Merline Lovelace (5 page)

Louise had often suspected he repeated that chant as much for himself as for her, but she didn’t dispute the truth of it. She’d taken pleasure from his hands and mouth, and given as much as she could in return.

But this—

This joining wouldn’t compare to Henri’s fumbling attempt to pierce her maiden’s shield. Nor to the infrequent times he’d entered her body after that. With everything that was female within her, Louise
sensed this man, this soldier, would pleasure her in ways Henri could not.

A liquid heat formed between her legs. She no longer tried to tell herself she didn’t want him, that she would dishonor Henri if she allowed this man to mount her.

Except he made no move to do so.

His arm lay heavy on her waist. His breath was hot in her ear. But he didn’t slip his hand under her tunic. Didn’t try to find the slit in her leggings. Didn’t rub his fingers against flesh that had grown hot and slick.

Deciding she would not spend another night lying awake and tight with anticipation, she rolled over until they lay knee to knee.

“Why do you not lift my skirts?”

“What?”

“Why do you not join with me, as a man does with a woman? I felt your spear grow stiff.”

“I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

The gruff reply confused her until she remembered Spotted Dog, a skilled hunter who’d brought down many buffalo and took his pleasure only with other warriors to avoid draining his powerful medicine.

“Ahh. Are you one who chooses not to lie with women?”

“Yes. I mean, no.” His breath puffed out on a chuckle. “It’s just that— Well…”

When he hesitated, Louise began to wonder if perhaps he was like Henri, after all. So often the Frenchman had waited for her to set the spark to his fire.
Stealthy as a coyote on the scent of prey, curiosity crept through her veins. Curiosity, and the stirrings of need. She’d never curled up under the blankets with any man but Henri. Had never felt the desire to taste any man but her husband.

This one roused strange urges she’d never felt before. He was so near she could feel his breath on her cheek. So warm, his heat drew her like the low, flickering flames in a drafty lodge. Without stopping to think, without weighing the consequences, she leaned forward, put her mouth on his and used her tongue in the way Henri had taught her.

“Jesus!”

Daniel jerked his head back, stunned by the fire that slashed into his belly. Even more stunned by the savage urge that ripped into him. He came within a blink of rolling the woman onto her back and returning the thrust of her hot tongue.

He sucked in a sharp breath, welcoming the blade-edged cold of it, and forced himself to speak calmly. “You’ve got me wrong all the way around, Louise. I don’t choose to lie with other women because I have a wife who waits for me in St. Louis.”

She curled an arm under her head, tried to see the pale blur of his face.

“Many men, I think, have wives in one village and lie with women of another. Henri, he has a wife in France. He tells the priest who marries us she is dead, but me, I think he doesn’t speak the truth.”

“Well, I speak the truth. My wife is very much alive.”

Alive, but living in shadows.

The pain that always lay just under Daniel’s breastbone squeezed at his chest. He closed his eyes, struggling to remember Elizabeth’s face before she’d lost her merry smile and retreated into herself.

A knock of a knee against his yanked his thoughts from the fair-haired bride he’d married ten years ago to the ripe young widow now sharing his blanket.

With a somewhat less than gentle shove, he rolled her over until they were back-to-front again. Pain, frustration and—damn him!—lust laced his voice as he issued a terse order.

“Go to sleep.”

F
resh snow lay hip-deep by dawn.

Coiled tight by the hunger that had kept him lying stiff and awake most of the night, Daniel dug out of their cocoon and almost savored the lash of the cold.

Louise crawled out after him. Shivering, she dragged her buffalo robe over her shoulders. He didn’t know how she could look so young and innocent, yet use her mouth and tongue in ways that would put a Spanish whore to the blush. She’d learned those tricks from Chartier, Daniel guessed. The lecherous, lucky bastard.

“I’ll take you into the woods,” he said shortly. “Then we’d best get on the move.”

She nodded, apparently unfazed by the fact that she’d all but set a torch to him last night. With some effort, he banished the memory of her body molded to his and escorted her into the trees. By the time they returned, the men were up and moving.

