"There is no we," Kit replied, "so you might as well go on back to Albuquerque."
"But I'm ready to get married," Wally said. "I know I've been kind of non-committal in the past, but that's because I wanted to finish college first."
"That was two years ago," Kit said.
"Can we go somewhere and talk?"
"We just did."
"I mean some place where we can be alone," Wally said. "I took a room at a hotel in McMinnville. You could stay with me tonight and we could see how we do. I've been wearing this stretching device and it's made a big difference in just a month."
"I told you before, that didn't matter," Kit said.
"That's what you said, but if we got together again I think you'd find it did matter," Wally replied. "Can we at least give it a try?"
"Actually, I've had a better offer right here at the ranch," Kit said.
"You mean, better than the curator job?" Wally asked. "I didn't know this was a paying job."
"It isn't," Kit said. "I meant a better offer over in that tent." She pointed to Marc's tent.
"Is that where you're staying?"
"No, I'm staying in that big tent over there—" Kit pointed to her encampment "—but I'm thinking about staying in the little tent."
"Why?" Wally asked.
"Because I've got the hots for an android who's camping out there." Kit glanced back and saw Marc smiling.
"I hate it when you get like this," Wally said.
"I know," Kit replied, "but thanks for delivering the letter. Have a safe trip back."
When Kit turned to go, Wally reached out and took her arm, and said, "You can't just walk away from me. I just drove 1400 miles and since you left your stuff at my house we still have a connection."
Kit lifted her arm from Wally's grasp, and said, "I'm sorry about that but you should have called first. Just to set things straight, you can sell my stuff and pay for your trip and we'll no longer have a connection. But, so your trip isn't completely wasted, there are brochures at the lodge. Grab a handful and check out the local sights."
"I don't understand," Wally said. "I'm ready to marry you and I don't care about the laundry or if you hang the clothes wrong. What more do you want?"
Kit looked over at Marc, and said, "I want my android."
Wally looked at Marc, who was standing at the site, then shifted his gaze to Marc's tent, then looked back at Kit, and said, "Is he what you're talking about?"
Kit looked at Marc and smiled, then at Wally and replied, "He's filled in a lot of compartments in my life. Maybe you'll find the right woman to fill in all those compartments in yours and want to hang the clothes right. It's not such a farfetched idea. Now do have a safe trip back." She kissed Wally on the cheek, then turned and headed for the site.
When she got to where Marc was standing, he said, "Did you mean what you said about staying in my tent?"
"Sure," Kit replied. "It's mating season, I'm still the unattached female, and you're now alpha male among the juveniles."
"Korban, you'd better not be messing with my head right now," Marc said, "because you're talking about mating and I've been ready to mate with you since you watched me demonstrating the deet and did that thing you do with your tongue."
Kit eyed him, puzzled. "What are you talking about?"
Marc smiled. "You don't know, do you?"
Kit caught the self-satisfied expression on Marc's face, and said, "Are you messing with my head, Hansen?"
"Could be," Marc replied, while looking at her in amusement.
Kit wondered how one man could be so handsome, and sexy, and have such beautiful eyes, and a really intriguing male mouth.
Her lips parted because whenever Marc looked at her the way he was, her heart kicked into high gear, her breaths quickened, her lungs seemed starved for air, and when she studied his mouth because she wanted to kiss him, she couldn't help but lick her lips because... She didn't know why, other than she just really, really wanted to kiss him...
"Yeah, baby, that's what I'm talking about," Marc said. "The thing you're doing with your tongue. It gets me every time." He pulled her into his arms and kissed her soundly. "So, when are we going to start this mating ritual?"
"What about ranch rules?" Kit asked.
"I'm twenty-five," Marc replied. "Call it a post-teen rebellion. But maybe it should be in your tent after dark."
"You said you didn't have any condoms."
"I don't, but I want to put a little daughter right here." He placed his hand across Kit's belly and held it there. "We could get her started now, and make her legal in a week."
