Wild Yearning

by Penelope Williamson

  “That was the overture.” He took her hand and wrapped it tightly around his thick, surging erection. “This is going to be the real consummation.”

  He cupped her breasts in his palms, lifting them, brushing his thumbs back and forth over their puckered tips. He drew her up so that he could suck one into his mouth. She groaned a little for he sucked hard. She leaned back, her eyes squeezed tightly shut. Clinging together, they fell down among the furs.

  He covered her with his body, taking her slender wrists and pinning them on either side of her head, as if he would ravish her. She felt so incredibly tiny beneath him. He was afraid he would crush her. Yet as the same time he was overwhelmed with a purely masculine desire to possess, to take, to make her his.

  He rubbed his swelling arousal against the wedge of tight, dark curls between her legs and brought his mouth down so close to hers that their noses touched. “Better get real comfortable, Delia-girl,” he growled softly, “because this particular consummation is going to take a long, long time.”

  He began with her mouth. He explored it with his tongue, marveling at its heat, its silky texture. He sucked and nibbled on her lips, telling her between kisses that not even the first maple sap of spring tasted as sweet as her lips. She laughed into his mouth.

  With his tongue he traced the firm line of her jaw and the underside of her chin that jutted up so provokingly when she was angry or scared. The thought of that little chin, leading the way so bravely into the world, made him want to enfold her in his arms and protect her from all sorts of unnamed dangers and sorrows. “I love you, Delia,” he said, his open mouth pressed flush to her throat. His own throat was so tight, he was surprised the words got out. “You don’t need to worry ’bout anything now, ’cause I love you.”

  He felt her swallow. She tangled her fingers in his hair to hold his head in place. “Ty,” was all she said. It was enough.

  Her fingers tightened, pulling his head down. She arched her back, pressing her breasts into his face. “Suck me,” she said, and the words sent an erotic, burning thrill lashing through him like flame.

  He accepted her invitation and feasted on her breasts. He lavished them with compliments and kisses, flattened, massaged, suckled, and worshipped them. He placed his hand low on her belly … then followed it with his lips. He planted a loud, sloppy kiss on her stomach, just above her pubic hair, and nuzzled her with his face until he had her laughing. Then he slid his hands beneath her bottom, lifting her to his hungry mouth, and felt the taut muscles clench with shock and ecstasy as his tongue delved between her soft, wet folds of flesh.

  “Ty!” she gasped. “What are you doing?”

  “Loving you.”

  “But it’s … Oh, Lord above us…” But her thighs opened wide and she grasped the sides of his head, pulling his face deeper into her in case he had any intention of stopping. Ty smiled as he moved his tongue and lips along her hot, sweet cleft. Delia McQuaid might be hard to woo, but once won she was the most uninhibited lover he had ever known.

  He scraped her tiny nub of pleasure with his teeth, then sucked it between his lips. She seemed to swell beneath his mouth. Her head flailed back and forth. Her fingers dug into the fur at her sides and the air was rent with her guttural moans and cries. He felt powerfully male that he could do this to her, wonderfully blessed that she would let him. And when she came, it was against his hot and moist open mouth.

  “I love you,” he cried against her as the last of her tremors faded away. “Love you … love you…” He rose over her and came down on top of her, slamming his mouth over hers as he drove into her. She raised her hips higher, meeting his piercing thrust and grasping him so tightly that he shouted.

  He withdrew until only the rounded tip of him remained inside her, then delved into her, again and again stroking her clenching tightness. He held back, held back, held back … until he thought it would kill him. Then he set his teeth and thrust some more. The blood thundered in his ears; their breathing sounded like a nor’easter gale. Their bodies, slick with the heat of their passion, sucked and popped as they came together and drew apart.

  Her legs fell so wide apart, her knees were touching the bed. He heard a pathetic whimpering noise and realized it came from himself. He didn’t feel so powerful now. She was grinding him between her thighs, wringing him dry, sucking him empty, reducing him to a poor, quivering male animal who was nothing, nothing, nothing without her.

  He had never known such ecstasy.

