Snow Swept Moors: A Highland Winter Collection, page 40
He chuckled again. Given her cooking skills, within a year he would, indeed, be nothing more than the hank and bone she had initially described him.
If their marriage lasted that long.
For all the intimacy that transpired in the marriage bed he had ordered made for her – after all, beds were important status symbols to his wife’s people – he and Cat were still strangers. The vital news he carried he dared not share with his own wife. Not when she was one of the Royals. If allegiances and loyalties divided them, what hope was there for them – and how in the hell could they forge a meaningful marriage?
He could not wholly blame Cat for their wary regard of one another. For all his articulateness, acquired at the knee of his very learned father, he had yet to stutter out the shameful confession that he could only barely read and write. It went against his grain to confess that he needed someone else – as he needed her to acquire the rudiments of a gentleman.
More worrying to him, would she ever trust him again should she discover the full extent of the measures he had taken to secure her hand in marriage. Was not he guilty of violating her trust?
Despite these serious issues and despite his utter fatigue, his strides increased those last hours remaining until just before dawn he reached home.
Home.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Surfacing from sleep, Catriona flicked away the pesky mosquito buzzing her ear – only to have her wrist captured by a single hand and her lips covered by a ravaging mouth.
Instinctively, she rolled toward her crouching subjugator. Her nose wrinkled. He smelled familiarly of forest and fur, and rain and clammy leather. Smells that were at once earthy and wild.
The lips that claimed hers once again tasted of salty sweat. Her free hand, trapped between her breast and his ribs, worked free to slide up over the snug fringed shirt and anchor in his mane of hair.
His throat rumbled like rolling thunder. His arm wrapped around her waist, his hand pressing her hips and contouring her body to his lengthy frame. His other smoothed back her sleep-mussed hair from her cheek. “You have been too much in my thoughts,” he said, rubbing his jaw caressingly against her temple.
Oh, Dia. “I have missed . . . missed . . . this.” She could not bring herself to confess it was him she missed. In his absence, she felt hollow. And when with him, she felt nervous and breathless and so oddly excited it was like being ill.
“Too often I thought of your rounded ivory loveliness.” His hands squeezed her buttocks before sliding under her shift.
She should have been embarrassed by her body’s sudden gush. But, as she lived and breathed, she could no more prevent that natural response than she could prevent herself from seating, grinding, into his kneading fingers.
Her hand slipped up under his sweat dampened buckskin, her fingertips tracing the line of hair arrowing down the washboard that was his belly – and she screamed, a shrill, ricocheting cry that punctured the still of the dark night.
At once, Jacob rolled into a hunkered protection over her. “What?” he barely breathed.
She shrank from him, her hands palsied. “A . . . a . . . slimy thing . . . something . . . on you!”
“Aww, bleedin’shit.” Immediately he reared on his knees and was peeling the buckskin shirt over his head. “Get a candle.”
The rusty tin holder’s hastily lit candle held aloft, she stared with open mouth at his sun-browned torso, blotched with leeches and a scattering of ticks. Shivers of repulsion convulsed her spine. Goose bumps mottled her upper arms.
Head bent, long hair splashing his tattooed chest, he was already pulling at a tick’s body. “That shortcut through the swamp,” he muttered. The tick was anchored below his navel, where his leather breeches were slung low over his hipbones. “Here,” he said, holding out the tick.
“What?”
He started toward her, and she backed a step. He sighed. “Give me the drip pan, Cat.”
She trembled, extending the candle holder as far from her as she could, and he dropped the tick in the pan’s wax. Next, he grabbed at a leech attached just below his left nipple. Then, he went after a leech clamped within the hair of his armpit.
Still, a score or more of the bloodsuckers covered his upper body, front and back. He needed help. He needed a wife like Mary.
But Mary was not here, and she was. She shuddered, closed her lids, then opening them, sat the candle holder on the high chest of drawers. She circled behind him. Inwardly flinching and looking away, she squeamishly took hold of a clinging leech. Quickly, she glanced at it, already fat from engorging on his blood, then dropped it in the drip pan.
