Forever Mine

by Charlene Raddon

  He hadn't touched her since. For seven years she had mocked and ridiculed him every waking moment of the day. Her complaints were continual. The house he provided wasn't grand enough, the furnishings not rich enough, her place in society—as his wife—too lowly. To admit that the needs of his body had for a time occasionally brought him low enough to consider going to her room and finishing what he'd started that night so long ago, filled him with shame.

  Now, heaven forgive him, he'd nearly allowed his vile lechery to ruin an innocent girl. Bartholomew's self-loathing at this moment could not have been more profound had he actually done the foul deed.

  And still, he ached for Ariah.

  The Upham house appeared dark when he finally returned, half-frozen and exhausted. Cautiously, he pushed the heavy door inward. A lamp shone weakly from the table where she had left it for him, turned low to conserve fuel, but Ariah was nowhere in sight. Breathing a sigh of relief, he eased the door shut and removed his outer garments, one eye on the loft in fear that she would hear him and come down. For a long time he crouched in front of the fire, until his toes and fingers quit tingling and his body stopped shaking.

  Later, tucked beneath the warm quilts on the big feather bed, he stared into the darkness, imagining how it would feel to have her small body snuggled against him, their legs entwined, her head on his shoulder and her breath warm on his naked skin.

  On a low groan—as his body reacted to the vision—he rolled over, closed his eyes and sought the oblivion of sleep. But even there she haunted him, dancing just out of reach in the midnight mist, covered only in diaphanous veils that fluttered behind her like ghostly wisps of sea fog.

  The next morning, tired and listless, he made sure he was out of the house before Ariah awaked, taking his rifle with him. The rain had ceased during the night. By the time Bartholomew had saddled Snowdrop, using John's tack, and ridden to the main road, the dawn sky had begun to lighten. He rode slowly, more eager to keep himself busy and away from the cabin, than to reach his destination. Once, he shot at a deer grazing at the edge of a meadow. Hunting wasn't his greatest talent; the bullet passed a good six inches over the buck's back. It jumped, spun about at the same time, and disappeared into the brush.

  The steep, curving road was in as bad shape as he had expected. The saturated earth had given way in more than one location, leaving the off-side ragged like a saw blade. Mud slides and boulders half-blocked the road in spots. He skirted the rubble, glad he would not have to get the wagon past these obstructions as well as the one that had forced him to abandon everything in the first place. When he rounded the last curve and saw the wagon waiting, exactly as he had left it, he smiled in relief.

  Human tampering had not been his concern. No robberies had ever been reported on the Trask Toll Road. But a boulder or a slide could easily have bowled the wagon over into the river thirty-five feet below. Only a few rocks lay about the wheels. The tip of a sapling that had been ripped from the earth rested across the tarp covering the wagon bed.

  After dismounting and securing the reins, he dragged the sapling aside and flipped back the tarp to check for damage. Satisfied that nothing had been harmed, he refastened the covering, and walked beyond the wagon to the gaping chasm where the bridge had once been. The South Fork of the Trask was higher than he'd ever seen it, and more turbulent. A few beams from the old bridge could be seen jammed along the bank, but the rest had been washed away.

  He studied the sidehill above the road. The nearly vertical slope would be difficult to maneuver on foot, impossible on horseback. In these mountains, any attempt to circle around the hill could take days and would likely only get them lost. There was nothing he could do but return to John's and wait for the rain to stop and crews to rebuild the bridge.

  No doubt, John, worrying about his stock, would be among the first to cross the new span. Weeks could pass before that happened, however. He swung himself into the saddle and headed back to the house.

  Inside the cabin he found the fire blazing and coffee warm on the back of the stove, but no Ariah. Pierced by a loneliness stronger than any he'd ever endured before, he left the carcass of the rabbit he'd shot on the way back, snatched a cold biscuit from a plate on the table and went back outside.

  "Ariah? Ariah, where are you?"

  The quiet seemed to mock him. Alarm skittered down his spine. Had something happened to her?

