Dorothy Garlock (21 page)

“Annielove, Annielove . . .”

His mouth moved and she felt the gentle stroking of his tongue over kiss-swollen lips that remained still and parted. The wet sweetness continued to lick, and caress, to feel along the sharpness of her teeth, to explore her inner lips, to withdraw only to enter her mouth again. She thought only of the sweetness, of the gentle, healing touch. He drew back a second time and his hand came up to the back of her head and cradled it.

“What’s happened to us?” she whispered between quick breaths. Tears glistened in the corners of her eyes.

“Don’t you know?” He kissed the soft skin of her temples, then moved to her eye and tasted the salty tear that hung there. “I’ve known for some time that there was something rare and wonderful between us.”

“We’re in love.” They breathed the words together. Hers a question, his a statement.

She drew a deep, quivering breath and began to smile. Looking down into her wide, clear eyes, he laughed, intimately, joyously, lifted her off her feet, and swung her around.

With his face buried in the softness of her hair, his words tumbled over each other. “I love you, love you so much. You’re so beautiful! I’ve not been able to think of anything but you. Do you really love me? Do you? You like my home? You like Berrywood? You’ll stay and be my love!” His mind was empty of everything except her. “And I love you, love you, love you . . .” The words trailed off as his mouth traced the pattern of his love.

“Jefferson.” His name came shivering and sweet from her throat.

Their lips caught and clung, released and smiled, caught again. Their kisses spoke not of passion, but of newly discovered love. His lips covered her face, stopping at each closed eye to feel the flutter of it, moved down her smooth cheeks to lips that waited, warm and eager.

“Say it, sweetheart. Say it.”

“Jefferson . . . I love you.” Her whispered words came haltingly.

He laughed and laughed and hugged her tighter. “Was it so hard to say?”

She squirmed and rubbed her ear against his shoulder. To her surprise a giggle bubbled out of her. “It’s so new!”

“For me, too,” he confessed huskily.

“When did you know?”

“The night you came here and told me you wanted to love and be loved, and that you wanted your man to be the other part of you . . . after we shared a real kiss.” He took a strand of her hair between his fingers, one that had come loose from his nuzzling, and held it to his face.

The moon was well on its way across the sky and they had scarcely noticed it. An owl hooted nearby. Long habits of vigilance are hard to break, and Jeff lifted his head to listen. The call came again, and he relaxed.

Arms entwined, they moved back toward the house. When they came to the bank, Jeff jumped up to the higher ground, then reached down to pull her laughingly up and into his arms. They exchanged quick, sweet kisses before moving on. They reached the split rail fence and paused again. They stopped at the lilac bush and Jeff picked a blossom and tickled her nose with it. Never was a night so beautiful, nor air so sweet, nor a future so full of promise.

They sat down on the bench at the front of the house. Jeff wrapped his arm around her and fitted her shoulder into his armpit. Her thigh nestled against his thigh, her head fitted into just the right place on his shoulder.

“There’s so much I want to say,” she murmured.

“And I just want to look at you and hold you,” he whispered and turned her to tuck her more closely against his chest, facing him so he could still see her expression.

“Thank you for bringing me here. I was so scared on the Bank in Saint Louis and on the raft at Saint Charles.”

“I know.” He feathered kisses on her forehead. “I’m sorry I was so rough. I know now I was fighting my feelings for you.”

“I love it here. I love everything about Berrywood. I want to stay here forever,” she whispered, planting a kiss in one of the creases beside his mouth.

“And you shall—with me. Silas can marry us, or there’s a magistrate in Saint Charles.” There was so much tenderness in the look he gave her and in the timbre of his voice that she blinked back the tears and smiled at him.

“I . . . think I’d rather it be Silas.”

“We’ll wait for a while. Light will be back in a day or two and we’ll have him spread the word. We’ll ask the MacCartneys and the Witchers and the folks we met on the raft. They’re building on the other side of the Cornicks.” He pushed the hair back from her temples. “Take it down,” he whispered.

“Now?”

He laughed. “Shall I do it? The first time I saw you it lay along your shoulders and down your back. I thought you were the prettiest woman I’d ever seen.” His hands were carefully searching for the pins. “And there you stood, holding my gun on me!” His words teased her, his eyes loved her.

