by Shirl Henke
“You sure as hell did, Livy,” he replied softly.
“About that embarras,” she said, returning to the subject doggedly, unwilling to let him know how much his continuing suspicions could still hurt her, or how much his implied praise pleased her. “If we can make it to the river, we can hide in the beaver lodges—some of them looked pretty big from what I could see.”
“Well, hell, I guess it’s a better chance than thrashing around in this brush. How far downriver?”
“Half a day...I think...on foot.”
He stopped and she followed suit. They listened for any sounds to indicate the presence of men in the surrounding woods. They had zigzagged and changed course since killing the last of the Osage whom they had seen. Nothing disturbed the low hum of nature.
“Time to take a breather—and see to your feet,” he said, pulling her down beneath the cover of elderberry bushes beside a small trickling creek. They both quenched their thirst before he raised one of her small feet by a delicate anklebone and inspected it with a grimace.
“Not half as bad as yours were,” she said as he checked the other foot. “No thistles sticking out thick as porcupine quills.”
“But you are cut and bruised. Damn, if only we hadn’t lost the horse. My saddlebags had medicines.”
“If I just bathe them in the cool water, it’ll help. Some yarrow would be good to stop the cuts from bleeding.” She glanced around the creek bank.
Samuel saw the tall gold-crowned weeds the same time she did and walked down a few dozen yards to cut some.
“Becoming a regular woods-lore expert, aren’t you?” he asked as he began pounding the flower tops into a powder on a smooth rock.
“I have already survived a revolution, a cholera epidemic, several attempts to kill me, even one to sell me,” she could not resist adding. “I’ll survive this, too.”
He quirked one eyebrow. “If you had been sensible enough to come to me with the truth when Wescott tried to sell you, you could’ve saved us both a lot of trouble.”
“So very simple,” she scoffed. “The only way you accept the truth is when it stares you straight in the face—with incontrovertible bloody evidence.”
He thought of her ripped maidenhead and the blood smeared on the sheets afterward and his face darkened with a guilty flush as he shrugged off his shirt and began ripping it to make bandages for her feet. “I’d give you my boots, but they’re so much too big you’d break your neck trying to walk in them,” he said gruffly. Taking one slender foot that she had been dangling in the creek, he dried it off, and applied the yarrow paste. Then he began swaddling it with long strips of the heavy cotton cloth.
All the while he worked, she watched the play of bronzed muscles rippling across his chest. Olivia remembered how the crisp black hair there had felt when she pressed her face against that warm solid wall, listening to his heart slam furiously when he had made love to her.
They spoke no more as they resumed walking, following the small creek which would eventually empty into the river. When they reached a rocky area where they had to ford the creek, he gave her his rifle, scooped her up in his arms and carried her.
Olivia let out a squeak of surprise as his arms lifted her against his chest. “Put me down! I can walk. You’re not fully recovered from your injuries. You need to save your strength.”
“I’m fine. I don’t need you to lay open one of your feet and undo all my careful bandaging. After all, I don’t happen to have a spare shirt on me,” he added dryly.
Olivia was all too aware of that as she held onto the smooth muscles of his shoulders. He was as powerful as a great black panther. She was acutely conscious of the heat of his skin, the male smell of his bare upper body pressed so closely to hers. Her stiff resistance quickly gave way to acquiescence as his long easy strides ate up the ground.
She always felt protected and safe when he held her. Fool. He’s a greater danger to you than the hostile Osage and Pardee combined!
He stayed in the creek bed shallows for a mile or so saying, “This should keep them from tracking us quickly even if they happen to see signs farther back. How far do you estimate to the smaller river with the embarras?”
“If we cut overland to the south, maybe another mile, but you can’t—”
“Yes, I can,” he replied, holding her fast as he jumped from the creek across several flat rocks, careful to leave no sign of where he left the water. “Of course, this will make it damned hard for Dirt Devil to pick up our trail if Micajah is following.”
