Elizabeth Grayson (17 page)

Chase licked his lips in anticipation, but just that faint swipe of his tongue at the corner of his mouth set his lip to throbbing. The sting he’d gotten while he was splitting the log was already swollen and hot. He could feel more bites twitch to life on his forearms, shoulders, and back.

All of them were swatting at bees and being stung, but everyone had known the risks—and the profits they’d reap when the job was done. Once they’d scraped out the log and filled the copper tubs with honey, they swung into line and headed back to the
Andromeda.

Most of the passengers were out on deck enjoying the evening breeze when the small lantern-lit procession came striding back down the ravine. Chase immediately spotted Ann just outside the galley door.

Balancing the boiler against his hip, he waved to her. “I’ve got something for you, Annie, that you’re going to like.”

Ann leaned as far over the railing as her rounded belly would allow. “What is it?”

He grinned at her. “Come and see.”

She was waiting on the main deck when they thundered across the gangway.

“What did you bring me?” she wanted to know, her eyes as wide and bright as a six-year-old’s.

Chase held out the washtub for her to see.

“What
is
that stuff?”

“Honey!” he told her. He lowered the tub he’d been carrying onto the deck. Then, dipping two fingers into the warm, sticky ooze, he offered them up to her. Ann laughed, took his wrist, and guided his fingers between her lips.

The moment her mouth closed warm and soft against his flesh, Chase knew he was in trouble. His chest went tight as she sucked the honey from his skin. His ears buzzed and his insides liquefied as she swirled her tongue against him.

Desire condensed in him like humidity on a glass of lemonade. Ann had absolutely no idea what havoc she was wreaking.

Blood surged into his groin. He went heavy and turgid and hot. His penis rose against the front of his trousers, straining against the fabric. He stood there, knowing a hundred pairs of eyes were focused on the two of them. That each of the men who were watching knew exactly what was happening to him—and were amused by it.

A flush of mortification swept up his neck. Yet Chase couldn’t seem to take back his hand. He couldn’t seem to step away. He couldn’t seem to do more than stare at Ann.

He tried reciting times tables in his head—eight times six is forty-eight, eight times seven is fifty-six, eight times eight is ... It didn’t help.

Then, with a slow final glide that nearly melted his knees out from under him, Ann relinquished his fingers and stepped back smiling. “The honey is delicious.”

Her voice seemed muzzy in his ears, and all Chase could think about was her mouth. How warm those lips had been, how slick her tongue. How sweet she’d taste if he kissed her.

“Did you get stung there on the lip?” Ann asked and raised her hand to touch his mouth.

Chase jerked back reflexively.

“Did you get stung getting me honey?”

“We all got stung,” Rue broke in, taking pity on his brother.

Ann turned her attention to Rue and the four men standing at the top of the gangway.

“You all did this for me?” she asked them. “Because you knew how much I’m enjoying sweets right now?” She gave Goose’s hand a quick, sticky squeeze. “How good all of you are to me!”

Every one of the men blushed to the tips of his ears. Not one of them mentioned the price that honey was going to fetch once they reached Fort Benton.

That riled Chase more than made rational sense.

“Then the least I can do,” Ann went on, still beaming, “is look after those stings.”

While Ann was dispatching rousters for whiskey from the salon and mud from the riverbank, Chase grabbed up the copper tub and escaped to Frenchy’s galley. From there he went on to his cabin.

Her cabin.

The captain’s cabin.

He couldn’t let Ann near him right now. He was still thrumming with the sensation, all but quivering with his need to take her in his arms. He could think of a hundred things he’d rather do with her right now than feed Ann honey.

He stormed through the sitting room and into the bedchamber. He tore off his shirt, splashed water from the ewer into the gilded basin, and dampened a washrag. He peered into the mirror that hung above the wash-stand.

Bright red welts splotched his face. More peppered his throat and shoulders. A liberal scattering marked his back and ribs. He soaked a cloth, dabbed it experimentally against a few of the stings, and cursed.

The damn things hurt!

“I wondered where you’d gone,” Ann said from the doorway.

