The River Nymph

by Shirl Henke

  With an oath of pleasure and frustration, he took the offering in his mouth and suckled, then gave her a small, swift bite. She jerked away, touching her breast in amazement, making sure it wasn’t injured. “Why did you—”

  “Just payin’ you back a little for our first kiss.” A lazy grin spread across his face now. “Notice, I didn’t even draw blood.”

  “I’m going to make you pay for that, Mr. Daniels,” she said, scooting down the mattress and taking his shaft in onehand. She teased it with her fingers, knowing she was playing with fire—a liquid flame that had ignited in her own belly and pooled between her legs. How long could she resist? When he strained at the shackles, the muscles of his arms and chest stood out, sweat-sheened in the soft light, tan and rippling, powerful. She moved away from the instrument that was causing her—as well as him—to lose control, and let her hand splay over his chest, feeling his heart pound. Then she grazed her nails slowly down, tracing the narrowing vee of gold hair that traveled back to the inevitable.

  “You must’ve been a Spanish Inquisitor in a previous life,” he said through gritted teeth.

  Delilah cocked her head, considering. “Perhaps. Some kinds of torture are great fun.” Without warning, she climbed higher and swung one knee, then the other, outside his hips and moved over the rigid staff begging for attention. She brushed back and forth, just enough for her moisture to wet the head of his phallus.

  “How long are you going to keep this up?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. How long can you keep that up?” she replied, breathlessly.

  “St. Louis?” he ventured, positioning himself as she swayed over him.

  “That long?” she asked, with a roll of her hips. “I am impressed.”

  “You should be.” He gasped, raising his hips and plunging upward, impaling her with a hard thrust. “But, I…am… a very…impatient man,” he said, feeling her moist heat surround him. He rotated his hips, then began to withdraw.

  Delilah followed him down as he lay against the mattress, placing her hands on his chest. “I was impatient when you first taught me this game, remember?”

  “I never figured on bein’ chained to a bed to practice,” he replied, waiting for her to move as he arched high inside her.

  “I never figured on having to chain you for practice.” Finally, unable to resist, she began the familiar ride, slowly at first, then quickly escalating to a desperately swift pace thatsent her spiraling out of control, her body convulsing with spasms of pleasure that shook her soul. I can’t ever lose you, Clint, never! Delilah waited as the storm subsided. Then feeling him yet rock hard inside her, she began again…and again…

  Finally, he knew his endurance was ending. He tried to think of something, anything besides his cat-eyed woman with her silky flesh pressed so close to his, her scent heavy in his nostrils, her fiery hair brushing his shoulders while her breasts burned against his chest. She was his in a way she’d belonged to no other, and that pleased him more than he wanted to admit. She had betrayed him, sent bluebellies after him, had him dragged here in shackles—hell, she’d even taken his boat!

  But none of that mattered now. All he could think of was their joining and how much he desired to have her by his side always. That thought forced an end to his control. He spilled himself in deep, wrenching pulses, filling her, feeling her cries as she came to culmination yet again. For all her skill in hiding her feelings across a card table or in a business negotiation, Deelie could never hide this. This was primal truth.

  The truth was he loved her.

  As she collapsed on top of him and nestled against his shoulder, the unalterable fact rocked him to his very soul. He could not travel down this road again, had sworn never to allow such pain in his life again. Yet here he was, in love with a woman once more. A woman who didn’t even trust him. Fool!

  Unable to stop himself, he asked, “Deelie, why did you send the soldiers after me?”

  She grew very still, her hands cupped around his shoulders, motionless for several moments as the silence thickened. Finally, she sighed, letting out a long, slow breath. Then she rose up and looked down into his face, meeting his gaze, as if measuring her response.

  What would it be?

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was not that I didn’t trust you,” she began hesitantly, then bit her lip and continued, “well, maybe I didn’t but not for the reasons you think. I wasn’t afraid of losing the money. I don’t believe you’d run off with it—not…not any longer.”

  “Then what?” he coaxed, utterly confused as he saw his own tumbling emotions mirrored in her eyes.

