Mountain Magic

by Simmons, Trana Mae

  "Oh!" she said when she exhaled. Her knees wobbled and she tightened her hold on his neck. Her body sang to her with ripples of pleasure and flushes of warmth. Her neck wouldn't hold up her heavy head, and she laid her cheek against Jon's shoulder.

  "Oh."

  Jon cradled her against him, fitting each soft curve into a special place on his own body made for it. He laid his cheek on her hair, breathing in deeply and running his hands up and down her back.

  "You want another reminder?" he whispered.

  "I don't think I could stand one right now. I...."

  "Well, here now, Cat," Silas said as he came through the door. "Don't be crying like that. Me and Jon'll help you clean up this mess."

  Immediately Silas realized his mistake when Jon glared at him and Caitlyn turned around to face him, her eyes danged sure not sparkling with tears.

  "Oh, it'll be all right, Silas," Caitlyn said in a dreamy voice. "It can all be fixed, like Jon said."

  Silas backed out of the room, almost tripping when his heel hit the chair inside the door. "Uh...you and Jon go ahead and see what needs done. I'll check around outside."

  Caitlyn blinked, then slowly looked around the room again. Suddenly she whirled on Jon, her eyes narrowing dangerously.

  "This has gotta stop, you know."

  Jon splayed his hands wide in amazement. "What?"

  "This...this huggin'. And k...kissin'," Caitlyn said, too flustered to notice she wasn't watching her wording. "This cabin ain't big enough for us to move around real well in as it is. And I don't 'spect to have to worry 'bout you pawin' me ever time I get close to you."

  "Me pawing you?" Jon shot back. "You were snuggling up to me just fine, and enjoying that pawing every damned bit as much as I was!"

  "Well, it's still gotta stop," Caitlyn insisted. "First thing you know, you'll be a waitin' 'til Silas starts snorin' and come sneakin' into my bedroom. You just better remember that I sleep with a skinnin' knife Paw give me under my piller!"

  Jon leaned toward her, his fists clenched at his sides. "I don't need to sneak into any woman's bedroom! I've never had to sneak into any woman's bedroom and force myself on her in my life! Any woman's bedroom I've ever gone into, I've been invited to enter!"

  Caitlyn backed away a step before she could stop herself. "Don't hold your breath waitin' for an invite into mine," she said with a half-hearted smirk, which was all she could muster when faced with the furious blue iciness of Jon's eyes. "Hell'll freeze over 'for that happens."

  "Think so, huh?" Jon advanced a step and Caitlyn wobbled another step backwards.

  "Y...yes," she said.

  "How many degrees will hell have to drop before you want me to kiss you again?"

  After a second's hesitation, "S...same amount."

  "Wanna bet?"

  "No!" Caitlyn said with a little screech as she ran for the door.

  Jon's laughter followed her, and she whirled around outside the door to glare back. Indignantly, she stamped her foot and brushed the long braid of hair that had fallen over her shoulders behind her neck.

  How dare he laugh about what had just happened between them? How dare he make fun of her attempt to explain to him that she had no desire to let this — attraction, her mind finally supplied as she groped for the right word — this attraction get out of hand and saddle them both with a loss of freedom.

  She started to march back inside and tell him exactly that — in clearer words this time — but she heard Jon's clumping, booted footsteps cross the floor. She grabbed a bucket hanging on a nail beside the door and fled to the lake. It was going to take a lot of water to clean up that mess inside.

  For some silly reason, Caitlyn leaned over to peer into the smooth lake surface before she disturbed it by dipping in the bucket. Her face looked back at her, and she studied it closely.

  Wisps of hair curled around her forehead and cheeks, dark ebony with a tinge of reddish highlights in the sun. The reflection wasn't mirror clear, but she could make out a faint flush on her cheeks. She had always admired the Indian women's high cheekbones, but her own face was more oval. Her nose fit pretty good in proportion to the rest of her features, but her lips looked a little too large today.