Lieutenant Wilkinson was still in the grip of his illness. Too weak to walk, he climbed into the boat.
The soldiers manning the paddles were forced to chop and hack at the ice obstructing the channel as the river carried them along. The rest shuffled along the bank in snowshoes fashioned from bent hickory frames interwoven with strips of rawhide.

Daniel took point and ranged ahead with One Eye. The going was slow and arduous. They’d traveled far fewer miles than either liked when they reached a wide bend in the river. Squinting through the snow, Daniel tried to see what lay beyond the turn.

“How far to the winter camp of the Quapaw?”

One Eye held up two fingers, thought for a moment and uncurled a third.

Hell! Two days’ march yet. Maybe three if the storm didn’t let up. At this rate Christmas would be come and gone before they reached the camp.

All reports indicated it was a good-size gathering. Lieutenant Wilkinson was especially anxious to meet with Cash-she-se-gra, chief of the Quapaw. The general had given his son specific orders to establish friendly relations with the chief, known by the English name of Big Track. Daniel had an idea the general was more interested in the lucrative fur trade centered around the Three Rivers area than in formal treaties between the Osage and the United States, but at this point, he didn’t much care. All he wanted was to get his ragtag band out of the cold and snow.

He shuffled forward and had covered another quarter mile or so when he heard shouts. His stomach tightening, he whirled and plunged back through the tracks he and One Eye had just made. When he
reached the others, he saw at a glance what had happened.

The damned dugout had snagged on a submerged tree and tipped over again, dumping its occupants and cargo into the river. The current had already carried Private Wilson some ways downstream. Huddleston and Boley had gone after him. Lieutenant Wilkinson clung to the overturned boat with one arm, his other wrapped around the leather pouch containing the box with his journal and the circumferentor. Private Bradley had gone into the river, too, but he’d floundered onto the ice and was scuttling toward the bank on hands and knees. The ice splintered under him, each snaking
crack
sounding as sharp and ominous as a pistol shot in the cold air.

Wind That Cries stood on the bank, unwilling to add his weight to the ice for fear it would shatter and take both him and Bradley in. It was the girl who threw off her heavy buffalo robe and stretched out onto the ice.

“Take my hand!”

Bradley lifted his head at her shout, lurched forward and made a grab for her arm. Their fingers touched just as the ice came apart. For a second Daniel thought Louise might have him, but their hold was too loose or his weight too much for her. With a curse that carried clearly on the frigid air, Bradley sank into the dark water.

“Help them!” Daniel shouted to One Eye. “I’ll go for the lieutenant.”

Dropping his rifle, he kicked off his snowshoes,
tossed aside his buffalo robe and plunged down the riverbank. The hides wrapped around his boots slithered on the snow-covered ice, but he moved fast enough to make the channel mid-river before the slick crust broke under him. Gritting his teeth, he sank into the icy water.

The cold was like a blade plunged straight to the heart. It drove the air from his lungs, stunned him into immobility. He went down, eyes open, arms dangling like dead weights at his sides. With his mind shut down and his whole body frozen in shock, he stayed under for what seemed like two lifetimes, until finally—finally!—he forced his limbs to move.

He broke to the surface mere feet from the overturned craft. Shoving its prow toward the bank, he swam the hollowed-out log and the officer clinging to it to shore. By the time they reached the bank, Bradley was out. Wet and shivering, he helped One Eye and Louise pull Daniel and the lieutenant on to dry land. Daniel left them to get a fire started and went to aid Huddleston and Boley.

When at last he’d gathered his troops all again, he couldn’t remember ever seeing a more wretched lot. The wet ones stripped down and huddled under blankets and borrowed buffalo robes. Squeezing the water out of their clothes, they stretched their garments on branches and waved them over the fire to dry. The ones who hadn’t gone into the river chopped more wood for the blaze, melted snow for coffee and generally commiserated with their comrades. Only one remained apart. She stood alone at the riverbank,
the drifting snow almost obscuring her bundled figure.

