Wild Indigo (17 page)

“Jacob,” she said softly, testing her voice for steadiness. He must not know how much the blood unsettled her. She gently tapped his shoulder. “We have to take off your other boot.”

“Hmmm?” He was barely conscious.

“That boot. We have to take it off.”

“Cannot,” he mumbled. “Tried, before.”

“We have to.” She tugged at his sleeve to make her point. “Now. And you should be in bed.”

She looked at him. Weariness and pain scored new lines in his handsome face. She had to act. Her heart raced as she knelt, boldly draping his arm around her shoulder, and urged him to stand. Bracing on her, he pushed himself up.

“Come,” she said. “Lean on me.”

Slipping an arm around his waist, she guided
him to the bed, trembling inside. He was so large, so hot. So close. She felt vulnerable, yet oddly powerful to have such a man relying on her.

Retha's arm around his waist jolted Jacob awake. His wife was touching him of her own accord. Though unsteady, her hands had been firm and caring. But as much as he wanted to prolong the moment, he could barely stand on his miserable feet. After easing himself down on the edge of the bed, he mutely stuck out his booted foot.

She looked at it. “You said it wouldn't come off.”

“Not for me, it wouldn't. You try.”

Facing him, she grasped the boot's heel and pulled. He relished the fierce concentration on her face, half-hidden by her hair falling free. But the boot wouldn't budge, and her tugging hurt like sin. A hiss of pain escaped him.

She stopped, shaking her hands in frustration. “I cannot do this.”

“You can.”

Her tone brightened. “We could cut it off and spare you.”

“No.” He was alert enough to know he didn't want her slicing up his only good riding boots, not with footwear at a premium because of the war. But her concern warmed him. “The worst damage is done. Try the other way.”

“What other way?” she asked in a small voice.

Ah, he thought. She wouldn't know how to take off a man's boots. A small fissure of tenderness opened in his heart at this reminder of her absolute innocence of men, their habits and their needs.

“This way. Turn around,” he said softly, as if to a
newly broken filly. He placed his hands on her hips, finding them round and firm, and turned her about. Stiff but showing no other reluctance, she let him position her straddling his leg as she faced into the room.

He leaned back on his elbows. “Now, I brace my foot against you for balance. You grasp the boot by the heel and pull.”

She even allowed his free foot to brace against her behind. Her firm, shapely behind. The sight of it so near, its feel, took the edge off his pain.

Until she started pulling in earnest. A poker of pain branded his heel.

“The slower you pull, the longer it hurts,” he said between clenched teeth.

Obediently she leaned her weight into the boot. For a moment he banked his senses against pain by focusing on the slimness of her waist. His ploy almost worked. But as the boot came off with a tearing wrench, the black oath flew, unbidden, out of his mouth.

“Jacob Blum!” she scolded, hanging on to the boot as she spun away and faced him. “Sister Krause would never have let me marry a man who said things like that!”

“Hurt like the Devil,” he said meekly, although he managed a slight grin over the biting pain. He did not believe in false heroics where there was such delicious sympathy to be gained.

But she hurried to pick up his other boot and stood the pair at the foot of the bed, escaping contact with his body. He regretted the loss, but decided to take his small gain.

She had touched him; she had let him touch her.

He flopped back on his bed, her bed, and laughed. He wanted to introduce Retha to every pleasure he knew and consign Sister Krause to…the sanctity of
Gemein Haus
with the Single Sisters.

Retha rounded the bed and loomed over him. “Don't you laugh,” she said with mock severity. He loved it.

“Wouldn't dream of laughing,” he said, struggling to hide his grin.

“I'm not through with you.” Picking up the lamp, she whisked into the kitchen.

Jacob was so tired and so pleased by her caring touch that he drifted off to sleep, smiling, only to be shocked awake sometime later.

A cold, wet
something
touched his feet.

“Wh-at?” He tried to sit up to see. Faint light filtered through the window.

She had come back.

He was instantly attuned to her presence by his bed.

