The Secret Rose

by Laura Parker

  Thomas sat down carefully on the side of the bed, wary of this new Aisleen. “Aye, a man in the bush most often wears a beard. Ye’ll nae be liking it?”

  Aisleen curved her nails to catch the bristles. “I don’t know. It will scratch, won’t it?”

  “Some women don’t mind.”

  The change in her eyes was startling. From bemused gold to amber rage in a blink. “I won’t have you walking down the street with another woman hanging on your arm!”

  “Saw that, did ye?” Thomas smiled. “Then ye know it wasn’t me fault.”

  “It was certainly your fault!” Aisleen snapped, but she couldn’t hold her anger. Giggles bubbled in her chest, fermenting and then foaming over at the most inconvenient times. “Oh, Tom!’ she gasped between giggles. “You mustn’t make me angry. I don’t like being angry.”

  Thomas smiled and reached out a hand to steady her by the shoulder. “Aye, and I’ve given ye grief enough this day. Poor lass, look at yer chin.” He touched the bruise with infinite tenderness. “It must pain ye something fierce.”

  “It doesn’t,” she answered truthfully. “Jack gave me something for the pain.”

  His laughter was quite the best laughter she had ever heard, she decided. “Jack has the same cure for every ailment. I hope ye will not be thinking too badly of him come the morning.”

  Aisleen looked at him, at his black hair and blue eyes, at the masculine contours of his jaw and brow, at his handsome mouth that she wanted very badly to kiss. “Love me,” she whispered. “Please love me!”

  “But I—”

  He was unprepared for the strength of the arms she swung suddenly about his neck to bring his head down for her kiss. Her kiss was warm and wet and inviting, and he forgot everything but it and the warm silky body that thrust itself against him. Wrapping his arms about her, he followed her down into the bed.

  Her hands were suddenly everywhere: at his belt, pulling it free from the buckle, at his shirt, unfastening buttons and tugging the tail from his trousers. Her breasts were impossibly soft against his chest, except for the hard nubs of her nipples.

  He tried to be careful, not to jar her head, but she would not let him be gentle. She pulled him eagerly onto her, her kisses dragging at his mouth, devouring him in their hunger, seeking his breath before he could catch it. The heady intoxication of her passion brought to flame his own desire for her. Yet she was not satisfied with a return of her kisses. She wriggled under him until he lifted his head in puzzlement. She scooted up in the bed until she was half out from under him and then threw back her head and arched her back, offering him two swollen nipples.

  He caught one peak in his lips and felt her shudder with pleasure. Bracing his elbows on the bed, he supported her back with his hands and began, one stroke at a time, to lick up from the shallows of her ribs to the summit, where he caught the nipple with a flick of his tongue. Each time, she gasped until the lower half of each breast was slick and she quivered uncontrollably.

  When she lifted her head, her face was deeply flushed, her hair tangled in her lashes, and her eyes two honeyed pools of passion.

  “Ye’re so beautiful!” he whispered. And she was, with a wild unstudied beauty that had nothing to do with light, or dressing, or composition of muscle and bone.

  He lowered his head to rub his bristling chin into the soft curve of her belly, his hands sliding lower to buttress her hips. He had never touched a woman in this way before, had never known one long enough to hold and touch and possess as his fertile imagination might direct. His head moved lower, into the wild, fiery tangle that smelled of heather and sea mosses, and there he plied her with his tongue until she wept and shuddered and wept again, all for him.

  He had not words for the emotion sweeping over him, just a deep primitive satisfaction that she allowed him these moments, this mastery that he had not even known was possible. His Aisleen, his “vision”—she was worth waiting for, worth fighting a hundred men for, worth anything for this!

  When his own need for fulfillment levered him up across her once more, he had not words to express the need or the pleasure. He buried his face in her shoulder, lifted her hips while she, for the first time, parted her thighs without persuasion. He came into her easily and completely, a perfect match of soft, wet warmth and firm, hot flesh. She embraced him from within, welcoming him as no woman had, holding him as no woman had, pleasuring him as nothing ever had.

  When it came, the fierce explosion of passion shook them both, left them gasping and shuddering and holding on to each other as the only reality in the world.