  “Sky told me about your wife and child…what you did…” She felt his whole body stiffen with outrage. “Please, don’t be angry with her. I saw the way you began to change the farther upriver we traveled, your clothes, your hair…your…manner. Then the incident with the Tetons and the dynamite…that ghastly woodhawk’s camp…”

  He almost wrenched his shoulders from their sockets as he came up off the mattress. “You followed and spied on me at Johnson’s lair! Well, I reckon it’s a good thing you did have the bluebellies shackle me. Who knows what a savage like the Liver Eater might do to you,” he said tightly. “Tell me, did you enjoy the show we put on for you?”

  A bright spurt of fury swept through her, amazing her as she seized his shoulders and shook him, digging her nails into the muscles. “Don’t you ever dare compare yourself to that—that animal! You’re nothing like him—nothing, do you hear me!” When he turned his head away, she cupped his jaw in her hand and caressed it, letting her thumb rest on the cleft in his chin. “You mourned over the vengeance you exacted—you didn’t revel in it. Sky told me how you drank and grew suicidal with grief and guilt. Then when Talks Wise finallybrought you back from the abyss, you returned to civilization and took care of your sister.”

  “That’s me, purely noble,” he snarled. Humiliation swept away reason. She had seen him in that hideous place, that very heart of darkness.

  “Clint, if I hadn’t brought you back to the Nymph, I was afraid you’d sell our cargo and wire me the money, then join the Sioux who are being hunted down by the army. You’d be killed for certain. I…I couldn’t let that happen.”

  “You couldn’t let that happen.” He parroted her words in a harsh, angry burst. “Well, I surely appreciate your concern, ma’am, but it was my decision to make, not yours.”

  Delilah slipped quickly from the bed and seized her robe. With her back turned to Clint, she jammed her arms into the sleeves and tied the sash, then scooped up her night rail. She walked to the lantern without looking at him and turned down the wick so he could not see the tears trickling down her cheeks. Once the room was dark enough, she pulled the key to his shackles from her pocket and unfastened his right arm, then tossed the cold steel on his chest.

  “I don’t believe you’ll cut off my head for a trophy, Clint. You’re free. If you want to break your family’s heart, then go off and join those poor people the army will decimate, leave behind the life you’ve built in St. Louis. Try to expiate your imagined sins by killing yourself on a battlefield.” I’ll die with you, my love…

  She could hear him unlocking the other chain and heard the soft rustle as he picked up his buckskins and started to pull them up his legs. Delilah let herself out of the room, leaving him alone in the dark.

  Clint stood on the hurricane deck as they loaded the soldiers on the boat. He had refused to go ashore with Delilah and Jacques when they met with the commandant at Fort Abraham Lincoln that morning. As he knew she would, Deelie played her poor widow card, and the army agreed to pay them four hundred a day for the services of Jacques Dubois and TheRiver Nymph to transport the wounded back to Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis. The money would arrive eventually.

  After she’d unlocked Clint’s shackles four days ago, Sergeant Finn’s troopers had kept a close eye on him. The river was high and very swift-moving, but he knew that even if he jumped overboard, he’d be
as likely to get stuck in mud as swim to shore—and that was if they didn’t shoot him either way. When they moored at night, he was not confined to his cabin, but sentries were always posted along the shoreline. In truth, he was not certain if he wanted to escape. He went about in a daze of confusion, humiliated and guilty, trying to sort out what to do with his life. So far answers had eluded him.

  And Deelie avoided him. Well, hell, why wouldn’t she?

  He continued his duties as mate, keeping order on the main deck and supervising the crew for the captain. When occasional fights broke out between passengers over sleeping space, the angry yellow-haired man with the gun quickly put an end to them. Perhaps it was something the combatants saw in his eyes…

  Although Deelie’s betrayal still stung bitterly, his anger toward the wounded men he saw now began to evaporate. They were just ordinary soldiers, following the orders of an egotistical madman whose craving for fame and power knew neither conscience nor bounds. He watched as they were carried up the gangplank on crude litters, bloody bandages and crude splints covering shattered limbs—and those were the ones fortunate enough not to have been gutshot or hit in the face.

