Heaven in His Arms
Page 14
Tiny thrust his foot out from behind a tree and Andre flew to the ground. The giant’s laughter echoed in the forest, like the roar of a great beast. “Since when has a little stench kept you away from a woman, Andre?”
“Mutiny!”
“It really isn’t fair,” Tiny continued, “with the poor girl having to carry her own case and all.”
Panting, Genevieve reached them, feeling a joyous quiver of victory when she saw Andre on the ground, struggling to rise. She launched herself upon his body, slamming fully into his chest and bracing her hands on either side of his head.
“I’ve got you now, husband.”
He placed his hands on her waist and tried to lift her offhim, but she pressed brazenly against his body, using all her weight to fight him. The men gathered around them.
“Christ, she stinks!”
“Worse than a savage in the height of summer.’.’
“Eh, you all right, Andre?”
Silence.
“I think we’d better leave, boys.”
Their footsteps faded into the forests. She hardly heard them, for her attention was focused on the man beneath her. He was wet with sweat from racing around the forest. She wiggled her body against his, rubbing him with the stench, fighting against him as he tightened his grip around her waist.
“I’m not the only one who’ll pay the price for your little prank,” she said, clutching a handful of his shirt as he tried to pull her off. “You’ll smell as bad as me when I’m finished—”
“Careful, Genevieve.”
“Careful? I’m going to mark you with this stench if it takes all night.” She wriggled again and he made a noise deep in his throat. “That was a wicked thing you did, sending me off to get sprayed by that creature.”
“No more wicked than what you’re doing to me right now.”
“This is what you deserve. I’m not going to be the only one stinking like the open sewers of Paris—”
“Stop wriggling.”
”—and if you think you’re going to change clothes, I’m telling you right now that I’ll wriggle all over the next set, too.”
“Genevieve.”
A muscle moved in his cheek and his eyes glowed with a light she had seen before. Her breath caught in her throat and she suddenly realized that his laughter had long died; she suddenly realized how provocative her motion was, how intensely he held her in his embrace. He was no longer fighting to get her off, he was fighting to keep her still.
“Someone should have warned me about you back in Madame Bourdon’s house.” His gaze traveled over her tousled hair, the long column of her exposed throat, and his voice was as husky as rustling leaves. “They should have warned me that you laugh like a child but move like a woman.” He slid his hands up her back to tangle in her hair. “They should have warned me that you were only half lady, and the other half … I’m not sure what the other half is. It’s half wild, impulsive. Wanton. Have you always been like this, Genevieve? Or is it these woods that bring it out in you?”
She listened to his words—magic words, dangerous words—too close to the truth, validating all she had feared, all she could not control. His fingers snarled in her hair, combing through the tresses. His shirt was untied and hung open, showing the hollow in the center of his chest and the faintest gleam of sweat. She felt an unbearable desire to lower her head and lick a drop that pooled in the darkness of that hollow.
He pressed his hips against her abdomen. “Feel what you are doing to me, woman.”
Her lips parted in a silent gasp as she felt the hardness of a man’s passion pressing against her navel. She knew then what she had suspected when she first laid eyes on him in Montreal, what she had feared. She wanted him. The way a woman wants a man.
Even as she admitted the passion to her secret self, another revelation came to her. She wanted him, not just because he was her husband, not just because he could give her the security and the home that she always wanted, not just because fate had thrown them together in this strange situation, and not, most importantly, just because he was a man. She wanted him, Andre, the man who could carry two hundred pounds of weight on his back for two or three miles; the man who walked and lived and breathed as comfortably in this untamed wilderness as if it were his own parlor; the hard man with a soft heart.
He could make her a woman, here, now, on the littered carpet of dried nettles and grass and crushed, crinkling leaves, and she knew with absolute certainty that she wanted to give herself to him.
Oh, God … what is happening to me?
