He declined with a shake of his head. “Have you got a tub, Lily?”
She pointed to a nearby mound of household goods covered by a big canvas tarp from the fort. All these things were reserved for the new cabin. “It’s under there somewhere, with the stove and all the other things.”
To her surprise, Caleb walked over, threw back the tarp, and rummaged through fixtures and household goods until he found the big tub. Lily intended it to serve for both washing and bathing.
After setting it right out in the middle of the grassy yard under the stars, Caleb disappeared inside the cabin to fetch Lily’s water buckets. These he carried to the creek, where he filled them, then he hauled them back and dumped them into the bathtub.
Lily watched him in silence, wondering if he planned to bathe right out there in front of God and everybody, and in cold water, too. She certainly had no intention of doing any such thing.
Once Caleb was satisfied that there was enough water he stacked wood around the base of the big vat, along with twigs and dry grass, and struck a match to the lot. Lily drew in a sharp breath as the flames encircled the tub, racing around it in a flickering orange circle.
“What are you doing?” Lily called from the apple crate, unable to keep her silence any longer.
She saw Caleb’s teeth flash in the semidarkness as he grinned. There was a moon out, and it gilded him and shimmered on the water in the bathtub and the creek.
Presently, after testing the water with his hand, Caleb announced, “Your bath is ready, sodbuster.”
Lily stood. “I’m not going to bathe in the open,” she said.
“All right, then,” Caleb answered, pulling his shirt from his trousers, “I will. No sense letting all this nice hot water go to waste.”
Lily might have loved Caleb Halliday, but she begrudged him that clean, steaming bath water in the worst way. “Don’t you dare step into that tub,” she said, marching over to where he stood. “It’s mine.”
Caleb smiled and folded his arms. “Fine,” he said. He didn’t show any sign of moving, and the fire around the tub was getting low. Soon the chilly evening air would cool the water.
“You could at least give me some privacy.”
He smiled and sat down on the nearby stump of a long-gone maple tree. “I could,” he said. It was perfectly clear that he didn’t intend to, however.
Lily looked with longing at the water, then turned her back on Caleb and pretended he wasn’t there. Quickly, before her courage could desert her, she removed her clothes and stepped into the tub. The feel of the hot water closing around her tired, achy flesh was so delicious that she made a little crooning sound as she settled in.
She was caught completely by surprise when Caleb joined her, naked as the day he’d left heaven, and sank into the water. Some of it splashed over the edges of the oblong tub and sizzled as it met the fire.
“I suppose it would be a waste of breath to ask you to get out of this tub,” Lily said.
“Absolutely,” Caleb replied.
Chapter
20
Caleb leaned back in the bathtub, apparently unabashed by his nakedness. His long, muscled legs were entwined with Lily’s softer ones, and she felt a toe touching her in a most private place. She sank a little deeper into the water, at once hiding her bare breasts and warming herself against the chill of a May night.
“Why did you go to Tylerville this morning?” she asked, as though it was perfectly normal to be sitting in a brimming bathtub in the middle of a meadow with a man she hadn’t married. Safety, it seemed to Lily, lay in ordinary topics.
Caleb smiled. He’d gotten a bar of soap from somewhere, and he began lathering his hands with foamy suds. “I wanted to order lumber for my house,” he answered at his leisure.
Lily shifted in an effort to escape his toe. “Why are you doing this, Caleb?”
“Doing what?” He was washing industriously under one arm.
“Going to all the trouble to homestead and build a house when you have no intention of staying here.”
Caleb soaped the other armpit, then cordially handed the bar to Lily. “I can’t leave you out here alone, can I?” he reasoned in pleasant tones. “I haven’t resigned my commission yet, so I can’t board a train for Pennsylvania either. I might as well do something constructive while I’m waiting for you to come to your senses.”
Lily sighed. There was no point in trying to convince Caleb that she was never going to leave the homestead if she could help it. At long last she had something of her own, and through her mother and Mrs. Pride of Bolton, Wyoming, she had a chance, however remote, of finally finding her sisters.