“If he is, that dog will find us,” she said with assurance, praying that they would all be reunited safely.
Within an hour they had reached the confluence of the small river and the larger Missouri. As Olivia had observed, a large thicket of driftwood and other debris floated at the mouth of the lesser body of water. Near one end a sawyer bobbed precariously, beating time on the rippling current. At the opposite end a huge complex of beaver lodges stuck up, giving the impression of a small city. Several of the lodges were a goodly size.
Samuel set Olivia on her feet, on a long flat stretch of rock, and relieved her of both the rifles she had been carrying. “I vote for that big one in the center,” she said, pointing to one huge brown dome that rose above all the other surrounding lodges. “The trick will be finding a way in,” she continued, starting to roll up her pant legs.
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “If I recall correctly, you can’t swim.”
“I can now,” she replied calmly. “Like a fish.”
“More like a beaver, I hope.” Then he hesitated again, weighing the options.
“If we do this, we lose the use of our rifles,” he reminded her, but already he had concluded that they were both too exhausted to go any farther.
Olivia shrugged. “We’re almost out of powder anyway. There wasn’t much in Pardee’s powder horn to begin with. He’s a careless woodsman.”
He tied their shot pouches and powder horns to the weapons, then carefully submerged them in murky water beneath the brush snarled undergrowth of the embarras. Hopefully they could retrieve them when they left. Then they waded out into the river, diving into the cold green current. Samuel kept an eye on Olivia, moving close to her. She swam with graceful ease, slithering past slow-moving mudcats who drifted along the silty brown bottom. Underwater weeds undulated around them, twisting like silken gauze in a summer breeze.
When they moved beneath the shadow of the embarras, all light vanished and the only source of reckoning was pure instinct, as they aimed for the center of the largest beaver lodge. Both prayed they could feel its underwater entrance.
Groping along the tightly meshed network of twigs, wood and hard-packed mud, Samuel found an opening big enough to stick his head into. Fitting his shoulders would be a tight squeeze. His lungs were beginning to scream for air. He turned, reached out for Olivia, not sensing her nearby at first. Then suddenly the current surged and he felt something brush his arm.
Confused by the inky blackness, Olivia grasped for something to orient herself. Although she had become a strong swimmer over the summer months, she had never spent this long underwater, beneath light breaking cover such as this. All sense of up and down had vanished and she fought panic. Perhaps using the beaver lodge had not been such a great idea after all. Then she felt Samuel’s hand grasping her arm and shoving her into an opening. She was half-pushed while she half-propelled herself upward until she suddenly broke through the water. Blessed warm air rushed into her strained, burning lungs.
Quickly shimmying up into the dim cavern, she felt Samuel right behind her. He struggled to work his way through the funnel-like opening. Frantically, she reached down into the water and tugged at his shoulder, pulling with all her strength beneath his armpit until he, too, surfaced, filling his lungs with huge gulps of air.
“Damn, I thought I’d never work my way through that pinhole opening,” he gasped, coughing up water as he blinked to acclimatize his eyes to the faint light
filtering into the lodge from a narrow air hole in the center of the dome-like roof. He could make out Olivia’s shadowy outline as she huddled across from him.
“For a while there I was reconsidering the wisdom of trying to find this place,” she said.
“Hell, I don’t know. If they trail us this far, they’ll have no way of being sure that we entered the river on this embarras. I expect it’ll take them a day or two to split up and look for a sign before they get close. Meanwhile we can rest.” He could see that she was shivering in spite of the stuffy brackish air inside the lodge. “Best we get out of these wet clothes,” he said, beginning to pull off the sodden britches and boots he’d hurriedly secured from the Ste. Francoise mercantile.
Olivia sat very still, suddenly aware of how intimate their circumstances were in spite of the size of the lodge. She looked nervously around, gauging the ceiling to be ten feet at its apex. The round room was perhaps as large as forty feet across at the base. The floor of the lodge was sturdily built of painstakingly layered roots, twigs, wood shavings and moss, so tightly packed as to be rock solid, but wet from seepage from the river bottom. “Will the beavers come back at dark, do you think?” she asked nervously.
