Pamela Morsi (23 page)

The brothers were not interested in any of their arguments. It seemed that nothing would dissuade them from following through with their chosen course of action. As the island came within sight, Eulie glanced over at Moss. He seemed to be surveying the distances to both the east and west banks, apparently gauging the likelihood of the two of them swimming to shore.

The afternoon was growing later and the sun was already low in the sky, skimming light across the water.

“How long are you going to leave us here?” Moss asked.

Delbert chuckled. “Well, let’s just say you’ll have plenty of time to get frisky with the missus.”

That struck Donald as hilarious, and he laughed uproariously.

When the prow scraped up against the sand, the Pusser brothers jumped out and dragged the boat halfway ashore. It took both of them to carry Moss out. As they slipped into the dark shadows of the trees, Eulie found that she was frightened for the first time. She did not like being alone out here at all.

The solitude only lasted a moment before Delbert reappeared. She was hoisted up over his shoulder and carried on to the island. He put her down within a short distance of Moss, who was once again struggling against the rope that held him.

“At least untie us,” Moss entreated. “There could be a bobcat or a panther around here. With my hands tied, I could never protect her.”

“Cats ain’t that fond of swimming,” Delbert told him, dismissively.

“It’s going to be night soon,” Moss tried again.

“And morning after that,” Donald piped in.

“Let’s go,” Delbert said. “We’ll leave the mated pair to their own company.”

They started to go, but Donald hesitated.

“We don’t have to put the two of them so far apart, I don’t suppose,” he said.

He walked over to Eulie. Jerking her up easily, he carried her over to Moss.

“I believe this belongs to you, Collier,” Donald said as he dropped Eulie directly on top of him.

“Ummphh!”

The breath was momentarily knocked out of them both.

“You two have a big time, ya hear?” Delbert called out to them laughing as he and his brother walked away.

Donald hooted along with him as they pushed their boat back out into the river and disappeared from sight.

“Are they gone?” Moss asked her.

His voice blew upon the side of her neck, all warm and ticklish. She turned her head to look down at him, so close beneath her.

“They’re gone,” she told him.

“Well, at least we can be grateful for that,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “My arms feel kind of cramped, but I’m not hurting at all.”

He wiggled a little bit as he lay beneath her.

“They really got me trussed up like the Christmas goose,” Moss said. “I don’t think I can get loose. What about you?”

He was so close, so very, very close. She had missed this. She had missed the warmth of being next to him.

Eulie began to pull against her wrists. To her surprise, she easily managed to get her thumb loose. Without any examination of her reasoning, she did not then simply slide the rope off her hands. She ceased struggling.

“I can’t get undone either,” she said.

His face was only inches from her own. She gazed down into the eyes that had become so familiar, the eyes that she so admired.

“Kiss me,” he whispered so softly that perhaps he hoped that she would not hear.

She angled her head and brought her mouth down upon his own. They could share a kiss. The contact, sweet and sensual, swept her away. It was just a kiss, she told herself. Just one kiss. There was nothing too dangerous about it. One kiss, but it was like a hundred kisses, a thousand, as his warm lips lingered upon hers, toying and testing and teaching. A month ago one kiss had gotten them married. Today it made them instantaneously intimate. There was no shyness in either of them. They wanted the touch, the taste of each other. They wanted the incredible closeness of it.

With hands bound behind them, there was no embrace, no caress, only the joining of two mouths.

“Mmmmm,” he moaned deep in his throat, as if finding her delicious.

Their lips separated, but it was not at all enough. He nipped and teased at her mouth, unwilling to let her go completely, unwilling to allow the precious intimacy to slip away. He caught her lower Up between his teeth and tugged ever so gently, willing her nearer.

He began struggling beneath her once more, putting frantically at the cords that held him fast.

“I want to hold you,” he told her. “I have to hold you.”

His ineffective movement had the untended consequence of rubbing his body lasciviously against her own.