He looked over his shoulder. His gaze was grave. “You do not have to do this.”
Shuddering, she stared back into those dark blue eyes. “Aye, I do. I am your wife.”
Her throat gagged reflexively. Somehow she managed to detach another and add it along with the other vermin writhing in the wax.
She tried to think of other things – of Phoebe’s sweet pumpkin bread smelling of melted butter and cinnamon, of Anne MacDonald’s charming morning patter at Moll King’s coffee house, of Afton Manor’s mantle clock chiming out the hour, and the feel of her cool, silk pillowcase under her cheek.
One tick’s head was left, latched onto the flesh of Jacob’s nape, and she shivered with the willies. Once she was able to pry it loose, she told him, “Drop your leggings and breeches.”
He glanced over his shoulder again and flashed her a grin. “I thought never to hear you ask that of me, Cat.”
With her blood-stained thumb and forefinger circled, she flicked his ear and returned to face him. “Ye strut far too cockily, me husband.”
After he shucked his muddy, scruffy breeches, he had good reason to be cocky as she viewed him in the candle’s revealing light: Sleek, powerful, with not a pinch of fat anywhere. Long legs, tightly muscled buttocks, a muscle-plated chest, and shoulders wide as a yardstick. And densely lashed eyes that watched her closely, as she knelt to inspect the lower half of his magnificent physique.
“Oh, mercy,” she breathed, staring at the visibly stiffening length of flesh. “Now ‘tis not the time to rise to the occasion, Jacob Dare.”
From above came his groan. “I cannot help myself.” His fingers dug into her shoulders. “God, Cat, let us get this removal business over with. I want to get on with what we started.”
When her fingers slid tantalizingly slow up the inside of his thigh to locate a leech buried in the hollow of his furred crotch, she felt him tremble and heard his ragged inhalation. Her own inhalation took in his crotch’s maleness, and incredibly, under the circumstances, the smell stimulated the flare of wanton craving deep inside her.
With difficulty, she ignored the evidence of his arousal throbbing so close to her cheek, and worked to remove the repulsive leech. There had to be nearly another dozen leeches that clung to his lower body – dotting his thighs and calves, in the crevices behind his knees, and across his buttocks
At last, after all were removed, she rose and, circling in front of him, backed away from his length of reach. “Tis not finished, we are.” She nodded at his blood-flecked body. “Those wounds need to be treated. Follow me.” She picked up the candle holder. She avoided looking in its drip pan, packed with wax-entrapped vermin.
“By the way,” he called after her in a low, heated growl, “did you know the candle light reveals every wonderful curve of your body beneath your nightrail?
“Those curves were the bane of me life for a lang time,” she said, crossing to the shelf to collect the jug of rum.
His eyes were dilated with desire. “Staring at you, as I am at this very moment, I would find that difficult to believe.”
Blushing, but feeling pleased, she uncorked the jug and, eking a little rum into her palm, began to pat the lesions. “Clumsy and awkward, a biblical behemoth, I was. When the dance master came to town to give lessons, none of the lads wanted to dance with me. Worse, when there was a shortage of lads, I had to be the male partner.”
He captured her hand and brought it to his mouth. His tongue licked the potent rum from the hollow of her palm. Lashes fluttering closed, she shivered, this time from the pure pleasure of the senses. Then she fixed him with a stern look. “Ye are mucking with me, Jacob. Now loose me hand so we can finish here.”
She stepped around to his back, feasting her gaze, as she dabbed rum on the welts, bleeding more than normal wounds. Time and again she dabbed the lesions. Treating one at the base of his spine, she noted his fist, braced on one hip. “Your hands. How did you come by those scars, now?”
She felt the muscle ridging his lower backbone tense beneath her fingers. A long moment ticked by. “Trying to rip the ropes that bound my mother.”
“Why was she bound?”
“She was being punished. Burned at the stake.”
“Why?” she breathed. She circled around to look at him. His eyes were hard as obsidian. A muscle in his jaw flicked like lightning striking.
