Lori Benton

by Burning Sky

  “Willa.” It was all he had time to say before she raised a hand to his face and drew his mouth down to hers.

  For a second, he didn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Then he dropped the towel and took her in his arms, his fingers tangled in the cool of her wet hair. A groan rose from within her, a sound of surprise, and need. She slid her hand inside the open neck of his shirt, down the slope of his shoulder, her fingers cool on his skin, her mouth slanting more fully to his, at once hungry and yielding.

  His thoughts were in chaos, fragments of reason beating against the tide of joy and desire sweeping over him, beating it back until he could grasp one shining thread. He wanted her, but not like this—not yet. Soon—God Almighty, let it be soon—but not now.

  He thrust out a hand, landing it palm flat against the earth. “Willa—,” he spoke against her lips. “Let me stay with ye.”

  “Yes.” She strained to pull him closer. “Stay.”

  “No.” He took her wrist. “I dinna mean now—this—though I want it.” He let go of her wrist to touch her face, thrilled that her eagerness seemed to match his own. Groaning with the effort of restraint, he cradled her cheek.

  “Willa, you’re so like your eyes, the brown and the green. ’Tis like you’ve two souls in ye. Sometimes you’re as wild and remote to me as if you were born Mohawk. Other times it seems I’ve kent ye my life long, and you’re as near to me as my own heart. But whatever you’ve been, whatever else ye will be, I want you to be my wife.”

  Beneath his hands she went completely still. For an instant, even her breathing ceased. Then she choked out, “What?”

  Twilight had engulfed them. He could no longer see her face as clearly as he longed to do. He ran his hands down her slackened arms, cupping her upturned hands in his. He raised her fingers to his lips, kissed the tips of them gently. “ ’Twas no coincidence, your finding me as ye did, no coincidence these children came to us. ’Tis the Almighty’s doing. Can ye not feel it?”

  She pulled her hands away and stared, her eyes lost in shadowed hollows. “You do not wish to go away? You want to keep those children and … what? Raise them here with me?”

  “Aye.” She wasn’t reacting to his offer of marriage as he’d hoped, nor as her embrace had convinced him she would. His head was still half-full of thoughts of things forbidden him—her taste, her scent, the feel of her bare skin—at least until they were wed proper. “Aye and amen to both. With all my heart. And with all my heart, I love you.”

  He barely had the words out before she bolted off the ground, leaving him kneeling at her feet, staring up at the long white flow of her shift, her damp hair swinging, the pale oval of her face. He stood more slowly, feeling a heaviness weighing him to the earth. Silence stretched with no break but the distant hoot of an owl.

  A tightness built beneath his breastbone. He’d long since realized she was struggling with their nearness, that she feared to let him, the children—anyone—into her heart after all she’d lost. She clenched that grief to herself like a shield, keeping any risk of loving again at arm’s length.

  But she didn’t know how much he knew.

  “Willa,” he said, as the tightness coiled in his chest. “I ken about the children.”

  “The children?” she asked, clearly confused.

  “Your children. The daughters you had with your Mohawk husband.”

  Her arms came up, linking across her ribs. “How do you know?” She wielded the question like a weapon, meant to ward him off.

  “Joseph told me, the day he brought us Owl and Maggie.”

  She stared at him, her face white in the near dark. “He wouldn’t.”

  “He thought I kent or he’d not have spoken of them, or your need to let yourself grieve them. But he was right, Willa. You need to grieve, only let me be here while ye do. Let me help bear your burdens, give ye time to heal. And when you’re ready, to love—”

  She lunged for her clothing on the ground so abruptly he broke off. When she started to move past him, he tried to step in front of her. “Wait, Willa.”

  “No. Please. Get out of my path!” Dodging his grasp, she hurried down the footpath their feet had worn, returning to the cabin.

  He lingered at the spring after she vanished, hardly mindful of the mosquitoes descending about his ears, whining, seeking his blood. They might’ve bitten him raw; it wouldn’t have compared to the rawness within. Darkness gathered beneath the trees. Through their lacing branches, stars pricked the inky blue where the clouds had broken.