"You mean get married that fast?" Kit said.
Marc kissed her again. "It's a tradition around here. My parents were married a week after Dad asked Mom to marry him, Sophie and Rick were married the day Adam and Emily were supposed to be married, which was less than two weeks after Rick asked Sophie to marry him, and Adam and Emily managed to tie the knot in a week."
"But after that, it's still miles between Santa Fe and Belize," Kit said.
"I admit, we have a few wrinkles to iron out."
"Like one of us turning down a job offer," Kit said. "But even if I turned down the curator job and followed you to Belize, do you want your little daughter, who'll be all wrapped in pink, with lace around her socks, to spend the first months of her life in a tent with snakes and scorpions and mosquitoes? Or... we could wait until the time's right to start a family."
"I'm already twenty-five," Marc said. "Adam's got a three-year-old and a daughter on the way, and Rick's got triplets and twins on the way."
"Is this going to be some kind of baby race?" Kit asked.
"No," Marc replied. "I just don't want to lose my position at the top of the pack. Maybe we could do the in vitro thing and start off with sextuplets."
"Are you serious?" Kit asked, not absolutely certain Marc might not be serious. He definitely had a competitive thing going with his brothers.
Marc smiled. "No, Korban, I'm not serious. I don't want some doctor on a sperm hunt fooling around with my balls."
Kit put her arms around his neck, and said, "Is it okay for the field supervisor to fool around with them? She took a class in paleontology so she's qualified to do some applied research on how certain life forms evolve and change over time." She glanced down. "And from what I can tell, there's been some recent era changing, something that could even be fossilized."
"Okay, that does it. We're quitting for the day." Marc took Kit's arm and started toward her encampment, and Kit made no move to stop him.
***
"I had no idea it was that big," Kit said, while staring pointedly.
"I told you I didn't need creams," Marc replied. "Will it be a problem?"
"I'm talking about the tattoo," Kit said. "You told me the tattoo was small. It's a couple of inches long. But that's cute the way it has a leg stretched out and a three-toed foot reaching down like it's about to play with this—" she curved her hand around the thing that was jutting up "—which is very impressive, at least ten points an inch."
Marc's grabbed her wrist. "Now, you really are messing with my head."
"I know," Kit said. "This one's much more fun than the other. Are you complaining?"
"No, but the applied research is over." Marc covered her body with his and kissed her deeply, and Kit responded by entangling her tongue with his, and running her hands up his back and down his butt, and wrapping her legs around his hips, and letting out little moans of pleasure as Marc eliminated all the preliminaries, because Kit didn't want to wait any longer than he did. But after a rush of passion and some frenzied pumping, when they'd at last come down off their climaxes, Marc said, "Can we try again and maybe go a little slower this time?"
"I don't know." Kit sat up and threaded her fingers through his unbounded locks. "It's your hair," she said. "When it's loose like this I regress way, way back to cave times, when you, my sweet, from head to feet, were gowned in your glorious hair. But I can
't remember the rest."
"You also have it wrong," Marc replied. "You're supposed to be my sweet. I'm the one tusked like a cave bear."
"I can't believe it," Kit said. "You're analyzing our poem. Do you ever quit analyzing things?"
Marc sat up. "It's not a matter of analyzing it's a matter of the caveman being the one reciting the poem. I was thewed like an Auroch bull and tusked like the great cave bear—" he combed his fingers through her hair "—and you, my sweet, from head to feet were gowned in your glorious hair."
"Actually that was kind of romantic," Kit said. "You just called me your sweet."
"That's because you are. I said I could be romantic," Marc replied. "And deep in the gloom of a fireless cave, when the night fell o'er the plain, and the moon hung red o'er the river bed, we mumbled the bones of the slain."
"Actually we weren't mumbling bones," Kit said, while trailing a finger down his chest, "we were sharing a mastodon bone between having sex."
"Come here."
"Where?"
