rising, Titus danced his fingers over the bare flesh of her loins, seeking that moist patch of hair where she wriggled as soon as he brushed his hand against her heat.
Roughly she dragged his engorged flesh forward as if it weren’t attached to him at all, forcing him to rock over her as she planted him within her moistness. Certain was he that he would spend himself right then and there—exactly as he had that first night at the swimming hole with Amy Whistler. But just as he began to tense and shudder, she suddenly stopped moving, reaching down to grab his scrotum, pulling on it gently, but insistently, until he sensed that overwhelming need to explode slowly dissipate.
He welcomed that wash of relief by immediately throwing himself back into his energetic thrusts. Likewise she imprisoned him with her legs, locking his head in a death-grip with both arms, flinging her hips up against him in a clumsy dance by this half-dressed two-headed beast.
When she began to groan—low at first—he quickly stopped and reared back in wide-eyed surprise: mystified, more afraid than anything. Great God, if he went and hurt her, what the devil would her brute of a father and halfbreed brothers do to him?
“No! D-don’t stop!” she ordered, squeezing her legs about his hips even tighter, dragging his head back down as her hips gyrated insistently.
Obedient was he, willing captive that Titus was. A prisoner of his own sudden appetite, aroused to a fever pitch by those patches of smooth flesh he stroked beneath the crumple of her dress pulled high above her waist, compelled by the moistness he had penetrated, made dizzy by the strong smell of fragrant wood chips, sweat, and potato beer clinging to her like hickory smoke clung to his pap’s hams suspended above the smoldering fires in the smoking shed.
It wasn’t long before her groan became an insistent whimper. As the sound grew in volume at his ear, the primal grunt of it began to hammer at him every time they collided. Then she nearly scared him out of his skin when she suddenly grabbed one of his hands and clamped it over her own mouth as she thrashed back and forth. He ripped the hand away.
“Keep … keep it there!” she huffed in a high-pitched whine.
Seizing his hand again, the girl slapped it back over the bottom of her face as she went back to lunging up at him. He’d never had a woman throw herself into this mating with such fight, at the same time wanting him to keep her quiet.
Then he knew why she had clamped his hand where she had.
The instant she began that muffled scream, he stopped his thrusts and started to pull the hand away. Terrified at the wild shriek from the beast below him, he clamped the hand back down over her mouth as she threw herself into a hissing, snarling tantrum there in the shadows of the dogtrot. Titus jerked his head this way, then that, afraid to his core that at any moment the elder Colbert would appear at the corner of the cabin and find him not just rutting with his daughter—but bodily harming the frightened young girl to boot.
Why, it sounded as if someone were killing her!
Then, as her hips slowed their lunging gyrations, she reached up and took a bunch of his hair in each hand, dragging his face down so she could lather it with her wet mouth.
“Ain’cha ready?” she huffed breathlessly at his ear.
“I … got so scared—”
“Do it. Just do it now,” and she let go of his hair, locking her hands on his buttocks poking above the wide waistband of his britches like two bare hillocks rising above a line of timber below.
She clawed and scratched them, kneading his skin while thrusting herself up to him. No longer did she have her eyes closed. Now they were intense, snakelike slits. Her lips pressed together in a line of determination.
Again she asked, “You’re ready, ain’cha?”
For the moment he could not answer. Suddenly everything above and below his groin seemed shut off from all sensation, incapable of any function aside from assisting what eruption was about to occur. And with his first explosion she moaned and whimpered beneath him again—small, feral yelps of pleasure.
As he ground to a halt, fully spent within her, the girl slowly, softly stroked those bare mounds she had been pulling tight against her.
The next thing he grew conscious of was her voice in his ear.
“We cain’t sleep here all night.”
“No … no, we can’t.” His mouth tasted pasty, as if he’d been sucking on a trencher filled with lye ash.
Groggily Titus raised his head. The air was cold, damp too of a sudden, on the bare flesh of his buttocks. He was surprised to find that she and he lay just as they had finished—fallen asleep locked in that final embrace of afterglow.
But then she was pushing him to the side, rolling the other way herself. The cold shocked him all the more as his limp flesh flopped against his belly, shrinking quickly.
Scrambling to her feet, the girl tugged down her skirt, shuffled that loose blouse back into place, and smoothed it over those young breasts he had wanted to taste so badly while they had been dancing. He realized he wanted her again. When he reached up for her, the girl pushed his hands down.
“Get your britches pulled up,” she ordered in a harsh whisper.
“C’mere. I wanna—”
“No,” she answered harshly. “Maybe ’nother time. My father come out looking for me if I’m gone too long.”
“Just go let him see you, then come back.”
“Maybe you go on to your bed. Your cabin yonder,” she countered coyly. “Maybe I’ll come find you later. You was good, boy. Better’n a lotta the men I had me.”
That raised his ire. “I’m every bit a man like them.”
Behind her hand she giggled, turning away. “Like I said, better’n most every one I had.”
The shadows absorbed her so quickly, he never got another plea out. It took a few moments more before the cold breeze brushing his bare flesh seeped back into his consciousness. Hobbling to his knees, Titus heaved himself from there to his feet, hopping about while yanking up the britches.
With them buttoned he slipped around the side of the cabin, stole a long last look in the open door. There he found everyone still in full revel. Kingsbury turned, saw him, and motioned Bass back in.
Titus shook his head, pointing to the hut. After the pilot nodded, Bass moved out of the splash of flickering torchlight as the wind picked up. The night air smelled rank with rain as he reached the second of the two huts where the boatmen had stowed what blankets and belongings they were packing north to the Ohio. Inside the shanty, out of the wind, his nose pricked with the smell of another. Eyes were slow growing accustomed to the dark as he searched the walls, while dancing torchlight from across the yard spilled in through the hut’s single, small window.
“Hezekiah?”
“Yes. Me.”
“You’re awake.”
“Not sleep. The noise. Guns.”
“Yeah,” he said, searching the floor with his hands. “You got both our blankets?”
“Right here.”
Titus settled in beside the big slave as Hezekiah held up both blankets. “Cold night.”
“Sure is,” the slave agreed. “Warm now.”
He let out a sigh and closed his eyes, sensing the body heat from the big man’s back beginning to warm him.
“Ask you question, Titus?”
“What’s that?”
“You with woman tonight?”
“How you mean?”
For the longest time there was no reply. Then Hezekiah said, “With woman: like you was with Nina back to Miss Annie’s boat.”
“Yepper,” he answered, remembering Ebenezer Zane always answering in the affirmative just that way.
“Thought me so. Goo’night, Titus.”
For a moment he wanted to ask the slave how he knew, then decided he wouldn’t. Eventually Bass said,