  His long, swift strides ate up the ground as he checked the outhouse and the chicken coop. He was about to throw open the barn door when he heard the dulcet, slightly husky tones of a woman's laughter.

  Ariah's laughter.

  For one heartbeat Bartholomew froze, mesmerized by the sound and impaled on a sudden shaft of jealousy. Who in hell could she be laughing with in there? With his pulse pounding erratically and his blood heating in a way he was becoming used to—the way it always did when she was nearby—he swung open the door and stepped inside.

  "Oh, don't you like it up there?" Ariah crooned softly somewhere within the gloom of the unlighted barn.

  Bartholomew paused while his eyes adjusted to the dimness. Then he saw her.

  With her hair loosely knotted at the top of her head so that it puffed out around her face, Ariah lay sprawled in the hay, her legs drawn up beneath her skirt in a not too ladylike pose that exposed delicately turned, stocking-clad, ankles above little John's boots. High overhead, a kitten dangled from her fingers, mewing plaintively. Captivated by the sight, he watched her lower the kitten and nuzzle its silky head beneath her chin. He could almost hear the kitten purr, could almost feel Ariah's satiny skin against his own face.

  The urge to throw himself down beside her, to drown her in kittens so that she was too busy hanging onto them to resist his caresses, carried him three paces closer before he clenched his fists, tightened his jaw, and slowed to a casual stroll. But every step he took toward her weakened his resolve to control his yearning for her and end the intimacy growing between them. Dry hay crunched beneath his feet. Ariah glanced over and saw him.

  "Bartholomew." She sat up, hugging the kitten to her breasts. "Where have you been all day? I was worried when you didn't come back for lunch."

  His full, sensuous mouth lifted at one corner. "Yes, I can see how worried you were."

  Kissing a kitten's pink nose, she said, "I had to find something to do to keep from going crazy waiting for you." The ball of fluff wriggled out of her grasp, climbed onto her shoulder and teetered there under her hand while she rose gracefully to her feet, wearing a bewitching smile.

  She had missed him; he saw it in her eyes. She had worried about him. Suddenly, spring invaded the dim, musty barn, filling it—and him—with invigorating lightness. He wanted to run through the woods with her, climb trees, hunt frogs, anything and everything. He felt seventeen again, energetic and eager and terribly in love.

  "Come exploring with me," he said, plucking a bit of hay out of her hair.

  Like dust motes, her laughter floated upward to the thick beams overhead. "You're crazy, it's too muddy."

  "All right. Then feed me."

  The kitten batted at a honeyed wisp that had come loose from Ariah's hair. Keeping her eyes on Bartholomew, she rescued the strand from the tiny claws. Something in his husky voice made her go shivery inside. She set the kitten down and preceded Bartholomew from the barn. Douglas firs shielded the house from the ugliness of the muddy farmyard. As they passed, Ariah, always on the lookout for birds, pointed out a small gray form hopping about the lower branches. Its black-hooded head distinguished it from the more common sparrows flitting about. "Look!" she cried, "a dark-eyed junco."

  Bartholomew smiled. "We call them Oregon juncos."

  She lifted her brows at that. "Oregon doesn't own them, you know. We have them in Cincinnati, too."

  "Not with black hoods and chestnut mantles, you don't. The Western variety is officially known as an Oregon junco."

  Across the track that led from the road past the house to the barn and o
ther outbuildings red-winged blackbirds squabbled over territorial rights in a cattail bed.

  "They're beginning to nest," Ariah said.

  "It's spring."

  His warm gaze seemed to pierce her soul. For a moment she felt the same heady sensation women had been feeling since the dawn of time, hearing their mates call for them. Soul to soul. Heart to heart. A call she wanted badly to answer.

  She had awakened thinking of his kiss and longing to experience it again. What had he meant when he'd said he would die if he didn't have her? Had he enjoyed the kiss as much as she did? It had been her first, if she didn't count the wet, awkward smack Ian had given her on her twelfth birthday. But Bartholomew had surely kissed many women, besides his wife.