“I doubt they’ll want houseguests. They’ll avoid this lodge and use the others until we’re long gone.” He, too, studied their quarters, noting the sleeping loft the beavers had built a foot or so above the wet floor. Walking over to the surface that ringed the perimeter of the circular room, he tested its sturdiness. “Alder bark. Soft and dry. Should easily hold our weight, too. Good carpenters, these beavers. At least we can sleep in comfort.”
He looked at her again, noting that she had made no move to get out of her wet clothes. Suddenly their proximity struck him, too. Clearing his throat nervously, he said, “I’m going to search for dinner. You’d better shuck those clothes or you’ll catch your death.”
“Dinner?”
“Yes, if I remember correctly what Santiago and his trapper friends have told me, the tunnel opening over there should lead to a food cache.”
“Oh.” She could think of nothing else to say. Her throat was suddenly dry. With trembling fingers she began to unfasten the laces on the filthy shirt. Relieved when he turned his back to go into the adjoining lodge, she pulled it over her head, then lay back and skinned off the sopping britches. At least the light was faint. He would not be able to see much of her naked body...she hoped.
In a few moments Samuel returned with the bounty from the beaver’s cache—berries, iris bulbs, sedges, watercress and mushrooms. “Not exactly a banquet but it’ll fill us up,” he said, setting down the vegetarian delight.
Her stomach gave a sudden growl and she reached out for a handful of the berries, stuffing them greedily in her mouth. “I haven’t eaten since I grabbed some wild persimmons yesterday.”
“Try the mushrooms. They’re almost like meat—at least the chewiness makes it seem that way,” he said between mouthfuls.
They shared the repast, making casual conversation about the bitterness of iris bulb or the sweetness of the dried choke-cherries, gradually becoming more aware of each other’s nakedness and their proximity, sitting in the middle of the cavernous room. Outside, a leopard frog snorted and rattled while a chorus of wood frogs kept up a steady chicken-like clucking in the background. The gentle hum of the river’s current was broken by the erratic slapping of sawyers on the embarras, pounding the water as they rose and fell with the tug of the current.
Another current, hot and electric as a summer storm was pulsing inside the lodge. Suddenly as they each reached onto the pile of food their fingers touched. Both pulled away as if burned, speaking at once.
“I didn’t—”
“You must—”
They stared at each other, their eyes glowing, meeting across the gloom, dark stormy blue and glittering deep emerald.
“What are we going to do, Livy?” he asked at length, breaking the spell of silence.
“I... I don’t know,” she whispered, fighting the urge to cover herself in spite of the cloaking gloom.
“I want you,” he admitted, unwilling to formulate his thoughts any further than the obvious.
“You say that as if you begrudge your own desire.” Her voice was at once hurt and scornful. “You don’t trust me, Samuel. You don’t want to want me.” You don’t love me.
“I admire you—your courage, your resourcefulness. As to trust...” he hesitated, then admitted, “I have reason to suspect your guardian of treason. Considering the circumstance that first brought us together, can you blame me for being suspicious?”
“I suppose not...but I have just as much reason to detest Emory Wescott as you and things have changed over the past months...” I have fallen in love with you.
“They sure have changed over the past days. We are married, Livy,” he reminded her.
“Don’t call me that.” The pet endearment hurt. “My father used to call me Livy.” And he loved me. Not wanting to dwell on that she quickly added, “Neither of us wanted this marriage. We were foolish to consummate it.”
He smiled in the darkness. “Then you admit I wasn’t the only one who participated that night?”
“You’re the most insufferably arrogant man I’ve ever known.”
“I’m the only man you’ve ever known...at least in the biblical sense.” The idea pleased him suddenly. He reached out and slipped his hand around her slender wrist, pulling her toward him as he stood up.