Eulie gasped, both from the unfamiliar pleasure of his lengthening erection against her thigh and the startling jolt of pure carnal desire that rushed through her veins.

Their mouths were once more locked together in a sweet exploration of lips and teeth and tongues. He raised himself to a half-sitting position, pressing toward her. It was not a commensurate substitute, but it was his only alternative.

With his hands useless behind him, he used his mouth to stroke and caress where his fingers might have. He eased her to his side and then rolled partway over her, giving him more control over his movements and exposing more of her to his view.

He inched a path along her throat with a thousand tiny prickling love bites. When he reached her ear, his tongue snaked out to lash it. He captured the lobe between his teeth, treating it with the reverence one would accord a hard-won trophy. His panting breath skittered along her flesh like hot grease in a skillet. Eulie heard a curious, mewling sound with which she was unfamiliar. She realized with surprise that it was coming from her own throat.

His lips were back on her own once more, tasting, osculating, suckling, until in her passion and impatience, Eulie could bear it no more. She slipped her hands free of her bonds and embraced her lover, burying her fingers in his hair.

It was through a lust-tinged haze that Moss first realized that there was something different. In the last few minutes of desperate desire, something, somehow, was changed. But with blood pounding in his ears, the duet of labored breathing, and the indecipherable moans of two healthy humans following the inclinations of nature, he did not immediately care what had happened. As long as his bride continued to kiss him
so ardently and he could rub the throbbing erection in the front of his trousers against her firm young thighs, the entire world could crumble around him and he would not take note of it. She was all and everything that he had ever craved or longed for in his life. She was every bit of it. And she was wholly more than that. More than he had ever dreamed or imagined a woman could be to him.

His lips, which sought to nuzzle and kiss every part of her that they could reach, found the long slender fingers of her hand and the delicate underside of her wrist. Such beautiful hands, he thought. Such beautiful hands. So work worn and callused, yet so capable of tender caress.

Hands.

“You’re untied!” he told her.

She seemed startled, as if she had only just noticed it herself.

“Yes … I … I must have gotten loose,” she muttered.

Her gaze was still dewy-eyed and her mouth still pouting prettily from his kiss.

“Free me,” he told her. “Get me out of these ropes.”

Oh! Oh … of course.”

He rolled away from her, presenting his back. She pulled and jerked at the bonds for a moment before unscrambling the complicated knot. When the tie gave way, he sat up immediately and rubbed his wrists for a moment before going to work on the binding at his ankles. It was not all that easy, made more difficult by his need to keep his right arm lying lengthwise across his erection.

He’d allowed himself to get out of control again. He had always thought himself a man very capable of keeping his appetites in check. Obviously, that was in the days before he acquired a stringy-haired bride. He didn’t really mind for himself. He would suffer the consequences of unspent passion as a duly earned penance, he already ached with it. But it was so unfair to Eulie. She was a generous and giving person. She responded to his sexual overtures with all the warmth and enthusiasm that she brought to life in general. He could kiss her until she was breathless with desire and she would kindly forgive him for leaving her unfulfilled. He didn’t deserve her good nature.

Having untangled the rope at his feet, Moss stood up immediately.

He glanced down at Eulie. He thought to offer his hand, to pull her into his arms, but decided against it. He was still as randy as a billy goat. Distance was undoubtedly the best idea.

He walked out to the water’s edge and stared across the expanse to the far bank and the mountain view beyond. The sun was near to setting behind the high peaks behind him and the shadows were long. It gave the terrain an aura of beauty that was almost otherworldly. And at the same time there was a familiarity about it that was somehow comforting. His mother, his father, his grandparents—all the generations, even back to the old Scotsman—had gazed up at these hills the way he had. It was almost as if changelessness, continuity, became an end of its own.

Deliberately he closed his eyes and waited for the emotion to pass. He waited for the inevitable sensation of choking confinement, that hopelessly hemmed-in feeling that had been the spur that induced his wanderlust
from boyhood. He waited. Amazingly, there was nothing.

