Eyes of Silver, Eyes of Gold (34 page)

So at first Anne cooperated with Cord’s plans for hay season. She stayed home, took care of the livestock and did the milking and other chores. However, after three days of watching Cord rise in darkness still stiff from the previous day’s work and come home at night after dark almost too tired to wash in the creek and eat before falling into bed, she had had enough. On the fourth day she rode Red to the hay meadows. There had to be something she could do. “Why can’t I drive the hay rake?” she asked. “That looks easy.”

“If you fell off and the tines got you, they’d rip you to pieces.”

“Why should I be silly enough to fall in front of the tines? If
you
fell off that way
you’d
be ripped to pieces.”

Cord gave in as she’d known he would. By the end of the week they had a routine established. He rose before first light and was in the fields by daybreak. Anne took care of the livestock, did anything else that couldn’t wait in the house or garden, packed a lunch, and followed him to the fields on Red.

He did the cutting. She drove Keeper and did the raking. Anne found she could pitch hay high enough to help load the first quarter of the hay wagon, and if she drove the loaded wagon to the barns, Cord could start later, riding Red, and arrive when she did to unload the hay into the barn. Cutting was the slowest work, and Anne’s help gave Cord more time for it every day.

For lunch they ate the sandwiches she packed with peaches or apricots, then lay side by side on the blanket she spread for a table for half an hour, staring at the sky, too bone weary to do more than breathe.

At night they shared the milking and feeding chores, then bathed in the creek. Anne spared an occasional rueful thought for her oh so proper upbringing as the last of her inhibitions dissolved, victim of mind-numbing fatigue.

During the day she wore a minimum of the lightest cotton clothing with a wide-brimmed straw hat and thin work gloves for protection. More often than not she cooked dinner clad only in one of Cord’s shirts. He seldom bothered with clothes at all after their bath.

Anne felt no shyness over an occasional pat on the bottom, or gentle rubbing of her stomach or a breast, and no hesitation over touching Cord the same way, running her hands across flat chest muscles or tracing the curves of his back or arms. They worked together in an easygoing intimacy, but little desire flared in those weeks. It was not so much the abusive work of the day past as the knowledge that tomorrow would be the same.

It rained twice, once an afternoon thunderstorm that cost a whole day’s work - the afternoon of the storm and the next morning while the fields dried - and one entire day-long rain that cost a day and a half in drying time.

They accepted the breaks gratefully, but on those days Cord checked the horse herds and fences, and Anne caught up on baking, laundry, and the garden.

They had been driving themselves this way for three weeks when he told her. “We could quit today.”

“What do you mean, could?”

“By the end of today we’ll have the barns full. It’s enough to get our horses through a hard winter in good shape.”

“And if we keep going?”

“Only about another week before even the higher meadows will be too ripe - or there’ll be a serious rain. Anything else we harvest, we’d have to stack outside.”

“Then what?”

“We’d sell it.”

“How much?”

“Maybe the price of a horse.”

“That’s a lot of money for a week’s work. Let’s keep going.”

“Mm. Sure?”

Stretched beside him on the lunchtime blanket, Anne nodded as vigorously as she could manage. So they went back to work.

Exactly one week later, as they again lay side by side, Cord signaled the end. “Another couple of hours and we’re done, babe.”

She turned to look at him. “You know, I’ve never done anything like this before, never been so tired, but I’ve never felt so good about anything either, like it really matters.”

He was up on one elbow now, face shadowed by the sun behind him. As always, his eyes drew all light available, and in the golden glints was a beginning flicker of desire.

“Tired?”

Anne touched the springy black hair at his temple. “Not that tired.”

He drew her close and kissed her mouth, face, and eyes, leaving a trail of awakened nerve endings down her throat and across her collar bone.

Anne lay passive and accepting until he began unfastening the buttons of her waist, but then stopped his hands, got to her feet and undressed for him. The mask was gone; he leaned back and watched with undisguised appreciation until she finished and was standing naked before him.

As Anne pulled the pins from her hair and shook it down in a silken cloud around her shoulders, she caught a hint of something in his face and eyes she had never seen before, but he instantly lowered his gaze, stood, and removed what little he had on, for his shirt was hanging from the hay wagon where it had been since mid-morning. The past weeks had also honed Cord down to thinness, and muscle, bone, and tendon showed in sharp relief under warm copper skin, emphasizing, not detracting from, the ever-present aura of power around him.

As she raised a hand to touch him, he came to her, tipped her chin up for the first kiss. The taste of him always made Anne feel lightheaded and joyful. This time when she began to sag against him, clinging for support, Cord lowered her to the blanket, following her down without stopping the kiss. Once again she simply accepted his caresses in an almost trance-like state.

“Turn over.”

Drugged with the kiss and the sensations it provoked now spreading through her, she obeyed, pillowing her head on crossed arms, eyes closed. He pushed her hair aside and teased the soft spot behind and below her ear with small nipping kisses, trailed across her shoulders, made her shiver with pleasure as he worked on the nape of her neck.

His fingers drew tantalizing patterns of pleasure on her sides as he kissed his way down her spine, tracing the thin line of the knife scar as if he could heal it still. Then he kneaded the cheeks of her bottom and backs of her thighs as he worked his way back to the nape of her neck.

Anne turned onto her back, wriggling with delight as he again tasted his way downward, then began to nuzzle and nudge at soft breast flesh. As he spread a hand flat across her belly, her muscles rippled with building desire. He fastened on one already hardened nipple, then the other, sucking and nipping, sending hot sparks of pleasure racing everywhere. His hand moved rhythmically on her belly, slipped down to stroke her inner thighs, and finally explored the swelling, dampening flesh hidden by crisp dark curls. She could no longer be still but pushed up against his hand moaning softly.

