Frontier Bride (Harlequin Historical)

by Ana Seymour

  “Come here, you she-wolf, or this encounter is going to be over before it’s started.” He pulled her down against him and began kissing her again, methodically, skillfully, with devastating thoroughness, until she was moaning herself. Then he pulled her upward to take each breast in his mouth for the same exhaustive treatment. She cried out his name, and he quickly brought his mouth back up to hers, silencing her. “Take it easy, sweetheart. We’ll have Bouquet pounding on the door in another minute.”

  Hannah looked horrified and for a moment her ardor cooled. Then he slid her body along his and moved in such a way that she ceased to care about Bouquet or any of the rest of the world.

  “Should I stop and convalesce some more?” he teased, but his voice was thick with desire.

  She shook her head and dug her nails into his shoulders as he held her hips and positioned her for their union. When it came, coherent thought fled them both. They moved together with one will that superseded reason and intellect. Slowly at first, then with increasing frenzy until Hannah collapsed against him, with him, spent and changed.

  For several minutes they lay without speaking. He stroked her hair, and she listened with her head on his chest to the wonderfully healthy pounding of his heart.

  She expected that when either one did speak, they would sound somehow different. But Ethan’s deep voice was just the same, with the same rich, teasing note. “Now will you believe me that I am recovered?” he asked. “Or do you need more convincing?”

  She boosted herself up, her elbows on his chest. Joking was easier than trying to sort through the overwhelming feelings. She let out a deep breath and gave him a saucy smile. “I think your nurse is going to need more convincing, Captain Reed.”

  Ethan reached to give her a playful slap on her bare bottom. “How many years do you think it will take to convince you?”

  “Years?”

  “How about fifty?” he said, his tone suddenly serious.

  The smile died from her lips. She and Ethan didn’t have fifty years or even fifty days. By rights they shouldn’t even have today. It wouldn’t be fair to Randolph and the children for her to carry on an affair while they wintered at the fort. She wasn’t a free spirit like Polly McCoy. She had other obligations. She shifted herself off him.

  “What is it, sweetheart?” he asked, grabbing for her waist to pull her back to her former position.

  “I can’t do this, Ethan,” she said, reaching for her dress and slipping it over her head.

  Ethan let her go and pulled himself backward on the bed. He saw the distress in her light blue eyes, and he wanted to make it disappear as quickly as possible. He’d done a lot of thinking in the past few days, some clear, some clouded with delirium, but the conclusion had come out the same every time. He wanted Hannah. And he meant to have her. Not just once every few months when he could track her down in some settlement or trading post. He wanted her with him, by his side—tracking, hunting, exploring, mapping new rivers. He wanted her to be wherever he was. And if there were children someday, perhaps that somewhere would be a little cabin on the Destiny where they would raise a family. Children who would grow up like their mother—resilient and adventurous and strong enough to be worthy of this vast new land.

  He no longer felt that she would be better off with Randolph Webster. In spite of what he had seen in their cabin that night back at the settlement, he knew with absolute certainty that Hannah was not in love with her employer. She was not a woman who could respond to Ethan the way she had just now with her heart committed to another. But he was not completely sure that love was enough. Hannah was strong-willed. Perhaps she wasn’t interested in tying her future to an adventurer with a past full of women and wandering. He thought he knew her heart. But he wasn’t sure, and there was only one way to find out.

  “Where are my damn trousers?” he said loudly.

  Hannah started. “Excuse me?” she said with a puzzled expression.

  “My trousers. They’ve taken my clothes so I wouldn’t get out of bed.”

  “I…think the colonel has taken them…” She backed away from the bed, looking mystified by his sudden change in subject and tone.

  Ethan stood up, dragging a sheet after him. “How the hell is a man supposed to propose matrimony without any trousers?”

  Hannah’s face registered pure shock. “Pro… pro…pose?” she stammered.

  He mumbled under his breath as he tied the sheet around his waist. “I guess this will have to do,” he said grumpily. Then he dropped to one knee and reached for her hand.

  Hannah couldn’t help a little giggle. He looked so silly, half-naked, the sheet trailing behind him like a woman’s train. He frowned. “You see! There are certain matters in life that must be settled with one’s trousers on.”

  “Oh, no,” Hannah said hastily. “Er…I…I quite like you without your trousers.”

  Ethan’s frown turned to a suggestive grin. “The feeling is mutual, my sweet.” Then he changed his tone. “Which is one of the reasons why, Hannah Forrester, I would like to request the honor of your hand in marriage. In exchange, my lady, I pledge you my heart, for in truth it is already yours.”

  Hannah’s eyes blurred with tears as he placed a kiss on the back of her hand. Her throat was too full for words.

  Ethan raised his head. “Well?” he demanded.

  She nodded and pulled him up. He rose and clasped her against him, losing the sheet in the process. He looked down at her tenderly as he rocked her back and forth in his arms. “How do women do that?”

  She started to recover her voice. “Do what?”

  “Laugh and cry at the same time.”

  She laughed and cried some more and shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  He kissed the top of her blond head, her teary eyes and her softened mouth. Then he pulled back. “Did I get an answer to my question?” he demanded to know.

  “I think you knew the answer before you asked it.”

  “Not entirely, sweetheart. Let’s just say that I was hopeful enough to talk with the fort solicitor earlier today about buying your papers from Webster.”

  “And what if I had said no?” she asked, feigning indignation.

  “I think I would have had to buy them anyway. I wasn’t about to let you go riding off with Webster. Not with the way he looks at you.”

