CAROLINE AND THE RAIDER

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Then you still want me,” she marveled. “You’re not planning to go away.”

  He frowned. “I wasn’t planning to go anywhere, Wildcat—not without you, anyway. You’re my wife.”

  Caroline’s heart fluttered into her throat. “No one could have blamed you if you hadn’t wanted anything to do with me, after all that’s happened.”

  Guthrie laid an index finger to her mouth, then took the pan of milk off the stove and set it on the floor for Tob. Having done that, he lifted Caroline easily into his arms and started up the back stairs.

  “Where’s your room?” he asked, when they reached the hallway.

  Caroline pointed to the appropriate door, feeling like a traditional bride on her wedding night. Her throat was thick with emotion, and a little coal of passion was already burning bright deep inside her.

  The small room seemed even more crowded with Guthrie inside. The sheer power of his personality seemed to push at the ceiling and the walls. He laid Caroline gently on the bed, then sat down to kick off his boots.

  “We’ll stay here until our house is ready,” he said.

  Caroline laid a hand on his muscular back, trying to assure herself that he was really there. “I wouldn’t want to leave Miss Ethel now anyway,” she said.

  He turned to look at her, pulling his shirt from his trousers as he spoke. “I’ll make sure there’s a room for her at the new place,” he said, but they both knew Miss Ethel wasn’t going to last until the new house was built.

  “You’re a very special man, Guthrie Hayes,” Caroline said, and tears brimmed in her eyes.

  Guthrie’s eyes danced as he unbuttoned his shirt, took it off, and tossed it over the bedpost. “I’m glad you think so, Wildcat,” he answered. And he stood up to remove his trousers.

  Caroline couldn’t help admiring him; she’d missed the special dimension his lovemaking gave to her life. “Maybe in the spring we can look for Lily and Emma,” she said.

  The lamplight glowed on his naked body as he bent over Caroline, placing one hand on each side of her waist. “By then, the baby will be big enough to travel,” he agreed, and then he dipped his head to kiss her.

  His tongue teased her lips and then conquered her mouth, and Caroline gave a little whimper and arched her back, needing his weight upon her, and his uncompromising masculinity inside her. But he soon made it plain that he wouldn’t be rushed.

  Slowly, still kissing Caroline, he dragged her nightgown up around her waist. Then he spread her legs and poised himself between them, teasing her with his manhood and the promise of pleasure.

  “Is this what you want?” he whispered against the tingling flesh of her lips.

  “Yes,” Caroline groaned, unabashed. “Yes, Guthrie, all of it—hard and fast and deep—”

  He chuckled and slid down to nibble at her neck. “Still my Wildcat. Do you know what I want?”

  In answer, Caroline pulled her nightgown the rest of the way up, so that her breasts were bared to him. With a contented moan, Guthrie found a nipple and took it into his mouth, teasing it with his tongue and his teeth before suckling in earnest.

  Caroline responded with a low groan and raised her hips against him, seeking him.

  He gave her an inch, just to torment her, and continued to take suckle at her breasts.

  Finally, Caroline could bear it no longer. Her need was great, in spite of and because of all the things that had happened to her in recent weeks. And there was the fact that Guthrie hadn’t touched her intimately since that night at the way station, when he’d made love to her in the outdoor bathtub surrounded by canvas walls.

  She laid her hands to Guthrie’s buttocks and they went taut under her palms.

  “I won’t wait any longer, Guthrie,” she warned, and then she guided him into her.

  He moaned helplessly as she took him deeper and deeper, her sheath closing around him, pulling at him, caressing him. His mouth covered Caroline’s as his hips moved faster and faster.

  Her body was moist with the effort of her response as she met every thrust, each one taking her closer to the silver fire that would exalt and purify her. When the tight coil of pleasure suddenly unwound, she wrapped her legs around him and, with little twisting motions of her hips, milked him of his seed.

  With a muffled shout, Guthrie spilled himself into her and then sank to her breast to take the nipple again, between gasps for breath. Caroline drifted into a contented sleep, her body sated, her spirit calmed.