  Afterward, as his head lay heavily upon her shoulder, Aisleen thought she felt the cold trail of tears upon her skin. But that was not possible. What did he have to weep about? It was she who was lost. She lightly stroked his head, smoothing the silky hair that lay behind his ear. “Do not weep, avourneen machree.”

  *

  “You make a fine pair! A black eye and a bruised chin! The folk of the New England district will know there’s real gentry among them at last,” Matt pronounced as he and Sarah stood outside the hotel the next morning to see their guests off on the coach for Bathurst.

  “We’ll heal right enough,” Thomas answered and touched his tender eye. “Haven’t had more fun in years.”

  Aisleen merely looked at Sarah, too miserable from her hangover to give much thought to her chin. “Thank you for everything,” she said through stiff lips and gave the woman a quick hug. “You must come and visit us once we’re settled.”

  “Don’t know that we’ll have the time,” Sarah answered and patted her stomach. “Soon we’ll be busier than ever. Matt’s thinking of opening another public house far west of here at a place called Broken Hill. Some of the older diggers think it’ll be the place of the next big strike.”

  Matt hushed Sarah with a hand over her mouth. “Can’t tell the little woman a thing,” he groused. “Before ye know it, there’ll be a dozen sly grog shops going in under me nose.”

  “Don’t suppose ye’d consider moving up north?” Thomas asked. “Not many of our kind in the district. We could do with some honest Irish neighbors, if ye know what I mean.”

  Matt smiled. “Maybe, when I’ve made me fortune and we’re more settled.” He glanced at Sarah, and she nodded at him.

  “That’s the ticket!” Thomas moved to help Aisleen climb onto the dray with extra seats that served as transportation to Bathurst. He climbed up after her and waved a hand. “G’day, Matt, Sarah! See ye next time through!”

  Aisleen did not look back as they rounded the corner; she could not without shaming herself with tears. Once more, she was being uprooted just as she was beginning to feel a bond between people and herself. Was it always to be like this?

  “We’ll be seeing them again,” Thomas said beside her. “I’ve known Matt some years. He’ll come round to me way of thinking, see if he doesn’t.”

  “Were you transported together?”

  For a moment, Thomas said nothing, and Aisleen wondered if she had embarrassed him. They were not alone. They shared a seat with a huge woman with whiskers on her chin and a rummy breath.

  Thomas reached out and took her hand, his eyes on the road ahead. “There’s many a thing I should be telling ye, lass, but now is not the time. When we’re alone together, I’ll be answering yer questions, all yer questions. I swear it.”

  Aisleen leaned her aching head on his shoulder, and his arm came about her to hold her close “That’s me lass,” he murmured in her ear

  Danger no refuge holds, and war no peace

  For him who hears love sing and never cease…

  —The Rose of Battle

  W. B. Yeats

  Chapter Sixteen

  A lurch of the coach jolted Aisleen awake on the seat, but Thomas’s arm was there at her waist to hold her steady. She looked into his face and smiled.

  “Not much further now,” he said. “We’ll soon be stopping for the night.”

  She nodded and
lowered her head back onto his shoulder, where she looked past him out of the coach window. The afternoon sky shone in vivid shades above the Blue Mountains. They had taken the regular coach from Bathurst across the mountains, a trip that Thomas informed her would take the remarkably short time of a day and a half when she considered that the journey with the sheep had taken more than three weeks.

  After a moment, she glanced at her fellow passengers. There was a thin woman in a deep-brimmed bonnet that hid her features. Beside her, a child of eight dressed in his Sunday best clung to her hand. To their right, two rough, pipe-smoking diggers sat silently exhaling clouds of bilious cheap tobacco that circled the brilliant feathers they had stuck in the bands of their bush hats. They had not spoken, but Aisleen was aware that their gazes seldom left her. If Thomas noticed, he said nothing. She suspected that he did notice, for he occasionally patted the hard lump under his jacket which was the butt of his pistol.

  Aisleen suppressed a yawn, delighted that she was not on the trail with Jack, who was following them on horseback and leading Thomas’s mount. They were to meet on the eastern side of the Divide and then travel north to the New England district together. The coach was faster, more comfortable, and the meals served up hot and hearty at coaching inns. If she never saw the back of another cook wagon, she would not regret it.

