Jessie's War (Civil War Steam)

by Connors, Meggan

  “Try to be nice.” She looked down into the dark behind her, the deep and endless dark. Whispers wafted over her, and she felt the pull of magic. “I… I…”

  The flint sparked and the tumbleweeds caught fire. “Oh, thank God.” Luke put some of the tinder on the flames and stepped away as the fire crackled to life and the acrid smoke of wet wood filled the shaft. His dark duster swirled about his ankles as he approached Jessie, and something about the way he moved seemed otherworldly and dangerous. He put his hands on her shoulders. “We won’t take anything from your ancestors. It’s not the same as with the miners. This is for survival. I’m sure they’ll offer us their hospitality if we ask for it.”

  After all this time, he still understood her heart so well. This time, when his fingers grazed her face, she didn’t resist him. She allowed the contact of his skin against hers, and wanted to remember what they’d once shared. She wanted to take comfort in this man who had once meant so much.

  And then he broke her reverie. “All right, take off your clothes.”

  “What the hell, Bradshaw?” She shoved him hard.

  He stumbled back in an overly dramatic fashion and his smile tangled and twisted in the pit of her stomach. “Your clothes are wet, and you’ll freeze if you don’t get out of them. Strip. I’m going to take care of the horses and I’ll be right back.”

  She watched him leave, and immediately wished he’d come back.

  Her first reaction was to resist, but if she wanted to live, she’d do as he asked. People died from exposure out here far too often, and her clothes were soaked through. So she tried to work the buttons of her coat with fingers numb and stiff. She fumbled with the buttons and failed. She tried to shake off her coat and couldn’t manage that, either.

  Jessie sank to the ground in a heap of sodden skirts. The heat of the fire burned, and she moved away from it and toward the dark, gentle warmth emanating up from the lower chambers of the shaft. Their chant nothing more than murmurs on the wind, she heard her ancestors’ voices, strong and unafraid.

  They beckoned to her, and her Paviotso heart responded.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, and the song washed over her as she took up the chant. Only for a moment, out of deference to them. In her mind’s eye, she danced with them. She danced with her mother and her people. Danced with them into forever.

  Wake up, that voice whispered.

  She ignored it.

  The fear and the anger and the hurt were washed away as her ancestors greeted her and accepted her as one of theirs. For the first time in a long time, Jessie belonged.

  Calm and at peace, she was stone and sand, the pinion pine and the fast-moving waters of the river in spring. She was sagebrush and scrub and the sky, filled with bright stars.

  Wake up, Jessie.

  For a moment, she was pulled away from her people, but she reached into the abyss for them again.

  She was tufa and hot springs, the scorching sun and the thunderous clouds of summer storms. She was snow-capped mountains and dry, desert valleys. She was the rabbit and the coyote. She was the sleek fish of the great lake, and she was the fisher. She was the mighty hunter and the prey.

  She was one and she was nothing. She was so very small and she was infinite.

  A sharp sting pierced through the dream vision. She ignored it. Another one broke through. Beneath the chant, she heard something discordant and angry, breaking the melody. The dark pulsed, and the magic began to crack.

  “Jessie!” Luke roared. The spell shattered as she grasped for it with desperate hands.

  He slapped her face twice more and then picked her up by the collar and set her on her feet. His fingers dug into the flesh of her shoulders, and he shook her so hard her head fell back.

  “Wake up! Don’t do this to me! Jessie, wake up!”

  Disoriented, her ancestors’ song echoed in her ears. “I only closed my eyes for a minute. So tired,” she mumbled.

  His voice broke on a laugh, and when she opened her eyes, she saw relief in the way he looked at her. “Can’t you do one thing I tell you? Just one? What is wrong with you?” His tone was exasperated but not unkind. One strong arm held her upright as his fingers touched her neck where her heart beat, and it lurched into a more regular rhythm.

  Luke.

  “Can’t you hear them?”

  She fought to hear the voices over Luke’s. Everything about him was so loud, she could almost hear the blood rushing in his veins. Jessie turned away, wanting the quieter peace of her ancestors. They were more real to her than he was, this dead man who chose now to walk back into her life. Her ancestors were and always would be. Her heart yearned for the peace they offered.

