Ride the Wind: Touch the Wind Book Two Read online

  RIDE THE WIND

  by

  Erinn Ellender Quinn

  Ride the Wind (Touch the Wind Book 2)

  © 2016 Erinn Ellender Quinn

  Edited by Anita Quick and Anne Bright

  Cover Design and Layout by Crystal Visions

  Stock Photography from bigstockphoto.com

  Interior Layout by Anita Quick

  Length 70,090 words / 244 6x9 pages

  All rights reserved on original material, which may not be reproduced or used without the written consent of the author, except for brief quotes in reviews. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or any other means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this book. Such action is in violation of the U.S. Copyright Law.

  Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  First Edition

  Amazon ASIN B01LX6ZVBS

  Long Branch Books

  Shattuc, Illinois

  Look for these erotic romance titles

  by Erinn Ellender Quinn

  writing as Nia Farrell:

  THE THREE GRACES SERIES e-books:

  SOMETHING ELSE (The Three Graces Book One)

  SOMETHING DIFFERENT (The Three Graces Book Two)

  SOMETHING MORE (The Three Graces Book Three), nominated for Best BDSM Book of the Year, Ménage Category, 2016 Golden Flogger Awards

  THE THREE GRACES TRILOGY paperback

  Contains SOMETHING ELSE, SOMETHING DIFFERENT,

  and SOMETHING MORE

  SOMETHING SPECIAL (The Three Graces Book Six – sequel to SOMETHING ELSE) e-book and paperback

  DARK MOONS RISING e-book and paperback

  REPLAY BOOK 1: VIKING RAID e-book and paperback

  AS WICKED AS YOU WANT (Forever Ours Book 1) e-book and paperback

  REPLAY BOOK 2: TRIPLE PLAY e-book and paperback

  by Nia Farrell and Jane Austen

  PRIDE AND PUNISHMENT—AN EROTIC RETELLING OF JANE AUSTEN’S BELOVED CLASSIC

  e-book, paperback, and large print

  DEDICATION

  To my Wiccan and pagan friends, my psychic friends, my teachers, students, and spiritual family who have shared this journey with me. The road is long and winding, but it always leads us home, time and time again.

  ~ Erinn

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Preface

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Epilogue

  Author’s Bio and Books

  PREFACE

  This book will be the exception to most rules. It’s the second book in my Touch the Wind series but the first to be released. It’s a paranormal historical romance, and the sex scenes are more poetic than graphic—a departure from the erotic romance that I’ve been writing as Nia Farrell.

  And it’s truth written as fiction.

  I didn’t realize it when I wrote the first book Touch the Wind, a swashbuckling romance about an Irish sea captain’s daughter who is determined to break her father out of a Jamaican prison. She succeeds (spoiler alert here) but he’s wounded while escaping. Book Two Ride the Wind opens with Ian O’Malley at death’s door, brought home—he thinks—to die…except his stubborn Scots-born beekeeper is just as determined to save him. It wasn’t until I was well into the book, and found myself falling in love with Ian all over again, that I realized I was writing my story, one of the more than seventy past lives that I remember.

  There are seven standalone books in this series. Six books are traditional swashbuckling romances set in the Caribbean, with the timeline flowing from Book One to Three, Four, Five, Six, and Seven. The action in Ride the Wind is removed from the others; the story takes place in Tidewater Maryland. Book One is its prequel; Books Three through Seven, its sequels.

  If you’re reading this and aren’t a big paranormal fan but you do like pirates-of-the-Caribbean romances, please check out the rest of the series. If you’re into paranormal, the heroine in this book is an empathic, telepathic healer and animal communicator. The heroine of Book Five has faulty second sight which creates no end of problems, to see and not understand, to look and misinterpret, to act on what you think is right only to discover you’re horribly wrong. Except for Beth Gordon in Ride the Wind (Touch the Wind Book Two) and Comfort McBride in Chase the Wind (Touch the Wind Book Five), the rest of the ladies are feisty, independent women who rely on rational thinking, female intuition, and the whispers of their hearts to guide them.

  But I’m launching the series with this book, Ride the Wind, a paranormal historical romance inspired by the love of my life in another time, another place, on another plane of existence, where on nights of the full and new moons, and at the eight turnings of the Wheel of the Year, I would dance with starlight in my hair.

  RIDE THE WIND

  Prologue

  The Oaks Plantation, Tidewater Maryland

  June 6, 1727

  Is it Tuesday? Feels like Tuesday. God have mercy, spare me another….

  Tuesday? Beth Gordon pulled her attention from the poultice she was making to listen to her patient’s pain-fueled, fevered thoughts. When they’d brought him in half an hour ago, she’d had him carried into the overseer’s cottage, next to her mam’s, for easier tending. To their misfortune, her midwife mother was gone to a neighbor’s for a birthing, leaving Beth alone to deal with Captain Ian O’Manion, the man who owned their indentures, a man who’d arrived at death’s door.