  She reached up and touched her mouth, probing a finger tenderly around it. Kiss-swollen, maybe? She stared into her own eyes, unable to tell if the color came from them or the lake water. It was so blue today — as blue as Jon's eyes.

  She leaned over a little further, and her braid fell across her breast. She fingered it, comparing the silkiness of her own hair to the feel of Jon's blond locks, and deciding that the texture was awfully similar.

  Caitlyn snorted and flipped her braid over her shoulder. She didn't need this, darn it. All she wanted was to have a good trapping season, so she could earn enough money from her own share of the furs to come back again next winter to her cabin.

  She didn't need anything else. She didn't need a man to snuggle up to at night — she could add a bearskin to her bed if it got too cold. She didn't need kisses — she had gotten along right well all these years without them. She sure as hell didn't need to find herself swelling up with a babe — knowing that in nine months she would be stuck changing nappies and suckling a little figure that depended totally upon her for its very existence — an existence that would tie her down and cause her to lose the freedom she valued so highly.

  Hugging and kissing led to that — hugging to kissing, and kissing to petting and pawing. Then to that final act Sky Woman and Paw had always tried to keep quiet, never knowing that she sometimes lay awake on her side of the wigwam.

  And that act led to babies. She knew that, although she had avoided any attempt Sky Woman made to talk about it with her.

  Somewhere in her memory that little cry started up again, cut off abruptly as always. She felt the shaking start, but she could control it in the daylight. It was only at night — dark and lonely when she sat up with a start in bed, swallowing screams she knew would lead to her own death if she voiced them — that restraint failed her and she cuddled under her blankets, shivering violently.

  Caitlyn swiped the bucket through the water to fill it, then stood and turned. Her eyes unerringly went to the cabin, and she saw Jon standing in the doorway, one shoulder leaning against the jamb and hands tucked into his pockets. Despite the distance separating them, she could feel his gaze on her. It should have felt as cold as the lake water behind her, but for some reason a hot flush stole over her cheeks, down her neck, and even across her breasts. Even lower.

  With a determined slant to her chin, she gripped the bucket and headed for the cabin.

  ****

  Chapter 10

  Caitlyn laid her finger down so the black and orange wooley worm could crawl onto it. It tickled a little as it crept up her finger and onto the back of her hand, and she giggled as she carried it outside. After carefully lifting the wooley worm to a red sumac leaf, she noted how fat it was, then looked around her.

  Barely a month after their arrival at the cabin, the signs were all there — the bushy coat of the worm, early tinges of fall color on the leaves, squirrels continuing to gather nuts to store long past their usual morning hours. Today, with Jon and Silas already gone, she'd decided to take her own tour through the wilderness.

  When she bridled her horse, she noticed her pinto's sleek coat beginning to lengthen. Every animal she saw as she rode appeared to be in a hurry, racing against the time food would be hard to come by. The two bucks she scared from the brush were long out of velvet, their color muted from the brighter bronze of summer. She ran across several scrapes — trees with ragged bark where the bucks rubbed away the antler velvet, the ground beneath the trees torn up from their hooves. Marking their territory in preparation for rut, she knew from Mick's lessons.

  The male deer urinated, too, Mick had said, their scent also a warning. And the height of the chipped and scarred tree bark served as evidence of the stature and strength of the buck claiming that certain
territory. Any other buck was free to challenge that buck's control, if it measured itself against the other buck's signs and thought it had a chance to defeat him.

  Survival of the strongest and best of the breed, Cat. Mick's voice echoed in Caitlyn's mind, and she smiled to herself.

  It was early for rut to begin, but also a little early for the huge flights of wild geese and ducks to be winging southward overhead. However, almost every night the haunting cries had followed her into sleep.

  "Going to be a hard winter," Caitlyn told the dog trotting beside her pinto. "It'll make the furs good, if we're able to get out to run our trap lines."

  She'd taken to talking to Dog a lot. Silas — fairly glib at rendezvous — had retreated by degrees into the silence he claimed to enjoy, which matched the peaceful solitude he loved in the wilderness. Jon — well, Jon talked a little more, but not a lot. Mostly he questioned Silas to assure himself the proper measures were being taken to see them through a winter he knew from the past season could hold danger.

