desirous of but one thing from a woman. So to control that man, to keep him in line and force him to practice his Christian industry, a woman had to portion out her sexual favors a little at a time—never could she truly enjoy that shameful travail she had to undergo in the name of God’s high command to be fruitful and replenish the earth.
Yet right from first jump Gritta had been different. After that first painful, and blessedly short-lived, episode on their wedding night, Gritta had thrown herself into lovemaking with such an abandon that it surprised Jonah, a young man fully expecting no more from a woman than for her to lie there while he did his business and finished, when at last she would pull her nightshirt back down over herself and roll away to fall asleep like her husband.
That’s what he had expected from the tales told him by a stone-faced Mother Hook.
But Gritta had been different from that first jump. She had come to him eagerly that second time, awakening him, every bit as hungry as he was for her, if not more so. It had startled him, perhaps even frightened him a little, to find such eagerness in this woman he had vowed to spend out his years with. He was worried too at first with what monster he had unleashed in his new wife. Yet he quickly came to enjoy and savor, to love, ultimately, that most secret person Gritta proved herself in bed with him. So quiet and strong before the rest of the world—it was like he alone knew her true self: a woman who became a ravenous temptress once they were alone beneath the covers. He loved her for it—if for no other reason than she wanted love, wanted to be loved as much as he wanted her to love him, answering his needs and hungers with the unquenchable fires of her own.
So it was they found themselves in this bed below Big Cobbler Mountain in the Shenandoah of Virginia once again. Countless miles and endless years it had taken in bringing her back here where they both began a life together standing to make their vows before the circuit rider, their families, and God Himself.
That was before they had pulled up deep family roots and resettled to Missouri with young Hattie. Before the two boys come along. Before the Yankees and Sterling Price and Pea Ridge and bloody Corinth, where he had to lie in the damp, rain-soaked forest waiting for the Yankees to find him—afraid the tremble-fingered blue-bellies would shoot him on the spot, simply because Jonah had dragged himself on his belly across a few yards of wet grass on that forest floor, crawled toward a dead Yankee to steal the young soldier’s rations. Some crumbs of hardtack and a handful of moldy salt beef. As bad as it was, Jonah had mused as he gulped it down greedily, at least the. Yankees had something to eat in this god-blamed war.
Yankees had boots and shoes too, while most of the boys Jonah marched with come along to fight the blue- bellies with an empty belly and bare, bleeding feet.
The nights had been cooling off so suddenly in those days before the battle at Corinth that Jonah had coveted the dead soldier’s boots like nothing he had ever coveted before. He took them, not without a struggle from the stiffening carcass, along with rank, torn stockings too. Not that it was hard getting those socks off the dead soldier. Just that everything was a struggle to Jonah what with the welling pain in his leg wound and the lost blood that made him faint, ready to puke with most any ounce of exertion he made.
But now it was over. His hunt for Gritta complete, and Jonah had brought her back to the Shenandoah Valley.
“Make love to me like you never have before,” she whispered to him as his left hand cupped, stroked the other breast.
“Like never before?”
“Now, Jonah—now,” she growled the words, insistent as she tightened herself around him, thrust herself up toward him, arching her back as he planted himself more firmly into her heatedness.
It drove him near crazy when she did that, never ashamed was Gritta of asking for what it was she wanted. She was so unlike what his mother had told him he was to expect of a woman on that morning before the preacher joined the young couple. So unlike what even his father had already confessed a man had right to expect of a wife and her duties to her sworn husband.
So this felt like that second time their wedding night, all over again: her crying out in pleasure as he hurled himself against her, frantically gripping her, holding her for fear their damp, sweaty bodies would slip loose and fly asunder when what he hungered for most right now was to melt together with her as one and never be apart. He was fearful with the savageness of their lovemaking that he would fling himself free of her: lose her again, if only for a moment.
That fear was something he could almost taste. Like the salty sting of the sweat he bent to lick from the crevice between her breasts.
Yet Gritta stayed with him, rocking with a fury that drove him ever higher.
“Let me feel you explode inside me, Jonah—please,” she begged at his ear, biting it tenderly, her fingers raking the back of his neck. “I want to feel your heat,” she moaned.
There was no more holding back once she did that to him. It was one command he had never been able to deny. Whereas he had spent a life of choosing what orders to obey, Jonah Hook was helpless when his woman demanded his immediate compliance.
The release came like a long-awaited volcanic shock quaking the entire Shenandoah Valley. Tingling from his belly down through his thighs, Jonah exploded in a growing crescendo of thrusts as he sought to plant himself deeper and deeper into her body—wanting never to free himself of this moistness, this heat, this joy of ultimate togetherness with her.
Then as he lay there atop Gritta, his breath slowing raggedly, for the first time sensing the sweat pouring from his own body and hearing at his temples his own heart hammering like it wanted free of its cage, Jonah marveled at what he had found with this woman—marveled that they had seen their special bond through the long years of his search to reclaim her.
The breeze of that evening felt good on his cheek as he snuggled closer to her, listening for the beat of her own heart, the slowing of her own breathing, the last of the whimpers in the back of her throat as the crescendo washed from her in eddying waves.
Gritta trembled beneath him like a frightened animal again, like she always did as he pulled his softened flesh from her. He drew the woman into his arms and brought her against him as he rolled onto his back. The breeze felt good and clean and cool and dry.
A sky above their bed hung dusted with more stars than he had ever recalled seeing over the Shenandoah before.
Jonah blinked, and blinked again. Drinking deep of the air as the Big Dipper whirled silently overhead.
The sky. The air.
Different somehow.
The coarse wool blanket beneath his hand startled him. Not the soft, years-worn goose-down comforter whereon he had made love to her.
As he sat upright, he trembled like a wet dog with distemper, the sweat on his brow and face and chest gone quickly cold and stale now in the breeze. Jonah drank deep of the night air. Only one place smelled like this—the high plains. Sage. But more than sage.
Wildness. Unfettered wildness.
He swallowed hard, near choking on disappointment.
“Goddamn,” Jonah muttered, his head sinking backward in an arc atop his shoulders as he clamped his eyes shut angrily, cursing the dream that had come to haunt him again.
That haunting vision returned less and less with every year now, yet still it remained a torture he practiced on himself—forcing himself to believe again each time the dream returned that he was actually making love to his wife back home in Virginia.
How real it had been. The touch and smells and tastes of her. The utter warmth of her wrapped around him.
So cold now in the aftermath that he began to tremble uncontrollably, drawing his shirt to him across the dry grass. Dolefully Jonah dragged it over his head as the tears began to well in his eyes. So alone.
So damned alone, after all. Halfway gone to hell and back all these years. Having finally found his girl. Hattie.
The boys were gone—sold off somewhere into the Southwest. At least that was what he had learned from one of those who ripped his family from their homestead during the bloody days of the war.
And his woman—said to be the property of some maniacal bastard who laid claim to her in the name of his own God.
Jonah flung an arm at the night sky, shaking his fist at God, at everything that God wasn’t for Jonah. God
