Wild Indigo (9 page)

“There.” His soft, sweet tone was musical, the voice she had always admired, and his face so very close that she saw only shadowed planes and golden angles lit by the setting sun. “Say my name.”

“Jacob,” she whispered obediently.

“Good,” he whispered back, managing to sound like a teacher until his mouth covered hers, humid and urgent. She closed her eyes. He was too, too close. Too pressing. A pressing heat, heat like the brutal summer's day that lay thickly over the room, enveloped her body.

He pulled at her lower lip, released it, then parted her mouth with his wet tongue. Its tip touched her teeth, then probed around them and searched above them and between them. He touched her tongue. She gasped. He tasted of the cider.

She had seen people kiss, a little, but hadn't imagined it would feel like this. Nor had she thought that a kiss would taste—that a man would taste—so good. No matter that he did, his invasion sent an unexpected ripple down the back of her neck. A frightening sensation. A faint memory of some bad dream, some nameless fear flitted across her mind's eye. She wondered—no, worried—what would happen next.

But he broke off.

And she felt his terrible absence in the cool air on her damp lips.

“Jacob?” She whispered his name again, confused by yearning and an unspeakable fear that strummed through her at once.

“Beautiful.” Jacob started to touch his new bride's lips with his finger until a look of feral caution flashed in her amber eyes. He withdrew.

Perhaps he had imagined that look. She tasted sweet as a summer peach plucked from a tree and hot from the sun. Yet she pulled away. Twice. He gave a sigh and let her go again. Noticing the heavy confinement of his black coat for the first time all day, he unbuttoned it with fumbling fingers and shrugged out of it. Hot air hit him like a blast from a forge. God help him, he hated summers in his new country. They had never been this bad in Germany.

He turned to hang his coat on a peg. Not a second too soon. Under his damp waistcoat, hard desire for Retha pressed against his breeches. His virgin bride was not yet ready for evidence of his arousal. She could barely handle a drink of cider. Behind him, she choked merely sipping it. He hoped coughing would occupy her while he adjusted himself inside his breeches.

She walked away, striding lightly across the floor into the parlor. He pivoted in time to see her tip a curtain aside. For a long time, he watched and wondered as she gazed into the night. He must have frightened her away.

He blamed himself. He had assumed too much and rushed her. She could not be like his first. Christina had been a distant cousin and his closest childhood friend. With their families, they had sailed to the Colonies together and never been separated after that. Once married, they had come to loving as naturally as water flows a well-planned course.

Retha started out a stranger.

That had to be her problem. Simply welcoming her here must not have been enough. Women took to houses in bits and pieces, room by room, table by chair by bed. Except for the scary night he found her, she had never seen his home. He could only hope she didn't remember that. She had been only ten or twelve, and straight from years of living in bark houses under stars. How alien his home must have appeared to her.

He joined her by the shadowed parlor window, knowing she saw nothing. “'Tis dark out,” he reminded her quietly.

“Everyone's gone home.” She sounded lost. His heart twisted. He could think of nothing in his life for which he had been as unprepared as she must be for this. For him, for his whole family, overnight. Christina had been playmate, confidante, long before she became his wife. He must not assume that anything tonight would be the same.

“Come,” he said. He thought better of trying to lead his bride. Wild she might be, but innocent, too, unused to a man's touch. He was sure no man had ever kissed her.

He lit a golden candle, releasing its honeyed scent into the room and casting a pale light. Already it was dark enough to spook his daughter. But his new bride was a grown woman, as his senses told him relentlessly.

“This way. The children sleep here.” Reversing their steps through the entry to the stairs, he led the way to the loft's two rooms and gave her time to look around.

“That's a fine tile stove.” Her voice sounded controlled.

“In winter, it heats both rooms.”

The candle's light muted the intricate designs on the stove's sleek tiles. She asked if it had been made here or imported. He didn't know, he hadn't built this house. And then she was full of questions about who slept where and whether the boys took care of wood and fire and ashes and how Anna Johanna slept at night in a room alone.