  A man who wanted to dance right through it, when he couldn’t even walk.

  Let me go.

  “I cannae.”

  Her soft words were chosen with care and were not lightly spoken. Even now, she felt the weight of them on her shoulders and her back as she braced herself to touch him, knowing what would happen when she did. It didn’t help that she was being watched like a hawk. But his man would be gone soon enough, leaving just the ghost in the corner.

  Lieutenant Mick McGuire spared her from taking off the Captain’s clothes, at least, and for that much she was grateful. She quizzed him on her patient’s history but knew better than to question how he came to be in such a sorry state, with broken ribs, bruises, and contusions, shot in the side with no exit wound. The bullet was gone, but infection threatened to finish what his assailant had failed to do: kill him.

  Please don’t make me stay. I want to go. I’m ready. Let me die.

  “Nay. I’m sorry,” she whispered, and braced herself to hurt him anew, though it would be no more than necessary and it would hurt her just as much. His wounds had to be cleaned, treated, bound, and there was no help for it, the pain she knew she would bring him, this man whose e
nergy was so fouled, she felt violated just being near it.

  She touched him, and she wanted to vomit.

  Goddess, she pleaded. Give me strength.

  Oh, God. Dear God.

  Beth didn’t know if the thought was his, or hers, or theirs. Later, when they were alone, she would say what she couldn’t with his lieutenant here. She would tell him that it wasn’t his fault, that she would never judge him, that he was home now, and safe. That life could go on, more grand and glorious than he ever dared to dream. That he had reasons to live, things beyond his conception. Foals to raise and grandchildren to dandle upon his knee and a small village’s worth of bondservants who depended on his survival and good fortune. He had a future, a wonderful, magickal future, if only he believed.

  Don’t lie to me.

  I’m nae. Can ye nae feel the truth of it fer yerself? she silently challenged him.

  He didn’t rouse, didn’t speak, didn’t respond. She waited for the longest time. Then, finally, from a sad, haunted corner of his mind came his confession. Feel the truth? No, he thought. How can I?

  If she didn’t know it before, she knew then that her work was cut out for her. Healing a body was one thing. Healing mind and spirit took a great deal more.

  Beth tended the small things first, worked her way up to the angry flesh that wept with putrefaction. McGuire kept his hawk eyes on her the entire time, until at last she stood and stretched her back and washed the Captain’s blood and gore from her hands. McGuire, who’d kept quiet while she was working, spoke only when he turned to go.

  “They said to tell ye, ‘don’t leave the bottle.’ They said ye’d know what it meant.”

  The laudanum on the table, suddenly and for no explainable reason, tipped over.

  Aye, she knew what it meant. Desperate people did desperate things. The last man who’d slept in this bed had been hurt, too. He’d asked Captain O’Manion’s niece to leave the bottle one night, and he’d finished it off, ending his life but not his existence.

  Beth looked at the smiling ghost in the corner and shivered.

  Chapter One

  For two days Ian fought her, but the bitch wouldn’t let him go. Wouldn’t let him die, no matter how much he begged and pleaded and insisted that it was the only way to be free of the pain.

  Instead she’d tip the spoon and let him sink into another poppy dream, grateful and resentful at once, glad that he didn’t hurt—at least for a while—and hating her for keeping him here, knowing the pain would inevitably return. Her mother Jannet had taken one look and given him up. Why couldn’t she?

  Bitch.

  “Aye?”

  There she was, at it again. Listening to his thoughts.

  Can’t a man have any privacy?

  She chuckled, and the sound threatened to roll over him like a patch of sunshine on a partly cloudy day. Too bad it was the dark of the moon, else he might have been tempted to pry open his eyes and look through the doorway at her, propped in the chair she’d had brought from the big house, her slim bare feet stretched on a matching ottoman and that damned fox in her lap.

  Granted, it was more comfortable than the bedroom floor, which is where he first saw them curled up together, looking as if a fairy princess and her Otherworldly pet had somehow managed to get trapped this side of the Veil. In his first moment of consciousness since landing here, he had been struck speechless, unable to do anything but look upon the pair until he’d drifted off and gotten lost in the nether-lands once more, but this time he’d taken with him the memory of her.

  Elsbeth Gordon. Twenty-one years old and three years left in service, if he could stand to keep her that long. The way she listened—or refused to—was all the more incentive to sell her papers or trade her off to someone else who could handle a Scots-born beekeeper with wild red curls and Caribbean blue eyes—

  And you didn’t think I noticed. Sorry. Habit.

  Ian lay there in the dark, debating whether he really wanted to grasp that thread of lucidity. Because it wasn’t Tuesday, he decided. What the hell. Give it a shot. Gradually he became aware of his surroundings, the bed he lay in, the extra cloth girding his loins like a bloody infant. Listening to his body, thirty-six years old going on a hundred, he wondered how he could feel so much pain and yet nothing else worked. Laudanum?

