Rafe and Dennis got to Galvano before the dogs were thoroughly roused by the blood pouring from his nose and mouth. Sadie kept rearing, and I got a round-about glimpse of Jerry's arrival, but Rafe bellowed at him to investigate the fire. Dennis appeared to be trying to protect Galvano from Rafe's flying fists when a bullhorn blasted the confusion. The staunch defenders of law and order had arrived, stopped by the electronically sealed gate.
Albert was now clinging to Sadie's bridle, yelling to me something about the pitchfork. I nearly skewered him, but he wrenched it from my hand. Then Dennis was shouting at me to get off so he could let the cops in.
And really, the whole scene was unbelievable. And got more so. There was Albert, like some diabolic gnome, holding a pitchfork inches from Galvano's chest as the man lay groaning in the dust; Dennis riding like a centaur out of the yard; and Jerry coping with the unwieldy bulk of a foam extinguisher, demanding to know where the goddamned fire was.
Rafe caught hold of my wrist, jerking me half off my feet and into Orfeo's stall. He flipped me over his knee. and proceeded to pound my bottom with a hard and merciless hand until I begged him to stop.
"I told you to stay in the house, Goddamnit, Nialla."
"You love me. You love me. You love me," I screamed at him from the straw, weeping with joy and pain.
He grabbed me up and began shaking me, his face a blur of soot-streaked white, his blazing eyes my point of focus.
"You ever, ever disobey me like that again, Nialla Clery, and I will wear the hide off your ass with a crop."
"You love me. Say it. You love me!"
He stopped shaking me, glaring ferociously.
"Of course I love you!" He roared it louder than the bullhorn. "Why in hell did you think I married you, you witless woman?"
He was dragging me out of the stall just as Sheriff Erskine heaved himself out of the first squad car.
"Mrs. Clery wasn't harmed, was she?"
"Harmed?" Rafe snapped the word out so violently Erskine backed up hastily. "No, she's not harmed!" Then Rafe took a deep breath and a tighter hold on my wrist, pulling me past Erskine to where two troopers were hauling the dazed and bleeding Galvano to his feet.
Before anyone could interfere, Rafe had grabbed Galvano by the jacket front.
"What in hell were you trying to do to my wife… you…"
Galvano started screaming for hell, the cops tried to peel Rafe's hand loose, stepping on my bare feet because Rafe had not let go of my wrist, and there were all these heavy bodies crushing me.
I'm not sure how everyone got untangled, but then Galvano was sobbing out that he hadn't been doing anything wrong. Rafe yelled louder that he was a murderer, a pyro. Only the troopers got Galvano into the police car and jack rabbited off.
"Now, just a goddamned minute there, Clery," Erskine started bellowing, because Rafe transferred his fury to Erskine, but Dennis and Jerry intervened. "You cool off or you'll get served with assaulting an officer."
"Berserk" was the only word for the expression on Rafe's face. I was sick with fear. And staggering, started to fall. Fainting!
I didn't, but it had the desired effect, Rafe even caught me before I hit the ground.
"Nialla! Nialla! Now, look what you've done, you goddamned fuzz head. Jerry, get Bauman here!"
Rafe practically raced to the house with me, all the time Erskine bellowing his ineffectual, "Now, just a minute there, Clery," in our wake.
It seemed advisable to come to my senses the moment Rafe laid me on the couch so he'd think of something else besides his quarrel with the Sheriff. I groaned and waggled my head, but I couldn't look Rafe in the eye after pulling such a stunt. I caught glimpses of Erskine's pale face, though. Was he scared of swooning women, or had he just realized what a beating I'd saved him?
At any rate, by the time Bauman arrived, everyone had calmed down, and sane conversation was possible.
I was one mass of bruises and lacerations. I wasn't very comfortable lying down either, but I could hardly explain that to the doctor. However, he did bandage the worst cuts on my feet and put something aromatic on my incipient bruises, all the time scolding me for being such a goddamned fool. I couldn't defend myself at all because the screaming excitement earlier had rendered me mute. So I lay wan, tired, and disgustingly smug while the others hashed over the events.
Michaels was contacted and had advised us he was returning immediately. Suddenly a stickler for the forms of law, Erskine said he could charge Galvano only with trespass, arson, and assault and battery. I had perjured myself with a nod to the fact that J recognized him as my attacker in the stable.
How he got on the property was a trifle embarrassing for Rafe, because in an effort to get Wendy Madison back in her own house quickly, Rafe had unlocked the side gate, leaving it unlocked while he and Michaels drove her home. Galvano had evidently been hiding on the grounds, seen his opportunity, and taken it. He'd made it to the west meadow and set the dry grass afire. When Rafe and the others arrived, with the dogs, he'd hightailed it up to the house. Only it was locked. So he'd set the barrel fire and phoned me to be sure I knew the peril in which my horse was. What he intended to do when he'd captured me, we never knew. I don't like to speculate.
Michaels landed in the charred west meadow, and his arrival cleared everyone out of the house. The thunder I could hear outside was nothing to the storm in my husband's face. My fanny began to smart, and I slipped my hands over it protectingly, trying to make myself very small in the couch as he loomed, Big Chief Lightning Eyes, over me.
"All right, Nialla Donnelly, you've been getting away with murder, but the crisis is now over, and you, young lady, are going to behave yourself. If you ever disobey a direct and reasonable order from me again, and if you ever pull another stunt like that stagy faint…" Then his grim expression softened, and he was sitting on the couch and pulling me into his arms, his hands roughly tender. "Of course I love you, Nialla Clery."
"But you never said it."
"Did I have to?" he demanded fiercely, looking deeply into my eyes. "It's so easy to say." His lips twisted bitterly.
I thought of two discarded wives, Amazons who'd been anything but economical. I thought of his mother, and I wanted to kill her and them. Instead I held his soot-smeared face in my hands and tried to iron out the bitter lines with my fingertips.
"No, it's not easy to say, Rafe Clery. If you mean it and it's all you have to offer."
"All you have.."." The twist in his smile straightened out. "If you do mean it, Nialla, say it?"
In his eyes was that unexpected vulnerability and wariness that I'd glimpsed before, and an intense yearning that had nothing whatever to do with physical lust. In the second I had this clear view to the core of a complex personality, I experienced an elation, a humility, and a womanly wisdom that made me simultaneously maternal, wanton, and sad.
"I love you, Rafe Clery. I love you very much in many ways I didn't know a woman could love a man. I fell in love with you when you walked into the stall beside Orfeo. I hated every woman who had ever ridden in that car and worn your scarves. I nearly cried when you walked out of the stable after dinner like an operatic Prussian. And after we rode together that morning-as if we'd done it all our lives-I hated myself because I was so damned inadequate for you. No,, you shut up and listen. It was absolutely indecent of you to appear in that excuse of a bathing suit you wear. It was a dirty, dirty trick, Rafael Clery, and I only just realized that you knew exactly what you were doing to me, even then…"
The smile in his eyes, on his lips, was real, and his hands seemed to move with joy on my body as he swung me around, cradling my head on his chest in the crook of his arm. My voice was coming back, but still breaking now and then, and he cuddled me, with this idiotic smile on his face.