Mountain Laurel

  With that he rode away, leading Maddie’s horse behind him.

  The man wasn’t out of sight before ’Ring was on his feet and starting down the hill after him. Maddie, of course, was fastened to ’Ring, and she went tripping after him.

  “Will you stop!” she said as she fell over a tree stump. “He’s already gone and you can’t catch him, not on foot and not with me chained to you. I wish he had given us the key.”

  He turned on her. “You seemed to want to go with him. Maybe you wanted to unlock these things so you could go with him.”

  “I what? I wanted to go with him? Are you out of your mind?”

  “I saw the way you were smiling at him.”

  She glared at him. “I can’t believe this! I may have just saved your life by keeping you from jumping on a man who held a gun on you, but now you stand there having a fit of jealousy.”

  “Jealousy? I am merely stating what I saw. You nearly threw yourself at him. It’s a wonder that you didn’t ask him to take you with him along with the horses.”

  Maddie started to yell back at him, but then she relaxed and smiled. His jealousy was rather nice. “He was the best-looking robber I’ve ever seen. I don’t imagine he has to use a gun on the women he robs. All he’d have to do is smile at them and I bet they’d give him anything he wanted.”

  ’Ring stood there and glared at her for a few moments, then she saw him relax. He smiled at her, and Maddie thought that the robber wasn’t the only one who could make a woman do whatever he wanted. “Well, here we are, just the two of us, chained together, no horses, no blankets, no anything at all, but three whole days before you have to be somewhere else. Why don’t we stay here and have a little vacation?”

  Maddie was standing as far away from him as the chain would allow. “Stay here? We can’t stay here.”

  “Why not? You need a break, and you said that it was three days before you had to meet anyone again, so I guess that means it’s three days before you have to sing again, so why not stay here? Aren’t you sick of that camp and living in a tent?”

  “Actually I am, but I can’t stay here with you.”

  “Why not?”

  She closed her eyes for a moment. How could he be so dumb? “Because, Captain, you are a man and I am a woman. And on top of that we are chained together. Does that answer your question?”

  He stood there, looking at her for a moment, as though he were trying to understand her meaning. At last he said, “Oh, I see. You’re concerned that I’ll…You know. I guess I’m being branded a rapist again. What if I promise that I won’t make any improper advances toward you? What if I swear not to touch you? Will that help?”

  Maddie looked at him. Three days alone in the woods with a man, and a man such as Captain Montgomery. She shouldn’t do it. Absolutely not. Of course she shouldn’t. She should go back down the mountain, get Sam to cut the handcuffs off, then spend the days peacefully in her tent, alone. Reading. Worrying about Laurel. Alone.

  “You’d have to swear on your word of honor,” she heard herself saying. “I mean, Captain, I wouldn’t want to be fighting you off every minute.” Even the thought of fighting him off made chill bumps on her arms. What if she lost?

  He looked at her very solemnly. “I swear that I won’t touch you. I would swear on my mother’s grave, but she is still very much alive, so I guess you’ll just have to take my word for my intentions. I swear to not touch you no matter what.”

  “No matter what?”

  He stepped close to her, and when he spoke, his voice was very low. “I won’t touch you no matter how much I may want to. No matter how your hair smells when it’s been warmed by the sun. No matter that I would give ten years of my life just to hold your bare body against mine. No matter how the memory of you riding in front of me, your thighs against mine, haunts me. No matter that the nights in the mountains are cold and, because we are handcuffed together, we will have to sleep together, wrapped around each other, our bodies perfectly fitting together. No matter what, I will not touch you.”

  Maddie closed her eyes. His voice was so soft that even though he was so close to her she could feel his breath on her face, she could barely hear him. He put his hand to the side of her face, his fingertips in her hair, his thumb against the corner of her mouth.

