Bittersweet

by Anita Mills

  As his mouth explored her ear, her throat, her breasts, her hands opened and closed restlessly in his hair. Turning her away from him, he nuzzled the nape of her neck, her shoulder, while his arms circled her, his palms brushed her nipples, his fingers stroked her belly to the thatch below. Parting her legs, she gave herself over to his probing fingers until her breath came in great panting gasps, her low moans rising into a crescendo of cries. As his hand left her, he rolled her over him, and her whimpered protest died as she took him inside.

  “I’m all yours now,” he panted. “Do what you want.”

  She moved tentatively at first, savoring the feel of him. When she looked down, his eyes were closed, his expression intense as his body anticipated every twist, every rock. “Ride,” he urged her. “Ride hard! Now!” Grasping her hips with both hands, he bucked beneath her, pounding into her as she ground her body against his, seeking ecstasy. Biting her lip, she worked harder, until she felt it build, until the flood sated her. Drawing her knees tight against his sides, she curled forward into his embrace, exhausted.

  Despite her weight on him, he felt as though his mind floated, buoyed by the languorous peace of utter physical fulfillment. He didn’t want to leave her. He didn’t want to move. He just held her, listening to her ragged breath, feeling her heart pound above his chest. Finally, he reached to stroke her damp hair back from her temple.

  “I love you, heart, body, and soul,” he whispered, giving her own words back to her. “I swear it.” The back of his hand brushed her cheek. “Laurie, are you crying?”

  “Yes, but I can’t help it—I just love you so much I can’t stand it.” Turning her face into his shoulder, she confessed, “I’m a crier, Spence—sometimes, I cry when I’m too happy to laugh.”

  “I guess you had a good time,” he murmured.

  Her fingers crept to caress his bare shoulder.

  “What makes you think that?” she managed to ask.

  “Well, for one thing, you were howling your head off,” he teased her. “I thought Jessie’d wake up and think I was killing you.”

  “I did not.”

  “Oh, yes, you did. I never heard such caterwauling in my life before tonight.”

  She could feel her cheeks redden, and she was grateful he couldn’t see her face right now. “Well, it was probably from shock—I … uh … well, I never . . . ,” Her face was so hot she couldn’t go on.

  “Never what?”

  “Well, Jesse wasn’t … I mean, I was never on top before. But I liked it … I just didn’t know anybody did this quite that way. I guess he just wasn’t one to spend much time courting—he …” Her voice trailed off guiltily. “One man doesn’t want to hear about another, does he?”

  “Only if he’s better.”

  “Much, much better.”

  “Then it’s all right.”

  “There wasn’t anything wrong with him, but he wasn’t much for hugging and kissing.” She felt his arms tighten around her, holding her even closer. “Most nights, I didn’t know he was interested until he pulled up my nightgown and put his knee between my legs.”

  “He probably would’ve suited Lydia better than I did. I don’t know what Ross thought he was getting with Liddy, because she wasn’t exactly a passionate woman—she liked being admired by men, and she enjoyed flirting with them, but she was pretty repelled by where it led.”

  “But she was so beautiful.”

  “No more than you—no more than you,” he said softly. “And you’ve got a hundred times more heart than she did. But unless you’ve got an overwhelming interest in her, I’ve said about all I want to on the subject. I just want to lie here with you.”

  “Yes.” She felt him slip from her as she eased off him. “But I almost feel sorry for her, because she didn’t know what she could’ve had with you. That’s the last thing I’m going to say about her—she cheated herself as much as she cheated you.”

  “That’s two things,” he reminded her, turning against her. “Did anybody ever tell you, Mrs. Hardin, that you have the most incredible eyes?” he murmured.

  “No, but I always wished they were darker.”

  “Now that would be a pity. There’s nothing I’d change about you but your hands, and that won’t take long.”