  As she snuggled down against him once more, Thomas smiled. The misgivings and uncertainty of the last weeks had left him. They had a great deal yet to learn about each other, some of it a filling in of the past, but he no longer doubted that they would survive the truth.

  She loved him—at least she was beginning to do so. His welcome into her bed the night before would remain in his memory if he lived to be a hundred.

  As for the other, he did not know what to think of it. In fact, he shied from an examination of it. If he thought about it too hard and too long, he might grow wary of her or of himself. It was not a natural gift, of that he was certain. As to its purpose, there seemed to be none. Accept and forget: that would be his advice to her. He would take it himself.

  He bent and touched his cheek to Aisleen’s brow, his gaze settling blandly upon the taller of the two pipe smokers, who seemed to find the curves of Aisleen’s bodice of irresistible interest. With an easy movement, he reached inside his coat and lifted his pistol so that the butt of it peaked through the opening He saw the thin woman across from him stiffen in fright, but he merely smiled and nodded at her. His point had been made with the diggers.

  The coach swayed on its leather supports, and the driver cursed the horses around a tight bend in the canyon road. All at once the driver’s cry split the air, and the coach veered sharply toward the edge of the precipice as he fought to bring the animals to a halt. Aisleen slid forward on the seat with a cry of fright, but Thomas caught her, bracing them with a boot against the opposite seat.

  “Ambush!” the driver cried over the protest of his passengers. “All out, lads!”

  The diggers were the first to jump from the coach, and as they left, Aisleen saw the burning tree that had been dragged across the road.

  Thomas reached for his pistol, but it was too late to prevent an attack. Half a dozen men rushed from the bushes that flanked the mountain side of the road.

  “Bail up!”

  The cry was followed by the crack of pistol shots and then the thud of a body as one of the diggers dropped onto the roadside.

  The thin woman screamed, and the child with her wailed in fright as he threw himself into her arms. The remaining digger leaped back in beside the hysterical woman and winked at Thomas. “Bushrangers! Half a dozen!”

  Aisleen clutched Thomas’s arm. Thomas gave her a quick, reassuring smile and tucked his hand with the pistol in it into her skirts. “Say nothing.”

  A moment later, the coach door was thrown open and the driver was shoved into the breach, a pistol at his temple.

  “All out or he’s dead!”

  “If it’s gold ye’re after, lads, ye’ll be finding it with the luggage on top.” Thomas’s voice was amused and slightly bored.

  The digger fired a shot past the driver in the open doorway, and the bushranger was thrown back by the bullet that bored his forehead. The driver was thrust aside as a second robber turned his pistol into the coach’s interior and fired. With a cry of pain the digger collapsed onto the terrified woman’s lap.

  Aisleen’s screams were muffled by the weight of Thomas’s body as he covered her. From the opposite side, new shots entered the coach, and the digger jerked and moaned as several bullets found their mark.

  “Bail up!” came the shout a second time.

  “We surrender!” Thomas reached over and threw the dead digger’s pistol from the window. “We’ve women and a child!”

  A man moved into the breach of the open coach door, and a face out of a nightmare stared in on them. Aisleen gasped and recoiled. It was a travesty of a human being: the mouth wide and lipless, above a thin beard the cheeks seamed and furrowed, ravaged by the harshest elements of the sun and pitted by disease. The eyes were almost lost in a permanent squint. It was a face to be remembered with a shudder and a prayer, and when she turned to Thomas she saw her own revulsion reflected in his contracted pupils.

  But he did not withdraw. A bemused smile flickered on his lips. “Sean O’Leary.”

  The man stared at Thomas; then a slow, gap-toothed grin spread over his face. “By hell and the devil! If’n it isn’t me old friend Tommy!” The small man’s wild eyes seemed to drink in Thomas, his grin widening to imbecilic proportions. “God rot me if I don’t have ye at last!”

  “I’ve heard ye were looking for me,” Thomas said politely, but he did not release the pistol he held hidden in Aisleen’s skirts. “Well, here I am.”