He opened his eyes, thoughtful. What had happened to his thinking? Where was that grievous yearning to get away? Perhaps the freedom to leave had somehow relieved him of the desperation to go.

Eulie stepped up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist.

“You’d best not touch me,” he told her. “I’m still hotter than a two-dollar pistol.”

She didn’t move safely away from him. On the contrary, she held him even more tightly and lay her head against his back. He felt the touch of her lips between his shoulder blades. The gesture was so tender, so loving, that tears welled up in his eyes. He blinked them back impatiently, startled at the strange rush of his emotions.

He reached down and grabbed her hands at his waist and released himself from her grasp.

“We’d best not be playing with fire, Eulie,” he told her. “We aren’t getting off this island tonight. In daylight we might have tried to swim. But it’s just too dangerous in the dusk.”

“So we’ll be here till morning?” she asked.

He nodded.

“Leight will show up bright and early. He’s a good man, Eulie, one that a person can always count on,” he said.

Eulie nodded. She remembered how Bug had discouraged Rans from leaving Barnes Ridge to work for him. He had intervened against the shivaree gang, unwilling to allow her to be hurt. And he had tied her bonds so very loosely. For the first time, she was thinking
more kindly of Clara’s unattractive beau.

“So we are stuck here together all night,” she said.

“It seems so,” he answered.

“And we can’t play with fire while we’re here?”

Her words were flirty, teasing.

He turned to look at her. He couldn’t help smiling. She was sweet and pretty. Just as he’d thought her to be that day at the falls, now so long ago. She’d brought such happiness to the farm, into Uncle Jeptha’s life, into his own life. She’d taught him to smile again, to laugh. That was a gift she’d given him of her own free will. Nothing he had asked for or even deserved. He owed her so much. He could not use or misuse her.

“We’ve already talked about this, Eulie,” he said. “I am leaving and I can’t leave you carrying a baby. It wouldn’t be fair.”

The truth of that quieted her. They stood thoughtfully apart, both staring out at the darkening of the distant horizon.

“We could do it once,” he heard her say quietly.

“What?”

He turned to look at her.

“Once,” she repeated. “You said that the first time I can’t get with a baby. So we could do it once.”

His mind put up a thousand barriers to the suggestion. The front of his trousers, however, seemed to like the idea very much.

“We could do it this one time,” she said. “We’re here and with no one else around and nothing else to do. It would be safe because it’s our first time.”

There was something strange and unusual about her tone. It was high-pitched, and she was talking very fast. She was not looking him in the eye.

Moss put it down to nervousness. The poor girl, he thought. It couldn’t be easy to suggest something to a man. Even one that you were tacitly married to.

“I don’t know, Eulie,” he said. “I’m not sure that would be very smart.”

“Why not?” she asked.

At that moment Moss honestly could recall no good reason.

“You’re my husband, but you’re going away,” she said. “If we don’t … if we don’t, well, then I will never know what it’s all about. I’d really like to know.”

Moss would really like to know as well. He wanted to know the warmth between her thighs, he wanted to feel the smoothness inside of her. He wanted to spill the hot seed boiling up in him into the depths of her body.

He swallowed the tremendous lump that had formed in his throat. The lump in his trousers was not so easily dispensed with.

“But we could only do it once,” he told her. “That would be the only way to be certain that there is no child. And the first time is usually not very good.”

She was looking directly at him now, her voice a more typical tone, her demeanor unfailingly cheerful.

“Well, if it isn’t very good,” she assured him sunnily, “then at least I won’t miss it and long for it when you’re gone.”

The thought that she
might
miss him, might long for him after he was gone, was almost too excruciating to bear.

“Do you really think you want to?”

She walked over to him. Easily she was in arm’s reach. She bit her lip nervously.

“I want to … if you want to.”

“Oh, Eulie, you can’t even know how much I want to,” he said. “But I’m just afraid that if-”

She raised her index finger to touch his lips, silencing him.