“Here, in the southern colonies, both bastardy and adultery are punished, you understand.”
She could only nod.
His distant gaze slid slowly back to fasten on hers. “When an unmarried woman gives birth outside of wedlock, she is usually trussed up half naked like an animal. Publicly whipped until blood flows freely.”
“But you said she was burnt at the stake.”
“I am coming to that.” He glanced at her, then looked away again, as if he could not stand the sight of her sympathy. “When that first flogging happened at Fort Dobbs, my father resigned his commission. He moved as far from what you call ‘civilization’ as he could. Here to the western wilderness.”
“And then?”
“He died, four years later. My mother was turned out to fend for herself and me.”
“And that meant what?”
“With a bastard son, she was not cordially welcomed among either her people or my father’s. She was reduced to servicing Fort Dobbs’ soldiers. But the army wives, the laundresses, the local squatters . . . those good citizens were offended.”
She said nothing, not wanting to interrupt this rare spate of words.
“They decided they were going to flog me, the bastard. My mother interfered. Their anger turned back on her, again. Flogging was not enough for them.” He flexed his hands before him, as if testing their suppleness. “I tried to reach her, to save her, but . . . I was only eleven at the time . . . .” He shrugged.
She was appalled, unable to look into that impassive countenance and know the terrible unseen scars that disinclined him to place his trust in anyone or anything other than his own strength and knowledge. She lowered her gaze to the ceramic jug she held then looked at him once more. “And, so, at eleven, where did you go to live?”
His razor-edged smile curled his lips with cynicism. “With her people for a few years. Then, I struck out on my own. Where I belonged – with the other animals of the forest.” His hand atop her shoulder nudged her to her knees. “I believe I still have other places that need your attention.”
Sobered, she returned to her ministrations, applying the rum in a feathering touch on the lesion at his inner thigh. And yet, she could not but be stirred by the sight of him. Oh, she had seen bulls grazing in the pastures, their huge bollocks swinging lazily. And she had seen a stallion’s enormous erection just before he mounted and rutted. Common occurrences.
But this . . . this man who had suffered and turned his back on civilization . . . she could not but feel longing for who he was and what he had made of himself. Lightly, tenderly, her lips brushed the spot just above his laceration.
“Awww, God, Cat!”
Taking that as an affirmative that she was pleasing him, she nuzzled her nose in the nearby coarse, spiraling hair. What it enwreathed visibly throbbed. She inhaled audibly of his musk.
As if by accident, her fingernails grazed one hard, seamed testicle. His grip on her shoulders tightened vice-like.
She was becoming bolder at the idea of initiating her own desires, too long tamped down like puritan society’s pipe tobacco. She moved her head merely a faction to gently lick him, then drew away.
He groaned. “I was right. You do have a mouth on you.”
She looked up. His head was thrown back. The muscles of his throat were taut ropes. She feared she could never get enough of this backwoodsman. Best he never learn she was his to do with as he wanted.
Lust and the law bound them, but love?
Chapter Twelve
What a wretched place.
Jacob was gone again after being home but a few hours. More and more often, his work for the Continentals demanded his absence.
And Catriona was miserable. Miserable with the miserable chigger bites. Miserable with the hot monotonous days and monotonous food and long, monotonous nights. Miserable with pulling weeds that choked the kitchen garden, toting in split logs for the fireplace, scouring the necessary, scrubbing the chamber pot, and washing clothes on the tub’s washboard.
True, she had the morning reading classes with Esau and Jethro and Mary and Billy to look forward to, but those lessons were nowhere as stimulating as a pianoforte recital at Campbelton or a play at nearby Cross Creek.
And true, she had books to read, but candles were a scarce commodity. As was every blasted thing. She was accustomed to adoring servants carrying out her every whim. And now she had no one – unless she counted Fergus, who once again had taken up residency outside the cabin door come nightfall.
