A Wild Yearning (15 page)

She stopped struggling. She twisted around and looked up at him, tears streaming down her cheeks. "But they were the
first
that ye bought me, Ty. An' there can always only be one first."

"Aw, Delia." He held her, rocking her in his arms as she sobbed against his chest. "Don't cry, honey. Don't cry..."

They were only a pair of shoes, Ty thought, and it would be a simple matter to replace them. He couldn't understand why they were so important to her. Yet she cried as if their loss broke her heart.

Delia stood on the inn's front porch and peered through the driving rain at a small bay mare tied to the hitching post. "Oh, Ty, ye've gone an' bought me a horse!" She looked up at him, her eyes glowing, her smile wide.

Ty stared back at her, his brows drawn together, as if he were trying to decipher the meaning of the look on her face. Instinctively, Delia ducked her head, afraid he would see too much.

"I got tired of walking," he finally said, sounding almost angry, but she was getting used to his morning grouchiness, and it no longer bothered her. "Besides," he added, "I told you I would."

Heedless of the pouring rain, Delia leaned out from beneath the shelter of the porch roof to give the mare a pat on the muzzle. The mare blasted air out of her nose, and Delia snatched her hand back. She expected Ty to laugh at her, but he didn't.

He squinted against the rain as he looked down the road where a boy walked, driving a cow with a stick. "I wasn't able to find you any shoes though. The only cobbler in Portsmouth is so busy he said it would take him at least half a day before he could get around to sewing you up a pair. We really don't have time to wait, Delia. I'm sorry."

"Oh, that don't matter t' me, Ty," she said, although every time she thought of the shoes lost forever at the bottom of the river, she felt so sad. It was as if she was never meant to have them, just as she was never meant to have Ty's love. And the sadness swelled inside her until she felt she would choke on it.

"I don't need shoes, Ty. Especially now that I've got my own horse t' ride."

Ty didn't seem to hear. He had bent over to rummage through the haversack at his feet. "I thought in the meantime you could wear these," he said offhandedly, and he held up a pair of soft white deerskin moccasins intricately decorated with colorfully dyed porcupine quills and shell beads. They were so beautiful Delia didn't dare reach out to take them. Tears pressed behind her eyes, making them ache.

"Oh, Ty..."

He pushed the moccasins against her stomach. "Well, aren't you going to take them?"

She raised her eyes to his face. His mouth was set in a hard, taut line. But his eyes blazed with a turbulent emotion she didn't understand, though it had the power to make her heart thunder crazily in her chest.

The porch suddenly seemed too small to contain them both. She made a tiny movement as if she would dash out into the rain. His hand fell heavily on her arm and she jumped.

"But, Ty, I can't," she protested.

"Yes, you can. Sit down," he ordered gruffly, gesturing behind her at a bench that leaned against the wall next to the inn's front door. "I'll put them on for you."

Delia gathered her cloak beneath her and sat. The rain overflowed from the gutters, splashing into the muddy yard, but the porch was snug and dry. Ty knelt at her feet. He bracketed her legs with his widespread thighs, his position pulling his buckskin breeches tautly across his hard muscles. His hunting shirt was open at the neck, revealing an expanse of brown skin and a V of curling dark chest hair. Nestled within the hair was a small deerskin pouch hanging from a thong around his neck.

She touched it with her fingertips. "What's this?"

He looked up. His eyes were shadowed, brooding. "It's just a bag."

"But what's in it?"

He sighed. "A totem... a symbol. Of my manitou, my guardian spirit."

She stared at the bag where it rested against his chest. She wondered how it would feel to twist her fingers in that soft, curling hair. Or to press her lips there, in the hollow in his throat where his pulse throbbed steadily.

"Ye actually believe in those Indian things? In guardian spirits?" she asked to break the heavy silence, and her voice quavered shamefully.

He didn't answer. "Give me your foot," he demanded instead.

His hand encircled her ankle, and the touch of his fingers on her bare skin sent an exquisite shiver up her leg. Her stomach went all fluttery and her heart all skittery, and she shuddered.

"See there, you've probably already caught a chill," Ty grumbled. "Running around barefoot in this weather." He shoved on the moccasin almost roughly. "Give me your other foot."

