Sunset Embrace (13 page)

But he would forever regret it if he heeded that cry. He closed his mind to it.

Gradually his grip relaxed and he eased her away. Lydia moved back quickly the moment she gained her release. The sparks shooting from the corners of his green eyes frightened her. When
she
was sitting on her knees a safe distance from him she whispered, "Are you feeling better?"

That was entirely dependent on one's point of view. "Somewhat."

"Your teeth aren't chattering anymore."

"I'm getting warmer." He was a helluva lot warmer. Hot, in feet. So damned hot he didn't know why the hair on his body wasn't singed.

"I wish we had something hot for you to drink."

"I do too. Maybe at breakfast I can build a fire."

Neither thought so, but it gave him something to say and something they could nod their heads in agreement over. Now that the immediacy of the crisis was over, they had to come to grips with sharing the wagon.

"I'd better put some clothes on."

"Oh," she said, lifting a hand to still the fluttering pulse in her throat. Why her heart was pounding and why her breath was irregular, she couldn't imagine. But every time she looked at the network of hair disappearing into the shadows of the blanket bunched around his hips, she went to trembling all over. "Of course." She turned her back and pretended to straighten the covers on the pallet.

In a minute he said, "It's all right now." He was sitting on the floor in a pair of breeches, pulling on socks. He hadn't put on another shirt. Even as Lydia watched, gooseflesh formed on his arms and chest.

"Mr. Cole man," she said, moving away from the mattress, "get in here under these covers or you're going to have pneumonia."

"No. I'll bundle up over here."

"No. I've already warmed a spot." That's what he was afraid of. "And it's your bed, after all."

Well, at least the girl remembered that. "No, you go on—"

"Please, don't be stubborn about this."

"I'm not being stubborn."

"You are. If I hadn't been using your bed, you wouldn't have been outside in the first place. Don't make me feel any more guilty than I do." She could see the indomitable thinning of his lips and took another tack. "If you get sick, it might delay you and Lee getting to Texas."

"I won't get sick."

"Or you might die. Then what would happen to Lee?"

"Tin not going to die."

"How do you know?"

"For godsakes, all right!" Ross exploded. He bent at the waist and made his way to the pallet, falling onto it with more weariness than he wanted to admit to, and pulling the warm covers over his shivering body. "There. Are you satisfied?"

"Yes," Lydia said, smiling.

She mopped the wagon floor with the damp towels, then threw them outside with his clothes. No telling how long it would take them to wring the water out of those things, but she couldn't leave them in the wagon. Turning out the lantern first, she crept to the opposite corner, wrapped herself in a blanket, and leaned against the side of the wagon.

Damn!
Ross knew what he should do, but how could he? How could he invite that girl, who had slept with God knew how many men, who represented everything he hated and had tried all his life to escape from, beneath those blankets with him? How could he ask her to lie beside him where Victoria, ladylike and proper even in bed, dressed in her chaste nightgowns trimmed with satin bows and eyelet lace, had lain?

Of course it wouldn't be that way. He didn't want the girl.
Like hell,
his baser side mocked him. All right, he was stiff with wanting her. He ached like hell. It was physical. But he was a man, not an animal. Victoria's love had rid him of all that ugliness inside him. He couldn't control his body, but he could control his response to it.

"Miss . . . uh, Lydia," he spoke into the darkness.

"Yes?" Her voice was shallow with fright. What was he going to do? It was most often in the night when men did things to women. She could remember her mother's weeping as she lay with Otis Russell in their bed. She could remember Clancey's defilement of her own shuck mattress.

"You can't sit there for the rest of the night. If you like, you can lie on the other side of the mattress."

"I'll be fine."

"Don't be ridiculous." He came up on his elbows to address the silhouette huddled in the darkness. "Its hours till dawn. It's cold and damp. You can't sit there all night
or
you'll be consumptive by morning."

"I have a strong constitution. I'll be fine."

The last thing his shredded nerves needed was the girl's obtuseness and another argument with her. Lately he had been losing every one of them. His temper flared. "Dammit, I said to get over here." He extended his hand, closed it around her upper arm, and hauled her across the wagon.