“Turn around,” Caleb said gently when she didn’t speak, “and I’ll wash your back for you.”
The experience sounded too pleasant to refuse, and Lily shifted until she was kneeling, facing away from Caleb. The breeze made her nipples stand taut, and she was glad he couldn’t see. “I have another bone to pick with you,” she said as he began a delicious process of washing and massage combined.
“Umm?”
There had been so many things happening that Lily hadn’t had a chance to pursue this particular subject. “Charlie Fast Horse.”
Caleb’s tone was sober. “Oh.”
“Yes,” Lily said, looking back over one soapy shoulder, “oh. Caleb Halliday, that was a nasty trick you pulled, pretending that Mr. Fast Horse might buy me for two horses and carry me off to his camp. I was terrified.”
He began rinsing away the soap, and when he spoke he didn’t sound the least bit contrite. “It wasn’t prearranged, if that’s what you think. Charlie and his friends just happened by, and there was sort of a tacit agreement to have a little fun with you. You must know that I wouldn’t let anybody hurt you.”
Lily started to turn around, meaning to lecture Caleb on the perils of such pranks, but he stopped her by grasping her shoulders in his hands. His fingers were slick with soap, and they slid down to encompass her sumptuous breasts. She gave a trembling sigh and ceased her resistance before it could begin.
She arched her back, letting her head rest against his shoulder as he made free with her breasts. His lips moved along the sensitive flesh of her neck, where tendrils of her hair were starting to slip from their pins.
Lily closed her eyes as he cupped water in his hands and rinsed the soap from her breasts; in some ways, the sensation was as delicious as a caress.
Caleb nibbled lightly at the place where her neck and shoulder met. “Shall I make love to you, Lily? Right here and now?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Oh, yes.”
Caleb turned her, causing her to kneel astraddle of his lap. She could feel his powerful shaft between her thighs as he bent his head to take one aroused nipple between his lips.
Unashamed, Lily gasped with pleasure and wove her fingers through his hair. Whatever it was he drew from her so hungrily, she delighted in giving it.
Water began to splash over the sides of the tub as Lily moved in response to Caleb’s ministerings, seeking the thing that evaded her so persistently. “Not yet,” he said against her breast, but his hand pushed back the velvet shelter to fondle her.
Lily was soon desperate. Her hands left Caleb’s hair to grasp his shoulders in an attempt to persuade him, but he continued to feast upon her, and to tease her with beginnings that did not progress to an end. She let go of his shoulders to grip the sides of the tub, her head back and twisting from side to side as he tongued and suckled her nipples.
When his finger slipped inside her she tensed violently, feeling her body clutch at it, try to draw it in. Caleb withdrew the finger and positioned Lily to receive him. “AH right,” he whispered, and, laying his hands on her shoulders, he pressed her slowly down onto the length of him.
Lily was in a fever; she sought to move upon Caleb, but he grasped her hips and stilled their motion. She knew he would make her glory in his possession of her, make her savor it.
She longed so for
the friction he denied her that she raised his head from her breast to receive her kiss. He was as hungry at her mouth as he had been at her nipple, but he wouldn’t allow her a single stroke of his rod.
Lily was not without recourse, for she knew how to break Caleb’s resolve. She found his ear and traced its outer rim with the tip of her tongue, and he shuddered in her arms and within her. With a groan he raised her slowly to a point of near abandonment, then took her again.
It was easy to increase his pace after that; Lily had only to whisper wicked little promises to him. Soon he was o longer restraining her, but using his hold on her hips to propel her along his shaft. Lily shouted to the stars and spasmed repeatedly as she climaxed, and Caleb soon joined her in the sweet inferno.
When it was over, and they’d both settled back to earth, Lily reached for the soap and gently washed the warrior that had conquered her. He came to smart attention in her hands in the process, and Lily knew there would be another tender battle, perhaps less urgent than the first, but no less satisfying.
