Kiss of a Traitor (29 page)

While she sat on the three-legged stool beside the bed, she tried to organize the work facing her. First on her list was food. But she could not hunt until the storm passed. In any event, she was reluctant to leave Aidan alone until his delirium abated. He might rip off his bandages in his present state and harm himself, destroying all her hard work. So she waited for the storm and Aidan to quiet before she hitched his kit bag and powder horn over her shoulder, retrieved his pistol, rifle, and small animal snare, and left the cabin again.

Willa tramped into the forest after feeding and watering the horses. The sun peeked out from behind dark clouds, but the cold day turned her breath into fog. She buttoned up her coat beneath her chin and continued on. The woods were thick with game, rabbits and squirrels mostly, and a lone buck deer. She allowed it to pass by unmolested. She could have brought it down, but with the burden of Aidan’s care, gutting and skinning a deer seemed like an impossible amount of additional labor when smaller animals would do nicely.

A brace of rabbits and six squirrels hung from her belt by noon. Willa filled the kit bag with blackberries, wild onions, and winter corn she found growing wild in an abandoned Indian encampment on the forest’s western edge. She uncovered beans, squash, and pumpkins growing in amongst the corn and scooped up a ripe pumpkin. Before leaving, she marked the field’s location in her mind.

Aidan was awake and alert when she returned. His fever had waned again and, by the scowl on his face, he wearied of lying in bed.

“Before you speak,” she said prior to his uttering a word, “I shall not hear of it. You cannot leave this bed yet. You are frightfully weak with fever. Neither your snakebite nor your knee has healed sufficiently for you to be stomping about.” She set the pumpkin on the bench, let the kit bag tumble to the floor beside it, and slung the rabbits and squirrels across the loom. “I shall not have you undoing all my efforts, after having worked long and hard through day and night to save your life. You will not throw it away because your male pride demands it. I am perfectly capable of caring for us until you recover.”

“Have you finished?” he asked calmly, his eyes dancing.

She inclined her head.

“Then would you kindly escort me outside so I can tend to my personal needs?”

Warmth surged into her cheeks. “I will not,” she said firmly as she walked over to hand him the flask that once held panther’s breath. “I’m surprised you have anything left in you, considering the quantity your stomach expelled, but you can use this. You may not rise from that bed until I give you leave to do so.”

Aidan looked at the flask, held it upside down, and shook it. His gaze darted to her. “You drank all my panther’s breath?”

She pulled back her shoulders. “Indeed.”

A small laugh erupted from his scratchy throat. “I must say I’m amazed to be the only one in this cabin spewing his guts. I trust you had the sense not to drink it all in one sitting.”

“I fear so. And ‘twas quite good, thank you.” She sniffed and returned to the game animals while Aidan filled the flask.

After gutting the squirrels, Willa hung them outside from a high branch to keep them fresh and prevent predators from stealing them. Then she skinned and gutted the rabbits. She boned them, cut the meat into chunks, and slid them into a pot of boiling water she hung over the fire. Wild onions, corn, and pumpkin seeds joined the meat to make a stew. After parching more seeds and corn kernels in the flames, she pounded them into flour, poured in water, and kneaded the mixture into dough. She formed the dough into small, flat loaves, arranged them on a tin plate, covered them with a second plate, and heaped coals on top. The remainder of the pumpkin ended up in hot ashes beside the fire to roast slowly.

Aidan slept through the meal preparations, his arm hanging over the side of the bed, the flask still gripped in his hand and sitting on the floor. Willa retrieved the flask, poured the contents outside, and trekked to the stream to wash it.

When she returned, her stomach grumbled at the redolent odors of rabbit stew and baking bread, all infused with the sweet scent of roasting pumpkin. She forced herself to tend Aidan’s wounds first. When she removed his bandage, he awoke and took a long, appreciative sniff.

He slanted her a smile as she slathered more poultice on the snakebite and rewrapped his knee with a cloth soaked in the witch hazel decoction. “Had I suspected you could cook, I would have fetched you to our wedding sooner.”

Willa kept her eyes lowered to the motions of her hands. “Please understand this, Aidan. You have no obligation to wed me simply because our fathers signed a betrothal contract when we were both too young to give our consent. In any event, I am well aware that you came to Carolina, not to wed me, but to spy for General Cornwallis, or so you assert.”

His mouth flattened as he raised her chin up on his fingertips. “Should the time come, we shall wed not to satisfy a betrothal contract, but rather because I stole your virginity and carelessly left my seed inside you. Honor demands it. No man worth his salt seduces an innocent maid and leaves her to face the consequences alone.”

Her body grew rigid.
Honor? Because he was
careless
and left his seed in her?
He did not steal her virginity; she gave it to him. Her innocence was not his to steal, but rather hers to bestow. She had deluded herself into believing he accepted her gift lovingly.
But no, he stole it, as though he were a plundering thief in the night and she no more than a silver candlestick.
Her heart had begun to open up to him. In a brief moment of weakness she fancied he harbored feelings for her. It now appeared as if
she
was the careless one.

“Your only careless action, Lord Montford, was to darken my doorstep.” Her words came out choked. “And when you return me to it, I shall be elated to see the back of you.”

She spun and stalked away. Aidan reached out to stop her and missed, nearly falling out of bed. A troubled expression reflected his bewilderment at her outburst, at the venom in her voice. “Come back, Willa, and let us discuss this matter.”

She paid no mind to his entreaties and declined to return to his side until she slapped a tin cup of stew in his hand and dropped a wedge of hot cornbread into his lap.

