fireplace. Banging into it with a shin, he grunted more in surprise than in pain and clumsily wheeled about, causing his mind to swim in a great, sweeping wave as if it were unhinged and adrift, rocking back and forth within his skull. Like a tow sack filled with rocks, he collapsed back onto the bed, let out a sigh, and sank backward across the rumpled quilts and wool blankets.
“Lift your foot up,” she told him. “Best we take off these here moccasins afore your feet get froze.”
After she flung them over to the pounded clay floor by the fire, the woman kicked one leg over him so she could straddle him. He stared up at her face, trying so hard to focus, just to keep his eyes open. He groaned from the effort it was taking, sleep calling him more fervently now.
“You ain’t gonna get sick, is you?” she asked. “You get sick—you’ll be cleaning your own mess up.”
He tried smiling at her to let her know he wouldn’t as his eyelids grew too heavy to fight them any longer. Not sick. Just sleepy.
She was tugging on the long tail of his shirt, yanking to get it out of his leather britches. He felt himself giggling softly. So damned warm, inside and out.
Titus did not know how long he had been asleep, but he was sure he had been. Time had passed. He knew this feeling, coming awake slowly, drifting down in the warm immersion of that land between sleep and wakefulness. He giggled again, not really sure if he made a sound with it, or just laughed within.
Then he groaned. And remembered groaning for the last few minutes, sensing the rise of pleasure. He felt his breathing grow shallow, increasingly rapid as the fixed, physical joy intensified, warmth radiating from his groin. Slowly he opened his eyes, hoping to discover just what was overcoming him when he found her hands working over his rigid flesh.
The woman had it standing up straight as a poplar volunteer bursting from the ground, about as hard as one of those hickory wiping sticks Amy Whistler’s pap kept curing in that trough all the time. And just as he worked a pumice stone up and down a new wiping rod he was making for his own rifle, the woman kneaded her hands up and down his hardened flesh, making it almost too hot to be comfortable.
Groaning again, he closed his eyes, not wanting to wake up and find out that this feeling was nothing more than one of those dreams he used to have back in that darkened sleeping loft outside the tiny hamlet of Rabbit Hash. Such pleasure simply could not last this long. This exquisite torture hadn’t lasted anywhere near this long with Amy—none of the times at the swimming hole or in the woods when he had decided it didn’t matter anymore and he no longer gave a damn, he was going to have her body whenever he wanted.
This time when he opened his eyes halfway, she looked up and found him watching her.
“It don’t matter you gone and got yourself drunk.”
“I’m drunk?”
“Had yourself a man-sized snootful this night, I’ll tell you,” she declared. “But Mincemeat’s real glad you ain’t had you so much she cain’t get your pizzer hard for our fun.”
“Our … our fun.”
He looked up from the tops of her breasts in that bulging chemise to find her eyes burning into his.
“You wanna touch ’em?” she asked, her whole face alive with a knowing smile.
“Touch ’em?” he asked in reply, then brought a wobbly hand up.
But as he did, she reached up and yanked down the front of her chemise. Both breasts spilled out over the top of the chemise and the leather bodice she had laced around her midsection. He was startled at the size and shape of them, larger than any he had seen before. Hell, he had only seen Amy’s, and only then in moonlight at best. Hers had been smaller, hard and firm. But these—as he brushed his fingers across the flesh of one—were soft, pliant, and seemed to have a strange and direct effect on just how he felt down there where she continued to rub him.
She inched back, withdrawing the breasts just beyond his reach, saying, “Tell me if’n you like this.”
Once she laid his hot flesh within her cleavage, she used both her hands to press her breasts inward, encircling him as she began to rock back and forth on him, moving slightly up and down as she squeezed and released her breasts against him while keeping her eyes locked on his.
“Don’t you worry ’bout nothing,” she cooed. “I can tell just from looking at you when you’re ’bout ready to toot. An’ I won’t let you toot till I’m good and ready for you to do just that.”
His mouth had gone dry again, so dry. Rolling his drumming head to the side slowly, he spotted the mug on the table. Then remembered he had drained it. There had to be something else hereabouts for him … but in another heartbeat Titus’s thoughts no longer dwelled on his thirst.
He felt her shift her weight atop him, taking her breasts from his flesh as she went to her feet beside the bed. There she yanked furiously at the oiled-leather whang that lashed the bodice beneath her breasts. After pulling it and the rumpled chemise over her head, she tugged at her belt and shimmied out of her long skirt, skipping out of the long, quilted pantaloons at the same time, while he stared hypnotically, captivated by the sway and bobble of her heavy breasts.
By the time she had placed one knee back on the low bed, he had rolled to the side and reached out for her, locking her shoulders in his hands, flinging her down to roll atop her.
“Think you know what you’re doing, do you, young river rat?” she murmured.
He was rocking back slightly to plant himself when she took him in her hand and drove him against her.
“Right there,” she groaned. “Gimme all what you got for Mincemeat—right there, now, li’l river rat.”
He wanted to stop and tell her he wasn’t a river rat. He wasn’t a man who worked the Ohio like the others. He was just a runaway farm boy wanting something different. Something more. But Titus didn’t stop, and he couldn’t make the words come out of his mouth, what with all the whimpering he heard himself making as he worked himself in and out of her growing wetness that clung to him all the more with every thrust.
It had never lasted so long—not this high-pitched ringing in his ears as he clawed up toward the pinnacle, expecting to explode any moment as he fought his way upward. With Amy it had been so earth-shattering the first time, so violently short the next times—none had lasted like this.
He thought he could feel her raking her chipped and battered nails along his back, digging furrows along the straps of muscle as he hammered harder still. Sensing the woman’s ankles lock behind his buttocks as she throbbed back into him with every one of his strokes. For just a moment he gazed down at her face, finding her eyes become catlike slits, the tip of her pink tongue just peeking between her browned teeth. Lower still he noticed that the firelight glistened on her neck, some strands of hair plastered against her damp skin. Dewdrops of sweat stood out like clusters of diamonds on her soft breasts, the shape of those mounds changed somewhat—perhaps flatter now—as she lay on her back, moving against him.
In that next moment those flickering droplets he watched seemed to explode into a million fragments of whirling, shattered particles of light. Shooting stars was all he thought of as the first explosion rocked him to the core. His hips drove forward to plant himself ever deeper within her center. As he slowed over her with the succeeding thrusts, Titus could feel her shudder beneath him at last, her chin arched back as her hips continued to grind upward against him.
With one last quiver he was finished, and he looked down at her, feeling an immense weight suddenly piercing his head from temple to temple. His body relaxed from the center outward, an inch at a time as he sagged upon her. Sensing the sharp angularity of her hips against his, the boniness to her rib cage beneath those breasts where her breathing eventually slowed like his, he slowly let go.
So tired was he that he thought he could rest his head in the crook of her shoulder for just a little while. Feeling his nakedness all the way down to the soles of his feet. Later he could drag his clothes back on and wander back to the tavern to look up the rest of the boat crew. Have some more of that beer.
And—mayhaps if he was lucky enough—Titus would talk this woman into bringing him back here to her bed one more time before he had to join Ebenezer Zane and the rest in pitting themselves against the Great Falls of the Ohio.
It all sounded good enough to be a dream.
His tongue felt like he had dragged it all the way up the trunk of a black walnut tree, tasted like he’d used it to clean out the stall muck caked within all four of the plow mule’s iron shoes.
Thirsty, Titus thought of getting his hands on more of that spruce beer … but that only made his head throb all the more. Slowly becoming aware of the pressure on his shoulder, he opened his eyes and looked down—finding her sleeping against him. The fire in the corner pit had all but died out.