  When she awakened early the next morning, Guthrie had left her bed. She washed and dressed hastily and hurried down the hallway to Miss Ethel’s room. Mrs. Penn was there, spooning thin cereal into the slack mouth, and she didn’t smile when she saw Caroline.

  “Good morning,” Caroline said, all the same.

  Mrs. Penn nodded curtly and raised another spoonful of cereal to Miss Ethel’s lips.

  Determined not to be shunted aside, Caroline came to stand at the side of the bed. “Yesterday, Miss Ethel spoke to me,” she said.

  Mrs. Penn looked unconvinced. “About what?” she asked.

  “I think she was trying to say my sister’s name, Lily.”

  The pastor’s wife nodded. “There was a young lady here by that name a few weeks ago,” she allowed.

  Caroline couldn’t help the eagerness in her voice. “Did you see her? Talk to her?”

  “No,” Mrs. Penn answered flatly. “I know only what Ethel told me—that she was quite charming and that she asked for you.” She paused and cleared her throat. “About that young man you’ve been traveling with—”

  “He’s my husband,” Caroline interrupted. “He has a copper mine outside of town, and we’re going to build a house right here in Bolton.”

  Mrs. Penn had the good grace to look uncomfortable. “Well, I suppose if you’re married, it isn’t wrong for him to be spending so much time here.”

  “I’m so glad you feel that way,” Caroline said politely. Then she sent Mrs. Penn away and spent the morning taking care of Miss Ethel herself. She was reading poetry again when suddenly Miss Ethel’s whole countenance brightened, and it seemed that she sat up a little straighter against her pillows.

  “Sister,” she said clearly, and then she sank backwards.

  Caroline knew before she touched Miss Ethel’s wrist that she would find no pulse, but she tried anyway. Then, vision blurred with tears, she gently closed the old woman’s eyes and stumbled out of the room.

  She went down the stairs and out the front door, nearly tripping over Tob, who was stretched out across the top step.

  He whimpered and stood up to greet Caroline, his cold nose nuzzling her palm. She petted him and proceeded along the walk and through the gate.

  People called out to her as she walked through the main part of town, but Caroline didn’t pay any attention. She was intent on only one thing, and that was finding Guthrie.

  He was at the mine, as she had known he would be, but there were other men there, too, setting up equipment of some kind. The mine was now being worked in earnest.

  Guthrie spotted Caroline right away, left what he was doing, and came to grip her shoulders in his hands. “Miss Ethel?” he asked.

  Caroline swallowed and nodded. “Gone. She’s gone.” She wanted and needed to cry, but she couldn’t make a single sound, not even when Guthrie took her into his arms and held her close.

  “It’s all right,” he whispered. “I’ll take care of everything.”

  And he did. He explained briefly to his companions, put Caroline into the seat of his wagon and started back toward town. He stopped on the way to leave word with the undertaker, then proceeded to the church. After informing Pastor Penn, he led Caroline inside the house and sat her down at the kitchen table.

  While the minister was upstairs, Guthrie brewed tea for his wife and set a cup before her.

  “I’ve ordered the lumber for the house,” he told her, and the words were like a lifeline flung out into the dark seas of death. “Our childr
en will grow up there, Caroline. I’ll make love to you in the master bedroom, and you’ll fry chicken in the kitchen.”

  She knew he was telling her that life goes on, and she was grateful for the reminder. “They were good to me,” she told him brokenly.

  Drawing his chair close to hers, Guthrie clasped her hand and lifted it to his lips. “I know,” he replied.

  “It would have meant so much to them to know we were married …”

  “Maybe they do know,” Guthrie broke in gently. Then he drew Caroline onto his lap and her tears came, wetting the fabric of his shirt where she laid her head on his shoulder.

  He carried her upstairs and put her to bed in a thin satin chemise after the pastor and the undertaker had gone, the latter taking Miss Ethel away in his special wagon.

  “Don’t leave me,” Caroline whispered, rising to her knees in the bed and putting her arms around Guthrie’s neck. The heat she felt at this close contact with him shamed her, given the fact that one of the dearest people in her life had just died, but it would not be denied. Somehow, this sudden and violent passion she felt was a response to death, a rebuttal of its power.