  “They’ve always been pretty rough. And hanging wet clothes out in this weather doesn’t help them any,”

  “Wait here—I’ll be right back.” Picking up his shirt, he covered himself before he walked over to the table. When he returned, he had the mysterious sack, and he had a smug grin on his face. “I’ve got the real wedding present on order from Omaha, but this will have to do for now,” he said, climbing back into bed.

  “But I didn’t give you anything.”

  “You just did.”

  “Yes, but that’s not—”

  “Go ahead—take a look inside.”

  “Well, one’s a jar of something,” she observed curiously. Holding one to the light, she read, “ ‘Mrs. Holland’s Recipe for Soft Skin.’ I sure need that.”

  “Go on,”

  She took out a flat, tissue-wrapped package. As she unfolded the paper, she gasped, “It’s beautiful!”

  “It’s just a comb.”

  “But it’s silver—and it’s got little roses on it.”

  “There’s one more.”

  It was a stoppered bottle. Holding it gingerly, she removed the glass top and sniffed the contents. “It smells a little like lilacs—Spence, this is French perfume! Real French perfume!”

  “I thought it smelled pretty good,” he admitted.

  “Good! It’s lovely, that’s what it is. I’ve never had any perfume in my life—ever.”

  “Then it’s about time.”

  “But you must’ve spent a fortune!”

  “No.”

  “I’ll bet it was close to ten dollars.”

  “It was a tad more than that.”

  “Then I didn’t need it.”

  “Well, since I won’t be buying you a ticket east, I could afford a lot more than this. I would’ve, too, but the sutler didn’t have much to choose from.”

  “But these are women’s things, so I wonder who he thought he could sell them to.” She wet the stopper, then dabbed the perfume behind her ears. “How do I smell?”

  “Good enough to kiss,” he answered, taking the bottle from her. If he lived to be a hundred, he’d never tell her it had been ordered by someone at the hog ranch. Reaching past her, he set the bottle next to one of the burning candles. “You know,” he murmured, nuzzling the nape of her neck, “there are more than two ways, if you’re interested.”

  As his warm breath caressed the sensitive skin there, she felt a shiver of excitement, and she knew exactly what he was talking about. “How many?” she asked weakly.

  “Probably dozens.”

  Turning over to face him, she slid her arms around his neck. “Oh, then, I want to learn all of them,” she whispered huskily.

  “It’ll take a little time,”

  “We’ve got the rest of our lives, don’t we?” With the scent of French lilacs rising from her skin and the flickering light of a candle reflected in her eyes,

  Laura settled deeper into the feather bed. “But I expect we’ll need some practice.”

  As he lowered his head, Laura’s lips parted, inviting him to love her again, and he felt whole in heart, body, and soul.

  Perched on the seat of the wagon, Laura wrote in her journal, despite the roughness of the road. At her feet, Jessie lay snugly wrapped in the wooden box Chen Li had made for them. A gift, he’d called it when he’d come to take possession of the cabin. It’d taken some doing, but Laura had finally managed to persuade the railroad officials to let him have it, using the argument that it was ideally suited to the laundry business she’d just sold to him. In her last memory of the odd little Chinese man, he’d shown up in red silk padded pajamas to bid them good-bye, then stood in the cab
in doorway to wave them out of sight.

  To mark her new life with Spence, she’d started this journal the day after her wedding, and she intended, to keep writing in it until she died or went blind. Someday, it would belong to Jessie, so she filled her account of each day with descriptions of what she’d done and seen, observations of people she met, the little joys and hardships of travel in the prairie schooner Spence had bought for this journey, daily recipes, and whatever advice struck her mind. While Spence teased her, saying she was writing so much she’d need a whole library just to store her journals by the time she was done, she wrote in the hope Jessie would cherish them as much as she’d cherished those her own mother had kept for her.

  One thing she wouldn’t recommend was traveling so far in a wagon. Even with a new team of six mules pulling it, the cumbersome Conestoga was slow, grinding out the miles at a rate of three to the hour on flat road, less than two where it was rocky, and hours to the mile on the steep, winding grades of mountain passes. By the time she got to California, she was sure her behind would be made considerably wider by sitting all these days on the hard wooden seat.