After Caleb had reciprocated by cleansing Lily, the moment calling for supreme bravery arrived. She snatched up her discarded clothes and rose out of the relative warmth of the tub, shivering as the night chill savaged her. Not waiting to dry herself, Lily ran naked into the cabin and poked the last of her firewood into the stove in a desperate bid for warmth.
Caleb entered minutes later. He was wearing his trousers and carrying his boots and the rest of his clothes. He dropped the boots beside the stove and held out his hands to the hidden blaze.
Suddenly self-conscious, Lily picked up his shirt and put it over her, buttoning it carefully so that only the sides of her thighs and her knees, ankles, and feet showed.
Caleb chuckled at that. “I emptied the tub and put it back under the tarp,” he said, “so Corporal Pierce and the others won’t get any wild ideas about you bathing in the middle of the prairie.”
Lily blushed, embarrassed by what she’d done. She wondered why she never suffered these agonies before the fact, when it might do some good. “Corporal Pierce is a gentleman,” Lily said stiffly.
“And I’m not?”
Lily shook her head. “No gentleman would do what you just did.”
“And no lady would howl like a she-wolf while riding a man,” Caleb retorted.
Lily guessed they were even, and she didn’t want to fight with Caleb. She was tired and a little discouraged, and that would give him an unfair advantage. She averted her eyes and let the remark pass.
Caleb caught a finger under her chin and made her look at him. “Do I have to sleep in the tent tonight?” he asked quietly.
Lily swallowed and shook her head from side to side. “No.”
They took their time in retiring to Lily’s bed, but when they did, Caleb unbuttoned the shirt she was wearing and laid the fabric aside. She spent most of the next hour pitching breathlessly from star to star, unable to hold back the cries of pleasure Caleb extracted from her.
When she awakened in the morning, Caleb was gone from her bed, and there was a fire blazing in the stove and water heating on top. Lily tossed back the covers and rose, naked—Caleb had reclaimed his shirt—to wash and put on underthings. She wore her bright yellow dress that day, because there was sunshine seeping through the cracks in the walls, and that was reason to celebrate.
For the next week Lily was content. She worked on her garden in the daytime and watched the steady progress Wilbur and the others made on her house. At night, when Caleb returned from the fort, they read or played cards or talked, then slipped into Lily’s bedd made love until the last dregs of energy were drained from their resilient young bodies.
Perhaps it was the knowledge that this idyllic time would soon pass that sweetened it for Lily; she was under no illusions that Caleb meant to stay with her. He was only trying to bind her to him, using his body and the everyday difficulties of a homestead. But even if that had not been the case, even if Caleb had married her and promised to stay right there on the land until the day he died, there would still have been an empty, bruised place in Lily’s heart.
She wanted, needed, to find her sisters. In fact, with each passing day the dream seemed more compelling, more urgent, as though there was some terrible danger looming over Caroline and Emma that might destroy them.
The day Lily’s house was finished, the lumber for Caleb’s arrived. Lily thought it was stupid of Caleb to build a house at all, and obnoxious of him to insist on putting it just on the other side of her property line so that it would come within inches of adjoining hers.
Once her stove had been carried inside her new house, and her bed had been set up, and her bright new dishes unpacked from their sawdust-filled barrels, Lily decided it was time for a party. She invited Colonel and Mrs. Tibbet, and Velvet and Hank, and Wilbur and all his friends. She served a large beef roast for supper, having held her breath for a moment when Sergeant Killoran told her its price, and Hank played a fiddle for their entertainment and took photographs of everyone before the sun set in a majestic blaze. There was much merriment that night, with everyone laughing and talking and dancing to the spirited measures of Hank’s fiddle, but as the evening drew to a close Gertrude Tibbet took Lily aside and whispered, “This is all very nice, dear, but why haven’t you married Caleb?”
Lily looked down at the diamond engagement ring still glittering on her finger. She’d given up trying to remove it days before, though this was the first time she’d truly admitted the defeat to herself. “We still can’t agree on the important things.”