“Jefferson! Be serious. Tell me about Light. He comes and he goes. I asked Callie about him and she said he scouts to be sure there are no hostiles about. Does he have a home? Someone to care about him?”

“For the last few years his home has been wherever Will and I are. Light is a wild, free man. He lives the way he chooses to live.”

“It must be a lonely life.” She lifted her hand to his cheek. “You shaved tonight.”

“I shaved every night, hoping you’d come out.” He
turned his lips into her palm. “Now I think I’ll grow a beard. I won’t have time for all that shaving.” He loosened her hair from its braid and carefully combed his fingertips through it.

She became braver and trailed her fingertips up and around his ear, then through his hair. It was thick and clung to her fingers. She laughed with pure joy and wonderment. He remained still, his eyes devouring her.

“Oh, Jefferson . . . I didn’t know it would be like this,” she breathed.

“Like what?” His face nuzzled her hair, her neck, behind her ears. “Talk to me, sweetheart. I want to know your thoughts, your hopes, your dreams. I want to be the other part of you.”

“You are. Oh, you are! I just feel so light and feathery. Just as if I could flit about like a butterfly, as if I could sing like a bird, but as if I could move mountains, too, or hold back a river. Do you think that sounds silly?”

“Silly?” He took her hand and slipped it inside his shirt and placed it over his heart. “Feel my heart pounding. I’ve crossed mountains, ridden the rapids, and fought Indian wars, but none of it made my heart jump with fright so much as the thought that you might not like it here, that you might not like me. I thought of a hundred different ways to keep you here. I knew that Light or Will would take you back if you really wanted to go.”

The rhythmic thump of his beating heart pounded against her palm. Her fingers were flattened against the hardness of his chest and now they curled, gently, into the soft golden down that covered it and found a small hard nipple to examine curiously. He took a quick breath and settled his mouth on hers. He kissed her with hunger, taking care not to bruise her lips as he had done on the raft. His ragged breath was trapped in her mouth by his plundering kiss. Her fingers continued to move over his chest, and had she been able to think clearly, she would have wondered at the trembling of his body. He moved his mouth from hers and took great gulps of air.

“Annielove, Annielove . . . I’m afraid I’ll not be able to wait for the gathering of our friends before I take you in all the ways a man takes the woman he loves. You’re so sweet, so soft, and I love you so much.”

She moved the hand inside his shirt up to his throat and rested it there. “I don’t know much about men except what I’ve heard women talk about,” she said softly, calmly, and was astonished she could speak to him about such things. “I heard only one woman, my mother, say that what happens between a man and a woman in love is beautiful.”

“What did the others say?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

“They said it was a woman’s duty to accept a man inside her and it was best to do it and get it over with. But my mother said I was conceived out of love, not duty. She told me this a long time ago when she realized she’d not live to see me a grown woman.”

“Ah . . . I was such a fool that night on the raft. It’s no wonder you wouldn’t look at me or speak to me for days. It took all the courage I had to ask you to marry me, and when you refused so bluntly, my pride was hurt. I knew then I wanted you more than I had ever wanted anything. And later, after you faced the renegade and I realized he could have just as easily turned his gun on you, I almost died of fright.”

She closed her eyes against the intense look on his face and he bent to kiss her eyelids, then her cheeks, forehead, and lips.

The moon passed over the pines, arced overhead, and still Annie Lash and Jeff sat on the bench. He wrapped her in his arms to shield her from the cool night air and they whispered to each other their innermost thoughts, hopes, and fears— all except the one Jeff held back, the one that he’d not tell her until the very last.

“Jefferson,” she whispered after numerous tender kisses, “what about Callie? I think she’s in love with Will. Not that she’s ever said anything. But I can tell by the way she stays with me when he’s around. She’s afraid to be alone with him.”

“I know, sweetheart. Will loves her, too. It’s a mess they’ll have to straighten out. Now that I have you, I know what hell Will is going through. Callie deserves better than my half brother; but she’s married to him, and he may come back to claim her and the boys most any day now.”

“Will she go with him?”

“I don’t know. But if she wants to stay, I’ll see to it that she stays.”