She yanked open the door. Fergus jumped to his feet and swung around, musket at the ready. The rising moon’s yellow light slanted beneath the porch roof to disclose beneath the coonskin cap the curmudgeon’s bleary eyes. “Well, if the bloody mosquitos dunna carry ye off, the Indians will.” She slapped at a whining one. “Come on inside.”
His bearded chin ducked to his barrel chest, and, peering up at her, his bristly brows wagged warily. “I can better protect ye from outside, lass.”
“For the love of God, Fergus, the mosquitos will feast on the Indians first.” Her shoulders slumped. “I am just lonely. Come in and have a wee dram and regale me with tales of Scotland – or Ireland, is it?”
The Ulster Scotsman huffed a little but followed her inside on bandy legs. She crossed to the shelf and took down two cups along with the jug of ale. It was running low. She would be better off learning how to brew than spin. Although, she privately was of the opinion that gnat’s urine would taste better than Mary’s home brew
She plunked the cups on the table and poured a liberal dose for both her and Fergus. Sitting opposite him on the bench, she raised her cup. “Lang live Scotland. Lang live Ireland!”
He clinked his cup against hers. “To Scotland – and Ireland.” He took a deep draught of the ale, then sighed. “But tis been a lang time since I laid me eyes on me country’s misty mountains and glens and blue lochs.”
“What is it about you backwoods people that ye have the gift of the silver tongue when ye make up your mind to talk? Why did ye leave, Fergus?”
He wrapped his hands with their ragged nails around his cup. She tried to imagine him as a younger man, like Jacob, foraging in the wilderness on his own . . . and how he must have seemed to a suffering Coowee like her own savage knight in armor.
The cabin’s silence stretched and stretched. Fergus took another swallow from his cup. Then, as if addressing himself to the books piled on the hearth, he said, “Me family were crofters. When the rent was raised to intolerable heights, we were turned off the land.”
“Is that how ye came to be here, in the colonies?”
“Nope. We had no passage money. Nowhere to go, ye understand? Two of me brothers had already died from starvation. Me da was being held in a gaol. Me thirteen-year-old sister was selling herself on the streets of Banbridge. And I . . . ” his throat worked, and he took a swig from his cup. He wiped his mouth with the back of his furred hand. “And I, I killed me mam I did.”
Now she took a swill, nigh choking.
He was swigging another deeper draught. “Foot guards of the Government’s 36th army found me mam and me, hiding in a turf-wall cottage. I had escaped.”
His tone was low, stony like a cairn. “When a dozen or more foot guards began taking their turns with me mam, when I saw blood gushing from her . . . from there, well, I shot her dead with one of their French muskets.”
A grisly smile exposed his teeth, and she knew that for Fergus it was either that or weep uncontrollably.
She reached across the table and placed her hand over his clenched, hoary one.
His mouth worked. He stared down into his cup. He swallowed again. “Everybody’s got his own row to hoe.”
“After that, what happened?”
“When the opportunity to indenture meself to a mercantile company in the American colonies presented itself, I signed on – and promptly proceeded to lose meself in the Great Smokys.”
“How did you meet Jacob?”
“By that time, I was earning me living trading with the Indians, lass. Dinna care to venture often into towns, what with me being an escaped indentured servant and all. Crossed paths with Jacob at one of the Tuscarora camps. Half me age, he nonetheless was able to convince me there was money to be made at Kinsfolk Landing, what with the tar and resin distillery he had jest set up.”
“Aye,” she sighed, “he can be quite convincing.”
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Skinny Coowee was among the students who showed up for the next reading lesson. And Catriona had to wonder if it was at Fergus’s promptings. The Indian woman glanced from the doorway around Jacob’s orderly cabin. Well, it was orderly when Jacob was present. Her stolid, swarthy face betrayed nothing, but her eyes, bird-bright, were absorbing everything. She just stood there, waiting.
Collecting the scattered books, Catriona turned and smiled. “Come in, come in.”
Tentatively, she limped inside. At Catriona’s directive nod, she sat placidly on the bench, saying nothing, as Catriona readied for the lessons. Minutes later, in trooped Mary and Billy with Jethro and Esau.