Coral sunlight profiled her face, turning it into a cameo for his own private viewing. He wanted to trail kisses down her high forehead, to the bridge of her fine, strong nose, down her nose to its tip, all the way down to her shapely lips. Where the kissing would not stop.

“I made you a compress,” she whispered, as if she did not wish to rouse him. But he was aroused. She bent to her task at his feet.

He watched. A thick fall of hair, its amber depths tinged gold by the dawn, floated over his feet. The slanted sun outlined his bride's body, slender in
pristine white, and meltingly desirable. His desire stirred, quickened. Astounded and yet pleased at the morning urgency that pooled and throbbed in his erection, he shifted himself in his thick traveling breeches.

“Hold still,” she whispered again, snugging his leg to her rounded hip as if to steady it.

How? he wanted to shout. At the moment all he felt was the inevitable urge that had plagued him every morning since the afternoon he noticed her in the Square.

But this time was the sweetest, and the worst. She was here, at his side, touching him of her own free will. And with no sign that he could detect of the panicked, unfathomable woman-child of their wedding night. Or of the she-wolf who had defended his children only hours ago.

It was too soon, he warned himself. Too soon to hope her fears had been put to rest. He breathed in through clenched teeth. He would master this desire, subject it to his will and train it to her need.

She grasped the ankle of his near leg in her hand, and he winced. But she lifted it gracefully and tenderly and set his heel onto a soothing compress. Although his mind made quick note of its wet coolness, it wasn't the compress his body affirmed. Her slim hand rested on his leg, her round hip heated his calf.

With the purest frustration he had ever felt, he groaned. His fatigue vanished, transmuted into more energy than he had had in a decade. He wanted to touch, kiss, claim every inch of his bride's body; he wanted her skin rosy from touching, her face pink
with exertion, her very being quivering on the edge of where he was now. He wanted her with him. Surrounding him.

Methodically—and quite skillfully, he thought—she wrapped his other foot in some damp, cool vegetation and swathed it in a cloth.

“There,” she said, brisk and competent. “Almost done.”

Don't be done, he wished but did not say. His senses on edge, he willed himself not to complain, but to lie back and wait, turning every ounce of the desire that thrummed through him into a plan of action.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Those fresh comfrey leaves should do the trick,” she said proudly.

Fresh comfrey? He didn't even have dried comfrey in the house, universal as the herb was as a compress for scrapes and bruises. Half wild Indian that she still was, she must have gone outside to fetch some fresh. Outside, where Moravian Sisters were forbidden to go alone at night. Outside, where embattled men prowled the woods. His trip had shown him nothing if not that. Common sense overcame the delectation of his arousal.

“Where did you find the comfrey, Retha?” He made himself ask gently, needing to know but unwilling to break the tender spell of solicitude she had woven around him.

“Down by the creek, of course.”

He sat up. “
Liebe Gott
, Retha. You're not supposed to go there.”

“You needed it.”

“Perhaps so, but not enough for you to risk being seen and captured. Or worse.”

She dismissed his concern with a smile as naive as morning light. “I didn't see a soul.”

“Retha…”

“Except my wolf!”

“That beast be—”

“And no one saw me. You forget, Jacob. I know how to look out for danger. You're the only man who ever caught me.”

The only man who ever caught her! She must be thinking of that night years ago when he captured her in Salem Square. Had she escaped others? But when and where and how? And could they have anything to do with her troubled mind? The thought intrigued and then dismayed him.

He pondered the matter as she washed his face, untied his stock, and diligently sponged road dirt from his neck. He would probably never know. But he railed against the sense of honor that bound him not to ask another soul. He had to protect her from the shame of others knowing her affliction, as Sister Krause had done. More, in some strange way he did not yet understand, he had to protect her from herself.

“Retha,” he growled, “no one's safe out there…”

“Be still.” She dipped a cloth in a basin of water and covered his mouth with it. “I'm not finished yet.”

For the moment, Jacob closed his eyes and gave in to his wife's gentle ministrations, torn between his duty to correct her and his desire to let her have her way with him.

Any way at all.

Tomorrow he would deal with her rash foray into the night.