She’d never thought she’d feel like this, having wondered if it were even possible or if that feeling were just another fairy tale told to little girls so they would not lay in terror of the future. Now, something inside her began to ache, to yearn … some deep part of her that was still innocent, the part she’d hidden all those years ago, the part that still sheltered hope, which she’d thought she’d buried forever… .
Impulsively, she leaned down and pressed her lips on the salty skin of his neck. A pulse throbbed against her mouth. His throat vibrated with unuttered sound, his arms tightening around her. Her body trembled with a sudden infusion of heat and passion, a tingling so intense that she felt it right down to the tips of her toes. She had never been so conscious of another person’s body. It was as if these strong, hard limbs, the blood flowing through the veins beneath her lips, the tense muscles of his abdomen, were all her own, for she felt the trembling in him like an echo of her own. She wanted nothing more than to be naked against him, to open herself to this man she barely knew yet somehow seemed to have known forever.
His hands slid down to her shoulders and lifted her up. From between their bodies rose a fresh wave of the the stench, fetid and strong, warmed by the joining of their bodies.
She couldn’t help it. The coughing erupted. She turned her head away and pinched her nostrils together to clear her head of the acrid stink, all to no avail, for the stench had intensified in the close warmth of their limbs. He coughed, too, and she rolled off him, clutching her face as the full effect of the stench rose in the air.
He rose to his elbows. “It smells worse on my deerskin than it does on your broadcloth.”
“Good!” she said petulantly, the mood long broken between them. “It’s no less than you deserve.”
“Mmm. Maybe it’s divine justice.” He stood up and brushed the dirt off his thighs and leggings. “In spite of the stench, that skunk did us both a favor.”
His gaze slipped over her. “You have a way of making me forget myself, Genevieve.”
She wiped her teary eyes and silently cursed the striped creature. She wanted Andre to take her in his arms again, to make her feel that strange way again, but her eyes watered and her nose stung and she felt about as attractive as a woman with the ague. And with the air thick with the stench, the clearing was about as romantic as a pile of rotting meat.
He held out his open hand. “Come, let’s get back to the campsite.”
Reluctantly, she took his hand. He pulled her to her feet, then shook his head and stepped abruptly away.
“Do us all a favor tonight, ma mie.” His lips twitched. “Sleep downwind.”
***
Andre hooked his carved pipe between his lips and drew the stinging smoke into his lungs. The rich scent of tobacco rose in the air as the end of the pipe glowed like a ruby. He had taken to smoking his pipe more frequently since the incident with the skunk four days ago, in a vain attempt to mask the stench, and had discovered in the process how much he enjoyed the pungent taste of tobacco. Now, among a handful of his men, he leaned back on a stone just above the muddy edge of the shore, resting his sore shoulders and the cramped muscles of his legs after a rugged portage past Chat’s Falls, a crescent-shaped dam of primitive rock that surged from the bed of the Ottawa River.
Through half-closed eyes, he watched the end of the path. For the first time in the ten days of the journey, Genevieve was late in finishing
a portage. But he wasn’t worried. Not really. He told himself he was just enjoying the familiar sight of his men emerging from the forest, laden with goods, not waiting for a certain spirited, auburn-haired wench in a ragged pink dress to finally make an appearance.
Andre half-listened to the conversation going on around him.
“Geese just don’t twist their own necks and waddle into the cook’s canoe.” Anselme Roissier glared at the men as they crinkled open their sacs au feu and stuffed their pipes with tobacco. “Someone is not confessing. Someone here had to have trapped and killed that goose.”
Gaspard, Anselme’s brother, shrugged. “Whoever the hunter is, I’d like to raise a glass of brandy to him for giving us meat for dinner.”
“But no one has admitted it. Doesn’t that mean anything to you, to any of you?” Anselme raised his arms in a dramatic gesture of frustration. “It didn’t just drop from the sky and land neatly in the cook’s canoe. This bird was trapped and its neck was broken and it was planted there.”
