Wanton Angel (31 page)

Earline turned around, her face bleak inside the sodden hood of her bright red cloak. “Not as many as might have been,” she called back. “Most of them are either here or over at Genoa McKutchen’s place.” There was a minimal pause. “How’s Webb?”

Bonnie felt shame for leaving Webb, but she didn’t indulge it. “He’s been badly hurt,” she responded, “but I think he’ll recover.”

“You got that girl there looking after him?” Earline demanded.

Bonnie nodded and her eyes were drawn back to Eli. He had reached the Brass Eagle and was standing with one booted foot on its roof and one in the boat, his arm outstretched. Forbes was there, too, and he helped his fellow refugees into the boats before slipping down the slanted roof and landing with a splash in the angry river.

Bonnie’s breath caught and her eyes widened, but Eli caught Forbes’s reaching hand and, hauled him into the boat.

“I thought sure he’d be washed all the way to Grand Coulee,” Earline commented, standing closer to Bonnie now.

Bonnie let out her breath. She watched, mesmerized, as the rowboats drew nearer and nearer. The river swirled at her feet, nearly flush with Earline’s porch, and an empty burlap sack floated by, amid twigs and tar-paper shingles and other refuse.

Suddenly Earline’s shoulder struck Bonnie’s as the woman strained to help haul one of the rowboats in, and Bonnie’s oversized galoshes slipped on the wet boards of the porch. An instant later she felt the river water rising up around her, frigidly cold, and closing over the top of her head.

The galoshes were sucked from her feet as Bonnie struggled to the surface and managed one screaming gasp before the water filled her nose and mouth and at the same time whirled her about like a bit of flotsam. She came up again, managing a shriek as she cleared the water, and saw a huge log bearing down on her.

Desperately she grabbed for it, felt its bark tear at the skin on her arms as she held on. Too frightened to pray, Bonnie
clung to the piece of timber and tried to blink away the water that was blinding her. And the log spun round and round in the furious green water, as if trying to hurl Bonnie clear.

She must have been nearly a mile downriver when a head appeared over the other side of the log. She screamed before it dawned on her that this head must be attached to a living body, because it was smiling at her.

“Hang on, Bonnie,” Eli shouted, clinging to the log with one arm and flinging the other over to grasp Bonnie by what he could catch: her hair.

She hadn’t realized that she was slipping until Eli wrenched her head back above the water. She was too numb to feel pain, and the log was spinning crazily again. Eli hauled her up until she lay with her stomach on the log, and he held her there. All the filthy river water Bonnie had swallowed came up ingloriously and still the fallen timber turned.

Bonnie was beyond hanging on by then; it was only Eli’s grip on her that kept her from slithering into the water. The fear, the cold, and the sickening revolutions of the log combined to defeat her, and she lost consciousness.

She was awakened minutes, hours or decades later by a jarring thump that would have roused a corpse. Shivering so hard that her teeth chattered, Bonnie stared into Eli’s wan face and demanded, “Are we dead?”

He threw back his dripping head and shouted with laughter.

“It was a perfectly reasonable question!” Bonnie screamed. And then she looked around and saw that the log had run aground—which accounted for the impact that had jolted her back to full sensibility—and the gnarled roots of a tree were within reach.

She grasped them and hauled herself onto the muddy grass, scratching her hands in the process, but there was no pain because she was still so numb. Eli waded ashore and scrambled up the bank, giving Bonnie a look of amused exhaustion before dropping to his knees in the wet grass.

The rain showed no sign of abating, and Bonnie calculated that they must be miles and miles from Northridge. The countryside was unfamiliar.

Eli regained his breath and struggled back to his feet, his clothes plastered to his body. He held out a hand to Bonnie, who realized for the first time that she was sitting on the ground and not standing as she had thought. “Come on!” he shouted through the downpour. “We’ve got to find some kind of shelter.”

There were no houses or barns to be seen, and the scattered pines and Douglas fir trees were too small and too far apart to offer any kind of cover. Bonnie resisted the dark vapor that threatened to rise up around her and stumbled along behind Eli, her hand locked tightly inside his.

They were about a mile from the river when they found the abandoned wagon, lying on its side. With much maneuvering, Bonnie and Eli managed to drag it up alongside the stump of a tree and brace it against that, creating a lean-to of sorts.