Delaying questions. He started down the stairs before she had a chance to interrogate him about what was stored under the eaves. When he took her
hand it rested in his, compliant but passive. He gritted his teeth. He was in this marriage for the rest of his life. He would make it work.

Back in the parlor, she walked straight to his drafting table and held up the compass that had fallen out of its shagreen case when she had flung the gown.

She winced as she inspected the jointed instrument. “I hope I didn't break it. What are these things?”

“My drafting instruments. This is a compass.” He traded it with her for the candle. “I use it when I work.”

She gave him a blank look. She didn't even know who he was. Large scrolls of paper stood in a deep basket against the wall. He unrolled a stiff sheet detailing his latest project.

“This is one of my designs.”

Her eyes politely scanned the curling paper. She couldn't make out the object represented. Girls learned geography, but he couldn't expect her to have a feel for drafting.

“'Tis the mill's new water wheel.”

“It had a water wheel the last time I went by,” she said smartly.

“A wooden one. Ours has to be improved if we're to meet the army's demand for grain.”

She smiled vaguely, uncomprehending, unimpressed. He felt his loss. Christina had been his friend when he had discovered his knack for invention. Scarcely a one of his plans had escaped her helpful emendations.

With Retha, he realized with an inward groan,
such a point of commonality might be far to seek. For weeks, months, he had steeled himself to the notion that his new wife would be a different woman from the one he still privately grieved. But he hadn't steeled himself for this absence of familiar ground. He had to give Retha time, to learn, to adjust. To him. And himself to her.

His last sense of the afternoon's lively celebration waned like a setting moon. He determined to recover it.

Restless, he escorted her to the kitchen and poured another mug of cider. Gamely she came along, inspecting a rack of dried herbs hung along a wall.

He mounted a workstool and listened, amused, as she proceeded to talk about each and every one. To chatter. Any mature man would recognize a nervous bride. Stretching his legs in front of him, he relaxed as she rambled.

Thyme, she insisted, was the easiest to grow. He couldn't agree or disagree. He was watching her pretty chin.

“That's an annual”—she pointed to the marjoram—“but the Sisters have little success with it.”

It overran his garden, but he couldn't say so. His gaze had moved to her slender neck. Which invited his caress.

She touched a sprig of horehound. “Isn't this medicinal? Have the children had sore throats?”

“Not lately,” he muttered. Her shapely fingers deftly sorted through the rack.

Jacob was on a rack of his own. Those fingers ought to be on him, deftly sorting through layers of
hot, heavy clothing, through to where his body burned. He quaffed the last of his cider and touched her shoulder.

“Retha, 'tis time.”

She spun around, wide-eyed. He thought she swayed—a little away, a little toward him, he couldn't tell.

“You've had a long day.” In the candle's glow, her breasts lifted as she drew a quick breath. He shut his eyes against a stab of desire, then acknowledged what her quick breath must mean. A bride's nerves, not arousal. Nothing more. Even Christina…

Nein!
Not again! To himself, he vowed the end of all comparison. Christina had been dear friend, beloved wife, the mother of his children, but he had to let her rest in peace. He squeezed his eyes shut against the lingering hollow of her absence, and loosened the stock that tightened around his neck.

Retha was not merely another woman. She was his sanctioned bride. And simply scared of what would come. An understandable trepidation in a woman, any woman, he told himself, but the more so in a young one taking on a family nearer her age than his. His arm circling her slim waist, he aimed her toward the large room behind the parlor where he had stashed the gown.

Alarmed, Retha felt her body throb. She sensed possession in Jacob's guiding touch.

“Lead the way” he said.

She couldn't. Already exhausted from the effort of forestalling his next intimacy, her mind raced to seek another delay. She didn't know why she had to, only that she did.

Hot candlewax dripped onto her forefinger. She let it burn, grasping for a way to postpone the inevitable. None came to mind. She was going to have to sleep in his bed. The honeyed scent of beeswax filled her nostrils.