  Astraddle of Guthrie’s lap now, she kissed him hungrily, while her hands fumbled with the buttons of his trousers.

  He seemed to understand. Very gently, he gathered her chemise in both hands and pulled it off over her head. Then he pushed his trousers down far enough to free his shaft, which Caroline had already teased to full readiness.

  Guthrie entered her with caution, but she would not, could not be careful. She rode him hard, until her flesh was damp with her exertions and tendrils of hair clung to the skin around her face. Then, with a low cry, she spasmed, her head thrust back in triumphant submission.

  He moaned her name and then stiffened, and she could feel his essence flowing into her.

  “I love you,” he rasped out.

  Caroline heard the words and cherished them, but her need for Guthrie had not been appeased. Still joined with him, she put a breast to his mouth and stroked the back of his head, all the while whispering tender things too precious to be said aloud.

  He suckled for a long time, and then his hands started roving over Caroline in motions that grew more and more frantic by the moment. His rod towered strong and hot inside her.

  Caroline pushed him back, so that he lay prone on the bed, and slowly began to move upon him. Not until she had reduced him to delirium and drained him of his essence did she allow the pleasure to take her again. When it did, she gave herself up to it, glorying in the buckling of her body and the feel of Guthrie’s hands on her full breasts.

  It was a long time before they’d recovered enough to move and, this time, it was Caroline who put Guthrie to bed. After teasing his kiss-swollen mouth for a few moments with her index finger, she lay close to him and gave him a breast. He tasted the nipple with his tongue and then suckled in earnest, one hand making slow circles over Caroline’s belly.

  They made love again in the morning, and then Caroline got up, washed, put on a black dress, and began the business of bereavement.

  That afternoon, Miss Ethel was buried in the churchyard beside Miss Phoebe, and it seemed right that the two sisters were together again, in some finer and brighter world.

  Although she mourned, Caroline went away from the grave with peace in her heart. Someday, she would see her guardian angels again, and when she did, she would have a great deal to tell them.

  Chapter

  Winter snow was drifting past the windows, and Caroline was great with child, that late January day when she found the letters resting in Miss Ethel’s jewelry box.

  Hands trembling, Caroline stumbled to the padded chest at the foot of Miss Ethel’s bed and sat down. She splayed the fingers of one hand over her distended belly as she fumbled with the flap on the first envelope.

  The missive was from Kathleen Harrington, her mother, and there was a bank draft for seven hundred and fifty dollars inside.

  Filled with a tangle of emotions—hope, disbelief, outrage—Caroline read the letter twice before she made sense of the woman’s words. Kathleen had sought her, as well as her sisters, for years. Giving up her children was the greatest regret of her life, she said, and now she hoped for a reunion in Chicago.

  Caroline’s throat worked as she stared at the bank draft. She didn’t need the money; Guthrie’s mine was producing, the new house stood sturdy and imposing at the edge of town, and there had been small legacies from both the Maitland sisters.

  She crumpled the check and tossed it away, and it landed in the middle of the hooked rug.

  The other letter carried a return address of Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania, and it had been mailed months before, at the end of July. Caroline’s throat ached with hope and the fear of disappointment as she opened it, took out several folded pages, and began to read.

  July 28, 1878

  My very dear Caroline,

  It is my devout hope that, by the time this letter reaches you, you will be home from whatever quest you have undertaken, safe and sound….

  A quick look at the closing of the letter told Caroline it was from Lily, and her eyes filled with tears of joy as she read on. Lily was happy—except for the fact that she still hadn’t found her lost sisters—and she’d married a man named Caleb Halliday, formerly a major in the United States Army. She was expecting a child in the winter, and hoped to return someday to the homestead she’d founded in Washington Territory.

  Caroline was reading the precious words through for the third time, tears trickling down her cheek, when the door hinges squeaked and she looked up to see Guthrie standing on the threshold.

  “Lily,” she said, holding out the paper.

