Deep as the Rivers (Santa Fe Trilogy) (39 page)

   
But he could not do it. He gazed down at her lovely profile. Her face was pressed against the pillow and her eyes, those magical green eyes, remained squeezed tightly closed. He could see the faint glistening of tears gathered beneath her thick dark red lashes. She made not a sound. He reached down with one hand and stroked her cheek gently, then bent and kissed her lashes, releasing a single diamond bright teardrop, which he lapped up with the tip of his tongue.

   
“Salty and sweet, just like you,” he murmured softly.

   
Olivia could withstand anything but his tenderness. He did not love her, nor did he trust her. She could not bear that he should pity her, feel sorry for her pain or guilty because he had inflicted it. Yet when his lips continued their soft seductive caressing, moving across her cheek, temple, nose, to press once again at the edge of her mouth, she felt that old familiar warmth eddying inside of her.

   
The pain began to recede slowly but the feeling of being stretched almost beyond endurance remained. She moved ever so slightly, restive beneath the weight of him, the fullness of his body invading hers. At once she heard his ragged intake of breath.

   
“Don’t move, please, not yet,” he commanded raggedly. “I... I can’t control myself if you do. Give me time and I will make it good for you, Livy, I promise.”

   
His voice was low and husky, the words swiftly spoken, the shortening of her name almost an unconscious endearment. She turned her face to meet his kiss head-on, and opened her mouth when his tongue glided along the seam of her lips. Now when he plundered inside, she understood what the action mimicked. How could the one be so pleasurable when the other hurt? Yet a stealing warmth had begun to invade her senses once more, making her body liquid and heavy. She felt the tightening in her belly begin to ease, but the ache of wanting did not. It grew and grew with every fierce kiss and caress he bestowed on her, until she was returning them with abandon.

   
Samuel could feel her respond and that refueled his ardor until it burned out of control once more. He moved slowly at first, waiting for a sign from her that it was good. When her hands stole up around his neck once more and her thighs tightened around his hips, he knew he need hesitate no longer. His tempo picked up slowly, building gradually, waiting for her responses.

   
Olivia felt the hot coiling tension in her lower body blaze into open flames, the inferno stoked by Samuel’s movements. His body was perspiring in the cool room as he, too, seemed ready to blaze with the same scorching need. He savaged her mouth with fierce kisses, then moved to her neck. She loved the feel of his rapacious mouth on the sensitive skin of her throat and wanted to taste of him the same way.

   
Her lips brushed against the bristling whiskers on his cheek and jaw, then moved to the corded column of his neck. She touched the tip of her tongue to his hot skin and it tasted salty with perspiration, male and vital. This was Samuel, her love, her husband. She bit down on the thick bunched muscles where his neck and shoulder joined as the blinding surges of ecstasy spiraled out of control from deep within the center of her body. He continued to stroke with ever faster rhythm until she thought she might faint or die from the pleasure he brought her.

   
But she did neither, only waited for some mysterious culmination that her body intuited, even though her mind had never known of its existence...until that moment. She bit down, her teeth drawing blood as they dug into his skin, tasting even more of him as the dizzying contractions seemed to shatter her into a million diamond bright shards.

   
Samuel felt her sheath’s rhythmic pulsing begin deep inside of her, squeezing his staff so exquisitely he could not endure the pleasure without spilling himself. When she made an incoherent cry and bit into his shoulder, her whole body rigid with climax, he gave in to the glory of joining her, shuddering and pulsing his seed into her until he was more utterly drained than he could ever remember being in his life.

   
Olivia felt his body stiffen and his staff swell even more as it pulsed its life deep inside her womb. As he collapsed onto her body, cradling her beneath him, she held him locked tightly in her arms and legs.
I could be carrying your child now.
The thought stole over her unaware. Although it took her by surprise, the idea was not unwelcome. A small black-haired replica of her love would be a part of him she could keep, even if he chose to leave her.

   
Seeming to echo her last melancholy thought, he pulled out of her and rolled over onto his back, flinging one arm across his eyes. She felt the sudden chill of night air on her perspiration slicked flesh, once more vulnerable. Her first impulse was to slip from the bed and clean herself up, then don the ripped night rail to cover her nakedness. But just as she started to move, his words froze her.

   
“I wouldn’t have hurt you if I’d known. I’m sorry, Livy.”

   
The words stung her with his guilt and she retorted in kind, quickly, without thinking, “Sorry you hurt me or sorry you’ve inadvertently let slip your chance for an annulment?”

   
He sat up in the bed, resting his arm loosely across his bent knee but the casual pose belied the tension simmering inside him. “If you had explained to me that you were a virgin instead of coming at me with claws bared—”

   
“Explained? As if you would have believed anything I said! I told you I wanted an annulment and you laughed that cynical, patronizing laugh of yours. Nothing I could have said would have made any difference to you. Nothing any woman says ever will. You are nothing but an emotional cripple, Samuel Shelby, a man who hates all women because of your mother and your wife!”

   
“You are my wife now—and I’d hardly call what just passed between us hate,” he said softly, watching the heat creep up into her cheeks as she realized that she was kneeling on the edge of the bed facing him stark naked.

   
“You believe in no one, nothing. I pity your lonely life,” she said, slipping from the bed to scoop up her gown and hold it in front of her like a shield.

   
He, too, removed himself from the bed and grabbed his discarded clothes, cursing himself for the fit of lust which had made him fling them with such hasty abandon all about the floor. “I do have scruples, whether or not you believe it, else I’d never have married you,” he said angrily, as he slipped on his breeches and reached for his shirt.

   
“So, duty before dishonor...” she said brittlely, willing the pain of his callous words not to bite so deeply. “Are you a spy, Samuel? Is that why you are so suspicious?” She was grasping at straws and she knew it.