“I wish she could be as happy as I am.”

“Are you happy, Annielove?”

“Oh, yes!”

“I can make you happier,” he promised huskily.

“Hummm . . .” She didn’t sound totally convinced.

Callie stood hesitantly in the doorway of her room.

“Where’s Annie Lash?” Her voice trembled as she asked the question.

“She went out a minute ago.” Will lifted Amos off his chest and got to his feet. He could hardly bear to see the look of panic on her face.

“It’s bedtime for you, Amos.” She spoke to the child more sharply than she intended.

“Ah, Ma . . .”

“Don’t give me any back talk. It’s your bedtime.”

“Will was goin’ to show me how to fight. I don’t want to go to bed!”

“You’re goin’. You almost fell asleep over your supper.”

“That was afore Will—”

“That’s enough!”

“But I gotta pee first.”

“Amos!” Callie was sure she was going to cry.

“Now what’d I do?” The boy’s chin quivered, but he lifted it stubbornly.

“You know what you did, and you know what you’ll get for it!”

Big tears filled the green eyes staring defiantly up at her. “You’re mean! You said not to say
poot,
you didn’t say not to say
pee!
”

Callie groaned inwardly and tried to ignore her son’s pleading eyes and quivering lips. Color came slowly up her neck and turned her cheeks crimson. Her eyes went to Will as if drawn there. The candlelight showed his face clearly. His mouth, so grim of late, was slightly parted and tilted at the corners, his eyes were warm and bright and watching her intently.

“I’ll take him out.” Will’s big hand rested on the top of the cotton-white head.

“I ain’t got to poot, Will. Just pee. Ma lets me do it by the house at night. If’n I got to poot, I got to go—”

“Amos!” Callie felt the hot blood pounding in her face and was sure that she was going to melt and run all over the floor.

“C’mon, cottontop. We’d better get outta here afore yore ma takes a stick a wood to us.” With his hand on the child’s back, Will urged him toward the door.

“Will my hair be brown like yours when I get big, Will? I’m gonna have me a mustache like yours. Ma said if I eat lots I’d grow up to be big like you, but she said I’d better not swear like you or I’d get a hidin’. She said . . .”

Will looked back over his shoulder at Callie. She was staring straight ahead, her cheeks red, her hands buried in her apron pockets. He carried the image of her anguished expression with him out into the darkness.

Callie sank down on the bench beside the table. She sat there, feeling an aching torment, suddenly tired and bewildered, depleted of all her strength. She had been so nervous and strung out she could hardly think since the day, in his half-finished cabin, Will had grasped her hand and whispered to her. All she had ever yearned for was there in that gentle man. She felt a tiny thrill at the thought of that cabin being her cabin, that man being her man, but it faded quickly in the face of logic. She had a man, sorry as he was. He was the father of her boys, and for that reason alone she couldn’t wish him dead, even if that was the only way she would ever be free to go to another man.

The image of Will’s sun-bronzed face with its neatly trimmed mustache, high cheekbones, well-formed nose, and sharp but kind blue eyes floated before her. He wanted a woman, a home, and a family. Could she bear it if he took another woman to that cabin?

“Will said for me to say I’m sorry.” The sound of the child’s voice startled her. “He said mas have ’nuff to do without havin’ to make men outta boys like me. He said it was a man’s job. I asked him to do it, ’cause I ain’t got no pa.”

Callie looked up into the face of the man standing beside her son, and his eyes looked down into hers as if he could see straight through her and read her innermost thoughts.

“You have a pa, Amos. He’s just not here.”

“I don’t want
him
for my pa! I don’t like him. He’s a old . . . pissant! I don’t want him ever to come back. If he does, I’ll go stay with Jute and Henry. I wish Will was my pa. He’d show me how to be a man!”

“Amos, please—” The words choked in Callie’s throat.

“Get goin’, young scutter.” Will gave the boy a gentle push toward the bedroom. “Get yourself ready for bed. The first step to bein’ a man is to not depend on yore ma to do everythin’ for ya.”

“You’ll wait so I c’n say good night?”

“If’n it’s a’right with yore ma.”

“I’ll hurry, Will. I’ll hurry!” The last words came
from the bedroom.