They crawled beneath, heedless of their sodden clothes, and drew close to each other, clinging together for warmth. Mercifully they both fell into an exhausted sleep.

Bonnie awakened first; it was the light slanting through the spaces between the slats of the wagon that roused her, touching her like a warm, teasing finger. Sunshine! With a cry of glee, Bonnie scrambled out from under Eli’s protective arm and crawled into the bright light of day.

The sun was glaring down on the sodden earth, and Bonnie gloried in its rays, peeling off her wet, clammy clothes and her shoes and whirling naked in the shining heat like a pagan.

An appreciative laugh from Eli stopped her cold, and she stared at him, as shocked by what she was doing as any member of the Friday Afternoon Community Improvement Club would have been. She tried to speak, to explain that she’d only wanted to be warm, but no words would come.

Eli crawled out from under the tilted wagon that had sheltered them through the night, shivering in his damp clothes. “I think you have the right idea,” he said, removing his wrinkled shirt and kicking off his boots. Having done that, he boldly removed his trousers, too, and Bonnie turned away before she could see if he was wearing anything beneath.

A rustling sound made her turn around again, poised to leap back under the wagon if someone was approaching, but it was only Eli, methodically draping all their clothes, his trousers included, over a row of blueberry bushes.

Bonnie blushed crimson, and even though the sunlight felt deliciously warm on her bare back and bottom, decency made her demand, “I’ll have my clothes back, please.”

Eli was as naked as Adam before the fall from grace, and he looked back at Bonnie over one muscular shoulder, his eyes glistening with suppressed amusement. “Not until they’re dry,” he said. “Doesn’t that sunshine feel good?”

Bonnie covered her breasts virtuously and lifted one thigh in an attempt to hide the rest of her femininity. The odd stance made her lose her balance and topple into the damp, sun-warmed grass, and Eli was instantly beside her, kneeling on the fragrant ground.

“Thank you for coming to s-save me and b-bringing that log for us to hold on to,” Bonnie said, just to make conversation. Or perhaps to forestall the inevitable.

Eli laughed again as he reached out to stroke her bare thigh, her waist, one shivering breast. “I couldn’t lose you,” he said after a few moments, “and I didn’t bring the log. It just happened by, narrowly missing my head, I might add.”

“Oh,” said Bonnie. The grass was so warm and so soft and her body was arranging itself as Eli ordered. His touch felt so good, so soothing, and the sunshine framed his shoulders with a golden haze. She was lying down now.

“Sometimes,” Eli whispered, “I can’t bear it, you’re so beautiful—”

His hand had separated Bonnie’s thighs, or perhaps they had separated themselves, and she gave a cry as he found the tangle of curls and sought their secret with a soft foray of his fingers.

“Oh,” Bonnie said again, feverishly, as he tampered with her so boldly, and she felt her legs moving wider still.

“We’re alive,” Eli observed in a gruff tone of wonderment.

Bonnie moaned, her back arching. “W-we certainly are,” she agreed fitfully, as waves of heated joy flowed over her, through her, under and around her.

His thumb moved rhythmically to increase the delicious torment. “Now that we’re agreed, what shall we do about it? Being alive, I mean?”

A soft wail rattled in Bonnie’s throat and she felt her nipples go turgid as her hips and thighs seemed to undulate on a sea of rippling velvet. “Oh, my—oh—we should—we should—”

“Yes?” How could he be so calm, when Bonnie was burning before his very eyes?

“We should celebrate!” Bonnie choked out.

Eli bent and brazenly suckled at her breast, tasting it, drawing it gently between his teeth, lashing it with his tongue. “Celebrate?” he echoed. “How?”

Bonnie uttered a strangled cry of mingled passion and impatience. “You stupid man!” she cried, grabbing at his warm shoulders with her hands. “Make love to me! Oh—please—make love to me!”

For once in his life Eli obliged her instead of driving her to the very brink of madness first. He poised himself between her legs and entered her in a swift, searing stroke that made her grasp at the bare skin of his back. But then he stopped, looking down at her, his features taut with restraint.

“I love you, Bonnie,” he said.

Bonnie barely heard him, her need was so great. Her body, having just escaped death, was determined to affirm life. She flung her legs around Eli, forcing him into another stroke.

Eli moaned as their joining deepened, his head thrust back, his eyes closed. Slowly, so slowly that Bonnie shuddered with need, he withdrew. His return was slow too; inch by heated inch, he again sheathed himself inside her.