  She’d have gone to skin the goat, to hang it in the smoking shed. Probably she’d put some of the meat to stew on the hearth, while the children were asleep and couldn’t ask what sort of meat it was. Keeping herself too busy to think. Too busy to feel.

  Hiding away her heart again, so he couldn’t reach it.

  He walked at last to the cabin yard still sparking here and there with fireflies. He raised his eyes to the glittering stars blazing a cloud-crossed trail toward the wilderness he had come to set down in paint and ink. And maybe that was what he was meant to be doing. Maybe he had heard wrong, there on the porch as the sun set. But the sight could not hold his heart. It was the solitary cabin under the stars and what it contained that drew his gaze, his soul, his prayers.

  “I tried. You saw how it went, aye? What more would Ye have me do?”

  He waited in the insect-humming dark until an answer came, and it wasn’t the one he’d expected.

  Stay.

  “All right. But we’ve some convincing to be doing, then, aye?”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Because she couldn’t bear to stay inside the cabin feigning sleep, Willa was crouched in the garden pulling weeds with barely light enough to distinguish them from healing plants. Hearing a rustling beyond the fence, she assumed it the collie, which had come out with her, and went on with her work, sore hands digging into moist earth as the darkness lifted, head and eyes and heart aching.

  “Willa?”

  How long Neil MacGregor had stood in the gate behind her she didn’t know—perhaps it had been him, not his collie, she heard.

  She raised her head but didn’t turn. “Yes?”

  “I’d speak to ye before the children wake. May I come in?”

  His voice washed over her as it had done that first day she found him awake on the travois, catching at her heart with that way he had of turning the simplest speech into lilting music, while underneath beat a rumble like distant drums.

  “If you wish.”

  On the path between the aromatic beds, she stood to face him. The light was gray now, the garden a world of scent and shadow. She brushed her hands gingerly together, avoiding the burn, searching for words to undo what she’d done the previous night.

  The fire, the goat, the children’s distress, his kindness and strength, it had been too much all at once. It had weakened her, peeling back the layers she had built around that raw, wounded part in her soul. She had let down her guard against him when he found her at the spring, against the feelings he stirred in her despite all her efforts to keep them, and him, at bay. But she was past it now. She was strong again. She would tell him …

  He came toward her along the garden path, but he didn’t stop a pace away, as someone who wished to talk. Or listen. A glimpse of his eyes, blue shadowed in the dawn, was all she had before her face was between his hands and his mouth was on hers, tender and honest, and it was as if she hadn’t lain awake the night long fighting the pull to go to him. The roughness of his whiskers against her chin. The smell of him. The warmth of his hands, his mouth. She was back at the spring.

  When he pulled away, she stifled a groan. He had done it again, so easily. Broken through her defenses as if they weren’t even there.

  “You didna answer me last night,” he said. He still held her face between his hands. She didn’t have the strength to pull away.

  “You will make me say it?”

  “That’s generally what’s expected of a woman when
a man proposes marriage.”

  The gentle humor in his voice almost undid her. She risked a look at his eyes, with their strong brows that gave them such expression, and saw what he’d said in the dark was true in the gray of dawn. He was offering her everything she’d lost, and more. He was offering her his heart in a way Kingfisher had never done, as good a husband as Kingfisher had been to her, and she knew that if she took it, she would be giving hers in exchange, in a way that she had never known. And because of that, she stood before him, more terrified than she had ever been, knowing only one thing she could do to save herself.

  Despite the lightness of his speech, his eyes held a hope as deep and wide as the pearly sky above them. It was far too late to spare him hurt, even if she could spare herself.

  “You have not had one of your headaches in weeks,” she said. “Your wrist is healed. Pine Bird’s leg is healed. There is no more reason for you to be here.”

  She found the will to step back from the warmth of his hands, but saw she hadn’t rebuffed him.

  “Setting aside for the moment my feelings—and yours—d’ye expect me just to go, to leave ye and the children unprotected? After yesterday?”