"These are a lady's moccasins, Ty. How did ye come by them?" she asked, and then immediately cursed her flapping tongue. For they probably belonged to an Abenaki girl who had been his lover, or perhaps still was.

She didn't think he was going to answer her, but then he said, "They belonged to my mother."

Delia gazed down at the bent head of the man kneeling at her feet. Her heart was filled with so much love for him it hurt. "I promise I'll be specially careful with them, Ty," she said softly. "'Cause I know ye'll be wantin' them back."

"They're a gift, Delia. I don't want them back."

The other moccasin was on now, but Ty didn't let go of her foot. He rubbed his thumb over her toes, smoothing the moccasin's supple leather, then his hand moved up her calf, sliding beneath her cloak and petticoat to the back of her knee. Delia's whole body jerked.

He looked up at her, and his face was transformed by a gentle smile. "Are you ticklish, brat?"

"Aye," she gasped, bereft of breath. She held her whole body stiff, not daring to move in case she tempted his hand to wander further. And yet, yet... there was a sweet, burning spot between her thighs that ached for him to touch her there.

Instead he trailed his hand lightly down her calf, his fingers lingering on her ankle before letting it go, and all the while his eyes were fastened on hers. His intense look melted her, as if she were a crock of butter left in the broiling sun.

"Come to me tonight, Delia," he said, his voice low and as compelling as his eyes. She found herself leaning into him, as if he had spoken too softly for her to hear, when in fact his words seemed to sear into her flesh the way his touch had earlier. "Will you come to me tonight?"

"What?" To Delia's horror her voice squeaked like that of a mouse caught in a trap.

He gave her a brilliant smile, relaxed and easy, almost wicked. "I'm asking you to come to my bed tonight. I want to make love to you, Delia."

The door creaked open and they both jerked around, Delia blushing guiltily. The Reverend Caleb Hooker came onto the porch, followed by his wife. He gave Delia a conspiratorial wink and then looked out at the driving rain. "We're going to be miserable riding in this all day. What are you doing kneeling at Delia's feet, Ty? You wouldn't by any chance be propos—"

"Don't be an ass, Caleb," Ty got up fast, then bent over to brush imaginary dust off his knees, flushing under Caleb's knowing smirk.

Delia held her feet out straight before her, showing off the moccasins. "Lookit what Ty's given me."

"Why, they're beautiful!" Elizabeth had been staring morosely out at the weather, but now she stepped up to Delia and a smile hovered on her dainty lips. "Aren't they beautiful, Caleb?"

Caleb's face lit up at the sight of his wife's smile. "Yes, indeed."

"Hell, let's get started," Ty growled, bending over to snatch up his haversack. "I've never known a group of people for dawdling away a morning. At this rate I'm going to be an old man by the time I make it back to Merrymeeting."

"Don't pay attention t' him," Delia said. "He's always ornery as a weasel in the mornin's. Come noon he'll have growled himself out of it."

The Hookers laughed and Ty scowled at her. She gave him an impish grin in return.
I want to make love to you, Delia.
Had she really heard him say that?

They took the ferry across the river to Kittery. From there they would follow the King's Highway, which ran parallel to the sea all the way up to Falmouth, deep in Maine territory. As Delia rode beside the Hookers' cart, she looked around the small settlement with curiosity, for this was where Ty had been born. Born and brought up within a loving family until that February night when he had been snatched away by the savages and made into a savage himself. Yet eventually he had been found and brought back—
-forced
back, was the word Ty had used—and made again into someone else, an English gentleman.

Delia's heart ached for Ty, the boy. Three times in his early life he had suffered wrenching losses of those he loved—his father, his mother, and then a father again. Delia, who herself had lost a mother to death and a father to drunkenness, could well understand the agony in Ty's eyes as he had stood within his grandfather's luxurious bedchamber and said,
I
don't know what I am anymore.

How she longed to be able to wipe away his pain and loneliness. She thought that if only he would let her, she could heal him with her love. And he could heal her with his.

As they passed a palisaded garrison house in the center of town, they saw a pair of Indians shooting with bows and arrows at a target painted onto the spiked wooden wall. A group of rowdy, bearded men stood around, betting high stakes on the outcome.