"Back down here with me." Marc lay back and opened his arms, and when Kit cuddled up against him, Marc kissed her lingeringly, and said, "I love you, baby, and that was easy to say."
"I love you too, sweetheart," Kit replied, "but right at this moment, billions of microscopic little sperm are swimming around inside me, searching for one tiny egg, and if they happen to connect there will be a little Hansen on the way and we still haven't figured out how we're going to make it all work with you in Belize and me in Santa e. We need to talk about this."
"I know," Marc said, "and I know exactly where we need to be when we do."
"Whispering Springs?" Kit asked.
Marc nodded. "We might wait until after dark to go though, when the ranch guests and everyone else are settled for the night."
"Good idea," Kit said. "Meanwhile, I've finished nibbling on my mastodon bone and I'm ready for sex again..."
Two hours later, with a battery-operated lantern in his hand to find their way, Marc led them up the trail to Whispering Springs. Once inside, they quickly shed their clothes and stepped into the hot spring pool. Marc moved around to sit on the natural rock ledge and Kit cuddled up alongside him. Marc curved his arm around her, kissed her, and said, "You're an amazing woman. If I'd known this was what commitment was all about, it wouldn't have taken me so long to get with the program."
"I'm not sure you have it right yet," Kit said. "It's not about having an afternoon of really hot sex. It's about filling voids in each other's lives and there's still one big unfilled void in yours, and that's your project in Belize."
"It's not as important as it was," Marc said.
"Yes it is," Kit insisted. "It's something you want, and I'm okay going back there as long as I can share a tent with you, but since I'm not part of the team, that's not an option. How about, you accept the job and head the team for the initial dig, and if we find out your little bundle in pink is on her way we'll work out a plan that includes her, maybe find a bungalow to rent, somewhere not too far from the site, where you could come home on weekends?"
Marc kissed her on the temple, and said, "Not a workable plan for me. There would be too many unfulfilled voids during the week. But what about the job in Santa Fe?" Marc asked. "It's what you want, so not taking it leaves an empty spot in your life."
"Well, we came here for a reason," Kit replied. "Maybe we should close our eyes and listen to the mountain and see what comes. You said it's always worked in the past."
"It has." Marc shut his eyes.
For a few moments Kit looked at Marc and wondered if she could love a man any more than she loved him. She was tempted to touch his face and kiss him, and curve her arms around his neck and move onto his lap and take it from there, but eerie, faraway sounds were beginning to funnel through the crevices in the mountain, so she closed her eyes and listened, and waited.
For a while she tried to come up with rational ways to merge Marc's Belize project with her museum job, but each time she thought she was on the right path, it would come to a dead end. But gradually she began to relax, and before long a calmness seemed to settle around her.
Marc was the one to finally break the silence. "When you brought up the idea of excavating a mound I made a remark about your pissing off the locals by shipping everything to a museum and you said you'd get your team to move the museum to the site to make things easier. It sounds like a good idea."
"I said that because you were being a total android at the time," Kit said. "Obviously we won't be building a museum on the ranch."
"Why not? There are living cultural history museums all around the country. If we stayed here, after excavating the mound we could leave half of it open and in excavated layers, to show the process of doing an archaeological dig, and on the other half we could reconstruct some of the pit houses. One pit house could be set up for demonstrating cooking techniques like cutting corn off the cob with the jaw bone of a deer, or have someone grinding corn on a grinding stone. Another could be an arrow maker's house where an Indian from the reservation could show how to make arrowheads or tan leather or make bows. Later, we could have overnight campouts for scouts and they could make their own tools, and maybe even offer a powwow one night a week where visitors could be taught dance steps by the local Indians, along with giving them a historical narrative about the Indians who once lived in the village."
Kit thought about the idea. It wasn't so farfetched. Then she looked at Marc who was smiling, and said, "You're serious, aren’t you?"
Marc nodded. "It seems like the perfect solution. We'd still be digging, and in the end, you'd be curator of the museum."