  “I swear that I will not kiss your neck or your eyes or the little vein in your temple. Nor will I kiss your round white shoulders, or your waist, or your thighs, or the arch of your left foot. I will not lick the soft skin where your arm bends, or put your fingertips one by one in my mouth and suck on them. Are you hungry?”

  Maddie was lounging in a standing position, her knees weak, her whole body turned soft and pliant. “What?” she managed to whisper. She opened her eyes slowly. She could see his full lower lip and she had what was nearly a craving to run the tip of her finger under his mustache and feel the curve of his upper lip. His shirt was open halfway down his chest, and she wanted to bite the hair-covered skin she saw.

  “I asked if you’re hungry. Are you all right? You look a little pale.”

  Maddie opened her eyes a little wider and stared at him. Had he said all that she’d heard? “What did you say to me?”

  He put his hands under her armpits and jerked her upright to a full standing position. “Maybe we should go down the mountain after all, although I do think you need rest. The last few days are beginning to tell on you.”

  Maddie shook her head as though to clear it. “I demand that you repeat what you said about…about not touching me.”

  “I swore that I’d not touch you under any circumstances. Isn’t that what you were worried about? You did say that you were concerned about what I might do to you, considering that I’m a male and you’re a female. I was merely trying to reassure you.” He looked up at the sky. “You know, I think we might get some rain. If we’re going to stay here, we’d better find shelter and some firewood.”

  Maddie was wondering if she was perhaps going a little mad. Had she imagined what he’d said? He started walking and, being chained to him, she had no choice but to follow. “What did you say about…about sleeping together?”

  “I said that it’s cold in these mountains and, for warmth, we’d have to sleep together. Look over there, it’s an outcropping of rock. We can make camp there. I think there’s enough room for us and a fire. Now, how do we start a fire? You don’t have matches, do you?”

  “No,” she said softly, looking at his back as she followed him, then, abruptly, she stopped. “Stop right there! I demand that you repeat what you said to me, the part about my hair and…and my foot.”

  He turned slowly and smiled in a fatherly way. “You have two feet, a left one and a right one, and you have rather nice hair. Anything else?”

  Maddie started to say more, but she caught herself. Two could play at this game. Well, maybe she could play. She couldn’t imagine telling him that she wanted to see how his upper lip curved. She walked past him, trying her best to act haughty. “I don’t need matches to start a fire. My father—” She stopped when he didn’t move, the immobility of him jerking her backward.

  “Your father,” he said under his breath.

  She smiled sweetly. “Yes, my father. My father taught me some survival tricks.”

  “Such as starting a fire without matches? Rubbing two sticks together? Do you have any idea how long that takes and how difficult it is to do?”

  “I know exactly how long it takes, and if you’d done it as often as I have, you’d find it wasn’t too difficult. I may not carry matches with me, they get wet, but I always carry a fire steel and flint with me. My father said that a man—or woman for that matter—could survive if he had the makings for a fire, a snare, a few fishing hooks, and a knife.”

  “And I guess you have all these things with you.”

  “Of course,” she said smugly. “Don’t you carry them with you whenever you leave camp? One never knows when one may be separated from one’s horse. Don’t tell me,
Captain Montgomery, that you left everything on your horse.” She wasn’t sure, since he looked away quickly, but she thought he turned a bit red in embarrassment. Now who was feeling uncomfortable?

  Her father had taught her what to carry and how to carry it. During the long journey in the rocking stagecoach after she’d left the East, she’d whiled away a few hours by sewing a few pockets on the inside of her voluminous riding skirt. The pockets were as small as she could make them and about halfway down the skirt, so they would not show near the waist.

  Now, looking at ’Ring’s back, she knew that she was going to have to lift her skirt to get to the pocket, and she suddenly remembered being in the bedroom of a French soprano. Maddie couldn’t remember the woman’s name, only that her G’s were awful, but that day Maddie had seen the singer’s—if one could call her that—pantaloons draped across a chair. They were made of fine, exquisitely soft Swiss lawn. The fabric was so fine as to be almost transparent, and it was a lovely shade of pink, the color of a girl’s blush. Maddie had laughed at them and said to the singer that they were really quite worthless, that they wouldn’t stand any wear. The singer had looked at Maddie in the mirror and said, “They also tear quite easily.” At the time, Maddie had had no idea what the woman meant.