  The fire disintegrated into a mound of coals. The night air was full of the coming winter and Ty pulled the furs close around them.

  Sighing sleepily, Delia snuggled into the circle of his arms, burrowing against his broad chest. “I love you, Tyler Savitch,” she said, so softly he wasn’t sure if it was she, or only his own memory, that he heard.

  His arms tightened around her and he pressed his lips to her ear. He spoke to her in Abenaki, crooning the words of a love song. Then he repeated them in English, so she would know…

  “Sleep, sleep, my beloved. Do not fear the dark … for tonight my heart beats with your heart. Tonight we are one.”

  She slept, but he did not. He leaned on his braced elbow, resting his head on his fist, and looked at her. Simply looked at her. He couldn’t believe she was actually his and he didn’t want to sleep for fear that when he awoke it would all have been a dream. Besides, he liked looking at her…

  Hours later, Delia opened her eyes to find him gazing down at her with a bemused expression on his face. She smiled. “What are you staring at, Tyler Savitch?”

  His lips brushed her temple. “My wife.”

  “Oh, her.” She laughed and nestled deeply into his warm embrace, shifting so that her back was to his chest, his arms around her waist.

  His hands moved up and gently cupped her breasts. “Delia? How awake are you?”

  She moved her bottom in a seductive bump and grind. “Do you want to do it again?” she asked with such eagerness that he laughed with delight.

  “Yes.” He fitted their bodies close together so that she could feel his growing arousal. “Incredible as it is to me, I do. But there’s something else I want to do first.”

  She looked back over her shoulder at him. “Eat?” she said, with even more eagerness.

  He laughed again, rubbing noses with her. “Well, we can do that too. Afterward.”

  She complained, but good-naturedly, when he threw back the furs, exposing their naked bodies to the crisp air. He helped her dress, although they had to search the entire wigwam twice for one of her moccasins. Then he pulled on his shirt, tied on his leggings, and stepped into his moccasins. Snatching one of the furs off the bed, he led her into the night.

  The air seemed to crackle with the frost, pinching their skin, and their breath made clouds of vapor around their faces. It was so clear the stars looked close enough to touch. A pair of wolves cried to each other, their howls echoing across the lake.

  Ty turned Delia so that she faced north and she gasped with wonder. Bright spears and luminous bands of light shot up from the horizon and fanned across the black sky in rainbow splendor. “Oh, Ty!” she exclaimed. “It’s beautiful. But what is it? I mean, how is it happening?”

  “The Night Spirit has put on his robe of colored fire,” Ty said, then laughed with a helpless shrug. “Actually I don’t know what causes it. It’s always most dramatic, though, at this time of year.”

  He stood behind her, wrapping the fur around them both, pulling her close against his chest. They watched the dazzling display in silence for several minutes before Ty spoke again.

  “I was so afraid, Delia.”

  Somehow she knew he wasn’t speaking of his fight with the Dreamer. “Of what?” she asked softly.

  “Of loving you, in case I lost you. The way I lost my father and mother, and later Assacumbuit and the life I knew here at Norridgewock.” There was a tenseness to the way he held her that came from deep within him. “From the very first, I was s
o damn afraid of falling in love with you, I was like a kid being dragged out to the woodshed for a hiding—I fought it kicking and screaming every step of the way.”

  She turned so that they were chest to chest and hip to hip within the fur. She rested her hands on his supple buckskin shirt and tilted her face up to his. Through her palms she could feel the low tremor of his beating heart. “Then what happened to make you stop being so afraid?”

  A grin curled his mouth. “Nothing. I’m still scared blue at the thought that I might lose you—”

  “You won’t ever lose—”

  He stopped her words with his mouth. “Sssh. Don’t say it. You can’t know the future. But as terrifying as the thought of losing you is, nothing could be as bad as never having you at all. These last months, seeing you married to Nat, knowing you shared his bed and that I might never have the joy of making love to you again…” He shuddered. “I’ve never suffered such hell.”

  Delia started to confess that her marriage to Nat had never been consummated, but then she realized such an admission might have been an embarrassment to Nat. He was dead, but she owed it to him to protect his pride. So instead she said, “You have me now, Ty. For as long as we live.”