"There's one major problem," Kit said. "Commitment is about filling voids in each other's lives. A living museum might fill a void in my life, but what about Belize?"
Marc placed his hand on Kit's bare belly, and said, "This afternoon I put a baby here and I don't want to be stuck off in the jungles of Central America when your time comes."
Kit laughed. "Honey, you must think you have alpha sperm. We only made love three times."
"Which means around a half-billion sperm made a mad dash for your egg. And I can tell you for a fact, the sperm I gave you were very eager to get on with things, so since a sperm can reach an egg in as soon as thirty minutes, a little zygote's already on its way up your fallopian tube."
Kit curved her hands around Marc's neck, and said, "You're a very intelligent man, and you're extremely proficient in what you do, but you can't assume, just because you have big balls to generate potent sperm, and a jet-propelled delivery system, that I'm already pregnant."
"Don't complicate things," Marc said. "But speaking of a jet-propelled delivery system, it's refueled and ready to go again, so in case you're right, maybe you could climb aboard so we could make sure that egg becomes a little zygote."
"This is all about outdoing Rick and Adam, isn't it," Kit said.
"No, baby," Marc replied, "it's about us introducing some new genes into the Hansen line. You have blue eyes, and I have multi-colored eyes, and if we have at least six kids, odds are most of them will have something other than brown eyes and brown hair."
"Six kids means we'll have one more than Rick and Sophie," Kit pointed out, "which means it's still about you outdoing your brothers. But I do like the idea of making love while looking at each other, and maybe that would send signals to my egg to be more receptive to having sex with your sperm." She straddled him, and in the dusky twilight of the cavern, they again consummated their love, but this time it was slower, and during the moments after they'd come down from their climaxes, Kit looked at Marc and said, "I love you, and for some reason I can't explain, I feel as if a tiny little sperm is at this moment penetrating my egg."
Marc looked at her, soberly. "Is it because of the way we're doing it?" he asked.
Kit shrugged. "No, it's just a feeling."
"I love you too, baby," Marc said, "and maybe the reason I want you pregnant is because I want an e
xcuse not to go back to Belize. I'm liking it here again. I can even imagine building a house, not too close to Rick and Adam, but somewhere near here. Sam has a parcel of land set aside for me, and one for Becca and Chase too. He said he and Jayne want their kids around them, and he included me."
"And your mom and dad want you here too," Kit pointed out, "and a house in the vicinity of Whispering Springs would be heavenly, maybe one built into the side of the hill and overlooking the Indian mound."
After a few minutes, Marc said, "Meanwhile, I think the delivery system has finally run out of fuel. Are you ready to go back?"
"I am if you promise to stay in my tent with me tonight," Kit said. "You can sneak back to yours before your folks get up." She moved off his lap and climbed out of the pool, and Marc followed behind her. But after they'd dried off and dressed, and before they left, Kit picked up the lantern and walked over to the wall and studied the irregular surface with curiosity, and said in a thoughtful tone, while moving the light slowly around, "Did you or your brothers ever carve pictures on this wall?"
"No," Marc replied. "Why?"
"Come see." Kit raised the light, bringing into view the vague outline of a crude stick figure that appeared to have been inscribed into the cave wall with a sharp tool, and not far from it, was another figure. "It looks like a petroglyph. All around the figures are tiny lines and small cuplike indentations."
Marc walked over to stand beside her. Running his fingers over the stone wall, he said, "Cupules and grooves. They're associated with rituals involving rhythmic pounding during altered states of consciousness, usually by shamans’ intent on finding power."
Kit held the light up to the stick figures, and said, "Or this could have been part of a fertility ritual, like the Pomo Indians in California do with their baby rocks. Couples would go to a sacred rock together, make impressions on it, with cups representing the woman, and lines for the man, then pray and have sex." She pointed to a short, incised line between the legs of one of the stick figures. "This one's obviously a man, and this one's got a slit instead of a stick, so it's a woman."
Bittersweet Return (Dancing Moon Ranch Book 6) Page 19
