that thick neck the wolf tried vainly to crush—seeing how gently her husband’s hands treated the big dog, recalling how his hands ignited a fire in her.
Her husband loved his animals, the buffalo pony and mule, and now this dog too. Almost as much as she knew he loved her and their daughter.
“Have you decided upon a name?” she asked.
He stared at the flames awhile. The only sound besides the crackling of their fire were the shouts and laughter from down the valley where the many white men camped and celebrated. How the white man could celebrate!
“No,” he finally admitted, not taking his eyes off the fire. “This is so important, I do not want to make a mistake.”
“Who do you want to name her if you don’t?” she asked.
Her husband turned to look at her. “Isn’t it the father who gives a name among your people?”
“It is one of the father’s family.”
Wagging his head, Bass peered back at the flames. “Besides the two of you, I don’t have any family out here. I might as well not have any family left back there anyway. So there is no one to name our daughter but me.”
“Arapooesh calls you his brother.”
Nodding, Bass replied, “Yes, Rotten Belly is like a brother.”
“Perhaps he can help us when we return to my people for the winter,
“I am anxious to see Rotten Belly,” Scratch admitted. “It will be two winters since we have talked and smoked together.”
“A good man, my uncle is,” she said, scooting over to sit alongside him. “You have decided where we will go when we leave this place of many white men?”
“We will ride north when we go. There are beaver still to trap in Absaroka. We can take our time and work slowly north through the mountains while the flat-tails put on their winter fur, then find Rotten Belly’s camp for the winter.”
She grinned. “I will be going back to my people a married woman.”
“And a mother,” he added, looping an arm over her shoulder and pulling her against him. “Mother of a beautiful daughter.”
“You still think of me as beautiful too?”
Staring her full in the face, his brow knitted with concern. “I don’t ever want you to feel anything less than beautiful—for you are all my sunrises and all my sunsets. The way the light strikes a high-country pool.”
“You still think of me as your lover?” she asked, slipping her fingers beneath the flap of his breechclout to barely brush his manhood lying there under the layer of wool.
Waits wanted him now. All too Meeting were their moments alone. How desperately she wanted to know that he still thought of her as a woman, that the fire between them had not diminished now that she had given birth to their daughter.
“Feel what you are doing to that-which-rises,” he said with a groan of pleasure. “Then you tell me if I could ever forget you were the lover I’ve searched for all my life.”
Strange how it made it hard to breathe each time she felt him stiffen beneath her touch, sensing how her heart started to gallop. Then too, she always felt a tensing, a teasing flutter, that heated warmth begin down below where she craved him so. Now she snaked her fingers beneath the breechclout and touched his flesh. Just stroking him like this made her grow ready for him.
She nestled her head into the crook of his shoulder as his hand probed through the large, open sleeve of her dress and found her breast. He found her nipple hardened in anticipation.
“How long are you going to do that?” he asked. “Do you want to feel me explode in your hand?”
“No,” she answered and pulled her hand away from his quivering flesh, leaning back so that she freed her breast from his hand.
Onto her knees she rocked, bending over to yank aside his breechclout, there beside the firepit where she could gaze at the hardness of him. It made her wetter in anticipation as Waits by the Water seized both sides of her buckskin dress and yanked it up to her hips as she swiveled herself atop him on her knees. Taking that rigid flesh in one hand, she planted the head of him against her dampness as she guided his other hand back into the wide, loose sleeve of her dress where he could fondle her breast.
He responded savagely, imprisoning that firm, milky mound so roughly that she would have cried out in pain had she not already grown accustomed to his all-consuming hunger, his passion when they coupled.
Both of them groaned together as she eased down upon his shaft, descending far too slowly for him.
Her husband suddenly thrust his hips upwards against her, seating himself inside her warmth with a feral grunt of pleasure before he began to sway beneath her.
Interlacing her fingers behind his neck, she leaned back to the full length of her arms as he bent forward to bite at one of her breasts through the thin hide of her dress. How she loved to fee! the rhythmic bouncing of her breasts as the two of them rocked together, locked as one.
But of a sudden he pulled his head away from the breast and yanked at the dress, shoving up from her hips and over her breasts as she stretched her arms to the starlit sky where the fireflies of sparks rose beyond the tops of the cottonwood trees. First to one side then to the other they leaned, struggling to get her dress off her shoulders and over her head … until he held the rumpled mass in one hand, and tossed it toward their bedding.
Again she locked her fingers behind his arms as he bent forward to lick at her nipples, first one, then the other. She knew he was lapping at the warm milk that she could sense oozing from them as she neared the peak of her passion. Inside her he was growing even bigger, ready to explode and fill her with his release. He told her how he loved to suckle at her breasts, just enough to taste the milk her body fed their daughter. In little more than a moon since the birth, she had come to know how passionate her husband grew as he nursed on her. How mad it made him as he drove him in and out of her with a rising fury.
Then she heard his rapid breathing become ragged, as if the sound caught on something low in his throat— knowing that he was close. And with that realization she suddenly reached her peak, sensing a flood sweep through her just as surely as there would be if he tore down a high-country dam and what had been a flooded meadow rushed downslope between two narrow banks.
Her quivering thighs.
She felt as if her legs were the banks of that mountain stream suddenly released. Starting somewhere inside her belly where she had carried their daughter, Waits sensed the gushing wave wash downward, down, down over his manhood imprisoned inside her, on down as it swept over them both while their rhythm slowed like the passing of a stampede.
Not the hurtling passage of massive, lumbering, ground-shaking buffalo … but the breathless, fleeting passage of wild horses—their nostrils flaring, their eyes wide with wind-borne lust, their manes and tails blowing free in the wind.
She could tell he had enjoyed it as he pulled back from her and gazed into her eyes. He didn’t have to speak for her to know.
Her husband licked his lips and said, “There is no finer woman than you in ail this world. With all I have done wrong, with all the folks I didn’t mean to hurt but ended up hurting anyway over the years … I don’t know how I ever became worthy of your love.”
“The Grandfather Above has smiled on us both,” she whispered against his cheek, closing her eyes and wishing this moment would never end. Then of a sudden she rocked back and smiled at him, saying, “One Above smiled on me a little earlier in my life than he did in yours!”
“That doesn’t mean I’m going to die anytime soon, woman.”
Holding his face between her hands as she felt him continue to soften within her, Waits said, “You have lived through so many deaths already, I grow afraid you won’t live through any more.”
Bass pulled her against him fiercely, kissing her wet, warm mouth. When he could no longer hold his breath, he pulled away gasping. And said, “I have so much to live for now, I wouldn’t dare go and poke a stick in death’s hornet’s nest, woman.”
