Free Rebel by Heather Graham

sword!—but she was further infuriated to find herself absolutely impotent against him.
    She couldn’t bear it. Not a second longer. Pride be damned, truth be damned, nothing mattered but that she escape him and the fiery brand his length seemed to be imprinting upon her.
    “Please…” she just barely managed to breathe the word.
    She shook.
    The whole of her seemed to burn. She had never known such physical distress in all her life.
    She was ready to beg for release and agree with anything the man had to say just to gain her distance from him and put some clothing between them.
    Too late.
    For even as her whispered plea sounded from her lips, she heard the movement of foliage.
    And voices.
    People…
    “Oh!” An appalled hurt feminine sound.
    “Oh!” A furious, shocked masculine sound.
    “Ohhhh
…” spoken simultaneously.
    She froze. Indeed, there were people behind her. She wanted to sink into the water and disappear. Forever.
    There was, certainly, something of the gentleman in Ian McKenzie. For several seconds he was as frozen as she. Then he moved: swiftly, deliberately. Alaina discovered that she was no longer flush against his chest, but propelled protectively behind his back.
    Yet over his shoulder she could see that the McKenzies’ private Eden was not so very private.
    The very, very rich, elegant, and beautiful Mrs. Lavinia Trehorn, her brown hair artfully piled in a riot of curls atop her head, stood at the water’s edge near Ian’s discarded military-issue blue dress uniform and Alaina’s own neatly folded feminine attire.
    Peter O’Neill, his cheeks lobster red, his breath rushing in and out of pursed lips, stood at her side, taut and rigid with fury.
    “Oh, Lavinia, you were right!” he grated out, shaking. “You do know Ian, and indeed, you knew where he could be found, and Miss McMann is very definitely with him, so it appears! Yes, they are certainly together. And he is—what was it you said, Lavinia? He is ‘comforting the poor lamb’—and doing so quite well. In fact they both looked damned comfortable, I’d say!”
    “Ian McKenzie!” Lavinia said with stark reproach, her perfectly formed lips trembling ever so slightly with an even more perfectly formulated dramatic touch. “Ian, I thought that, oh…”
    She appeared angelic, and wounded. She looked as if she would faint.
    Still, it was Peter’s next single word that seemed to ring in the pine forest long moments after the two of them had spun about and departed back to Cimarron—with the latest, most incredible gossip.
    For Peter stared long and hard at Alaina, cheeks red and puffed, eyes burning with offended fury as he lashed out, “Whore!”

Chapter 4
    “H e is an unmitigated ass, and I’ll kill the damned bastard!” Ian murmured in a deadly voice.
    Alaina barely heard him.
    She had to escape the pool. She had to get back to Cimarron and find her father before others did. She didn’t know what she was going to say.
    The truth. Her father would believe her.
    Yet as she streaked across the water, a sudden cramp knifed into her leg. She gasped, clutching her calf. Ian swam up beside her, eyes almost black now with fury, yet his voice, though very deep and husky, was surprisingly calm. “What is it?”
    He was reaching for her.
    “No! No! Don’t you touch me! Don’t you come near me again!”
    He arched a brow, then swam past her, believing her words.
    But the pain knifed through her again. She allowed herself to fall beneath the water’s surface while she tried valiantly to massage her cramped limb and bring functioning life back to it. She ran out of air and tried to surface. She couldn’t kick.
Float!
she commanded herself. She surfaced, but the pain was so intense she went down again.
    Incredulous, she realized that she—Alaina McMann, who had been swimming all her life, who could hold her breath well over two minutes—was drowning. Again, little black dots were forming before her eyes. They were beginning