marry, as his mother had often said, to heartily cleave unto one person and only one person for the rest of his natural life. On the early frontier the parents of young couples announced their “banns”: publicly posting one’s intention to marry on three successive Sundays, allowing anyone who might object for whatever reason the courtesy of so doing.
Now she was running her fingertips down from his chest across his solar plexus, causing his manhood to squirm slightly as she drew nearer and nearer to it with every brush of her hot fingers.
Then she raised herself on an elbow, bit at his earlobe, and whispered to him, hot and moist, “I’ll be a good mother to your children, Titus. Ain’t no one gonna ever be a better woman for you than me.”
“I ain’t ready to have children.” He fought to get the words out. They sounded low and raspy, rumbling in his throat as his own passion rose.
In moments Marissa was biting him across the shoulder, down one side of his chest, and licking across his nipples. As much as he didn’t like that because it tickled, he had never once said anything to her, not daring to have her stop once she got herself worked up enough to start biting and licking his flesh. Instead, he lay there as riverbank clay in her palms, letting her shape him and move him, listening to her breathing become more and more rapid and ragged until she finally climbed over him, taking his rigid flesh in her hand and gently guiding him into her readiness as she settled her buttocks atop his hips.
As much as anything else in what they shared, he liked that part of it—when she first took hold of him and made his flesh a part of her. What fevered grappling he and Amy Whistler had shared, it had never been like this. Maybe it had been what Abigail Thresher had taught him about a woman’s body, taught him about his own, showing him how to satisfy both need as well as hunger.
But maybe, just maybe—it had to do with Marissa Guthrie too.
God, how he didn’t want to fall in love with her, a part of him afraid that he already had.
He looked up at her in the summer light, nothing but starshine, the crescent shadows beneath both small breasts, the rounded shadow beneath her chin as she leaned over him and let her chestnut curls tumble across his face before she met his lips with hers, opening her mouth, moist and hot and flavorful.
He was certain this was how a woman got hold of a man and would never let go. A woman’s power over a man just like this. For a moment he wondered if his mother had been like this with his father—getting Thaddeus so wrought up that he couldn’t leave if he had wanted to. Maybe that’s why his pap stayed on the land, settled in and never again gave thought to seeing what was out there. Maybe it was this mystical power of a woman.
Titus struggled against the rising crescendo orchestrated throughout his body, coursing into his loins—vowing he would not fall in love with Marissa Guthrie because she was too much like his mother: the sort of woman who had the strength to hold a man in one place.
Slowly, slowly she rocked back, back farther still, putting her hands down near his knees as she arched her back and braced herself while she throbbed atop him, round and round in an ever-faster cadence that seemed to join itself with the rhythm of his own heart. How she did that, he didn’t know. Part of the mystery that was woman.
He must not fall in love with her, for if he did, he would forever be there. Never to push on to St. Louis. Never to see what lay up the river where Levi Gamble said furs and Indians and the shaggy buffalo reigned. If he fell in love, Titus was scared down to the marrow of him that he would end up like Able Guthrie. Never to taste the caliber of the wind, never to dance on it a free man.
Like poor Able Guthrie: loving a woman who held him to her so tightly he couldn’t breathe, didn’t have room to roam. A good woman like Lottie, who wanted her daughter to give her the children she had been robbed of having for herself.
A good, but sad, woman.
His mother, a tired and worn woman after four children, three stillbirths, and two other babes who had died within their first year of life. A hard toll, even on a tough woman.
Now he looked at Marissa as she ground herself down onto him, as if she desired to swallow him, engulf him completely—groaning as the beast welled up within her. Did he have it in him to watch what toll childbirth took on her year after year?
He had run from the Chickasaw and fought them up so close, he could smell their sweat and their paint and even what they ate for supper. He had stood against the might of those rapids on the Ohio and held his own against the very worst the great Mississippi threw against a boatman. Titus had even dared free a slave within earshot of his masters, then shoot a slave hunter in the back when that man stood between his friends and freedom. No, let no man be so bold as to say that Titus Bass was one to shrink from fear. Instead, he had learned that fear often emboldened him—made him all the more ready to pit himself against a challenge.
But this … this thing of a woman and love … it was something that nonetheless made him shrink as never before. Afraid to his core. Frightened of Marissa? Yes, he admitted. For he had come to believe that she held the power to make him stay. For some men it might be a woman who kept them prisoner, for those like Able Guthrie. For others, like his father, it might well be the
At long last he was beginning to understand his pap, and why Thaddeus stayed on and on in one place … almost to the point of growing enraged when his own flesh and blood did not lust after the soil every bit as much as he. Now Titus was coming to understand.
To know why he would be expected to stay here in this place with the Guthries. Not so much because of the seductive lure and hold of the land, but because of the love a man held for his woman. And all that woman needed from him.
She began thrashing her head side to side as she whimpered, raking her fingers down his chest as she reached a crescendo atop him. With great, heaving thrusts of his hips he spent himself violently within her, listening to her muted shriek in response to every last one of his explosions.
Then Marissa collapsed, murmuring in his ear to promise that she would awaken in a while and have him again before she crept off across the starshine splayed on the yard below them, slipping away to her bed in that cabin. The words were no sooner out of her mouth than he felt her breathing deepen, become rhythmic, and he knew she was sleeping.
He lay there for a long time that night, the chestnut curls spilling across his chin, her hair smelling of the musty hay where they always coupled there above the cow pens. Titus lay there knowing that if he ever did fall in love with Marissa, he vowed never to tell her.
For if he told her of his love, he would thereby be trapped in this place. He simply could not be trapped there. Not held in one place, whether held by the land or imprisoned by a woman. Never to lay eyes on the wilderness at the horizon’s edge. Never to taste the bite of the wind as it roared out of those faraway places.
There and then he vowed that should he ever fall in love with Marissa Guthrie, he would have no choice but to simply convince himself that it wasn’t true. Then force himself to leave.
If not for his own good, for hers.
20
A great covey of passenger pigeons beat the autumn air overhead, enough of them to blot a great shadow upon the land and he walking within it, flew right over Titus, darkening the sky so that he turned with a start and looked up, frightened. The birds passed so close above the thick and fiery orange and red canopy that he could make out the pinkish breasts until they had flapped out of sight.
He sat there on the old broken-down horse’s back, watching them go, beating their way off to the south. In their wake suddenly opened in all that great expanse of blue sky sailed a lone osprey. Wide of wing it was, possessing that singular luxury of taking its time while the pigeons hurried on in flock. The osprey careened down from on high to inspect more closely this strange four-legged, two-headed creature below it, then beat its angular wings to climb back into the sparkling fall sky, circled once more over the man and horse, then disappeared beyond the horizon.