  Now, knowing that she was wearing pantaloons of heavy, serviceable, long-wearing cotton, she wished she were wearing underwear of pink Swiss lawn. ’Ring had said that he’d give ten years of his life to hold her naked body next to his. She might give five years of her life—not the singing years, of course, but the years afterward—to allow him to hold her.

  She lifted her skirt and pulled the fire steel and flint from the hidden pocket on the underside of her skirt, but he didn’t look at her.

  Then, with ’Ring attached to her, she gathered the dried inner bark of a cedar tree and a bit of cotton fluff from a cottonwood tree near the river. Her father had shown her how to hold the fire steel in one hand and strike it against the flint, and she’d done it very often, but now, with ’Ring so near her, watching her, she couldn’t seem to concentrate.

  “Here, gently,” he said, then took the steel and flint from her. “You don’t blow on it like a hurricane at sea, you kiss it. Like this.”

  They were so close together that their heads were almost touching and he looked up at her with his lips pursed, as though he meant to kiss her. Softly, with sweet breath, he blew against her lips.

  “A gentle kiss,” he said, looking down at the small pile of tinder. “As though you were kissing a virgin.” He looked at her, and the intensity in his eyes made her throat go dry. “Or a kiss to a woman who is very near to being a virgin.”

  “How?” she said, and to her horror her voice squeaked.

  He looked down at the fluff and shredded wood. “A man, at least a man who is concerned about the outcome, that is, can’t expect a virgin to be like other women. He can’t just one day take her and expect her to want him in return. No, he must first make her aware of what there is to want.”

  “Oh?” Maddie said. Her voice didn’t squeak but it was higher than necessary. “What is there to want?”

  “Love. Passion. Touching. Feeling. Sometimes virgins are hard to…awaken, so to speak. Sometimes women who have been virgins for a long time have buried their feelings, or have forgotten them and replaced them with other things, and then special things have to be done with those women.”

  “Special?” A tiny trickle of perspiration ran down the back of Maddie’s neck.

  “They have to be made aware that there is something in…shall we call it life, for them. They have to learn to look at men—or I guess we could be talking about male virgins as well, couldn’t we?”

  “Certainly. Of course. What should a woman see in a man?”

  “How he makes her feel when he kisses her, touches her, holds her.” His voice lowered and she had to lean forward to hear him. “How she feels when he makes love to her and caresses her. He has to first make her want those things so that she will come to enjoy them. Sometimes virgins don’t even know that love, that kind of love that’s between mature, healthy adults, exists. You know, that sweaty, lusty, hard, pounding kind of love, the kind where, at the end, you think you’re going to die from the release, a release that leaves you limp and fulfilled as nothing else in the world can.”

  Maddie’s upper lip began to sweat. “Certainly,” she said, her voice cracking just a bit. “That kind of love.”

  “With virgins you need to lead up to that.”

  “H-how?”

  “Talk to her, for one thing. Virgins love words. Tell her that you’d like to kiss her ears and her hair. Touch her breast. Not hard, mind you, that comes later, but just lightly at first. Kiss her closed eyelids. Virgins love that. Make love to her hands.” He lifted Maddie’s hand and entwined her fingers with his, his thumb rubbing the center of her palm. “Some people don’t realize how sensitive hands can be, how very much fingertips can feel, or all the body parts that fingertips can touch and stroke and caress. But you know, don’t you?”

  She didn’t even try to speak but looked at his big hand holding her small one and nodded.

  “Yes, virgins need to be wooed and courted. They need to have attention paid to them. A virgin needs to care for a man before she can relax and love him back.”