  “Hear who?” He unbuttoned her coat. Yanked it from her shoulders and tossed it onto the floor in a heap.

  “The chant. Can’t you hear them singing? Can’t you feel them?” Their song wrapped around her and held her tight.

  He unbuttoned her skirt and allowed it to fall away. With trembling fingers, he undid the buttons of her high-collared blouse.

  “They can’t have you, do you understand me?” His voice shook.

  He held her tight, pressing her face into the warmth of his chest, and she heard his heart, the beat strong and frantic. Her heart lurched again.

  He was the flame to her ice, and he held her tighter than her ancestors’ song.

  Down in the dark, toward where her long-forgotten dead lay in their graves, he shouted, “This one is mine!”

  Deft fingers unfastened the hooks and eyes at the front of her corset. The fog began to lift from her mind, and her ancestors suddenly seemed very far away. Luke was here. Luke was now. Luke was her past, but he was also her present.

  “You can’t claim me,” she murmured.

  “Well, someone needs to.” He sat her down, knelt, and removed both the boots and her stockings from her feet. Unable to voice a protest, she let him. He briskly ran his hands along her legs, and she gasped as sensation returned to her frozen limbs.

  “You’re soaked through, Jess. Why didn’t you tell me it was this bad?”

  “I tried to. You didn’t listen.”

  He smiled at that, but his eyes were sad. “That’s my girl. Come on back, Jessie. Give me hell. Be a pain in my ass. You don’t belong with them yet.” He took her hands and hauled her to her feet. Loosening the laces of her corset, he pulled it over her head, and in the next moment, he pushed her drawers over her hips. Large, scarred hands put a blanket on her shoulders. “You belong with me.”

  “Bullshit.” The fog lifted a little more, and she wrapped the blanket around her body and clutched the edges together. She hadn’t missed the tightness of Luke’s face when he looked at her.

  It had been a long time since she’d seen that expression.

  “You’re right, it is bullshit.” He pulled his shirt over his head. Watching her, he spread a canvas tarp and some blankets on the ground. “Lay down, Jess.”

  She obeyed, and he covered her with the blankets. He hung another tarp over the entrance to the cave, sat down, and removed all of his clothing with the exception of his drawers, which extended to his knees. Glinting in the pale light of the fire, bright metal surrounded his left calf all the way down to his foot. Silvery screws protruded from his flesh, and the scars surrounding those screws were raised and raw. New.

  “Oh.” She gasped, unable to disguise the horror and shock of seeing his artificial limb, attached to real flesh at his knee and his ankle. She’d never heard of an artificial limb attached between two pieces of living flesh. It shouldn’t have worked that way.

  He glanced down at his leg and shrugged. “It’s nothing, Jess.”

  Her heart mourned his loss, for the pain he must have gone through.

  Luke hung their wet clothes around the fire to dry, and, with sleepy eyes, she watched the way his muscles played in his bare back. It was a patchwork of scars, long and thin or puckered and red. How had he gotten them, how had he lost part of his leg? Wha
t kind of hurt had he suffered, and had anyone been there to help him, to hold him, to ease his grief and tell him everything would be all right?

  It wouldn’t be so hard to stay angry with him if he weren’t so damned beautiful. She remembered the boy he’d once been, with his wavy dark hair and silvery eyes dancing with mischief. The smile that lit the room. How he’d always made her laugh. The way he’d taken her hand at her mother’s funeral, the comfort he’d offered that awful day. The way he’d kissed her, and made her feel like she was the only girl in the entire world who would ever matter to him.

  That same boy had torn her heart out just six months later when he’d left to fight a war where even those who survived didn’t come back whole.

  He lay down beside her, took her into his arms and inhaled sharply. His skin burned where it touched hers, but the sensation wasn’t entirely unpleasant. “Christ, you’re ice.”

  “Yeah,” she whispered. Then she flinched away from him. “You’re naked!”

  “So are you.”

  “But… but you’re naked.”