  “Aye, I have you now, Delia. You are my wife, my lover.” He rubbed his face in her hair and pulled her tighter against him, melding their bodies. “And even if I am never to have you again after this night, this moment, you will remain wife of my soul. Keeper of my heart.”

  His words were a balm to her own battered heart. For the first time she believed, truly believed that he loved her. She sighed against his throat. “It doesn’t seem real … that we’re married.”

  “It’s real. But if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll marry you again in the Yengi way when we get back to Merrymeeting. Whereupon I will proceed to plant a dozen of my babies in your belly. One at a time, of course—”

  “A dozen!” She leaned back against his clasped hands to glare at him. “Tyler Savitch, you’ll have me pregnant the rest of my life.”

  He hugged her. “Um, yes … that’s the idea—”

  Suddenly a loud scream erupted from one of the longhouses at their backs. There was the sound of running feet and shouting, which set the dogs to barking, turning the village into a cacophony of noise.

  Ty’s head had flung up and he’d gone stiff in her arms.

  “Ty? What’s happening?”

  Throwing aside the fur, he grasped her hand and started at a run for the longhouse, where the screams were still coming in short, staccato bursts.

  “It’s Elizabeth Hooker!” he cried out to her over his shoulder.

  But Delia could tell that even Ty wasn’t prepared for what they found in the lodge. Elizabeth lay on a pile of blood-soaked furs, her white skin stretched as thin as parchment paper over the stark bones of her face. Every few seconds she clutched her stomach and emitted a throat-searing scream.

  “God in heaven,” Ty breathed, kneeling beside the anguished girl. For a moment he hovered there, doing nothing, and when Delia turned to look at him she saw stark terror on his face.

  Elizabeth screamed again and Delia had to clench her fists to keep from screaming along with her. “Oh God, Ty, is she dying?”

  “No,” he said, suddenly all brisk business as he bent over to examine her. “No, she isn’t dying and she’s not losing this baby either.”

  Suddenly the door banged open and the devil appeared on a cloud of sulfurous smoke. Delia’s heart almost stopped from pure terror.

  Then Ty said something in Abenaki and she realized the apparition was some sort of medicine man with a black-painted face, swinging a perforated bowl that oozed oily, foul-smelling smoke. He knelt beside Ty, shaking a rattle in Elizabeth’s face and mumbling an incantation.

  Elizabeth’s blue-veined lids fluttered open, focusing on the medicine man, and she screamed.

  Delia clutched the girl’s trembling hand. “Ty, make him go away. He’s frightening her.”

  “No, I need him. He knows more about healing than I could learn in a lifetime.” He bracketed Delia’s shoulders with his strong hands. “My love, I’m sorry but you’re the one who’s in the way.” He gave her a gentle smile. “If you want to be useful, you can keep us supplied with hot water.”

  Throughout the rest of the night and the long day that followed, Ty and the Abenaki shaman worked to save Elizabeth’s life, while Delia abided their wishes by staying out of the way except when they asked her to fetch more water or rags. For the first time Delia understood something of the courage it took Ty to be a doctor. He seemed to suffer empathetically with Elizabeth’s pain and she knew he would take the loss of any patient, no matter how old or sick, bitterly hard.

  The sun was just beginning to set again when Ty suddenly appeared before her. He wrapped his arms around her and clung to her, shuddering with exhaustion and the release of long-suppressed emotion.

  He sighed into her hair. “She’s going to make it, my love.”

  Tears of relief stung Delia’s eyes. “And the baby?”

  He laughed shakily. “That little unborn tyke is a fighter. I can’t believe the way he’s clinging to life. But, Delia—” He stepped back so that he could look down into her face. He smoothed the hair from her brow. “If the baby is to have any chance at all, he’s going to have to stay in the womb for at least three more months, and it isn’t going to be easy keeping him there.”

  She clasped the hand that cupped her face. “We can’t go home, can we?”

  “Not until spring.”

  The hunter studied the cloven-shaped tracks left by his quarry. They were fresh, for the flattened snow crystals sparkled in the fading winter sunlight. He smiled to himself—the hunt would be over soon and he was anxious to be home.