  Not that the trip so far was without interest. She and Spence had fallen in with a military wagon train headed west from Fort Kearny in Nebraska to establish a new fort of the same name in northern Wyoming, journeying with them between McPherson and the place where the Bozeman Trail left the Platte Road to head toward Montana. The army wagons had been accompanied by the remarkable old mountain man Jim Bridger, who’d had nothing good to say about Mormons, but was considerably more philosophical when it came to Indians, possibly because he was reported to have married more than one of them in the course of his colorful life. She’d duly recorded his observation, “Whar you don’t see no Injuns thar, they’re sartin to be the thickest.” Not a comforting thought given the ever-increasing hostility of the Sioux and the Cheyenne to the hordes of whites settlers, even though most of them were crossing the land, not moving in for good.

  Indian troubles seemed to be on everybody’s mind as war parties shadowed the Platte and Bozeman routes, harassing wagon trains, running off horses and cattle brought along for milk and meat, and cutting off anyone who lagged behind. Well-armed men had to go out in groups to get firewood, and only fools strayed from night camps. A headstrong Miss Peake, declaring, “I refuse to be intimidated by the rumor of heathens,” had walked over a hill and disappeared two days out of Fort Casper, Laura had noted in the journal.

  Unlike the military train, which had had seven hundred soldiers, more than two hundred wagons, and ambulances carrying officers’ wives and children, the group they were with now was terribly small—forty-two people in ten Conestogas, four supply wagons, sixty-four oxen, nine mules, and twenty-three cows, all guided by a former army scout and a half-breed Crow, who only spoke to the scout.

  Several disputes had broken out since Fort Casper over Matthew Daniels beating his pregnant wife so badly she now walked with a cane. After a brawl between Daniels and the other men resulted in his being exiled, his wife and five children had refused to go with him, and the desperate family was now trying to survive on handouts and by living in one of the supply wagons. Every time Laura saw Abigail Daniels, she tried to give her something. She remembered too well what it was like to be dirt poor.

  “You’ll be down to nubs and out of paper long before we reach California,” Spence commented.

  “I don’t want to forget anything—since she’s too young to remember her journey, I want Jessie to know everything about it.”

  “Everything?” he teased, raising an eyebrow. “How much have you put about me in there?”

  “Not quite everything,” she admitted. “I try to keep it decent enough for her to read. Maybe someday she’ll have children who’ll want to know what life was like in 1866. As much as things have changed in the twenty-five years I’ve been living, there’s no telling what’s going to happen before I die. They might want to know about goose grease salve and willowbark tea someday. Or about what was in a Conestoga, for that matter. Once the railroad gets clear across the country, not too many folks are going to travel like this.”

  “Is that the sort of thing your mother wrote for you?”

  “Well, we didn’t go anywhere to write about, so hers was mostly how to take care of things, what to use, how to tell what ailments we had, how to make up her home remedies and special concoctions, things like that.”

  “I’d still like to read it. I’d like to know what you were like as a little girl.”

  “Daddy used to say I was ‘yaller-haired and skinny’—my hair didn’t start turning brown until I was thirteen or fourteen. And Mama didn’t write much about how I was—it was more about what I ought to do. Only thing she said much about me was I used to get sick a lot, and she was afraid my lungs were weak, and I’d get her consumption, she used to grease my chest up every night it was cold out with stuff she made out of turpentine, camphor, clove oil, and lard; then she’d wrap a long piece of flannel around me until I looked like one of those Egyptian mummies when I went to bed. I don’t know what it did for my lungs, but my nose never got stuffed up. She put that recipe in one of those journals, along with a lot of others. She had concoctions for everything from cleaning soot out of chimneys to making hair shine.”

  “Did you use all of them?”