  The thought of Hester Noon renewed the guilt that had plagued Ariah after Bartholomew's flight from the cabin the night before. Ariah had kissed another woman's husband. Worse, she hoped to do it again. Not something her mother would have taken lightly—for all her modern thinking on an unmarried woman's need to know about physical relations between men and women. Demetria Scott had taught her daughter the difference between love and carnal sin. But knowing the danger of an unknown act to her immortal soul did nothing to kill Ariah's desire for Bartholomew.

  She glanced up and caught him looking at her with the intensity of a hawk too long without food. In that instant a truth larger than life bore down on her with brutal clarity. Right or wrong, whatever the consequences, all that was happening between her and Bartholomew Noon was meant to be.

  Ariah believed strongly in fate. When her father lay dying, and she recalled the letter from Mr. Monteer's attorney explaining his client's need for a bride, she realized at once that fate had something else in store for her, something that waited in a faraway land called Oregon. Now she knew what that something was.

  The air around them seemed to thrum, like a hive of aroused bees, as she and Bartholomew walked to the house. Every time he touched her or took her hand to help her over a slick spot, Ariah felt a spark ignite deep inside her body. She caught herself seeking ways to touch him. A tingling spread low in her abdomen and her heart raced. Not new sensations; she'd been experiencing them at one level or another ever since she arrived in Portland. She needed no one to tell her, however, that they had nothing to do with the city, or even with Oregon. It was the man beside her. It was Bartholomew.

  Ariah had known few men. None very well. Would she feel similar sensations with Pritchard Monteer? Somehow, deep inside, she knew she wouldn't. It was Bartholomew who was her fate, Bartholomew who would know her love.

  Thick, ominous clouds crowded the sky, adding to the darkness of twilight. Their breath came in silvered puffs as they trudged up to the house where Bones lay sprawled on the porch. The temperature was dropping. After shedding their mud-caked boots and outer garments, Bartholomew rebuilt the fire that had burned to glowing red embers in their absence.

  "Oh! Ugh!” Ariah exclaimed behind him. "Bartholomew, someone's left a poor dead creature here."

  He turned to see her staring aghast at the bloody, skinned carcass of the rabbit he had left on the drysink.

  "I thought it would make a nice rabbit stew," he said with amusement.

  Ariah shuddered visibly. "You don't expect me to . . .to touch that, do you?"

  He chuckled. "Tell you what. I'll take care of the rabbit. You find some vegetables to put with it."

  Soon the smell of simmering potatoes, carrots, onions and meat filled the air. While it cooked, Ariah sat at the table, Dr. Chase's book propped open in front of her, though her gaze spent as much time on Bartholomew's back where he sat oiling a harness than it did on the page. When the food was ready, she set the book aside and called him to the table. Except for a request for the salt or an idle comment about the food or the weather, they ate in silence. He was sopping up the last of the gravy from the stew with a half-charred biscuit when Ariah said, "We're both orphans."

  It was the last thing Bartholomew expected to hear. "What did you say?"

  She rose from the table, leaving her half-empty plate, and went to kneel in front of the fire. Her hair was damp and tangled. He watched her pull out the pins, watched the golden tresses fall about her shoulders and onto the floor as she sat back on her heels. She combed it with her fingers, plucking out a leaf or a pine needle here and there and tossing them onto the flames. Firelight limned her perfect profile, lending her a nearly classic beauty that made his breath catch in his throat.

  "You and I are both orphans," she repeated.

  He waited, amazed to realize that he knew her well enough now to know that her words—so seemingly bizarre and out of the blue—would make sense eventually. She was leading up to something. Sleet clattered softly against the window, like the drumming of fingernails on wood.

  "In New Guinea," Ariah was saying, seeming about to go off on another tangent, "there is a bird called a bowerbird because it builds a bower for its mate by stacking twigs against a sapling until it looks like a tepee. He carpets the floor with moss and decorates it with colored pebbles, iridescent beetle wings and flowers. When a female comes along, he dances about with an orchid in his beak to entice her inside. Some bowerbirds even paint the walls inside with wads of leaves soaked in berry juice."

  He said nothing to this, only waited patiently. When she continued, her voice was low and wistful.