 

Her husband was beautiful, Retha thought, lingering by his side in the brightening dawn. Roughly beautiful under the sheets, like a great slumbering bear. And perhaps as dangerous, for all she knew, although he didn't seem so now. His sleep deepened, and she watched with satisfaction. He had come home to her, let her nurse him, and drifted to sleep as if their life together was a matter of long habit. Clearly for him, life with a woman was. Life with Christina had been…She clamped down on that thought. She would not, could not think of his first wife.

Yet for her, being intimate with a man was all new, alarming, and…interesting. She had all but sat on his rock-hard thighs, felt his power, and managed not to flinch. She had snugged her hip up to his naked calf, felt its heat through her thin gown, and managed not to jerk away in shock. She had laved the bloody wounds on his bare feet and managed to control her queasiness.

But she could not suppress her fascination with his body. For under the fall of his breeches, she had seen him…thicken. Even now, as she remembered what she had seen, warmth spread through her belly, low, where she usually ached each month. This new ache alarmed her, except that it was sweet, not hard and pinching as her monthly pangs would be. Instead, it made her breath shorten, made each intake of air tickle her nostrils.

She looked back at him, searching for a cloaking, denying word for his visible response. For that…swelling. She looked away, embarrassed at the idea, at the word, yet scarcely knowing what else to call it.

She loathed being ignorant. Even more intrigued, she looked again. Had it…gone down? Perhaps. It wasn't quite so large. Then, and now, she wanted to explore him there. Perhaps even touch him. Her curiosity rose, making her as tremulous and irreverent as any silly, giggling Younger Sister.

Mostly, she knew of mating through barnyard animals and creatures of the wild. She had seen panthers coupling in the woods, bucks with does, mares with stallions. She had covered her ears to the caterwauling of cats. Once she had cringed to see a pair of mating dogs get stuck. A shudder of disgust ran through her.

Still, she wondered what her husband's private parts looked like under his nightshirt, under the concealing sheet.

Just as much or even more, she wondered what it was that men and women really did. And what Jacob had done to her on their wedding night. He could not have done exactly that, but what? He must have done something different, but how?

She wished she knew. Perhaps if she had not been such a troublesome charge, Sister Rosina would have told her outright, instead of turning her over to her husband's capable…hands. Perhaps if she had made friends among the older, unmarried women in
Gemein Haus
, they could have explained.

But what did any Single Sister know? Eva must
know now, but Retha's chance to ask her in the nighttime secrecy of their dormitory room was lost. Her friend was married and living in a house of her own.

A mother might have told.

But both of Retha's mothers were dead. That faintly remembered white woman who smelled of pine and lavender; and her Cherokee protector, Singing Stones, who taught her to walk in the wilderness.

Exactly what either might have told her, Retha could never be sure. All she knew of people mating were the sounds, last heard when she was ten or twelve and with the Cherokee. Disturbing, unexplained sounds: mysterious moans, grunts, cries. Sounds heard always in the dark. Always from inside bark huts.

Sometimes she had heard her Indian parents, sometimes others nearby. Their cries had haunted her, the men poundingly angry, the women keening hurt. Yet always the next day, to her great puzzlement, everyone had gone about their work as if nothing were wrong.

Surely something had been.

From upstairs, the first footfalls of a child awake jerked her back to the present. Wishing for more time to steady her thoughts, she listened anxiously. Whichever child was wandering about stopped. Almost tripping on the low step up from the bedroom, Retha hurried to the kitchen, hoping practical matters would crowd out her concerns. She lit a low fire and set on a kettle of mush for the children's breakfast along with a pot of coffee for Jacob if he
should wake. Later she would go to the children. She had not finished with her sleeping husband.

She scurried to his side to check on him. The compresses had slipped, and she painstakingly adjusted them. But his injuries were not what had drawn her back. She wanted another look at his massive body against the flaxen sheets. Another secret, lingering look at his power and awesome male beauty. And she wanted to touch him again, purely to feel his hair-roughened, heated skin in the utter safety of his slumber.