Andre frowned. He had his own theory about who had planted a freshly killed goose in the cook’s canoe that morning, a theory he wasn’t willing to share. His gaze shifted to where Julien stood, thigh-deep in the rivcr, wearing nothing but a garland of orange winter-berries around his neck, while Simeon droned in Latin nearby. From the start of the voyage, Julien had gazed upon Genevieve like a lovestruck puppy. Though the boy always staggered in exhaustion at the end of each day, he had long assumed the responsibility of gathering fir boughs for Genevieve’s bed at night, and now that the nights were growing colder, he’d assumed the duty of setting up a makeshift tent for her from the tarpaulins that covered the merchandise on the canoe. Genevieve’s complaints about the food and the availability of game had become insistent these past few days, and it would be just like Julien to hunt to please that saucy-eyed wench.
Hunting and killing fresh meat. Bloodying his hands and feeding his woman. Bringing a woman freshly killed meat was the most primitive courtship, and it angered Andre more than he liked to admit. This woman was spoken for, even if their relationship remained unconsummated. The men thought otherwise, for when she had been sprayed with the skunk, he had returned to the campsite to face the mirth of two dozen voyageurs, all wondering aloud, in bawdy language, exactly how his lively, vengeful wife had marked him so thoroughly with scent. At the time, he had shrugged it off. Let them think he had torn off her clothes and tumbled her in the forest. Nothing would be more in character. The truth was, had the rank stench of skunk not interrupted what had begun between them, he might have forgotten himself and taken what she so freely offered.
The thought burned in him more harshly than the smoke burned his lungs. He kept thinking that there were other ways they could please one another without consummating their marriage. Blood rushed to his loins. There were ways. There were ways for an inventive man and a willing woman … . Christ, what was he thinking? He was going to leave the witch on Allumette Island. To caress her, to taste her in the most intimate places, to feel all that quivering energy against his naked body and then abandon her… . No, no, it was too wicked for even him to do.
Almost.
“Who do you think killed the goose, frere?” Gaspard raised his voice and waved his smoking pipe in the air. “If you know who did it, tell us, otherwise, shut up and talk of other things.”
“All I know is we’re still in Iroquois country.” Anselme glanced nervously toward the edge of the forest. “There could be hundreds of them out there, sneaking around our camp, and we wouldn’t even know it.”
Andre knocked his pipe against a rock. Glowing red embers scattered all over the surface. “If they’re sneaking around our camp, they wouldn’t be hunting for geese. If they were here, you’d know it by now.”
The young man shrugged. “Maybe they rubbed the bird with nightshade or filled them with poisonous fungus to weaken us.”
“That is not the Iroquois way.” Wapishka blew a blue stream of smoke into the air and stared down at his fingertips, still scarred from his experience with the warlike tribe. “The Iroquois are warriors. They would attack, not weaken us with poisoned game.”
“You white men …” The Duke shook his head.
“You always look for reasons. There are not always reasons. It may be that a manitou is looking over us.”
Wapishka leaned toward the Indian. “Why do you think such things?”
“I had a dream. I did not know the meaning until this morning, when we found the goose in the cook’s canoe.”
Andre frowned at the dark visage of The Duke. Dreams were considered divine revelations to the Indians of these parts. Andre had begun to wonder if some Indian fertility god had snaked into his own head and purged all Christian teaching, for the revelations he’d been receiving lately were not in the least holy. They all involved Genevieve in various states of undress and in various stages of sexual ecstasy.
“I dreamed of a bird.”
He tore his attention away from his dangerous thoughts. They were part of his torment, as if the gods, angry that he spurned their revelations, tortured him by making him want her all the more. It didn’t help that she grew more beautiful with each day. After a portage, her auburn locks sprung from their chignon, straggling down her back and flying wildly about her face. The sun had darkened the spray of freckles across her nose. With her skirts ripped and sullied, her headrail loose over her shoulders, exposing the white flesh of her glistening chest, she looked common, attainable, and so very, very approachable.