  Abruptly, he dropped her hand and pulled back from her. “Look at that. I was so busy talking philosophy that I forgot about the fire.”

  Maddie looked over the little blaze at him. Her throat was dry and her body tingled from her toes to her hair line. She was afraid to try to stand because she didn’t think her legs would hold her.

  He sat back and grinned at her. “What an odd subject of conversation.”

  “Yes,” she managed to say.

  “What do I know about women, anyway? You’ve heard why my father hired Toby and you’ve heard Toby say that I’m not interested in women, so how could I know anything about virgins, or any other type of women, for that matter? Whatever made us talk about this anyway? Oh, yes, I remember, the fire. You know, we really should have used that snare that you say you have before we made the fire.” He grinned at her. “But then, maybe fires are like virgins and they can be rekindled if you know the right kisses.”

  He stood up, and as he did so, he pulled Maddie up with him. Her legs buckled under her and he caught her under the arms. “Are you all right? You don’t look all right. You’re pale as a ghost and you’re sweaty. You aren’t getting sick, are you?”

  “Keep your hands off of me,” she whispered. Before I make a fool of myself and throw myself at you, she thought.

  “Oh, sorry,” he said, releasing her so abruptly that she almost fell. She grabbed his belt as she started down. He, the unaffected so-and-so, just stood there and watched her, his hands held out at his sides to show that he wasn’t touching her.

  She was able to recover herself before she hit the ground. She stood in front of him, as far from him as the chain would allow. “Let’s g-go—” Her voice, that usually perfect machine of hers, betrayed her again.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t go anywhere,” he said with concern. “I’m not sure you’re well.”

  “Rabbit,” she managed to say at last. “Catch rabbit.” Maddie started walking, pulling ’Ring behind her, so that she didn’t see him pull out his handkerchief and wipe at his face then scrub at his sweaty palms, then wipe his face again, then reach inside his trousers and adjust himself, then wipe his face again, then, after watching her walk, close his eyes so hard that he shed a few tears. When she looked back at him, he was smiling at her as though he didn’t have a concern in the world.

  Chapter 12

  Maddie had never been so confused. She had always known what she wanted to do with her life and she’d planned it accordingly, but now, with this man, she never knew what was going to happen. She not only didn’t know what was going to happen, she couldn’t explain what was happening.

  She kept asking Captain Montgomery what w
as going on, but he just smiled at her. One minute he seemed to desire her, then the next he didn’t seem to know that she was alive—or that she was alive and female.

  He helped her with the buttons on her riding dress (even though they were down the front) and he helped her with the ties of her corset, which they used to make a snare for the rabbits. He laughed at her when finally she could stand it no longer and went behind a bush to relieve herself. After that, whenever she had to go, she made him sing even though the sound was grating to her ears.

  She couldn’t seem to figure him out. One minute she thought she had him pegged as a pompous know-it-all who wasn’t worth her time, then the next minute he was telling her about his sister Ardis. One minute he seemed cold and uncaring and the next he seemed full of pent-up emotions. One second he seemed to desire her and the next he didn’t look at her.

  What a day it was, Maddie thought as the sun began to set. They had used the fish hooks she’d had inside her skirt to catch a few big mountain trout, they’d lain side by side for over an hour waiting for a turkey that they’d heard to come near them, then ’Ring had pulled the snare made out of her corset ties and caught the big bird. Maddie had plucked it and he’d laughed because he didn’t believe she knew how.

  In the late afternoon ’Ring had followed a swarm of bees to their hive and Maddie had begged him not to try to get the bees, but nothing would make him stop. He’d lit a torch of dried cedar and used the smoke to dull the bees, but as soon as his hand was in the nest, the bees had come awake and taken after him.

  He came down the tree and started running, dragging Maddie behind him, and when she couldn’t follow fast enough, he tucked her under his arm and kept running to the stream.