  “So ye are,” the man answered and thrust his pistol in the weeping woman’s face. “Step out, Thomas, me boy. We’ve things to discuss.”

  “I think I’ll be keeping me seat,” Thomas answered and slid his arm free of Aisleen’s grasp, leaving the pistol in her lap.

  The man’s squinty gaze shifted to Aisleen. “Be that yer lass?” Thomas shrugged. “Heard ye was wed a few weeks back.” The man’s tongue rimmed his gash of a mouth as he stared at Aisleen’s red hair. “Haven’t seen a lass the likes of her in fourteen years.”

  His gaze moved back to Thomas. “Ye were always the one with the most luck. Seamus and Michael died on the hillside above Schull Harbor. They were the lucky sort, too, to me way of thinking. Thought I’d been hanged, did ye, Tommy? Well, I wasn’t! Now there’s just ye and me, and the score will be settled between us.”

  Thomas stared at the man a moment. “Very well,” he said in Gaelic. “For ye, Sean, I’ll be stepping out.” He pressed Aisleen’s thigh hard to keep her from moving. “But I’ll be asking ye, as one Corkman to another, to let the ladies be. Ye’ve no quarrel with them.”

  “Sean! For God’s sake! Hurry up!” one of the bushrangers cried.

  “Hold yer tongue!” Sean roared back, his pistol moving to point at Thomas. “Nae, I’ll nae kill ye. ’Twould be too easy. I’ll nae have ye die easy. Stand down, Tommy, lad. Stand down with me, just like the old days when we were rebels together against the English. Only this time, ye’ll nae be seeing us grabbed!”

  “No!” Aisleen clutched Thomas’s arm as he rose to leave the coach. Sean turned his pistol on her, but she was too frightened for Thomas to judge the danger in which she also stood. She lunged for the pistol that was sliding free of her skirts and lifted it.

  Thomas saw what she was about to do and deflected the barrel with the back of his hand before jumping free of the coach.

  “Thomas!” Aisleen cried, but he shut the door before she gained the exit.

  For an instant, his face was framed in the coach window. “I’ll be meeting ye in Sydney, macushla. Tell Jack about Sean!” The next moment he was felled by a blow from Sean’s pistol butt.

  “Tom!” Aisleen threw her weight against the door, but the la
tch held. A moment later Sean’s ugly face reappeared. “Ye’ll nae see him again, lass! I’ll be taking him to hell with me!”

  “Drive on!” came a cry from beyond the coach, and all at once they began to move.

  Realizing that she lay half-sprawled over a dead man’s body, Aisleen rose to push herself back in one corner of the coach seat, numbed by misery and fear. She sat a short while in silence, scarcely aware of her surroundings as the wails of the woman and child filled the interior. But gradually the hysteria that raged across the small space drew her attention, and she stared at the woman. What was she wailing about? She had lost nothing to the bushrangers.

  “Shut up!” she cried as the woman continued to keen wildly. “Shut up or I’ll strike you!”

  The woman halted abruptly to stare at her, but Aisleen turned her head away and began to weep softly. The weeping did not last long. Something must be done, but what?

  Aisleen reached up and began pummeling the coach ceiling with her fists. “Stop! Stop at once!”

  At first, she did not think the driver would heed her pleas, but finally he brought the coach to a halt. The moment it stopped, she grabbed Thomas’s pistol and climbed down.

  “What’d ye be doing, miss?” the driver called as she stepped down. “We’ve another four miles before we reach the coaching station.”

  “I’m not going there. I’m expecting a friend along shortly.”

  “Are ye mad, miss? Those bushrangers could come this way, and where would you be?”

  Aisleen pointed at her bags. “Leave our things at the next station. We’ll be coming back for them.”

  The driver gaped at her. “I can’t leave a woman passenger on the roadside.”

  Aisleen lifted her pistol. “Drive on!”

  With an amazing string of profanity, the driver whipped up his team, and the coach rolled on.

  When it was out of sight, Aisleen wiped the perspiration from her face with a hand and then found a large rock on which to sit to wait for Jack. Her perch was out of the sunlight and away from casual view from the road, but it allowed her sight of anyone traveling the highway.