Mrs. Tibbet glanced pointedly at Lily’s waistline, which seemed to be expanding of late. “I have a feeling it’s the future you can’t agree on. The present is quite another matter, though, isn’t it?”
Lily sighed. The nights she’d spent with Caleb in the past week had been the most pleasant of her life, and not just because of the lovemaking. They’d talked together, and Lily had read whole chapters from her beloved dime novels for Caleb’s enlightenment. They’d played games of gin rummy, Lily usually coming out the winner, and best of all, they’d laughed. She was going to miss those things even more than she’d miss the feel of Caleb’s hands on her body, once he was gone.
And she knew he would leave soon, even if he had ordered lumber and laid out a foundation for a sizable house.
Mrs. Tibbet put a gentle hand on Lily’s shoulder. “I’ve given up tendering advice, my dear, since you never take it anyway. I’ll only say, do come to the colonel and me if things get too difficult.”
On impulse Lily embraced her friend. “I promise I will,” she said gratefully.
When everyone had gone but Velvet and Hank, Lily and her friend sat in the light of the bonfire Caleb had built in the yard and talked. The Robbinses had started building their house, too, and with both of them working on it the walls were rising rapidly.
Velvet laid modest hands on her stomach when she was sure Caleb and Hank were still occupied smoking their cheroots a little distance away, talking about whatever things men talk about. “I’m going to have a baby ’long about Christmas time I think,” Lily’s neighbor confided. “I’m always real regular, and I haven’t bled since before Hank came back.”
Lily reached out and clasped her friend’s hand. “That’s wonderful,” she said sincerely, but then her smile faded. “I think we’ll probably become mothers right about the same time.”
Velvet’s grip on Lily’s hand was so tight that it pressed her knuckles together and made them ache. “That decides it, then. You’ve got to marry the major while he’s willin’, Lily.”
She lifted her chin to an obstinate angle. “Don’t you think I would, Velvet, if the man would only be reasonable?”
Velvet’s eyes rounded. “You mean he wants the cream without buyin’ the cow? But what about this ring?”
Lily sighed. “Caleb would marry me—if I would agree to follow him to Pennsylvania.”
“Isn’t that what the good book says?” Velvet
asked. “Weather thou goest, or something like that?”
The trace of scripture was like a painful barb to Lily. She supposed by now even God was against her, and she was too weary to repeat all her excuses. The truth was, for all of it, she was just plain scared. “What’s it like for you, Velvet? Being married, I mean?”
Velvet permitted herself a dreamy sigh and gazed into the bonfire as though she saw some wonderful pageant being played out there. “It gets better every day,” she answered after a long time. “Hank and me, we work together, side by side, all day through. And come night, we—well, we’re together then, too.”
Lily was touched, and a little amused, to see that her worldly friend was blushing. “Do you think that’s enough, though—liking what a man does to you in bed?”
Velvet shook her head. “Wouldn’t be enough by itself, I reckon. It’s if you can laugh and talk together, and if you know you’d stand by him no matter what, and he’d stand by you.”
Glancing toward Caleb, Lily let out a long sigh. “I just don’t know. That man is so stubborn, sometimes I think I’d better just give in and marry him.”
“Why don’t you?”
“He’d own me then, just like he owns his horse and his land and his shotgun.”
Velvet smiled. “I don’t mind Hank ownin’ me,” she said.
“That’s silly, Velvet,” Lily protested. “You’re a human being, not a saddle blanket or a wheelbarrow. Nobody can own you.”
“Can if you let ’em,” Velvet insisted.
Lily gave up.
Soon Hank came over to Velvet—it struck Lily again how agile he was for a man with a twisted limb—and they said their farewells for the night. Then, with Velvet carrying a lantern in one hand, they set out for their place on the other side of the timber.
Lily watched them go in silence, her arms folded. “What are you thinking?” Caleb asked, coming up behind her. She could feel his breath on her nape, warm and gentle. His arms slipped around her, pulling her close.
Lily and the Major Page 30