He wondered where she was now and why she was taking so damn long to finish this portage.
“This bird had plumage the color of blood.” The Duke closed his eyes, summoning the memory. “It was hungry and weak, but an experienced hunter. It knew that it would do better to hunt in the night than in the broad light of day, where its enemies could see it and take advantage of its weakness. It saw a snow-white goose, and when the goose saw this blood-red bird, it raised its neck to sacrifice itself. And so the red bird survived by the sacrifice of the goose.”
“Don’t let Simeon hear you,” Gaspard whispered to the Indian. “He’ll call that devil’s talk.”
“Your black robes tell me that the fish sacrificed themselves in Peter’s net to feed the people. Is that not the same as what is happening now?”
Gaspard’s smile dimmed. “That was a sacred miracle from God.”
“You white men flaunt your faith and then have none.” The Duke drew on his pipe. “The animals are sacrificing themselves for our sake. Manabus made it so”
Andre straightened when he saw Tiny emerge from the portage path, his face flushed and shining with sweat behind his bushy blond beard. Tiny was always one of the last men to finish the portages. Andre swiftly counted the voyageurs on shore and realized only two men had not yet arrived—two men and Genevieve.
“By the beavers of Saint Francis!” The giant caught sight of a naked Julien in the bay. He trudged to where the boy’s buckskins lay, discarded in a heap in the mud, and kicked them toward the water. “Enough of this baptism! Blossom’s going to be here any minute. .. . Have you no respect for a lady?”
Andre shoved his pipe in the beaded sack hanging from his waist and broke from the circle of men to approach Tiny. Blossom was the name the men had given Genevieve when she’d flounced back into camp after the incident with the skunk. There was another name he preferred for her, a name Wapishka had suggested, but few men could get their tongues around such a twisting Indian word. Taouistaouisse. Little-Bird-Always-In-Motion.
He caught up with Tiny as the giant shrugged the load off his shoulders. “Where is she?”
“By Saint Peter’s stones!” Tiny rolled his massive arms. “You’d have her on a leash if you could.”
“If it would keep her out of trouble—”
“She didn’t look in any trouble when I passed her some ways back.” He massaged his arms with meaty hands. “She should be slogging through the trees soon.”
Andre paced, willing her to appear between the tree trunks. When the last two voyageurs arrived and told him they hadn’t passed her along the trail, he pulled his pistol out of his sash.
“She’s probably preening somewhere.” Tiny appeared at his side, his pipe smoking in his hand. “You know women.”
He remembered her as she had been this morning, utterly unconscious of her own glorious dishevelment, barraging him with questions with all the vigor of a lawyer in the royal courts as to why they must rise before dawn.
“She’s not preening.”
“Then maybe she’s resting.” Tiny’s bushy blond brows lowered. “She’s barely been able to keep pace with us this past week.”
Andre checked the priming of his pistol. He hoped she had stopped in exhaustion and it was nothing more than that. Despite her spirit, despite her continuing stubbornness, she was weakening fast. She had slept through some of the jerkiest stretches of rapids, so deeply that Andre had allowed the voyageurs to relieve themselves over the sides of the canoe while she reposed. Perhaps she had collapsed and even now lay unconscious somewhere on the forest floor.
The thought brought a grim sense of deflated triumph. This is what he had waited for, this is what he had planned since she had whirled into his room at the inn at Montreal. He’d intended to leave her at Allumette Lake, a few days upstream. If she had collapsed, it was for the best, for if she lasted much longer, he would be forced to take more drastic measures to wear her out. Yet even as he imagined her asleep somewhere in the bushes, he remembered her flashing eyes, the stubborn way she clutched that wretched case of worldly goods, and sensed that mere physical weariness would not defeat her—at least, not yet. The witch was made of stronger stuff than he’d thought.