Chase started at the sound of her voice, but resisted the urge to grab up his shirt. She was his wife, goddamn it, and she shouldn’t be put off by the sight of him.

“You finished doctoring everyone else?” he asked her gruffly.

“Not one of them was stung as badly as you.”

“Beck Morgan and I broke into the honey tree.”

“Then that explains it.” She gestured with the bottle of whiskey in her hand. “If you come into the sitting room where the light is better, I’ll look after those stings.”

Chase couldn’t think of any way to avoid doing that, so he followed her into the sitting room and steeled himself against her touch. Ann stood over him, dabbing him with whiskey.

“You’re making me smell like a distillery,” he groused. The whiskey wasn’t helping; the stings felt worse.

“I rather like the smell of whiskey,” Annie confessed.

“I could take to swilling some in the evenings,” he offered, “if you like.”

He saw her bite back a smile. “I can’t imagine it would enhance your reputation as a steamboat captain.”

“No, probably not,” he agreed.

He wanted to make love to her so much he could barely sit still. The feather-light brush of her hands against his skin was exquisite torture. Her nearness was making him dizzy. He wanted to draw her onto his lap and kiss her until both of them were wild with desire. But he didn’t dare.

“Those stings feeling any better?” she asked and picked up the plate of mud. She started dabbing again.

He’d been aware of Ann before, but he hadn’t ever
wanted
her the way he did tonight. He hadn’t thought about running his hands the length of her legs, tasting the skin at the small of her back, or cupping her breasts in his two hands. He hadn’t thought about lying down with her, rubbing skin to skin, or coming inside her. Because of her reticence, because she was carrying someone else’s child, he hadn’t let himself think about what that might be like. But he was thinking about it tonight.

He was thinking about
her
tonight.

Ann was possessed of a deep, quiet beauty, the kind that would linger all her life. The kind a man discovered and rediscovered a hundred times as the years went by. Chase wanted so much to be with her, to savor that breathless loveliness when she turned thirty and forty and fifty. He wanted to be with her and hold her and cherish her forever.

He’d committed himself to a life with her. He just had no real idea of how rich that life could be—until today.

Ann set the pan of mud aside and stepped back to admire her handiwork. “There,” she said. “That should help.”

He’d been anointed with whiskey and dabbed with mud that was drying and starting to itch.

“Thank you,” he said.

“It seems the very least I can do since you were injured for my sake.”

He hadn’t imagined she’d be so delighted by a gesture that had begun, at least for everyone else, with the hope of gain. He supposed he should put their raid on the honey tree in its true perspective, but he didn’t want to disillusion her. He liked that she thought that he, that all of them, had done this to please her.

“I’m glad you like honey,” he said as he rose to go.

“At least you all should be able to sleep tonight,” she offered, following him to the door.

Chase looked down at her and thought that sleep didn’t seem very likely—at least for him. He had fallen in love with his own wife, and he didn’t know what to do about it.

THE RIVER CHANGED AGAIN WEST OF COW ISLAND, BECOMING shallower, rockier. Ann had watched the low earthen banks that hemmed their progress for weeks give way to bare, broken hills, then to striated bluffs of shale and sandstone. Even the air seemed different once they breached that endless stretch of prairie. The breeze had turned chilly, astringent, and it was spiced with the sweet bite of sage.

Early morning was Ann’s favorite time on the river, and today the silky gray surface of the water was flushed with the light of dawn. In the silence she could hear the
chuff
of the steam engine echoing back from the banks and the shrill cry of eagles circling.

Just as the birds wheeled and soared off into the sun, the galley door snapped open behind her.

“Damn it, Annie!” Chase barked. “What in the name of all that’s holy are you doing on deck? You know the Sioux have been shooting at steamers!”

They’d been seeing Indians along the banks for weeks, small family groups at the edge of the river, riders in the distance, and a few sad, solitary fellows who came down to the boat to trade. Though Ann knew mountain boats had been shot at and an engineer killed on this stretch of river not a week before, the Indians she’d seen seemed harmless.

“It was so hot in the kitchen,” she complained, fluttering the damp neckline of her gown. “I needed a breath of air.”