   
He grew very still, his shirt hanging open and unlaced as he stared at her with slate blue eyes that cut through the dim light of the dying fire. Damn, he had been right not to trust her! “Don’t confuse my dismay over our circumstances with some deep, sinister motives on my part,” he said with biting sarcasm. “Stuart Pardee is allied with your guardian, who offered your luscious little body to me after losing a bet that he himself had insisted on. I’ve since learned that Pardee is distributing guns and whiskey among the Osage in direct violation of the law. I’d be an unbelievable fool to trust a word you say.”

   
He had learned over the years that the best way to deflect an unwanted line of inquiry was to attack the inquirer. It worked all too well this time. Olivia grew silent and the glitter in her eyes brightened with tears that she held at bay by sheer force of will. She stood clutching the pitiful remnants of her night rail—the night rail he had ripped off her body—just staring at him in hurt amazement. He wished she would scream, throw things, curse him or come at him with her nails, anything but the stony silence she chose instead.

   
“Repair yourself, then get some rest. I’ll be back in the morning,” he said gruffly as he pulled on his boots and headed to the door.

   
“Where are you going?” she could not help but ask.

   
He turned to her with one eyebrow raised sardonically. “Why, to get drunk, my dear wife. Damn good and drunk.”

   
With that he was gone.

   
She was left alone with the dying embers in the fireplace casting their pale gray light on the wreckage of the room...and the shambles of her dreams.

   
Olivia lay alone in the bed, which seemed so much larger without Samuel’s big body in it. After bathing herself and straightening up the room as best she could, she had climbed back into the bed, so emotionally and physically exhausted that sleep should have claimed her instantly. But it did not. Instead, she had lain awake for hours, reliving every encounter she had ever had with Samuel Sheridan Shelby, from their first electric meeting in that crowded Washington ballroom to the shocking betrayal when her guardian had tried to sell her to Samuel. Was her husband partially right—had Wescott wanted to use her to gain entree to the colonel’s secrets?

   
Samuel had far more freedom to pursue a broader scope of assignments than any regular army officer she had ever encountered. Whom did he work for? The Secretary of War? Perhaps even President Madison himself? She imagined such a life might harden a man predisposed to mistrust those close to him from the onset.

   
But I would die before I betrayed you, my love.

   
As tears slowly seeped from her eyes she finally fell into a restless slumber. Hours passed. Or was it only moments before she was suddenly awakened with something cold touching her throat and a horribly familiar voice whispering in her ear?

   
“My knife is quite sharp and I’d hate to mar that lovely little neck, so do be quiet while my friend here ties you up.”

   
Stuart Pardee’ s mocking British accent and repellently acrid smell raised her to full consciousness, but before she could move, another pair of hands was groping beneath the covers, throwing them off and tying her feet with buckskin thongs. As Pardee pressed the keen edge of his blade to her throat, his “friend” rolled her on her side, pulled her arms behind her, and bound her wrists with another abrasive thong. Only when his accomplice had stuffed her mouth with a large wad of cloth and had bound that tightly in place with a strip of buckskin did Pardee relax his vigilance and remove his knife from Olivia’s throat. There had been no chance to fight, no chance even to scream.

   
“A good thing Bad Temper here traveled with me to the post. I might never have gotten out of that makeshift prison without his help, but I never intend to answer any of your colonel’s questions, so I left nothing to chance. Now, it is time for us to be on our way.”

   
She wanted to ask where he was taking her—but did she really want to know? Surely it was back to Emory Wescott. But why would her guardian want her abducted now that she was Samuel’s wife? Perhaps the renegade Pardee had some even more terrible fate in store for her among the hostile Indians who were his allies.

   
As he slung her across his shoulder and slipped silently from the cabin, she fought down her fear. Her captors would not always be so vigilant as they had been during the abduction. She would keep her head. Her chance would come. Until then, she would survive one day at a time, just as Micajah had taught her.

* * * *

   
Samuel awoke in the backroom of the mercantile, lying on a pile of partially cured beaver plews. Their smell added nothing to his already pounding headache and roiling stomach. As he climbed unsteadily to his feet, he looked around the warehouse, wondering how the hell he had ended up here. His mouth tasted brackish as a sink pond in midsummer’s heat.

   
Around him, littering the dirt floor were several whiskey bottles. Gradually the whole ugly scene with Olivia came back to him, along with his foolish storming out in search of the oblivion to be found in a bottle. As usual it solved nothing. In fact, it only made things distinctly worse. He would have to face her. The sooner it was done, the better.

   
Then he could make arrangements to transport Pardee downriver to St. Louis. Forcing himself to concentrate on how he might wring an admission of Wescott’s complicity out of the Englishman, he walked out of the warehouse into the glare of the sunrise, only to hear loud shouts and Micajah’s voice bellowing across the compound from the cabin.

   
Damn, had Olivia gone sobbing to her protector about how he had abused her? Somehow Samuel doubted she would do it. His wife had too much stubborn pride for that. A premonition of disaster raised the hackles on his neck as he began to run across the compound to where a group of trappers and merchants clustered about the manager’s cabin. He shoved his way past them and entered to find Micajah standing in the center of the deserted room with murder in his eyes.

   
“Where in tarnation have yew been?”

   
“Where’s Olivia?” Samuel replied with dread.

   
“Gone. ‘N so’s thet Englishman o’ yourn. Some o’ his Injun pals cut the guard’s throat ‘n let him outta th’ jail. First thang I thought o’ when I found out wuz Sparky. He tried to kidnap her last night ‘n now she’s gone, too. Yew left her alone agin, didn’t yew?” Johnstone accused.