  He picked up his pace, gliding effortlessly across the deep, soft snow on wide, flat oval shoes of bent wood frames and rawhide webbing. He saw where the tracks detoured around a pair of birches that grew six feet apart and knew then that the moose he followed was a bull, and a big one. The animal’s antlers had been too wide for it to pass between the trees.

  When he came to the shore of a frozen lake, the hunter stopped, concealing himself within a thick stand of snowclad spruces. The ice stretched before him, flat and empty, eerily green in the white winter light. From a distance the man resembled the animal he hunted, for he wore a thick coat of mooseskin and a set of antlers on his head. Holding a birchbark instrument to his lips, he reproduced the deep lowing sound of the bull moose. Then he settled mind and body to wait with the patience and endurance he had learned as a boy.

  Now that he was no longer moving, the hunter could feel the belly-shrinking cold. The air was raw and piercing, and in spite of the deerhair stuffing in his moccasins, his feet soon grew numb. Long streamers of clouds flowed in layers across the sky; it would snow again soon. He could smell the snow and feel it in the tight pinching of his nose.

  A tree that couldn’t take the weight of the ice snapped suddenly with a crack that echoed like a rifle shot. It startled a snowshoe rabbit, which bounded across the frozen lake, jumping high on his huge hind feet. But the hunter didn’t move. He’d been listening for some time now to the moose slogging through the wet drifts, coming his way.

  When the moose emerged into the open, he raised his enormous head and sniffed the air. The hunter lifted his short, powerful bow, knocking a cane arrow into the sinew string. The moose turned his head. Man and animal, hunter and hunted, locked eyes.

  Tyler Savitch pulled back the bowstring and let the arrow fly.

  The arrow, flighted with eagle feathers, flew true. It sliced into the animal’s thick neck, and blood from the jugular vein spewed into the air like the blow of a whale. The great animal swayed, sinking onto his foreknees in the deep snow, dying in silence. The hunter threw back his head and sang, thanking the spirits for their gift, and the music seemed to bounce off the sky.

  Ty butchered and quartered the animal where it fell, leaving a
portion of the entrails and some meat as a gift for the other predatory birds and beasts with which he shared these hunting grounds. He had to carry the meat in pieces the two miles down the trail to where he had stashed his toboggan. He used parfleches—rawhide containers—carrying the heavy packs on his back by a tumpline of coarse bark webbing.

  The going was much easier once he got the meat onto the toboggan. Like snowshoes, the toboggan was an Abenaki invention—a sledge made of a board about a foot wide, its front end turned up, which could be dragged by men or dogs across the snow. The toboggan made a swishing sound as it slid through the drifts and the icy pellets squeaked beneath Ty’s snowshoes. But in spite of the heavy load he pulled, Ty’s pace was swift. He had been away from his wife all day and he missed her.

  Coils of smoke rose blue against the sky, smelling of burning spruce. Ty topped a rise and paused to look down on the village spread in the valley below. The thatched roofs of the longhouses were dirty gray against the pure white background. The wigwams, snow-laden cones, resembled white wasp nests.

  The dogs’ baying announced Ty’s arrival and women emerged from the wigwams and lodges to relieve him of his burden. The meat would be taken to the smokehouse where it would be cured. Part would go into the village’s communal stores, but the bulk would go to the clan of families Ty hunted for. The muffle he kept for himself. The fleshy part of the upper lip and nose of the moose was a delicacy reserved for the man who had slayed the great beast.

  As he made his way to his own wigwam, Ty passed the bare poles of other lodges that had been stripped of their hide and fur walls. In winter, when food was scarce, many families chose to leave the permanent village and follow the game animals into the snow-laden forest. Because of the pinching cold, everyone, even the dogs, was indoors.

  “Delia-girl!” Ty sang out happily, as he unstrapped his snowshoes, whacking them against a pole to knock the packed snow from the webbing. He pulled aside the flap and, ducking low, entered his lodge. “Where are you, woman? I’m cold and tired and starving for a kiss …”