  “We need to share our body heat. You’re chilled to the bone.” He sat up, and she didn’t fail to notice his strong arms or the wiry dark hair that dusted his chest and thickened where it disappeared beneath the blanket.

  She propped herself up on an elbow and clutched the cloth to her chest.

  “You’re disoriented and confused, and when I came in, I thought… I thought—” He cleared his throat. “Well, I can’t put you in a hot bath. I don’t have enough wood for a bigger fire that will last the night. I can only offer you me.”

  Her heart clenched, and she closed her eyes against the rush of longing those words brought.

  “This is not all right with me.”

  Luke.

  “It’s me or your death of cold.”

  He had a point. Her body trembling from both the cold and something else, she lay back down among the blankets. Embarrassed tears stung her eyes.

  He lay down beside her and wrapped her in an embrace.

  Her body sang in the circle of his arms, and that shamed her all the more.

  “Shh,” he murmured into her hair.

  “I hate you, Luke Bradshaw.” Her voice broke.

  “I know you do.” He brushed his lips over her brow.

  Lulled by his warmth, by the rhythm of his heart, she fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep.

  Chapter Nine

  Luke stifled a groan as blood pounded in his groin.

  Jessie lay in his arms, her body soft and warm against his.

  She moaned in her sleep and rolled over, moving against him until her back was flush against his chest. Her satiny, golden skin was petal soft beneath his fingertips, and her breasts brushed his arm. She shifted, her backside rubbing against him, and his erection grew painful.

  He longed to touch her as he once had, though he had no right to expect anything from her. That didn’t stop him from wanting, or his body from aching.

  Her body twitched, and her breathing changed.

  “Jess…” he whispered into her hair, adjusting her head so it was pillowed on his bicep. The scent of her surrounded him, clean and spicy fragrant, like sage-covered hills after a summer storm, and he inhaled deeply. He pulled her closer, his hand brushing against the underside of her breasts.

  The noble part of him wanted the touch to be accidental. It wasn’t.

  God, he had missed holding her in his arms, missed the sweetness of her touch. Missed whispering words into her dark hair, and sharing secrets with her. He missed her laugh, the way she smelled, the way she moved.

  He had missed her. Jessie. Once his best friend. And his lover.

  She shifted against him again, and he was certain she was awake.

  If she stayed in his arms, he’d kiss her. They’d been so good together once. Maybe if he kissed her she would forget how much she hated him, and he would forget how much he deserved it.

  But she didn’t turn toward him, didn’t acknowledge him in any way. She stayed right where she was, feigning sleep, tormenting him with the softness of her body and the silkiness of her skin.

  Unwilling to turn toward him, yet not turning away either.

  The wind rustled the tarp covering the entrance to their camp. Their fire had died to nothing but embers, which glowed in the faint light creeping in from under the tarp. The morning arrived eerily quiet.

  No cannons, no crushers, no gunfire. Just the sound of horses broke the silence.

  Suddenly, she jabbed him with an elbow. Hard. “Bradshaw.”

  Grunting at the blow, he said crossly, “What?”

  She turned to face him, her taut nipples brushing against his arm.

  His body responded. He wanted nothing more than to kiss her and bury himself inside her—forgetting the long years that had passed, and taking up where they had once left off.

  Her eyes widened as if she understood the direction his mind had gone, and she didn’t like it.

  “Someone’s outside,” she whispered.

  Fuck.

  He jumped to his feet, his pistol in his hand just before the tarp was pulled back.

  “No!” Jessie shrieked as he came nose to nose with a pistol, held by one very angry-looking native. The blanket clutched to her chest, she put her hand on his chest to stay him.

  “Get behind me, Jessie,” he growled.

  He didn’t dare lower his weapon and move her himself. Didn’t the woman realize she was in his line of fire?

  The men who’d invaded their camp were dark skinned, black eyed, and they wore faded black dusters and heavy trousers, with equally faded vests and slouch hats. Bone pipe chokers wrapped their necks, and thick, leather bound braids fell nearly to their waists. The line of their weapons shifted as she moved. Away from her, and toward him.