Suddenly everything stopped. The point of his chin on her breastbone pinned her to the ground as she focused with bewilderment on eyes unquestionably gold in the sun.

“Maybe
I’m
too tired.”

“You wretch!” A hard push on his shoulders, and Cord let her roll him right over. She kissed him as he had her, but he was not as passive, his fingers tracing patterns along her spine as she kissed him.

He stilled as she tasted her way from the hard flat nipples along each rib down to the beginning of the seam-like line of hair. Her cheek rested there, as she traced light teasing circles on the lean belly, down corded thighs, returning to stroke the velvety skin of his now rigid shaft. She heard a half-smothered groan, then his hands clasped her around the waist, and she was astonished to find herself astride him, impaled.

Gazing down she was captivated by this view of her husband. Eyes half closed, features softened and blurred with passion, emotions were for once easy to read on his face. She moved slightly and saw his pleasure.

Concentrating totally on the effect she was having, she began a slow rolling rhythm, almost intoxicated with her own power. So engrossed in his reactions was she that a spasm coursing through her own body, causing an arching break in the easy cadence, brought a gasp, half from the intensity of the sensation, half from surprise.

He roused then from quiescent acceptance, pulling her down tight against him, reversing their positions, driving into her. She heard her name, low and throaty, then a sound that seemed torn from him.

No familiar skimming waves of pleasure came; instead her body was shattered with an inward explosion that fused them. As if from a great distance she heard a woman’s drawn out cry. Surely that could not be her.

The emotional cataclysm left her shaken and uncertain until her eyes locked on Cord’s. The words were there for her to read, reflected in his eyes, written on his face, and she could feel them pounding through her with each heartbeat.

She touched his face and whispered, “I love you.” He did not pull away, but said nothing. When he closed his eyes and pulled her against his chest, she knew he would not speak the words, but would not deny them either. It was enough for now.

They finished work in daylight for the first time, and it was only full dark as Anne began preparing dinner. Usually Cord was beside her, helping, but tonight he sat at the table, fiddling with a bit of harness, avoiding her eyes, as he had all evening. When he spoke, his words were unexpected.

“How do you feel about my mother, about the Indian blood?”

Anne busied herself checking the food on the stove, trying to think of an answer that would be honest but not too revealing.

“Never mind. Guess I don’t really want to hear it.”

The bitterness of his tone jolted Anne out of her reverie as she realized what her delay had led him to conclude. “Oh, no, that’s not it - it’s just that the truth sounds so selfish. I don’t want….” She was trapped now. He wasn’t going to let her tell less than the whole truth.

“Tell me.”

“I’m glad of it. I know it’s always made your life harder. That’s what so selfish of me, but if it weren’t such a…,” she searched for the right words, “social handicap, you’d have been married years ago to somebody like Rachel, and you wouldn’t have been here when I needed you. Not just today - I mean, even at the beginning - I didn’t want you to be hurt so or have your life changed like that, but I can’t even wish in my heart it didn’t happen because if it hadn’t I’d be - I don’t know even - maybe living in hell, or maybe really dead. I thought about killing myself once, you know, but I didn’t want to be dead. I just didn’t want to be married to George Detrick.”

Cord totally ignored the part Anne found so excruciatingly embarrassing. “Why would I marry somebody like Rachel?”

“Men always choose women like Rachel. She’s petite and feminine and soft and round.”

“Annie, do you see me riding docile fat ponies?”

She giggled at both images his words brought to her mind. “Well, if you’d been able to choose, you would have, and you wouldn’t have been unmarried at twenty-eight.”

“If I’d gotten to choose, I might have been married to you at twenty, but you probably wouldn’t have been too receptive to the idea.”

Her heart began to thud again. “That’s nice to say, but it’s not really….”

“Yes, it is. You were the first girl I ever really lusted over, you know. I mean not just a boy’s desire to do things to a woman, any woman, but a particular desire to do certain things to a certain woman.”

“You’re saying that to make me feel good.”

“You remember the day I knocked you off your feet - with the packages?”

She nodded.

“Before I recognized you I was waiting for the screaming and trouble, but when I saw it was you, I started to notice the shape of your legs and the way the lace on your underclothes looked so much better than the stuff on my sisters’. And how good you looked laying on your back looking up at me.”

“You mean I was impressed with how polite you were, and
that’s
what you were thinking?”

“You should be more impressed with how polite I was now you know what I was thinking.” There was a wicked grin in his eyes now. “But I never had the same effect on you, did I?”

“No, but nobody did. I never knew women had feelings like that until the first time you kissed me.”

“Come on, you were going to marry that Richard person.”

“If I’d married Richard, we could have been married fifty years, and I’d still never have known women had feelings like that. He did kiss me, you know. So did a few others. It was just - lips. I was so insulted because you were surprised I hadn’t - been with him that way. I couldn’t understand, but I did later. Four years - if I’d been engaged to you my virtue might have lasted four days, but never four weeks.” She grinned at him. “One kiss, and I’d have been lost.”

“Wouldn’t have helped much that I’d have spent every waking hour plotting ways to besmirch you.”

“But in the beginning, when we were first married, you didn’t even - I mean - but you didn’t.”

“I thought you wouldn’t like it. I thought you wouldn’t like it a lot.”

“Oh. I thought I wasn’t supposed to like it. I thought there was something the matter with me because I didn’t
dislike
it the way I was supposed to.” She laughed out loud. “I’m sure glad we both got older and wiser.”