“Look at her,” Huddleston muttered. “Cryin’ over her lost furs, I don’t doubt.”

“You’d cry, too,” Bradley retorted, feeling more kindly toward the woman after her attempt to aid him, “if everything you owned just went to the bottom of the river.”

“She ain’t lost everything.” Huddleston’s eyes shifted away to the haversack lying across the fire. “She’s still got that. No tellin’ what’s in it besides the few beans she doles out one by one like a miser does his pennies.”

John Wilson shook his head. “You’re a fine bucket of brine, Solomon. You guzzle down her coffee fast enough and misspeak her while you do.”

“All I’m sayin’ is that I’m comin’ to believe she’s bad luck, just like One Eye and Wind That Cries here said. Look how our boat tipped over today.”

“Hell,” Wilson protested, “we done tipped over a half dozen times before today!”

“Not in this kind of cold ’n’ snow. We’ll be lucky if we don’t be froze by morning. And what about the way she let Bradley here go into the river?”

“She didn’t let me go,” the shivering private put in, although with less force than he had a moment ago. “I was too heavy for her.”

“Maybe, ’n’ maybe not.”

“That’s enough, Huddleston.” Disgusted, Daniel tossed the dregs of his coffee into the fire. “If you put as much muscle into your assigned duties as you
do into stirring up trouble, we’d all be home by now.”

The disgruntled private subsided, but shot his sergeant a sour look as Daniel pulled on his almost dry long-johns, britches and socks. The socks had more holes than yarn left to them, but they gave his toes some measure of warmth, as did the strips of hide he wrapped around his feet as an outer covering while his boots dried. Dragging his buffalo robe over his shoulders, he went to join Louise.

She acknowledged him with a sideways glance, but didn’t speak. Tucking her chin down in her robe, she returned her glance to the river. In the waning afternoon light, Daniel couldn’t help but notice how the snowflakes clung to her dark lashes, sugar-tipping them. His glance roamed over her proud cheeks, caught on the silky strands straggling out from under her cap.

It was a marvel to him now that he’d ever mistaken her for a boy. He’d grown so familiar with her features over the past few days. And with the curve of her slender body. Sternly, Daniel shut out the searing memory of her rounded bottom pressed against his groin.

“I’m sorry your furs went to the river bottom.”

“The fault is not yours.”

No, but the responsibility was.

“I’ll collect six months’ wilderness pay when I get back to St. Louis. I’ll use it to see you’re taken care of.”

“St. Louis? Is that where your wife waits?”

“Yes.”

“Me, I have no wish to live in the lodge of another woman.”

The reply took Daniel aback. He hadn’t been thinking of taking the girl all the way to St. Louis with him, much less into his home. Elizabeth’s hold on her senses was frail enough without thrusting the responsibility for a trapper’s widow on her. Hastily, he scrambled for another solution.

“You don’t have to live in my lodge. I’ll make arrangements for you when we reach Arkansaw Post. You can remain there until I send you funds, then do as you wish. Unless you change your mind when we reach the winter camp of your people,” he added hopefully. “You might decide to stay with them.”

“No!”

“Just until I send you funds to cover the loss of your furs.”

“No!” She drew in a deep breath. “I have told you of the legend. Always I have lived in its shadow, but it does not change my life until my uncle’s wife delivers her child without arms.” Her voice went flat. “The shaman smokes the pipe and talks with the spirits and says I am bad medicine. The next week, my uncle sells me to Henri. I cannot stay with the Quapaw. I am not welcome in their camp.”

Well, that settled the matter, Daniel thought as he escorted the woman back to the fire. Not that it made much difference at this point. If this snow didn’t let up, they’d all likely freeze to death before they made it to the Quapaw village.

Louise spent the night huddled against Daniel’s back and the morning avoiding hostile glances from the two Osage guides. They blamed her, she knew, for the stinging sleet that gradually replaced the soft snowflakes. Blamed her, too, for the winds that now howled through the trees like the spirits of the un-mourned dead.