Acutely aware of his wife standing woodenly at his side, Jacob lowered the hinged press bed, retrieved its mattress from the floor, and tossed it onto the bedropes with a single sure motion. He snapped out freshly laundered sheets. He had become expert at this maneuver these last months. They puffed with air and settled with a sigh. He smiled. He doubted that the Sisters had meant to add that touch.

Beside him, his bride gripped her candle like a cudgel.

He took it back and secured it in the chamber candlestick. Wax had dribbled onto her forefinger. He peeled off the wax and drew her finger to his mouth, watching her expression as he tenderly kissed the mild burn. She trembled like a trapped fawn. But her amber eyes had the look of a wolf too smart to run, too wise to trust.

He did not understand. He was taking every care.

“Allow me only to free your hair…” he said. He released a breath, anticipating a fall of red-gold riches. She neither consented nor turned away. A light tug undid the new blue ribbon under her chin.

When he eased the starched
Haube
off, she lowered her eyes, sunk her chin to her chest. He didn't have to wonder why. His limited experience told him to ease her past this dawdling, this reluctance.
His fingers strayed into her tightly bound hair, scavenged for pins, and extracted them one by one, as if he—as if she—had all the time in the world.

They did not. In his mind, the children galloped back into the house, filling day and night with needs. He summoned his powers to make the most of this rare and private evening.

At last the silken mass tumbled down around her shoulders. In minutes it would cover his face, his arms, his chest.

“I have wanted to see you thus since that night.” His fingers combed thick tendrils, arranging them across the snowy collar of her dress, over her shoulders, down her back.

Truth be told, he wanted to feel it against his skin.

He unlaced the ribbon that threaded the length of her bodice, careful not to startle her with an inadvertent touch. Released, the stiff new linen stood out from her bosom. Memory led his fingers to the pins that fastened her neckerchief. He removed them carefully. Only when he tried to slip her bodice off did he realize how stiff she was.

“
Helfen mir, Liebling
,” he coaxed in his native tongue.

She helped, lifting one shoulder forward, then the other, absently, as if she were not actually there. She let her tan, striped bodice drop to the floor, revealing the top of her white shift. His eyes fell to her thinly covered breasts. High and firm, they barely moved. She barely breathed.

Concern deepening, he studied her face. With its arched brows, high cheekbones, fine nose, it was the
prettiest face that he had ever seen. Her expression, however, was painfully blank. Not scared or nervous, but blank. Like a sleepwalker's.

“Retha.” He waited. He had a sense that she was far, far away.

Her coming back was slow. She focused her gaze on him, and a little light returned to her eyes. He took that to be a response.

“Let me,” he coaxed again. “You are my wife. I am your husband. This is what comes next. Look.” He shucked his waistcoat and untied the stock that bound his shirt's damp collar to his neck.

Her eyes went glassy again.

Bewilderment and a terrible desire to chastise her besieged him in equal parts. Trying to keep both out of his voice, he ended on a tone of impatience. “This is what married people do. Kiss. And undress. And kiss some more.”

She stood as rigid as a stone.

He swallowed a black Teutonic oath that he had forgotten he knew and forced a gentler word. “Your new gown's on that chair. Why don't I leave you alone to change?”

He left the room, safely feeling his way on the blessedly dark, blessedly short walk to the kitchen, only to stub his toe on the table's thick leg. He gave a caustic laugh of pain. He had already used the blackest oath he knew.

What could he do? Something told him he had more than a reluctant bride on his hands—or rather slipping through his fingers. And only these two nights to get her past the difficult part.

A drink would help. His fingers searched the
table, skipping over the cider in its squat jug and going for a more serious kick. He took a burning swig from the uncorked brandy bottle.

Leaning his torso's considerable weight against the table's edge, he covered his face and sucked in air through his teeth. He had been in a state of rut for a month, and his ever-so-promising bride thought him an ogre. Sudden, deep fatigue walloped him. Sorrow and loss and loneliness, three impossible children, war raging around him—he had come through all his trials. Surely he could manage a resisting bride.