  Near the top of the mountain, at that special spot she always enjoyed no matter how many times she visited it, Caitlyn slid from the pinto. Other mountain tops stretched away in the distance, until only faint, purplish shadows outlined their peaks. The bright sun hovered in the brilliant blue, nearly cloudless sky, but still a tinge of chill shaded the air. Almost two miles below her, the trees and brush in the valley looked like she imagined the plush carpet Mick had told her some houses back east had covering their floors.

  She still missed him — darn it, would it ever get any easier? As though sensing her misery, Dog belly-crawled up to her with a whimper, and she wrapped an arm around his neck.

  "It's probably because it's getting nigh on a year now," she whispered to Dog in a clogged voice. "Next month was when it happened, you know."

  Absently, Caitlyn ran her hand down Dog's side, where a new layer of fat covered his formerly protruding ribs.

  "No," she acknowledged, "you can't know. You wasn't here then."

  She sighed and drew a leg up to prop her chin on her knee. Instead of focusing on the view before her, scenes from her and Mick's life ran through her mind. After a while, she realized it was the happy times she recalled — Mick's deep laugh and teasing voice when she determinedly floundered behind him in the snow, refusing to spend another lonely day in the cabin while he ran his lines. Her first attempt at tanning a beaver hide, which Mick solemnly assured her might make a good snowshoe, if she could do another one just like it.

  Christmases together, and even a day set aside as her birthday — the day Mick had found her. Those two days each year were her very own, when she spent every minute with Mick. No matter how outrageous her request, Mick would try to fulfill it.

  Her very own room that had taken only the two of them almost a month to build one fall. The curtains for the window Mick had asked Sky Woman to sew up for her Christmas present. Her own set of six traps a couple years ago, though he never would let her run her line on her own.

  "Guess I miss our talks the most, Dog," Caitlyn mused. "Paw had been all over before he decided to be a mountain man — seen lots of things, lots of places. He'd tell me 'bout them of an evening, while we worked on the hides."

  She gave Dog a stern look. "Not that I ever wanted to go see them myself. Paw always said there wasn't no place as beautiful as our mountains."

  The pinto threw up its head and snorted. Dog leapt from Caitlyn's grasp, hackles bristling on his neck and a low rumble in his throat. She instinctively curled her fingers around the skinning knife at her waist, which she carried whenever she left the cabin.

  "It's probably just an animal," she murmured to Dog, but she pulled the knife from its sheath, eyes searching the underbrush around her.

  For several long seconds, Caitlyn held her breath and listened, senses attuned for any wayward sound. A deer wouldn't have bothered the dog and horse. Bears usually favored slightly lower elevations, but wolves and pumas roamed even mountain tops. As the seconds lengthened into a minute, Caitlyn slowly let out her breath. Whatever it had been, it must have decided against attacking, because the pinto dropped its head to graze again and Dog sniffed the air a final time, then sat on his haunches.

  Funny, though, she hadn't heard anything leave. Must have been a timber wolf, since even a puma would probably have dislodged at least a stone or two when it scrambled away.

  She shrugged her shoulders and slipped the knife back into the sheath. The day darkened, and she glanced overhead to see a bank of clouds crawling toward the sun. Snow clouds, already this early in the season. She shivered in the increasing chill and hurried over to the pinto. A snowstorm might send Jon and Silas back in early from their scouting trip, and they'd have a conniption fit if they found her gone.

  Shoot. Caitlyn swung onto the pinto and urged him down the mountain trail. They still acted like there was an imaginary fence around the cabin that she was forbidden to cross. She could go to the lake and back, but no farther. If they found out she'd dared ride out alone, they'd probably take the pinto with them from now on when they left.

  Caitlyn shrugged and giggled to herself. Danged if that would stop her. Paw always said God gave men legs to walk before He ever showed them horses were good to ride.

