She thought of the laudanum in the kitchen cabinet back home that she used for her monthly. Doctor Hopwood prescribed it to her like he did many of the women in town. It was the only thing that had ever helped with the cramps and headaches. She wondered if the stranger’s “people” used the equivalent for aches and pains like hers and knew that with the way she was hurting it would take a lot of something to alleviate it and help her heal.
    After Lily had gotten her fill of the water, she felt him pat her face with a cool, damp cloth and tried not to grimace. She didn’t want to make him feel worse than she already had.
    “I thought you were dead when I found you,” he murmured.
    To everyone she knew and loved she might as well be.
    I can’t go back. I can never go back . “I am dead.”
    Distantly, Lily heard the bell over the entrance chime, but she didn’t open her eyes right away, too deeply enmeshed in the past. Despite the pain of the memories and her shame, she wanted to sink into the liquid warm feeling washing over her. She hadn’t felt like this, like a woman to be desired, in a long time, not since before the attack and her rescue.
    Wyatt had been treating her as if she was a piece of fine china since her return, and under normal circumstances this might have been acceptable, except that she wasn’t a piece of dinnerware. She was a warm-blooded, living, breathing being and she had needs.
    Her husband, however, seemed only able to tolerate her presence, as if out of duty rather than desire and enjoyment. She didn’t blame Wyatt. He was an honorable man caught in a bad situation. She just didn’t like being anyone’s millstone. She didn’t want his pity any more than she wanted the town people’s pity, and this had been one of the main reasons she’d chosen to stay with the Kiowas even after she had given birth. She had been beaten, left for dead and unsure of what else had happened to her in between. With that doubt tormenting her every step, she’d felt unfit to any longer be the wife of a good man. Had the encampment not been attacked and most of the tribe slaughtered, she’d be with them even now—her and her son. The encampment had been attacked, however, and she had…her son had perished with everyone else, everyone else except her.
    He had just been a baby, barely four. Why had God seen fit to let her live and her son die?
    “Hmm, looks to me like someone is fantasizing about a handsome young married homesteader.”
    Lily’s eyes shot open at the sultry purr, and she rested her gaze on the statuesque blonde standing at the end of the aisle smiling at her.
    “Hello, Miss Morgan.”
    “I told you before you can call me Rebel, unless the name sticks in your craw.”
    “No, not at all…Rebel.” She liked the way the name sounded on her tongue and appreciated the privilege the woman had allowed her. Evidently, Rebel appreciated it, too, for her violet eyes twinkled.
    “No need to blush, darlin’. I’d be fantasizing in the middle of the afternoon, too, if I had a husband as good looking as your’n.” Rebel chuckled, not unkindly, but it made Lily’s face even hotter. Maybe it was her compliment of Wyatt’s looks. Lily knew she had a fine-looking husband, at least she had always found him so. It just always unsettled her when other women noticed him the same way, especially someone as beautiful and worldly-wise as Rebel Morgan.
    “Are you harassing the customers again, Rebel?”
    Lily glanced past the other woman to see Maia stroll into the aisle behind her.
    Maia easily placed a hand on Rebel’s shoulder though Rebel stood head and shoulders above Maia’s petite height. Lily loved that about the Negro woman, had from the first moment she’d met her. Maia didn’t let anything or anyone intimidate her, not even Wyatt, who had given her his best, flinty-eyed cowboy look upon first meeting her and could intimidate anyone with the