Never had she been so affected by heat as she was this summer and the weight of her advancing pregnancy seemed to make it worse.

Chase drew her back from the rail, then squinted to where the sun was gilding the water in the steamer’s wake. “You’re usually done baking by this hour, aren’t you?”

Just thinking about the three dozen crusty brown loaves laid out on racks in the pantry made Ann’s throat knot with pride. Who would have thought when she was learning French and dancing and fancywork at school back East, that she’d find such satisfaction in doing something so practical as baking bread?

“I
am
done baking.”

“Then let me take you up to the cabin.” He cupped his hand around her elbow and steered her toward the stairs. “It’s just not safe for you to be waltzing around on deck.”

“I’m far too ungainly to waltz anywhere.”

Chase grinned, but he didn’t refute her.

“Please, Chase,” she asked as he eased her up the stairs. “The river’s beautiful here. It’s the most interesting it’s been since we left Iowa. And it will be so
hot
inside the cabin.”

“Would you rather come up to the pilothouse with me?”

Ann loved being in the
Andromeda
’s wheelhouse, loved the openness and the view, but she always waited to be invited.

“I’d like that,” she agreed.

It might have been the climb to the wheelhouse that stole her breath, though she preferred to think it was the scope of the landscape spread out before her. Low rounded peaks ran off to the southwest like lizards crouched in the sun. Directly ahead, dun-colored buttes rolled out of the earth like a line of ocean breakers.

Chase displaced his brother at the wheel and sent him down to breakfast. “You can linger over coffee if you like.”

“I’m going to write Ma a letter,” Rue said and turned to go. “Now, you stay off the sandbars while I’m gone.”

Chase snickered at the admonition and turned his attention to the channel.

For a time Ann was content to sit high on the lazy bench and let the wind blow through her hair, content to watch the world reel out before her in a dazzling panorama of golden landscape and cerulean sky. But as sharply cut spires of stone began to rise to their right and left, Ann crossed to the front of the wheelhouse to lean against the breastboard.

“The last time I was out this way, I found seashells in the rock at the top of those bluffs,” Chase told her, gesturing toward the pinnacles cut by water and wind. “Some folks think that means that this land was once an inland sea.”

Ann looked at him instead of the rocks. She studied that high, broad brow and fine, strong chin, those sharp blue eyes, narrowed against the glare. For a man with no formal education, Chase knew amazing things.

“So what do you think?” she asked him.

“I think the world must be immeasurably old for rocks to have crumbled into sand,” he said, and smiled at her. “And those seashells must have come from somewhere.”

The river meandered for a space, then as they eased around another bend in the river, walls of white and ocher stone closed in around them.

“This section of the Missouri,” Chase told her, “is faster, shallower. We’ll be running rapids day after tomorrow.”

Low-treed islands appeared in the midst of the stream, a string of them to starboard, with half-submerged sandbars at the upstream ends. Chase picked his way around the first one, passing close to a tumble of house-sized boulders at the base of the wall on the opposite side of the river.

As they broached the second island, a band of painted Indians galloped out onto the beach. They gestured the steamer nearer as if they meant to trade. As Chase steamed past, they began to fire at the
Andromeda.

Chase cranked the wheel to port, and as the boat came about, a second fusillade of gunshots boomed from the cluster of boulders on the opposite side of the channel.

“Get down!” he shouted and shoved Ann to the floor.

Ann curled up in a ball and grabbed her belly. Above her Chase shouted orders and dragged on the bellpulls to signal the engine room.

She could hear Indian rifles cracking from both sides of the river. Bullets
ping
ed and
thud
ded into the steamer. Footsteps thundered, and men started yelling on the decks below. A moment later Ann heard a spatter of return gunfire.

The engine room responded to Chase’s orders. The
Andromeda
trembled and surged ahead.

The shooting both on the bank and from the steamer intensified. One of the windows in the pilothouse exploded in a hail of shattered glass. Ann curled up tight and covered her head.

Chase muscled the wheel to port again. “Brace yourself!” he shouted.