  Huge, down-soft flakes began falling as Caitlyn rode into the clearing around the cabin. She hurriedly unbridled the pinto and shooed it into the corral Jon and Silas had repaired. At least there wasn't enough snow yet for the pinto to leave tracks through, and Jon and Silas's horses were still gone.

  Worriedly, she watched a few more-heavily falling flakes hit the pinto and melt in the steam from its back. No help for it if the men noticed the horse had been ridden when they returned. Maybe they'd listen to her the next time she asked to accompany them.

  Several inches of snow covered the ground a few hours later when Caitlyn threw aside the moccasin she was lining with rabbit fur and stomped over to look out the cabin door. Where the heck were they? The men hadn't taken overnight supplies this morning, as they had a few times before.

  Silas, at least, had to know she would be worried about them. Despite the deceptive beauty of the new snow, it could prove treacherous. The temperature had continued to fall all day, and neither Jon nor Silas had taken the heavy, buffalo-skin coats she had made for them from the hides of the buffalo Jon shot.

  A watery yellow sun struggled to peep through the cloud cover for a second, but retreated behind a new bank of roiling, indigo clouds. A frigid gust of wind sent Caitlyn back inside, and she slammed the door. Dog stretched awake from his coil in front of the fire, cocking his ears and whining at her.

  "They ought to've been back by now," Caitlyn told him. "Silas knows better than to get caught out in a blizzard when he's got a shelter to go to. They should've come on back soon's the snow started this morning and waited it out."

  She started to pick up the moccasin again, then threw it aside and went into her room. After pulling her doe skin dress over her head, she hung it on a hook and grabbed a pair of buckskin trousers and shirt from the shelf holding her few articles of clothing. She shimmied into the trousers and shirt, then jerked her wolfskin jacket from its hook.

  "Come on," she ordered Dog as she strode toward the door again. She paused to take down the two buffalo-skin coats hanging there, struggling beneath the weight of them but managing to fling them over her shoulder before she went outside.

  Dog raced over to the corral, with Caitlyn following more slowly beneath the weight of the coats. She flung them over the rail until she bridled the pinto, then draped them across the horse's back and mounted. Thank goodness Silas had enough sense to always inform Caitlyn which area he intended to scout each trip.

  She found them barely a half-hour later, peering through the blowing and gusting snow when she caught sight of a spark of light up ahead. Without Dog, though, she probably would have missed them. For the past ten minutes, she had followed him, after it became obvious his sensitive nose had picked up
something amid the wind gusts.

  Dog must have smelled the fire smoke, she realized as the spark that had caught her attention flowed more brightly, finally shaping itself into the flames of a fire. Jon lay on the ground beside it, with Silas crouched over his legs.

  Silas barely glanced at her as she rode in. "Damn glad to see you, Cat," he growled, and Jon's head swiveled toward her. "You bring us something warmer to wear? We had to stop here for a bit to thaw out a'for we could ride any further."

  Caitlyn slid to the ground and pulled the coats from the pinto. "What happened?" she asked as she hurried over to Silas. Her eyes worriedly scanned Jon, and she handed Silas one coat, then knelt to place the other one around Jon's shoulders.

  "Danged fool wouldn't listen when I told him he better start wearin' moccasins, 'stead of them boots with worn-out soles. Slid on some ice on a rock and almost broke his damn fool leg. 'Pears like maybe he only twisted his knee, tho'."

  Jon tore his gaze away from Caitlyn's face, but not before he saw her frown of worry give way to exasperation. He shrugged irritably when she tried to snug the coat across his chest and brushed her hands away. Shifting his body, he stuffed his arms into the coat sleeves.

  Caitlyn sat back on her heels and clamped her lips into a thin line. The firelight outlined Jon's profile, his mouth set just as stubbornly as her own as he gazed past Silas's shoulder. No sense telling him that he should have listened to Silas about the boots — looked like Silas had, as usual, made his opinion real clear to Jon already.

  A snowflake landed on Jon's eyelash, and she instinctively reached out to brush it away, her hand meeting Jon's finger when he reached up. She jerked her arm back, then scrambled to her feet.