Blinking at the bright sun, Aksa cast her eyes around for her brother, spotting him in the distance, standing knee deep in hay, examining a scarecrow that usually stood there to scare off thieving birds. Now it had apparently become Sammy’s arch enemy. He was digging out a bullet she could see, even at this distance, that had embedded itself in the post. Not a bad shot, she thought, noticing that it had hit right through the heart of the man-sized scarecrow. Looked like Sammy had moved on from tin cans. He was practicing shooting at people now. She didn’t know what to think of that.
In any case, there was work to be done. First, setting down the pitcher for later, she jumped the fence into the pasture behind their hut, elbowing Bessie aside in search of poop that had dried in the sun in the form of chips. In the shape of dark mud-colored flat discs, Bessie could produce enough all on her own to keep their stove running for breakfast and supper daily. Aksa had laughed once to see a cavalry trooper, looking like he had just arrived from back East with his spanking new uniform, staring at her stunned from the road as she gathered some chips.
“Don’t they stink?” he had asked, choking on some dust.
“Not after the sun bakes them hard,” she had smiled back, noticing the way that his eyes had traveled up from the chips in her arms to her teats. Noticing the way that he had swallowed hard, before spurring his mount onward into a trot.
She was never sure what that meant. That lingering gaze on her boobs. She had a fair idea it had to do with the muted laughter that she heard at night from time to time in Mama and Daddy’s stall in their hut. She also had noticed more and more often lately, on nights that there was moonlight enough to see, Sammy would reach down at the sound to tug his Thing and stare straight up at the ceiling. She had asked him once what he was thinking about then and, uncharacteristic of him, he had turned over without a word.
Well, Mama had been saying for some time now that “that boy needs a place of his own” to Daddy’s uneasy grunt. What that meant, Aksa wasn’t sure. Nor what it meant – such as last night – when Mama would venture through her sweetest tones the thought that “Maybe you can go to Massa Dolan...” only to have Daddy slam down his apple hooch on the table and exclaim, “Now, woman! We done talked about that!”
Her arms finally full of chips, she brought them back into the kitchen and stacked them neatly in the corner with the others. Mama gave her a grateful smile and returned to squeezing out the pot of last night’s wet wool, a messy job, the baby in her belly quite swollen now. Swollen enough that Mama was rubbing her back more and more often.
Ducking back out into the hot sun, Aksa wasn’t sure what she felt about another baby in the hut. More adobe bricks, that was certain. Grabbing up the pitcher, she cut across the pasture, pushing their two sheep out of the way as she frowned at the thought that had been troubling her lately. That maybe Mama wasn’t as happy as Aksa thought she might be with a new baby coming along?
Well, she considered, jumping over the opposite fence to the brick yard, either way, a baby meant a bigger hut for something, which meant more walls, and that took more bricks. On the ground in front of her lay a good twenty or so of them, almost a foot long each, drying in the sun from yesterday. It took a few days for them to fully cure. Along the edge of the yard were a couple of wooden frames, used for shaping the clay into bricks when wet.
Grabbing the hoe up from the ground, she attacked the wide clay pit dominating the yard that had been dug up over the years. These days it was a couple of feet deep, and just as easily as long across as Sammy if he lay down. Breaking apart the clods of dirt until she had enough for several bricks, she took up some dried hay from the pile nearby and mixed it in with the dust. Then, she filled the pitcher from the acequia ditch and carried it back to the pit to work the water into the dirt, returning several times until she had a good muddy batch of soup. Not too wet, otherwise she couldn’t carry it on the back of the hoe.
Next, she wet a frame with water, then setting it alongside some curing bricks, she made a number of trips to the pit, carrying clay back until the frame was filled and patted down. Finally, she slowly lifted the frame up and surveyed the neatly squared off brick of adobe clay with satisfaction.
One done. Twenty or thirty more to go?
She kept at it feeling the heat on her back, the sweat running down her back, between her breasts, between her thighs. Before long, she could hear the Blam! Blam! Blam! of Sammy hard at his own work. If one could call it work, she snorted.
On and on. After the first batch of clay had been all used up, she had gotten started on a second. Then a third.
“I bet you can fill up an entire day making those bricks.”
Wiping sweat from her eyes, she pursed her lips to keep from smiling.
“Well, some fool done clean forgot to give Mama some of Bessie’s chips this morning. Makes a body wonder what other chores ain’t getting done today.”
“Ah. Now about that...”
She turned to look at him, wondering where this was going. He was smiling, that wide, big-toothed bright smile of his that got him out of...well...everything. No matter how mad she ever got at Sammy, all he had to do was beam that grin at her and her annoyance boiled away like spit on the stove. Gone. Forgotten.
She waited. “So...”
He was still grinning. “I’m out of cartridges.”
She groaned.
“I shot a quail this morning for barter.”
“Mmm-mmm!” She started turning back to her bricks.
“I’ll take you with me.”
“No. Daddy will go nuts! The winter fields done gotta be cleared before harvest and they don’t do it too well all by theyselves. The fort–”
“Not to the fort, then. Just Lincoln. It’s shorter.”
That made her pause. She never got to go to town. Well, ever since her melons, she never got to go anywhere. But, they had nice things, lady things in town. Still...
“I thought Massa Dolan’s store closed.”
“We’ll go to Tunstall’s.”
That didn’t sound right. “I thought Daddy always said we should stay away from those English folk.”
“Nah,” Sammy beamed at her. “It’ll be fine.”
END OF CHAPTER ONE – Black Petals
Copyright Page
Chateau of Passion
Chateau of Love Series, Book Three
Copyright © 2018 Monica Bentley
All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events and locales is entirely coincidental. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher except for the uses of brief quotations in a book review.
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I spend my mornings covered to the neck, wrist, and ankle watching all those hard asses and harder abs walk by out of the corner of my eye at a conservative construction firm. Then, I go home and smother my babies with kisses after school.
In between, I dream up all-consuming stories that let you escape to exotic lands far away and exciting adventures with a healthy splash of steamy sex guaranteed to make a girl’s knees weak.
If you like triple-cream brie stories that slowly melt on the tongue, you’ll like mine. All the sex a girl can handle, sometimes raw and raunchy, sometimes sweet and gentle. Hunky and hard alpha males softly sweeping up innocent girls (who can be bad, too!) in a breath-taking romance that ends in HEA.
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In it, find out how Tempeste goes from farm girl to powerful witch.
Chateau of Passion Page 15