The weeks sped by in a blur. Christmas and the New Year came and went by unnoticed, merely days like any others in Willa’s daily routine. She nursed Aidan, bathing his skin when the fever returned, keeping his wounds free of infection, and providing the company and conversation he craved when cabin fever set in. She hunted game, gathered vegetables and early winter fruit not desiccated by frost, fetched water and firewood, and swept the dust and cobwebs from the cabin’s corners. She tended the horses, cutting dry meadow grass, picking corn to supplement their diet, and grooming and exercising them when the weather allowed.

At night she curled up in a blanket on the floor beside the banked fire and listened to Aidan’s soft snoring, her muscles sore, her body empty and aching, her heart bleeding. She had remained silent on the subject of his honor and her virginity, fearing open rancor would delay his recovery. Still, Willa suffered the cut of his words … and the loss of his touch.

Her revelation surfaced one clear night while she lay awake and listened to the mournful call of a lone whip-poor-will, which sounded like a ghost calling out to the living. Some alleged the whip-poor-will’s call presaged death. Despite the omen, her thoughts concerned life, not death. She had fallen in love with Aidan, completely and irrevocably. Her swelling heart threatened to burst, but she had no illusions of his harboring any such feelings for her. As he had made so painfully clear, should he consent to marry her, he would do so merely because he had taken her virginity and possibly left her with child. She rubbed a hand across her flat belly.
Had he?
The idea neither frightened her nor filled her with joy; it simply produced a melancholy ache. A lone tear tracked down her cheek.

She left her pallet, opened the door, and stepped outside. Bracing air stole the breath from her lungs. A frost rime coated the trees and pine needles like sprinkled sugar. She tightened the blanket about her shoulders and moved out into the clearing. In the moonless night, the glow from a million stars bathed the frost-laden trees in gelid light. She eased back her head to gaze upward and inhaled a deep, icy breath. Stars sailed like ships’ lanterns on a black, depthless sea. Their lights winked in an endless sky. Night creatures rustled in the forest. And above all, the doleful night bird continued its dirge,
whip-poor-will, whip-poor-will,
calling rhythmically in the darkness.

The cabin door creaked, but Willa remained focused on the bird’s somber cry. Warmth settled on her shoulders and against her back. As he brought her into the circle of his arms and held her close, he bathed her in his heat.

“What are you doing out here in the cold?” he murmured, sleep still heavy in his voice.

“I could not sleep.”

“Neither could I.” Sweeping her hair back from one ear, he tugged on the lobe with his lips.

Willa shivered. “Ha!” she managed to say as tingling ran down her neck and straight to the flesh between her legs. “You snore like an old hound dog. ‘Tis why I was unable to sleep.”

He traced the contours of her ear with the tip of his tongue. “I never snore, wildcat. You must have been dreaming.” His mouth glided down her neck as he took nips with his teeth and soothed them with flicks of his tongue. “Leave your lonely pallet beside the hearth,” he breathed against her skin. “Come to bed with me. Let me love you.”

If only you truly would.
His evident need lay against the small of her back, and she feared this searing lust was all she would ever have of him. It startled her to discover that she wanted him more than anything … other than his love. More than Francis Marion’s capture. More than her father’s approval. She wanted him with frightening desperation.

“Yes,” she replied. “Love me.” Only she understood the double meaning of her words.

Ford’s brain reeled as he braced himself on his elbows above Willa. He cupped her head between his hands and brushed a kiss across her mouth. Her lips parted, sending him an invitation. Opening his mouth, he drove a darting tongue into the warm moistness. She met him halfway, her tongue twining with his. A moan sighed from her chest, and his flesh hardened painfully, screamed at him to take her now, but he corralled his selfishness and contented himself, for the moment, with drinking from her mouth.

Pushing his hips into the vee of her thighs, he ground his hardness against her softness and heat as he suckled on the pulse point at the base of her neck. Her blood beat wildly against his lips. Another rush of desire sped through him at the evidence of her excitement soaring virtually as high as his. He moved down and circled a puckered nipple with the tip of his tongue to feel it tighten further and beg for his mouth. He obliged, sucked and licked and tugged with a light grasp of his teeth. She emitted a little squeak, wiggled her hips against him, and fisted her hands in his hair.

After tending to both rosy peaks, he slid down farther to lave her belly with his tongue and suck at her belly button. Then coming back up on his knees, he cupped her bottom in his hands and lifted her cleft to his mouth. Willa tugged so tightly on his hair he imagined she would pull it out by the roots. When he licked the moist furrow, she sputtered and struggled briefly, but soon gave up the fight. Ford dove into her sultry center. The pull of his mouth produced a rippling of her inner walls that throbbed against his tongue. The liquid essence of her desire flooded his mouth, salty tart and musk scented and going to his head like fine whiskey. He felt her thighs trembling, her sheath pulsing, and inched up to take the distended nubbin of flesh between his teeth.

The sharp edge of lust twisting his loins, Ford slid two fingers into her hot silkiness and pressed his fingertips firmly against the front wall of her passage. As he enclosed her clitoris with his lips and sucked in an insistent rhythm, Willa went over the edge in a hard buck of her hips and a high, keening wail. He held on and milked each strong convulsion, prolonging her flight until her muscles became as limp as melted wax.

He lowered her to the bed and lifted her legs onto his shoulders. Leaning forward with his hands braced on the bed beside her arms until her knees nearly touched her chest, he sheathed himself with a swift thrust into her sleek passage. Heat smoldered through his veins, and he moved in slow, measured strokes. She could do naught in her position other than take him fully each time he lunged. An endless, torturous litany of long, slow thrusts, from the very edge of her labia to the verge of her womb. Fire burned in his groin, and his cock swelled with urgency. His thrusting became more rapid, more forceful, until he felt like a mindless, burning, throbbing root. As he balanced on one hand, he wedged a finger inside her above his driving cock to widen her even more. The momentum of his impalement glided his finger along the core of her sensitivity.