Tears pooled in Lydia's eyes. She hadn't thought Mr. Coleman would do the bad things Clancey had, but she had been wrong. He was a man. She struggled until she realized that she was fighting empty air. Mr. Coleman had slung the blankets over her and then rolled to face away from her. He wasn't even touching her.

Lydia lay awake for long minutes, letting her body relax by gradual degrees. When Mr. Colemans breathing had been regular and deep for several minutes, she let herself believe that he wasn't going to hurt her and snuggled down deeper into the blankets.

It was still raining hard, though the thunder echoed now from far away and the lightning flashed no longer. Even though they weren't touching, the heat emanating from Ross's body felt good. She slept.

* * *

When Ross awoke, it took him a minute to orient himself. His eyes opened to the side slats of the wagon. Through the crack between the side of the wagon and the canvas covering, he could see that it was light but still raining hard. He was dry and warm and rested and felt pretty damn good about someth—

He rolled over quickly. Lydia lay beside him. She was awake, lying on her side away from him, holding Lee in the crook of her arm. The nightgown was unbuttoned and open. Lee was avidly sucking at her breast.

She turned her head slightly. "I'm sorry we woke you up. You were sleeping so soundly."

"You didn't wake me. I'm used to getting up early."

Ross tried to tear his eyes away from her, from his contentedly nursing son, from her breast, but he couldn't. He didn't think about lying in the same bed with her, neither of them fully clothed. He didn't think about Victoria. He didn't think about anything except how pretty she was when she smiled drowsily like that.

"No sense in getting an early start today," she said quietly. "The rain is as bad as it was last night."

"Sounds like it," Ross said absently. He wondered how he could have ever thought her hair was unattractive. A compulsion to touch its curly confusion seized him, and only by an act of will did he resist. He propped himself up on one elbow to better peer over her shoulder at his son. "He's getting fatter," he observed.

Lydia laughed, a soft, throaty laugh that brushed every erogenous part of Ross's body. "He should be. All he does is eat and sleep."

They looked on while Lee, unaware that he was something as important as a unifying bond between two strangers, sucked happily. He was greedy and a pearl of milk escaped his lips and rolled down his chin and onto Lydia's breast.

Ross didn't plan it, would have been horrified by the mere thought of doing it. But it was done before he realized he had even moved. He reached across Lydia, lifted the droplet of milk from her breast with his finger, and then brought it to his own mouth and licked it free with his tongue.

Realizing too late what he had done, he lay perfectly still, paralyzed by his own reflexive action. Lydia turned her head on the pillow to gaze up at him with disbelief. Her eyes went to his moustache, to his mouth beneath it, to the finger that still rested against his lips, a guilty culprit caught in a crime.

"I didn't mean to do that." Ross's voice was like a saw against hardwood. Lydia continued to stare at him with wordless inquiry, as though trying to figure out something beyond her reasoning powers. Why he didn't throw the covers off both of them and leave, he didn't know. He only knew that he was powerless to move either his body or his eyes away from hers.

At last she turned back to the baby. "He's already asleep again," she murmured softly as though nothing earthshattering had happened.

Ross fell back onto the pallet, an arm thrown over his eyes. With his ears, he followed each of her motions as she lifted Lee from her breast and tucked it into the security of the nightgown. She rebuttoned it. She positioned the baby safely against her side. She settled into sleep again.

And still he couldn't get over what he had done. And still he couldn't move away. And still he could taste it.

With the essence of her lingering on his tongue, sleep overcame him again. Unconsciously he lowered his arm and sought to warm it under the covers as he rolled to his side. Unknowingly his cheek trapped several strands of russet hair and they in turn ensnared his moustache. His body instinctively curved around the closest source of warmth, a rounder, softer, smaller version of humankind than himself. To his subconscious mind, it felt right.

The three slept on.

That's how Mr. Grayson found them an hour later.

R
oss Coleman had the quicksilver instincts of a rattlesnake. From years of guerrilla fighting and being a fugitive he had developed a sixth sense about any intrusive presence. It failed him completely that morning. He was still sleeping soundly when the wagonmaster cleared his throat loudly.

Ross opened his eyes to see Hal Grayson standing just inside the wagon's opening. He was staring at the floor, nervously rotating the brim of his hat between his fingers.