  "I could tell you any number of such romantic tales. How the male whooping crane bows to his potential mate. How they dance in synchronized steps and stances, turning it into a graceful water ballet. At the end the male becomes so exuberant he leaps completely over the female. Then there are the trumpeter swans that literally dance on top of the water. Or the great crested grebes that dance together with bits of weed from the bottom of the lake dangling from their beaks. I could even tell you exactly how the birds go about the actual mating."

  Her hands lifted once and fell back to her lap. "But I haven't the foggiest notion how humans go about the same thing."

  Silence engulfed the room.

  Bartholomew choked and sputtered on his last bite of biscuit. As he had expected, it all made sense now. A painful, gut-wrenching sort of sense he wished desperately he could ignore.

  Ariah felt heat rise in her cheeks as she waited, barely breathing, for his reaction. As the seconds ticked by and the hiss and pop of the fire began to sound louder and louder, she grew angry. Clenching her fists, she swung to face him.

  "Why is something as essential to every living being as human reproduction shrouded in such absurd secrecy? Am I some sort of idiot, that no one thinks me intelligent enough to handle such information?"

  Bartholomew's dark face flushed. "No, of course not."

  He rose so abruptly from his chair that it teetered on one leg before settling back on all four. At the stove he filled his cup with coffee, took a swig and choked again. Ariah rushed to pound him on his back.

  "There," she said, as if everything were absolutely normal between them, "are you all right now?"

  "Yes—" he coughed again "—thank you, I'm fine."

  "No, you're not. You're shocked and probably appalled." Spinning about, she paced to the fire. "Human reproduction is not a subject a well-bred woman—especially an unmarried one—allows to enter her head. We are expected to pretend that such activities do not exist, and swoon at the mere hint of anything as vulgar as bodily functions. But being women does not make us less human than men. Or less intelligent."

  With one hand on her hip and the other slicing sharp-edged toward his chest, she advanced on him, eyes flashing, nostrils flared. "Nor does it mean that we don't experience the same needs men do. And since we are the ones who must carry the babies and endure the pain of delivering them into the world, it seems to me we have at least as much right, if not more, to fully understand the entire procedure before we're committed to it."

  Completely flummoxed, Bartholomew wiped a hand down the back of his neck and along his chin, dark with new stubble as it was every e
vening. In the quiet that filled the room following her tirade, he could hear his beard rasp against his calloused fingers. He glanced at Ariah who was still glaring at him, defying him to argue with her. The girl obviously intended to force an answer from him and Bartholomew was at a loss as to how to get out of it. Finally, he cleared his throat and, carefully keeping his gaze on neutral territory, said, "Didn't your mother have any conversations with you on this subject when you were coming of age?"

  Mana—my mother—died, if you will remember, when I was only thirteen."

  He sighed, taking a seat in the brocade wing chair that faced the rocker in front of the fire. "Your father then?"

  "On my seventeenth birthday, Patera, Papa, told me it was time I gave some thought to what type of man I wished to marry. When I explained that it would help me to make my decision if I knew more about what would be expected of me in the marriage bed, he did a lot of hemming and hawing, and finally announced that he had urgent work to do in his study."

  A corner of Bartholomew's mouth lifted in a wry smile. He knew exactly how Jeffrey Scott had felt. Unfortunately, Bartholomew didn't have a study to which he could escape.

  "Ariah, I truly don't think I'm the person you should be having this discussion with."

  Her hands gestured wildly as she paced in front of the fire. "Then who is? I might have asked Effie if we'd stayed there longer. She seemed very kind and open. But before I felt I knew her well enough, we were leaving."

  Once again, Ariah wished she knew what the Fates had in store for them. Obviously, it wasn't marriage. Not now, anyway. Which meant that, in the meantime, she would indeed have to become Mrs. Pritchard Monteer. She whirled to face Bartholomew.

  "Within a few weeks, I will be married, yet I haven't the slightest idea what to expect." She knelt beside his chair, her blue eyes reflecting more fear now than anger as she stared up at him. "Is it so awful . . .what happens in the marriage bed, that everyone is afraid to tell me?"