  Guthrie took it and read it quickly, his grin broadening with every word. “Married a Yank, did she?” he teased, handing back the delicate pages and bending to kiss his wife’s forehead. “Oh, well. She’s your sister, so chances are, I’ll like her anyway.”

  With Guthrie’s help, Caroline managed to rise to her feet. She put her arms around his waist and rested her forehead against his shoulder. “Miss Ethel was saving the letters for me,” she said. “All these months, they’ve been right here. All I would have had to do was look.”

  Guthrie hooked his hand under her chin and lifted. “You had your grief to deal with,” he reminded her. “Besides, I believe things happen at their appointed times.”

  Caroline grimaced as the baby gave her a lusty kick. This was followed by a pain of startling intensity. “You may be right,” she managed, with a gasp. “Guthrie, I think your child has just decided to make this his birthday.”

  His eyes widened as he looked at her and, for a moment, his flesh was white as paper under its winter tan. “What?” he choked out. “You mean …?”

  “I mean I’m going to have this baby. Right now. Today.”

  Guthrie looked at her in quiet terror and started ushering her around to the side of the bed.

  She stiffened. “Not here. I want to be at home, Mr. Hayes, in our bed.”

  He looked horrified, as though she’d asked him to drive her to Denver or San Francisco. “What if you—what if he’s born in the wagon?”

  Caroline laughed, then flinched as another hard pain turned the muscles in her middle to flexible steel. “He—or she—won’t be born in the wagon, Guthrie,” she answered patiently, waddling toward the door. “But I do think it would be a good idea if we stopped by Doc Alien’s office on the way home and left a note on his message board.”

  At a definite loss, Guthrie helped his wife down the stairs, wrapped her blue-and-gray plaid woolen cloak around her when they reached the entryway, and maneuvered her carefully across the porch, over the steps, and up the walk to the gate. His sense of humor had returned by the time they reached the waiting buckboard, and he grunted as though he were hefting a side of beef into the seat, instead of the wife he’d so often termed “skinny.”

  Only then, as they were pulling away, did Caroline realize th
at she was still clutching Lily’s letter in her hand. Kathleen’s lay upstairs in Miss Ethel’s room, along with the unwanted bank draft.

  Guthrie drove as fast as he dared through the snowy streets, jumping from the wagon box before the rig had come to a complete stop in front of the doctor’s office.

  Typically, Doc Allen wasn’t around, and Caroline smiled through another contraction as her husband scrawled Hayes Baby Coming, Get There Quick! on the blackboard affixed to the wall beside the physician’s front door.

  By the time they arrived at their own house, a white three-story place with gables and a turret and a southern-style veranda, the snow was coming down in flakes the size of chicken eggs and Caroline’s skirts were soaked. Mary O’Haley, the middle-aged Irish housekeeper Guthrie had hired as soon as the construction was complete, was waiting on the porch.

  “I knew it!” the red-headed woman crowed, as Guthrie helped Caroline down from the wagon and shuffled her through the gate and up the walk. “I saw it clear as glass in a dream last night.”

  Upstairs, in the master bedroom, which ran the width of the house and half the length, Mary built up the fire while Guthrie stripped Caroline and put her into a fresh nightgown. She was not so far gone that she couldn’t have removed her own clothes; it was just that her frantic husband never gave her the chance.

  “It’ll be a boy,” Mary insisted, shaking her finger at Caroline as Guthrie tucked her into bed. “You mark my words, Mrs. Hayes. My dreams don’t lie.”

  Caroline was seized with another pain, this one more ferocious than the others. She gripped Guthrie’s hand hard and made a confession she knew he wouldn’t find comforting. “I’m afraid.”

  He sat on the side of the bed and brushed her knuckles with his lips. “Me, too, Mrs. Hayes,” he replied hoarsely. As always, he looked incongruous sitting there beneath the lace-trimmed canopy of the bed.

  The labor progressed rapidly, and it seemed remarkable to Caroline that when the pain took her, she made almost exactly the same sounds as when her passion was greatest. The paradox was that, even though she’d never hurt so badly in her life, she wouldn’t have traded a moment of the experience for anything.