  “Poor devils,” he said quietly, remembering his days in that Union prison in Alton, Illinois, when Confederate soldiers lay with their wounds festering until cholera finished off many who might otherwise have survived with decent medical care. Blue or Gray, men such as these paid for the stupidity of their leaders. That was the insanity of war. He had experienced enough of senseless violence. His life had beendestroyed twice because of war. Perhaps he lacked the spirit to rebuild it a third time.

  Clint watched Delilah and Luellen overseeing the placement of the wounded. During the time when the majority owner and the captain of the Nymph signed papers at the fort, the formidable Mrs. Colter had enlisted a dozen soldiers to cut fresh buffalo grass and make soft pallets of it on the main deck. Since the cargo had been offloaded and they had not been allowed sufficient time to fill the space with return passengers, there was plenty of room. Luellen selected the coolest places away from the boilers, well-shaded from the harsh July sun.

  Delilah and the doctor from the fort stood directly below him, discussing the care and treatment of the patients during the voyage. Clint watched him hand her a black leather case filled with medicines and a large drawstring cloth sack of bandages. After the medical officer left, she paused, as if feeling his eyes on her from above, then quickly walked away from the gangplank and disappeared on the floor of the main deck.

  Clint tried to tell himself her avoidance of him was for the best. She had seen Johnson’s lair. She had overheard their vile exchange of insults, Johnson’s accusation: What makes you think you’re better than me? Just because he’d taken scalps instead of heads did not exonerate him from the soul-staining savagery of his acts. He shuddered in self-loathing as he remembered his response to the Liver Eater—a swift punch, knocking the big old bastard to the ground. As if that could silence the demons lurking inside his head. Perhaps that was why he then nearly killed Johnson’s hired gun …or dared Biedler to kill him.

  Perhaps he should dive into the river and let Finn’s men shoot him. End it. But then he thought of Sky and Talks Wise and all the rest of his Ehanktonwon family…and, insidiously, of Deelie. She’d done her best to hide her tears from him when she freed him, but he’d seen them. He knew he had hurt her as much as she had unwittingly hurt him. Butthat was all he would do—hurt her again and again if they continued their relationship.

  Clint stared out at the water rushing swift and brown, twisting treacherously around sandbars and rocks, filled with hidden surprises—the joy of gliding over smooth water could abruptly end in a crash of splintering wood. “The Missouri as metaphor for my life,” he muttered, laughing at his circling thoughts. Blind Owl had been right: He’d spent too much time reading white men’s books!

  If only they could teach him how to handle his volatile affair with Delilah Raymond. He’d already broken his sworn oath never to fall in love with a woman again. But that did not mean he would soil her with the sickness buried deep inside him, one not even her skilled nursing could cure. Once they reached St. Louis and completed their contract with the army, he’d sell her his 49 percent of the Nymph and return to the Blasted Bud. And Eva. That was the only way to convince Deelie to get on with her life. Somewhere traveling up and down the river, she would find a man worthy of her.

  But that man would not be Clint Daniels…the man she now knew as Lightning Hand, the Pawnee Killer. The thought left a hollowness in his gut. Swallowing the bitter taste in his mouth, he pushed away from the railing and went to his cabin to wait until Deelie left the main deck.

  Delilah knelt beside the pallet of a soldier who had lost an arm and was running a fever. “Just let me raise your head and give you this medicine, Private Simmons,” she said to him. He was little more than a boy, with blue eyes and yellow hair. She wondered if Clint had ever looked so young or helpless. She doubted it.

  “You’re an angel, ma’am,” the young soldier said in a voice raw with pain. He grimaced at the taste of laudanum.

  “It will ease the pain, help you sleep,” she said, urging him to swallow the rest. “Now, some fresh, cool water.”

  He looked up at her. “It ain’t from the river, is it?” heasked, almost pleadingly. “If it is, I’ll have to chew it.” At the fort, river water had been used for drinking.