  She liked the jealous note in his voice, but she did not want any more trouble between Randolph and Ethan. “I had already told Randolph that I couldn’t marry him,” she said gently. “And…I don’t think he will be discon-solate for too long. He’s planning on escorting Nancy Trask back to Philadelphia, and the two already seem to have found a great deal of affinity.”

  “The man’s a fool. If I had lost you, I’d be discon-solate for a lifetime,” Ethan said fervently.

  She turned her face up for his kiss, which lasted longer than either expected. His breath shortening, Ethan began to move her back toward the bed. “Oh no, you don’t, Ethan Reed!” she said. She gave him a solid push and he fell backward, tripped over the dragging sheet and landed on the bed. “Not again. You’re going to stay in that bed and get well if I have to tie you down.”

  “That might be interesting…” Ethan said, one eyebrow raised.

  “And I’m going to go talk with Randolph before your solicitor does.”

  Ethan grew serious. “He will let you go, won’t he?”

  “Aye. But I want him to hear the news from me.”

  “As long as I know you’ll be coming back to me, take whatever time you need.”

  “I’ll be coming back in the morning,” she said sternly. “Now that you’re so…healthy, I can’t spend the night here with you.”

  “I could pretend to be sick,” he said hopefully.

  She took one look at his robust body, the signs of arousal once again fully evident. “I don’t think anyone would believe you,” she said dryly. Then she blew him a kiss and went out the door.

  Epilogue

  April
1764

  Hannah had jumped out of the canoe and scampered up the gentle bank before Ethan could even secure the boat to shore. “They’re here, Ethan!” she called. “Everything’s here, just as we left it.”

  He was relieved to hear the joy in her voice. He had been afraid that even if they found the Destiny River cabins still intact, the thought of her absent friends, now on their way back to Philadelphia, would make her sad. But he should have known better. His optimistic, confident wife was a woman who knew her own mind. She had said that she wanted to return and claim the settlement. And it was partly in honor of those friends that she had come back—so that their small contribution to the opening of the West would not be entirely forgotten.

  Ethan tied the canoe and walked up the bank. Hannah had disappeared into what had been the Webster cabin. If there was to be any sadness in the return, it would be there, where she had shared so many happy days with Randolph and his children. Back at the fort, she had broken down when she’d had to say goodbye. It had started out well with fond wishes and embraces for Seth and Eliza and Nancy, but when Peggy and Jacob had both burst into tears in her arms, Hannah had faltered. It had been wrenching for her to leave the two youngsters who had become like her own. Her only consolation was that they were to have a new mother now, and fortunately, they both had already grown fond of Nancy.

  Ethan, himself, had had a few difficult moments when she had gone alone for a final talk with Webster. The man had absolutely refused to take any money for Hannah’s indenture papers, and he had stood up as a witness at their wedding, but Ethan couldn’t entirely forget his memory of Hannah in her former employer’s arms. She’d come back from her farewell with red eyes, but had gone immediately to Ethan and had turned her face up for his relieved kiss.

  He followed her into the cabin. She was standing by the mantel, looking around the room. But if her memories were painful, her expression did not reveal it.

  “It doesn’t look like anything’s been touched, does it?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “It’s just as we left it.” She gave a little shiver, and he walked over to put an arm around her.

  “Is it hard to come back?” he asked tenderly.

  She leaned against him. “I was just remembering that the last time I was in this room, we had to carry you from my bed in there, and we didn’t know if you were going to live or die.”

  He wrapped his arms around her and held her against his chest. “I’m too tough to die. You’re stuck with me.”

  She swallowed down her emotion, then looked up at him, her blue eyes teasing. “Too bad. I believe Major Edgemont was just about ready to carry me off to a castle in England when that preacher finally arrived from Harris’s Ferry.”

  Ethan gave her a soft pat on her rear. “Saucy wench. I should have sold you to that Indian brave when I had the chance.”

  “Too late. Now you’re stuck with me.“

  Arm in arm they walked slowly out to look around at the rest of the settlement. Nothing seemed to have been touched. Even the hams from that last frantic butchering still hung undisturbed in the smokehouse.

  “Oh, look!” Hannah gave a cry of pleasure as they walked along the bank. The neat rows of fruit trees that she had thought never to see again had survived the winter intact and were covered with tiny white blossoms.

  Ethan smiled at her childlike delight. He never got tired of looking at her, of hearing her merry laugh, of holding her strong, slender body next to his each night. He never ceased to be amazed that she belonged to him. “Apple trees. So now we truly have reached Eden,” he said. He bent to pluck a soft blossom, then placed it tenderly in her hair.

  “I believe we have,” she said happily. She took his hand and led him farther along the bank to the mossy knoll where one night nearly a year ago they had made love. She wondered if he recognized the place. Probably not. Men were less sentimental about those things. She turned to him with a suggestive smile. “But I thought you said they didn’t wear any clothes in paradise?”

  “I believe I did,” he replied casually. They had walked two more steps when all at once he lifted her off her feet and deposited her on the carpetlike grass. Before she could say a word, he dropped beside her and rolled her beneath him. He threaded his hands through her loose hair and pressed her against the bank, lavishing her mouth with several thorough kisses.

  Then he drew back his head and wiggled an eyebrow at her as he asked. “How’s your back?”

  She gave a merry laugh and pulled him down for another long, drugging kiss. When it was over, they lay quietly in each other’s arms. Around them the sound of the gentle rush of the Destiny mingled with the calls of the songbirds and the rustle of the spring winds in the tall ash trees. But for Hannah the sweetest sound of all was Ethan’s voice as he put his mouth close to her ear and murmured, “Welcome home, my love.”

  * * * * *

  eISBN 978-14592-7528-7

  FRONTIER BRIDE

  Copyright © 1996 by Mary Bracho.

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