Delia glanced over at Elizabeth, hoping she wouldn't start screaming the way she had the last time they had come across an Indian. But Elizabeth was too busy being miserable to be frightened. She sat hunched in the ox cart, the hood of her cloak pulled over her head. Just then the wind changed direction, dashing rain hard into their faces. Caleb turned solicitously to his wife, helping to draw her cloak tighter around her. Elizabeth glanced up briefly at her husband, but the look she gave him was not one of gratitude.

Caleb turned his head aside, and Delia saw a sigh puff his lips. She pitied the reverend, for it was obvious he loved his wife dearly, wanted only her happiness, but all his efforts were being met with rebuff and failure.

Delia tried to think of some encouraging words to offer Caleb when Elizabeth drew her attention by pointing to their left and exclaiming, "Why, look at that!"

Delia followed the direction of her finger and saw a sagging, dilapidated clapboard building.

It looked as if it had been abandoned long ago. The front door leaned drunkenly from one hinge. Weeds and a pair of scraggly pines had thrust up between the boards of the stoop. The diamond panes of the few windows were long gone, and furry moss covered the clapboards on the building's north side. Incongruously, braced on a pedestal that was fastened to the wall near the door, stood a ship's figurehead.

She was a mermaid, and she must have been painted bright jewel colors once—ruby-red for her hair, jade-green for her tail. Her upper torso was unclothed except for a trailing sapphire-blue veil. Her bared breasts, their tips still rosy, must have once been the color of luminescent pearls. But the paint was cracked and peeling now, and sooty streaks marred her siren's face, looking like tears. It made Delia indescribably sad to see this mythical sea creature abandoned on land to be battered by the wind and baked by the sun, forever alone.

Delia squinted, trying to make out the faded black words on the signboard that ran across the length of the building, and cursed her ignorance, for the sign was a mere jumble of letters to her. "What is it? What does it say?" she asked Elizabeth.

"Savitch and Son, Shipworks," Caleb answered for his wife, surprise in his voice, and they all glanced toward Ty, who had increased his lead ahead of them. He wasn't looking at the clapboard building that bore his name but instead out to sea. If he heard what they were speaking of, he gave no sign of it.

Caleb opened his mouth, but Delia forestalled him. "Ty's da was a shipbuilder here in Kittery," she said hastily. "Afore he was killed by the Indians years ago. That building must be where he had his business."

"Oh... I see," Caleb said as his light brown gaze sadly followed Ty's rigid back.

Delia's eyes were pulled back toward the sign. Savitch and Son. She wondered about the man who'd had that sign painted, already eagerly anticipating the day when his young son would work by his side, building ships. Ty's father had died so young and violently and had left so much—a business that had faded without him, a wife who had died bearing his enemy's child, and a son. A son who had survived and grown up tall and strong. And lonely.

"Was Ty the only one of his family to survive the massacre?"

Delia looked down at Caleb in the cart. It took a moment for his voice to penetrate her thoughts and for her to make sense of the words. "What? Oh, no... Ty an' his ma were taken captive. But she died later."

Caleb's sympathetic eyes were again drawn to Ty's back. Elizabeth sat whey-faced and rigid beside him, the talk of Indian massacres reviving all her fears of the wilderness. To Delia's relief, they all lapsed into silence as the last of the settlement of Kittery fell away from them.

But she couldn't silence her thoughts.
I
want to make love to you, Delia.
She hadn't wished it out of his mouth; he'd actually said it. But what did he
mean
by it? Delia knew well how a man could take his pleasure from a woman without feeling an ounce of love. It was an urge men got, and the girls at the Frisky Lyon had charged two shillings to ease it. Was what Ty felt for her nothing more than an urge?

At first they passed yokes of oxen dragging logs back for the Kittery mills, but before long they were the only ones on the road. It was, in fact, being charitable to call it a road. It wound along the coastline almost at the very edge of the sea and was more a pair of deep ruts which the rain had turned into a sucking quagmire. Three times the ox cart got stuck and they all had to get down and push it free, and before long they were covered with the slimy mud, even Elizabeth. The rain poured down and the surf boomed and crashed against the rocky shore, dashing them with salty spray that left a sticky film on top of the mud that coated their hair, faces, and clothes.