Bonnie flung her arms out from her sides in a fit of wanting, clawing at the verdant ground with her fingers, her head tossing back and forth in the grass.

“Easy,” Eli cautioned, in a throaty whisper, “give it time, Bonnie.”

Bonnie’s entire body buckled as the strokes continued, now reaching deep within her, now almost leaving her. “Time,” she croaked. “Eli—you bastard—”

He laughed hoarsely. “What?”

Of its own accord, perhaps spurred on by Bonnie’s, his body fell into a faster, fiercer rhythm.

Bonnie grasped the ground in desperation, her head thrust back, but she was flung free of the earth all the same, losing herself in the glorious burst of joy and the shuddering shout that meant Eli had reached the pinnacle, too.

They slept entwined, beneath the sloping cover of the old wagon, waking again in the late afternoon. Their stomachs were hungry, but so were their souls. Once again, Eli and Bonnie made love, but this time they were neither frantic nor fevered, and they moved together slowly, content with the gentle pace their bodies set for them.

For Bonnie, release was soft and sweet, rolling from the tips of her toes to the crown of her head in gentle swells. Eli cried out as he tensed upon her.

They fell asleep again, and when Bonnie awakened, it was dark and she was alone. She sat up so fast that she struck her head on the wagonbed and howled with pain.

From somewhere outside, she heard Eli’s chuckle and the pleasant crackling of a fire. Her clothes came flying between the wagon and the stump it was balanced against, and she scrambled into them.

“I smell food!” she accused, crawling out from under the wagon on her hands and knees.

Sure enough, Eli had built a fire. He was roasting what appeared to be a chicken over the flames, having made a spit of small twigs and branches.

“Where—how—” Bonnie’s body ached for food, just as passionately as it had ached earlier for Eli’s thorough loving.

“There must be a farm around here somewhere,” Eli said with a grin. He was fully dressed and comfortably seated by the cheery fire. “I found this chicken wandering in search of its destiny, so I—”

“Don’t tell me!” Bonnie cried, but she was moving toward the fire even as she struggled into her shoes. “How did you start this magnificent blaze without matches—”

Eli shook his head. “Oh, ye of little faith. I rubbed two sticks together.”

“Nobody really does it that way, do they?”

Eli laughed. “It might have been a spark left over from when we made love.”

Bonnie was grateful for the darkness; it hid the color pounding in her cheeks. A moment later her embarrassment was displaced by worry. “Rose!” she gasped.

Eli put an arm around her, lending a solid sort of comfort. “Don’t worry, Bonnie. Katie and Genoa will look after her.”

“But they’ll surely think we’re dead!”

“In that case, our return will be a pleasant surprise,” Eli said.

The chicken, spattering over the fire, smelled wonderful. Bonnie couldn’t remember ever being so hungry, even during her Patch Town days. “I guess there’s nothing to be gained by worrying,” she said.

“There never is.” Skillfully, Eli removed the chicken from the spit and tore off a huge piece for Bonnie. “Well start back tomorrow.”

Bonnie was too busy consuming roast chicken to comment, and Eli ate with comparable appetite. When they’d both washed in the river, they sat watching the fire in silence for a long time.

Bonnie had ever been an enemy of silence. She looked up at the magnificent spread of stars flung across the heavens and sighed. “Poor Genoa must be frantic.”

Eli’s hand cupped Bonnie’s breast, which was bare beneath her stiff, sun-dried shirtwaist, and, rather than protesting, she cuddled closer to him.

“Um-hmmm,” he answered.

“They’ll be certain that we’ve drowned, you know,” Bonnie went on, a little breathlessly, because Eli was still caressing her.

“Absolutely.”

Bonnie shivered a delicious shiver. His thumb was brushing back and forth over her nipple, causing it to draw itself into a keenly pleasurable tautness. “Rose is too young to understand, so Genoa wouldn’t say anything about our deaths yet.”

“No,” Eli replied hoarsely, “I’m sure she’ll wait. Rose is definitely too young to understand.” He moved back from
the fire a way, pulling Bonnie after him, so that she knelt astraddle of his thighs.

She shivered again as he opened her blouse and bared her for his enjoyment and her own. She gave a soft sigh of contentment and tilted her head back as his mouth closed over one nipple and drew at it with growing hunger.