  “Joseph—”

  “Isna here,” he said. “I ken he means to come back for the children, but, Willa, you do ken he’ll ask ye again to go with him. Dinna tell me that’s not what he still wants.”

  She couldn’t meet his searching look. “It is what he wants.”

  “And will ye tell him no? Will ye force him to go and take the children away with him?”

  “I will. And then I will be alone.”

  He flinched at that. “What will you do, God forbid something like that fire should happen again?”

  “Whatever I must do.” She met his gaze, hardening her resolve so that she could get the words out. “I do not want the children to stay, and I do not want you here.”

  She couldn’t have made it plainer, but oh, his eyes. They were the only color in her landscape now. So blue, so filled with disappointment, bewilderment, hurt.

  “What was that about, then, last night?” he demanded of her. “You kissed me, Willa. There’s no pretending ye didna. Was it that you just needed a man’s arms to hold you, and mine did for you, being most convenient?”

  She couldn’t stem the tide of heat rising in her face or pretend she did not feel the ache in her chest, the urgent need to tell him no, it had been his arms she wanted. Only his. But she said the word, knowing it would wound. “Yes.”

  “ ’Twas naught to do with me, then?”

  “No.”

  The skin went taut across his cheekbones. Pain cut across his eyes. Still he said, “I dinna believe ye. Willa, dinna drive away the people who care for you.”

  She couldn’t bear this. Not his words. Not his eyes. Not his heart, offered to her with such terrifying abandon. She turned her back, bent her knees, and resumed pulling weeds.

  She went on pulling them as the silence stretched, bleeding out between them.

  When he spoke again, the hope was gone from his voice.

  “You’ve tried verra hard not to let me, but I’ve seen deeper into your soul than ye ken. You’re frozen as ice. But ice canna last, Willa. ’Tis either going to thaw or shatter. And a life of solitude doesna guarantee you’ll never feel grief or pain again. But if you want me to leave, then I canna force ye to let me stay.”

  Another pause, another wounding silence, then his footsteps on the path. Leaving her.

  The rising sun speared light through the treetops. It struck her face, but she didn’t feel its warmth. The sun that might have melted her was setting fast behind her, leaving a chill hardened around her heart, and the image of his eyes, ravishing as the snowbound memory of a summer sky.

  She left the garden after he’d cleared his things from the cabin and saddled his horse in the yard, and came down barefoot into the sound of his voice.

  “No—listen to me. Dinna hold my leaving against her. She has every right to bid me go. ’Tis not fitting, my staying longer. Besides, I made promises to people back east. I must keep my word, aye?”

  “Take us with you!” It was Owl imploring, sounding not the almost-man he wanted them to think him, but the child he was.

  Neil’s voice caught. “I would do—lad, I would was I bound westward. I’m headed east, back into the mountains, then down the Hudson where ye came from. I’m not likely to come this way again.”

  Willa halted at the end of the porch. In the yard Seamus stood bearing bags and canvas-wrapped burdens tied behind the saddle. The sight left her hollowed.

  Then she saw Neil, on the porch, on his knees before the children, their hair and clothes still mussed from sleep. He had an arm encircling each, and they clung to him as if they wouldn’t let him go. But gently he put them from him, never taking his eyes from their anguished faces.

  “I’ll pray for ye every day. Dinna be afraid, but trust the Almighty. For if I love you, being only human, then He does all the more. And because He loves you, He will keep you in the shelter of His hand. Will you remember that?”

  Owl said he would. Pine Bird bobbed her chin, though it dripped with tears. Neil placed a hand upon each of their heads.

  “Then may the Almighty Lord bless and keep thee, Owl and Maggie. May He make His face to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee. May the Lord lift up His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”

  The ache in Willa’s chest was unbearable.

  “Do you have all you need?” The words came out like crow squawks, shattering the moment, startling the children.

  Neil stood and stepped off the porch. “Willa, I wish you’d take—”

  “I will not.”

  He’d been reaching into his coat as if he meant again to offer her coin. He withdrew his hand. “What provisions I need I’ll get in Shiloh.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “Do you mean to send us away too?”