  These men might be a threat to him, but they were no threat to her.

  “Friends of yours, Jessie?” he asked.

  “Of a sort.” One of the newcomers said it with a laugh, though he didn’t lower the weapon pointed at Luke, and Luke didn’t expect him to.

  Jessie’s eyes were wide as her gaze bounced between Luke and the leader of the group of natives, a man distinguished by the hardness of his features and the intricate beading of his choker.

  This man was a warrior, a fighter, a man who had seen death and hardship. Luke recognized his own.

  The newcomer’s weapon never wavered. “Nice to see you again, cousin.”

  “This guy’s related to you?” Luke asked.

  “Yeah. I’m related to all of them, “ Jessie said. She acknowledged each of them with the barest of nods, somehow seeming regal despite the precariousness of their situation and the fact she had nothing but a blanket to hide her nakedness. “Been a long time, Cheveyo.”

  “Not entirely of our choosing.” He asked her something in her native tongue.

  Her eyes met Luke’s and she shrugged. “Of a sort.” The admission seemed to pain her.

  The echo of his earlier response seemed to placate her kinsmen, and his features relaxed, though his grip on his weapon did not. “Then I won’t kill him today. Tell your man to lower his gun, Jessica.”

  “He’s not my man.”

  Bullshit.

  Cheveyo’s lips curled into a mocking smile. “He’s naked in your shelter, cousin. I’d be interested to hear Grandfather’s take on that.”

  “Tell him, and I’ll kill you myself.” She picked up a blanket and handed it to Luke.

  He held it so he was covered, but he didn’t dare lower his weapon to wrap it around himself.

  Grudging respect lit Cheveyo’s features, and he lifted a single brow in Jessie’s direction.

  “Jessie?” Luke waited for permission to either fire or reach an accord. At this point, he didn’t care which, so long as when he left this cave, she left with him.

  She nodded, just once. “It’s all right.”

  Luke lowered his weapon and took his finger off the trigger, and Cheve
yo’s smile mocked him as her cousin waited several seconds to do the same.

  Much like the North and the South, the natives had been fighting a quiet war with the Union for as long as Luke could remember. If he decided to tread upon Paviotso or Bannock or Paiute or Shoshone land, he was in enemy country as much as he would be in Atlanta. In some ways, trespassing on Indian held territories was more dangerous.

  After all, he frequented the southern states, but even he gave the Ewepu Tunekwuhudu a wide berth, despite his connection with Jessie. He was well aware what her grandfather was capable of.

  “I am Cheveyo, son of Chayton,” the leader said, but he did not extend his hand. Certainly not offering friendship, but not declaring enmity, either.

  “Luke Bradshaw.”

  “Tell me, Luke Bradshaw, what causes you to trespass on my ancestral territory with my young cousin?” Cheveyo asked. He jerked his head to the warriors behind him. They turned and filed out of the mineshaft without a word.

  A powerful man, to have warriors at his command.

  Never taking his eyes off Cheveyo, Luke adjusted the blanket around himself. “I apologize for that.” He bowed his head. “We needed to find shelter from the storm, and this was the nearest place I could find. Jessie was exhausted and suffering from exposure. Otherwise, we never would have trespassed.”

  Something in Cheveyo’s eyes seemed amused. “I see. I do hope you understand that she did not trespass. You did.” Cheveyo searched the dark tunnel behind Luke. “Did our ancestors give you any trouble, white man?”

  “None at all,” he said.

  Anxiety lit Jessie’s dark eyes, and he answered her unspoken question with a shrug. He would never admit to what he’d seen the night before, to what he’d heard.

  He would never admit—to Cheveyo or anyone—what he’d heard in depths of the abandoned mineshaft. The many voices he’d heard in Jessie’s chant, a song that had been terrifying in its beauty.

  He’d pretend he’d never heard it, and maybe, one day, he would forget he had.

  “Interesting.” Cheveyo gave Luke a long look. “You realize you are in Indian territory, do you not?”

  “Technically, this area falls within the purview of the Union. The mine was not within the confines of the treaty negotiated at the end of the Paiute War.”