  Damned if she didn’t bring it to him.

  Maybe I’ll keep you after all.

  She ducked inside the insect netting, lifted his head, dosed him with the invalid spoon, and gently returned him to the supine position. She left him, and from beyond the opened bedroom door, he could hear her pulling shut all the curtains and rearranging furniture—an odd occupation for another late shift on an endless watch, but it was the tune she hummed that reached out and caught his interest. He listened, intrigued.

  Normally, he would sink into oblivion as soon as his head touched the pillow, but this time, this time he stayed a little longer, hanging on to curiosity, wondering about this bondservant who didn’t obey and gave him fits, this woman who slept with foxes and talked to bees.

  Normally he’d be asleep before she lit another candle and put a knife and cup and some dishes and things on the table she’d placed across the way. Normally he’d be insensate when she started peeling off the layers of civilization until she stood naked before the altar of her conscience. Normally he wouldn’t feel the circle she cast, or hear the wordless prayers she raised, or see the new moon rite she performed but he had gone outside himself again and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it except be glad that, if she was a witch, she was at least a good one.

  Beth did a healing ritual, using the dark of the moon to cleanse what she could without his permission. The Captain resisted her at every turn, and that made it so much harder than it should have been, than it could have been, but she knew better than to force the issue. He needed time and space, understanding and patience.

  More patience than she feared she had.

  She put her own life on hold for him. She had personal issues to attend, chores, and tasks, and responsibilities that still needed done, and the longer he kept hidden away, the harder it would be to pull him back, complete.

  What he’d experienced would have shattered a weaker man. Even now, she wasn’t certain that she could find all the pieces.

  Lord and Lady, I pray for strength. For the both of us.

  Beth looked beyond the sacred space she’d created. The Captain lay on the rope bed, eyes closed, his breath growing shallower as the fever he’d been fighting took hold. She felt him start to slip away. Don’t ye dare, she warned him, hastening to finish with respect, to complete the ceremony, and dissolve the circle. By the time she did, he was delirious, thrashing in his sleep, beyond physical pain but in a place far worse, a place where Beth feared she might have to go, too.

  He didn’t understand what it demanded, didn’t know what it would take.

  Then let me go.

  “Nay. I cannae,” she whispered, and climbed into bed to lie with him, stretching her length beside and against him. His need was such that she managed to deny her body its natural rhythm and held back the moontide that she would otherwise have started. Wrapping him in her arms, touching her forehead to his, sharing his breath even as she put one hand over his heart, she knew his suffering, she felt what he’d experienced, and ultimately took on his pain.

  There were long, long minutes of ebb and flow, taking and releasing, diving back in when her instinct for survival urged her to cut the cords and run. It took everything she had, everything she was, everything she never guessed she could be, to go with him to the gates of his hell and bring him back. It took hours. It took all night.

  And it very nearly killed her.

  “Let me go.”

  Ian almost smiled. “That’s my line,” he quipped, wondering, as he became ever more conscious, how he came to have a naked woman in his arms. They were lying in the overseer’s bed, her without a stitch, him swaddled like an infant. The sheets were
kicked down, and not because they’d spent the night romping beneath the insect netting that surrounded them.

  Full awareness returned with a vengeance: where he was, what he was, who she was.

  Damn you. Why couldn’t you just let me die?

  He felt her stiffen and resisted looking into her eyes. When he did, he saw the hurt and regretted being the cause of it. She probably thought him selfish, to want to leave this all behind. Elsbeth Gordon, with her wild red curls and eyes the color of Aruba, with her soft pink mouth and pretty teeth and cheeks that said she still knew how to blush, lying like a virgin in his arms when by all rights she should have been burying him.

  “And how did we come to this?” he asked her. Really asked her. None of this drug-induced, mind-reading, out-of-body stuff.

  His beekeeper blinked, taken aback, as if searching for an answer that would suffice.

  She had none.

  “Ye’ve been ill.”

  Ian frowned. “I’m wearing a damned diaper. I suppose that’s clue enough.”

  She glanced away, blushing brilliantly. “Do ye want the chamber pot? If ye can use it, I’ll help.”

  “Jaysus, Joseph and Mary,” he groused. A chamber pot.

  Still, it was better than a wet diaper.

  Bloody hell.

  He’d never been so embarrassed, to need her help unswaddling. Her, naked as a lark in the morning, and him, weak as a kitten, too puny to do more than sit propped on the side of the bed and make a dribble of a stream in the pot she placed between his feet. Still, it felt prodigiously like the road to recovery when he managed it.

  She tucked him back in bed when he was done, and through the gauzy panels, he watched her get dressed and clear the table of its odd assortment of things while he ignored the ghost in the corner. Poor Philip, stuck this side of the Jordan as surely as he was. She should have found a way to help Philip’s spirit get free and clear of this cottage instead of tormenting him into sticking around.