  Though she’d anticipated resentment toward her, anger even, over Neil’s leaving, Willa was taken aback by Owl’s question.

  “That is what you want,” she said, turning to the children who stood with brown toes curled over the porch’s edge, stricken faces lifted to her. “For Joseph to take you west to Niagara. To the People. Is it not?”

  “No—yes. We want …” Owl’s tight-knit brows unraveled in confusion, but Pine Bird thrust out her small quivering chin.

  “We want to stay with you,” she said.

  Willa saw the revelation in Owl’s eyes, unknown to him until his sister spoke for them. “Will you keep us, Miss Willa?”

  She rocked back on her heels, mouth open, but no words to speak. Even for Neil, it seemed too much. As though he couldn’t bear to hear her refuse them as well, he took up his hat and mounted his horse.

  “Cap!” he called to the collie, lolling on the porch through this distressing farewell as if nothing of consequence were unfolding.

  The dog sat up but didn’t obey.

  “Capercaillie! Let’s go.”

  The collie sidled close to Owl, pressing against the boy’s knee, ears flattened. Neil’s mouth slanted in a grimace he might have meant for a smile. He raised his eyes to the boy. “Ye’ll keep him for me, then?”

  “I will.” Tears coursed down Owl’s face now too. Pine Bird was looking back and forth between them, as if expecting someone to say this wasn’t happening. Willa pressed her lips tight together.

  Neil MacGregor looked at her from the saddle. “God keep ye, Willa. And thank you, for everything.” He chirruped softly, and the horse took its first steps away from her.

  The morning air was sticky, smelling of coming heat. The birds seemed to sense it; their trills held a sense of urgency, but they couldn’t drown the steady clop of the roan’s departing hooves. Over Willa and the children, silence had fallen, as hobbling as fetters. Neil had reached the fringe of trees between the yard and the cornfield before Owl’s shout broke its bonds.

  “Mr. MacGrego
r, wait!”

  Neil reined in the horse, twisting in the saddle to look back as the boy leaped off the porch and ran into the yard to stand, bare legged beneath his shirt, black hair straggling on his shoulders.

  “Don’t you want to know my name when you pray for me?”

  “Lad,” Neil said, “I’ve always wanted that. Tell me your name.”

  Willa was near enough to see the gladness and grief breaking on Neil MacGregor’s face, but she couldn’t see the boy’s, to know if he smiled or wept as he shouted, “It’s Matthew. My name is Matthew Kershaw!”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Outside the cabin, crickets were singing. Inside, supper was cleared away, plates and kettle scrubbed—as were the children, settled on their pallet in the corner but not sleeping. Or even sleepy, Willa observed as she gathered the trappings for bullet making: scrap lead, mold, and ladle.

  Her shot pouch was nearly empty. She’d let Owl, or rather Matthew—the children insisted on their Christian names now—use her musket to practice his marksmanship. Though he recovered some of the spent balls, digging them from the stump into which he’d shot them, most were misshapen and useless. She added them to the pile of scrap lead on the hearth.

  Maggie sang softly to a cornhusk doll, a gift from Anni’s Samantha. Even with Maggie’s small voice filling the room, Willa felt the absence of Neil MacGregor. Twelve evenings they had spent without him, not that she was keeping a count. She didn’t want to admit how much she missed his easy conversation with the children or his sketches spread out on the table, missed him standing at her shoulder giving dictation while she labored to write legibly with his quill. She kept busy, clinging to the part of herself that was relieved Neil was gone, dismayed when that part shrank a little each day. More dismayed at how frequently her thoughts flitted back to those moments by the spring, the night before he left. It overcame her in unguarded moments, the memory of his mouth on hers, his lovely words … the horrible things she had said to drive him away.

  It was harder than she’d expected, his absence. But the struggle would pass. If she would just cease thinking of the man, it would pass.

  Annoyed with herself, she set the mold and ladle on the hearth, then glanced at the children’s pallet, beside which a tallow stub burned in a wooden dish. The boy made a sudden movement when she looked his way, shoving something under a quilt.