Olivia did not resist. His heat drew her, cool and shivering, up against his body. His scent, his hard male vitality seemed to surround her as he enfolded her in his arms and slanted his mouth over hers, tangling his fingers in her long wet hair. When he rimmed her lips with the tip of his tongue, then pressed the seam, prying them apart with gentle insistence, she opened to him.
Samuel tightened his arms around her as he claimed her mouth, and felt her small cool palms press against the muscles of his back as her silky body molded itself against his. He could feel the tilt of her pelvis as he cupped her buttocks, lifting her to press against the aching insistence of his erection, groaning low in his throat as her hips unconsciously undulated against him.
When he swept her up into his arms and walked over to the narrow loft edging the room, she clung to him, returning his kisses with wicked abandon. He had to crouch low as the domed ceiling curved downward. Then he knelt and lay her onto the soft, dry bed of fine bark shavings. She closed her eyes as he loomed above her, his hands moving with deft sure strokes across her belly and up to her breasts, circling them, cupping and molding them until his mouth, hot and seeking, fastened on one nipple, drawing a sharp exclamation of bliss from her.
He felt her fingers dig into his scalp, pulling his head closer as he moved between her breasts, feasting on one, then the other, back and forth as she arched up and thrashed with the pleasure he was giving her. His hand slid lower, caressing the concave hollow of her belly, letting his lips trail soft, wet kisses down to her navel. When he circled it with his tongue she quivered.
His fingers found her wet, warm center, parting and delving inside in slick, delicate rhythm. She undulated against the erotic pressure, expecting him to cover her and fill her again. But he did not. Instead his mouth nuzzled the curls shielding her treasure, before delving lower. His head dipped between her thighs as his hands pressed them apart. Olivia was too shocked to resist when the heat of his mouth found the velvety folds of her sex, suckling and drawing on it, his tongue working maddeningly around the small nub where ecstasy centered.
When she moaned, he felt a surge of pleasure that he could give her this, some small atonement for the pain he had inflicted on their wedding night. He worked patiently, slowly, subtly, all the while gauging her reactions. Gradually her legs opened wider and wider and her hands clutched frantically at his shoulders. He could feel her whole body stretched taut as a bowstring. Using the flat of his tongue, he massaged the swelling little bud with long, soft, slow strok
es, until it began to spasm.
Olivia came up from the mat, a keening sound torn from her throat as the most intense pleasure rode in sharp little waves, jolting through her whole body, right down to her toes. Just when she thought she could stand no more, or go mad with it, he pulled away.
She lay open to him, throbbing in her release as he mounted her, guiding his rigid phallus into the pulsing heat of her body. He could still feel the fading aftershocks of her climax as he began to move slowly, deeply, willing himself to be patient, to make it last as long as he humanly could.
Nothing could surpass what she had just experienced. Or so she thought until his hard length pressed into her, this time sliding effortlessly deep. There was no barrier, no pain, only the enrapturing pleasure of his body joined to hers. Soon the lethargy of repletion began to fade, once more sharpening into renewed need. Olivia looked up at his shadowed face, able to make out only the glow of his eyes as he moved over her. Her arms raised, encircling his neck, pulling him down. Their lips met in a slow, tentative kiss that grew along with the building ecstasy they shared in the coupling.
Samuel felt her thighs tighten on his hips and his thrusting grew harder, faster. He reached up with both hands and placed his palms against her bent knees, pressing them backward so her hips raised higher, her body opened further, allowing him deeper access, increasing the maddeningly pleasurable friction, tightening the velvety sheath that surrounded his staff, drawing him ever deeper into her beckoning softness until he knew that he was lost.
This time she knew what the spiraling tightness, the thrumming ache meant, where it would lead her, where she would most willingly follow. She rocked her hips against him with each thrust, greedy for it, impatient, mindless with the sweet pain of need and fulfillment blended all together at once, until it burst upon her again. The splendor of climax was heightened even more with his answering response.