Ross's whipcord reactions took over. He leaped from the pallet, slapping his right thigh, reaching for something that wasn't there, and balancing on the balls of his feet in an attitude of attack.

Graysons eyes opened as wide as his mouth in astonishment. He had never seen a man move so quickly. He held both hands up in surrender. "I'm . . . sorry ... I ... kn ... knocked," he stuttered.

Lydia scrambled to the side of the wagon, bringing a startled and fussing Lee with her. Her eyes were wide with incomprehension, her hair a swirl of wild disarray around her head.

"Do your duties extend to entering someone's wagon uninvited?" Ross demanded of the obviously appalled Grayson.

"No, they don't—"

"Except when he's about to evict the party."

The smug voice belonged to Leona Watkins, whose beady accusatory eyes had been level with the floor of the wagon as she stood on the ground below. Now she stepped up into the wagon to glare at Lydia and Ross with righteous outrage.

Ross forced his muscles to relax and his heart to stop racing, "Evict? What's she talking about?" he asked Gray-son, who wouldn't meet Ross's eyes.

"I'm sorry, Ross, but Mrs. Watkins has gotten up a committee of folks. They voted that you and the girl have to leave the train since you've ... uh ... you plan to ... uh ... cohabitate."

"Cohabitate!" Ross roared. "We shared the wagon last night because it was pouring down rain."

"I understand—" Grayson began, but Leona interrupted.

"You shared a bed!" she screamed, pointing a bony finger at them. Then, turning to speak out the end of the wagon, she addressed the soggy group gathered outside. "I saw them. They were lying together on the same bed. He still doesn't have all his clothes on. God will probably smite me blind for the sinful thing I witnessed."

Lydia had had all she could stand. She saw the dozens of pairs of eyes curiously gaping at her through the opening at the end of the wagon. Bounding off the pallet and holding the squalling Lee to her chest, she said in heaving breaths, "You witnessed nothing except two people sleeping on the same bed!" At the sight of Lydia clad only in her nightgown, her hair unbound and seductively falling about her shoulders, Leona Watkins drew up as tight as a fiddle string, Lydia didn't notice. "I felt bad about using Mr. Colemans bed. I told him to sleep there on the pallet because he was cold and shivering. That's all. I was only lying beside him because there wasn't any other place to sleep."

"I know what I saw," the woman hissed, her scrawny neck stretching out like an angry hen's. Spittle flecked her narrow, pious lips.

"What in blue blazes do you know about how a woman sleeps with a man, Leona Watkins?" Ma heaved her bulk into the wagon, Zeke behind her. He had pulled his pants on over his longjohns, which he wore year-round. They were a faded red. With his hair sticking out at odd angles to his head, he made a comical sight. Leona went even stiffer when she saw him. "You got only one young'un. That must mean you got lucky the one time you was with your husband."

Leona's face drained of color only to be inundated by a deep blush. Her lips worked wordlessly. "I won't listen to this filthy talk," she said finally, spinning around to face Grayson again. "What are you, as elected leader, going to do about this sinful influence on the children of this train?"

Wearily Grayson sighed, shaking his head. His own wife, tolerant as she was, had been aghast when this morning, at the crack of dawn, the Watkins woman had come to their wagon with the news that Mr. Coleman and "that disgraceful trollop" were sleeping together in his wagon. Grayson hadn't believed it at first. He had seen Ross suffer through Victoria's labor. He had seen the devastation on the young man's face when they lowered the undecorated pine box into the ground. Ross had been angry when Ma brought the girl to him to wet-nurse his son. Grayson didn't think Ross would be ready to engage in a carnal act with any woman, especially the girl he obviously held such contempt for.

Still, Ross was a man. A young man. With more spirit and, Grayson suspected, a lustier nature than most. And the girl wasn't bad to look at at all, now that she had been cleaned up and dressed.

He looked at Lydia, then dropped his eyes in embarrassment. What man in Ross Coleman's situation wouldn't have done the same thing? Or have been sorely tempted at best. The girl, either to her credit or detriment, was of the stuff wicked fantasies were made. He bravely raised his eyes to Coleman, and shrank from the black hatred stamped on every rigid plane of his face. The man's green eyes smoldered.