  “If I had the ingredients handy. And whether you believe it or not, they all worked. And some of her medicines were a lot like ones in your formulary—when she dosed a body up, he knew he was dosed. She just couldn’t do anything with consumption, though, and she sure tried. Mama wanted to live to see me and Danny grow up more than anything.”

  “Yeah. She would’ve been proud of you, Laura.”

  “I hope so—I’d like to think so, anyway.”

  “She would.”

  “I still miss her. I’d give anything if she could be here now, if you could know her.”

  “I’ll get to know her through those journals.”

  “You really want to read them?”

  “Very much. I don’t know too many remarkable people—most of them just think they are.”

  “Well, you are.”

  “No. I don’t even know who I am anymore. I spent years learning to do something I came to hate, so it was pretty much a waste of my time and Thad Bingham’s money. When I showed up at your tent over by Kearny, I was going to San Francisco to kill Ross—maybe Lydia, too—then. I was planning to take Josh up to Canada and hide out someplace the law wouldn’t find me. I didn’t even know what I was going to do after that.”

  “And now?”

  “I don’t know what I’ll do to Ross when I see him. A lot depends on what he’s done with Josh.”

  “But you’re not going to kill him.”

  “No, but I may horsewhip him within an inch of his life. Since I’ve got a wife and family to look after, I’m not going to do anything that’ll get me hanged.”

  “It still hurts, doesn’t it?” she asked quietly.

  “I haven’t thought about it in a while, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Not even about Lydia?”

  “Just as Josh’s mother. She’s not part of me like you are, and she never was. If I’d had the time to get to know her, I’d have spared myself a lot of grief. She wasn’t anything like I thought she was, and she obviously thought I was somebody else. I don’t even know why she wanted to marry me—maybe because we both had black hair and she thought we’d look like a matched pair.”

  “You’re a handsome man, Spencer Hardin.”

  “I don’t know. I just know if she hadn’t left me, living with her would’ve been hell for both of us. I had all those dreams about coming home to her loving arms, and that’s all they were—dreams, delusions. Separation made it easier to pretend we had something—I could look at the picture of her and Josh, and it would take my mind off the hell I was in then without having to give much thought about what she was really lik
e.”

  “You’re still bitter, Spence.”

  “No, the bitter part’s over—life’s downright sweet now. I’ve got you and Jessie to love, and the only thing that’s missing is Josh.”

  “We’re going to find him. He’s been in my prayers every night, and I know we’re going to find him.”

  “If he’s not dead. If he and Ross both came down with cholera, there wouldn’t have been anyone to put up markers for them. A year later, anybody coming through would never find the graves, even if they’d been buried. Hell, for all I know, the wolves could’ve eaten the bodies, and left nothing but a few bones.”

  Laying aside the journal, she turned to him. “I don’t want to hear you talking like that—it’s faith that carries a person through, not pessimism. You’ve got to believe, or you can’t make it happen.”

  “I’m in this wagon, Laurie. If I didn’t think there was a chance, I’d be going east not west. Unless we have a child, he’s the last of my blood, and that means everything to a man. He may be the only one to carry on my name. As much as I love Jessie, she can’t do that for me—she’ll have her husband’s name, not mine. And until then, she’ll grow up a Taylor, not a Hardin.”

  “I don’t guess she has to,” Laura murmured.

  “It wouldn’t be right to take that away from Jesse. He wanted that baby,”

  “Like every other man, he wanted a son, Spence. When we lost the other baby, it was the first time I’d ever seen him cry. He wanted that boy so bad.”

  “He nearly lost you, Laura.”

  “That made him mad—it was his son he wept over.”

  “It’s the name I’d feel bad about—it’s all he had to leave her. I’ll have the joy of raising her, of watching her grow up. I’ll be the one some totally unworthy boy asks for her hand in marriage. I’ll be the one not wanting to give her away to him. Jesse won’t be here to see it, but I will. Besides, her middle name’s Spencer, so she’ll know I wanted her to have it. I just don’t want to take Jesse from her.”