It was a curse. Her curse. She’d escaped it only during the years she’d roamed the wilderness with Henri. He, like Daniel, shrugged aside the ancient tale.

Now Henri was dead, and Daniel wanted Louise to remain with her mother’s people. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t. Once there, she knew with a mounting dread, the whispers would begin again. The sideways looks. The prayers designed to pacify the angry spirits.

So great was her reluctance to hear the ancient legend once again, she almost—
almost!
—welcomed the storm that howled all through the day and into the next. Only the certainty that she would freeze along with Daniel and his men if they didn’t take shelter gave her the courage to stumble into the Quapaw winter camp late the following afternoon.

The sprawling camp was located not far from where three great rivers came together—the Arkansaw, the Grand and the Verdigris. The waterways provided easy means for the Quapaw to travel, as well as plentiful fish and game to see them through the winter months.

The camp itself looked little different from when Louise had last seen it more than five years ago. Set well back from the bank of the Arkansaw, the village was a jumble of more than a hundred longhouses constructed of bent poles covered with cypress bark. Each lodge housed several families joined by blood or by marriage, with the headman and his wife occupying the choice, fur-covered platform farthest from the smoke of the cook fires. A great council house, where games and ceremonies took place, sat at the center of the village. Pens for the horses were squeezed in among the lodges, to protect the animals from raiding bands and to provide them some shelter from the winds.

Louise’s stomach twisted as dogs barked and men and women bundled in fur robes braved the pelting hail to stare at the band straggling wearily into camp. The moon-faced officer wheezed with each step, but managed a brave smile for the chief who came out of his lodge to meet them.

The wind and sun had carved deep lines into Cash-she-se-gra’s face, but he still stood straight and tall as an oak. When his gaze swept over the bedraggled group, Louise ducked her face into the folds of her buffalo robe. Like a coward, she dreaded the moment he’d recognize her.

“I am Cash-she-se-gra,” he announced, “called Big Track by your people. I am chief of the Osage who live here, where the rivers run together.”

One Eye put her uncle’s words into English for the lieutenant, who replied solemnly.

“I am Lieutenant Wilkinson. Son of Major General James Wilkinson, military governor of the Louisiana Territory. I bring you greetings from him and from our Great Father in Washington.”

“This one is like an untried girl,” One Eye informed Big Track, making no effort to give a faithful account of the lieutenant’s spoken words, “but his father is a great chief among the whites. He has come to smoke with you and speak on behalf of the general.”

“I will smoke with him.”

“He also brings a woman of your clan. She is called Wah-shi-tu.”

Startled, her uncle whipped his head around. Louise’s stomach rolled as she lifted her chin and met his piercing stare.

“Why are you with these men?”

“I travel with them,” she answered in her own tongue, adding quietly, “I stay only as long as they do.”

Frowning, her uncle searched the group again. “Where is your man?”

“He is dead.”

His mouth settled into tight lines. “We will speak more of this inside.”

Lifting the bark-covered door, Big Track gestured his visitors inside. Gratefully, they ducked through the square opening. A good number of the curious bystanders crowded in after them. Louise hesitated, dragged in a deep breath and followed.

Dark, smothering warmth flowed around her as she
drank in the sights and smells of her childhood. Big Track’s wealth was evident in the rich furs draped over his sleeping platform and the many pouches hanging from the lodge poles. The pouches were crammed with the summer harvest of pumpkin, squash and corn, Louise knew, carefully hoarded to see his family through the winter. Despite her prickly nervousness at being back among the Quapaw, her mouth watered at the remembered taste of pumpkin cakes fried in bear grease.

She’d spent so little time with her mother’s people, only those few years after her mother’s death. Her memories of the Quapaw seemed to be centered on such small things. The way the married women wore their hair loose, while maidens wove two braids and secured them in loops at each ear. The sway of a baby swinging in its board-backed cradle. The earthy warmth of many people living together.