  “No, it’s from a fresh stream. We fill barrels with it every chance we get.”

  He murmured thanks as his eyelids slowly closed and he drifted off to sleep.

  Delilah found herself fighting tears. He was so young, maimed for life. The army had been his only career and now that was ended. She prayed he had family who would care for him and that he and the others would find a way to earn a living. Without that, all the medals and honors Washington intended to bestow on them would be meaningless.

  “Yer all tuckered out, Missus. Best let me take over,” Luellen said, reaching for the wet cloth Delilah was using to bathe Private Simmons’s face. “You been at this fer days ’n hardly slept.”

  “So have you, besides cooking for everyone on the boat,” Delilah replied, continuing her task. “I’ll manage. Although I don’t know how we would’ve done it if the army had been forced to send all the wounded back with the Nymph. As it stands, nineteen are too many for only four women to provide the care and company they need. Todd and a few of the crew do what they can, but wounded men respond better to a woman’s touch.”

  “Someone else needin’ a woman’s touch—yers, ’n he’s hidin’ out in his cabin,” Luellen said, her shrewd gaze fixed on her young friend.

  “Mr. Daniels is well able to fend for himself,” Delilah replied softly, trying to keep the pain out of her voice, knowing she was not succeeding.

  “Sooner ’er later, yew two gotta set down and talk. I don’t rightly know whut’s happened betwixt yew, ’n it’s none ’o my bidness, but this boat’s not big ’nough fer yew ta hide one from ’nother.”

  Delilah watched Luellen trundle away with a pail of water and knew she was right. They had been hiding from eachother since the night they left Fort Abraham Lincoln. As she picked up the medicine case and her other supplies, she scanned the open deck to be certain every man was resting as comfortably as possible. The sun was a hazy orange ball sinking toward the horizon. Dinner would be served in an hour or so. If she hurried, she might have time for a cool bath to wash off the stench and blood clinging to her hands and clothing.

  After asking one of the roustabouts to fetch her some water, she climbed the stairs wearily. Days such as this brought back horrible memories of the late war and working at the hospital in Pennsylvania. “Just place one foot in front of the other and you’ll get through this,” she murmured to herself. But her exhaustion had less to do with the men below than it did with the one in the cabin at the end of the second deck. Luellen was right: They should talk…if only she had the nerve to face him
after the ugly end of their last meeting.

  Since every surface in her cabin was covered with the medical supplies she had carefully laid out in order to keep track of them, she asked Luellen to have Todd set up her tub in her uncle’s empty cabin, which adjoined hers through the small sitting room they had shared. How she missed his calm, sensible advice and dry wit. He would know what to do about Clint. When they reached Yankton, she would telegraph Fort Benton to find out when he’d departed. With any luck, he might actually beat them home on a small packet, since they had lost two days to army paperwork and loading the wounded at Fort Abraham Lincoln.

  With that comforting thought, she laid her head against the back of the tub and began drifting off to sleep, utterly exhausted. The water had been filtered to remove as much of the river’s silt as possible. Drinking water was far too scarce to waste on such frivolities as bathing, so she added a bit of her expensive bath oil to sweeten it. She smelled the scent of roses as her eyelids fluttered closed.

  Clint paced like a caged tiger in his small cabin, looking around at four bare walls. He had been taking his meals withthe roosters rather than in the dining room with the officers and Deelie, then retiring, not wanting the suspicious and hostile stares of Finn’s soldiers on him. But the nights were damnably long and boring. He stared at his bed and remembered being shackled to it, Deelie coming to seduce him…

  He forced the lovely idyll and its ugly aftermath from his mind. Think of something else. But what? Then he remembered the volume of Shakespeare Horace kept in his cabin. That would provide diversion. On silent moccasined feet, he slipped out and walked down the deck to his friend’s door. Clint wondered if it would be locked. If so, he would not ask Deelie for the key. But, to his relief, it opened quietly. He blinked, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dim lantern light.