Firefly (46 page)

"I said come here," Hans commanded.  He kept his voice low, a fact that in itself set Julie on her guard.  "You must learn to obey me, Julie.  When I am your husband, I will not stand for disobedience."

"You are not my husband yet, Hans, and I am not yours to command.  I may never be."

She had said the wrong thing.  In an instant, he was on his feet and had crossed to her.  He tore the sock from her hand and threw it across the room, where it landed with a heavy thud of the darning egg inside it.  Startled, she had no time to defend herself against his next assault.  This time the little sewing basket, filled with pins and spools of thread and loose buttons, went flying through the air along the same course as the sock.  Instinct pulled Julie out of her chair before she could stop herself, and of course Hans was right there.

His large, hard hands grabbed her arms painfully and pulled her against him.

She could not raise her hand to slap him, for he held her arms too tightly, but she could and did turn her face away from his kiss.  He would have to let go her arm in order to hold her head, and then she would strike.

But he did not let her go.  He lowered his face to her neck, to the extended corner where it joined her shoulder and the skin and tendons were pulled taut.  Lips hot and wet, he mouthed the cool flesh before running the edges of his teeth threateningly along a pulse beat.  Julie moaned and twisted away from him.

Hans laughed, but there was no humor in that low snarl.

"So, this is how you like it? That is good, very good.  I like it too, when there is some pain."

"I don't like it at all," Julie corrected, her voice low with anger.  She had meant to keep her feelings hidden, at least for a while, but he had made that impossible.  "I loathe it, as I loathe you.  Let go of me."

He laughed again, completely undaunted by her denial.

"But I have no intention of letting go of you.  In just six more days you will be my wife and--"

"No!  I won't marry you.  I would rather live here and slave for my mother and put up with my father for the rest of my life than marry you.  If you drag me to the church, I will refuse the vows.  You can't make me marry you."

She tossed her head defiantly and then gazed into Hans' eyes.  They were on a level with hers, not above hers as Morgan's were.  Once she had thought Hans' eyes were the prettiest, clearest shade of blue; now she saw nothing but icy cold in them, no depth, no soul.  She was not afraid of him.

"Your papa wants to be rid of you.  You shame him.  He will not let you stay here, even if you wish to.  So where would you go?  To the doctor who isn't even a man?  Did you know that, Julie?  Your precious surgeon is a gelding, not a proud stallion like your salesman or that drifter your papa took care of."

Julie bit her tongue.  Something warned her not to reveal the truth, not yet and not to Hans.  Neither would she show him any shock or shame.

"He is still twice the man you would ever be," she spat.

He hit her then, releasing her arm and slapping her cheek so quickly that she could neither react to avoid the blow nor counter with one of her own before he had thrown her to the floor.

"I will show you what is a real man."

He placed one booted foot on her skirt, high enough to hold her down, while he began slowly to unbuckle his belt.  Next, instead of unbuttoning his trousers, he pulled the long leather band free from his waistband and wrapped the buckle end of it around his fist.  Now, despite her effort at control, Julie knew fear.

"Your papa did not beat you, and that was a mistake.  He should have taught you a sterner lesson of obedience to men."

"As I suppose you plan to do now?"

"Exactly."

He snapped the belt sharply so that the tip just flicked her thigh, where he had pulled the skirt fabric taut.  Julie flinched at the pain, but made no outcry.  She reached for the buttons on the skirt and quickly undid them.  Before she could scramble out of the garment, Hans had snaked his weapon again, this time catching the back of her shoulder.  There would be a welt, she suspected, from that lash, but no permanent injury.  And the pain was bearable.

Another blow landed on her buttocks as she got to her feet and ran for the stairs, and this time she could not suppress a short, sharp wail of hurt.  Stumbling in her haste, she felt an iron grip on her arm as she tried to clasp the banister and maintain her balance.

She saw bloodlust in those blue eyes, then a sound above drew both his attention and hers.

"What are you doing, you fool!" Wilhelm whispered from the landing.  "People don't mind when the whores scream, but they will come running if you start the same thing here.  Wait until you have her in your own house."

Wilhelm's scolding shocked Hans into loosening his hold on Julie's wrist, and she took the opportunity to race up the stairs.  Shoving her father aside, she frantically sought the refuge of her room.

Breathless, she leaned against the door and waited for the summons that never came.  Angry whispers floated up from the foyer, but she did not listen to them, did not care to listen to them.

How long she stood there, she could not tell.  The last light faded outside her window, and the night sounds drifted in.  She vaguely remembered hearing a wagon, she thought, but it occupied no identifiable place in the sequence of her memory.  Hans might have left immediately after the argument with Wilhelm or stayed much longer.

She wasn't even positive that he had gone at all.

She shivered, and a yawn escaped her.  When she let herself relax, after discovering that every muscle of her body was almost cramped with tension, Julie discovered she was exhausted.  She wanted sleep, days of it, and yet when she looked at her bed, she knew somehow that she could not lie upon it.

She went to the narrow wardrobe and fumbled in the dark for the clothes she wanted.  Her searching fingers encountered the soft batiste of her new blouse and lingered there, but that was not the garment she wanted.  The light blue would be too easily seen.  She finally found the dark blue calico, recognizable by its relatively unworn texture and the long sleeves. 

Fully dressed again, she next searched for a shawl.  Not for a second did she take all her attention away from the hallway outside her door, for she listened for footsteps, voices, even snores that might have told her anything, but she heard not a sound.  It was almost as though she were the only person left in the house.

She did not unpin her hair, though she thought of it, for it was more easily concealed under the shawl when coiled at her neck this way than loose.  With no mirror to examine her appearance, Julie trusted to her imagination to tell her how she looked, and then she went to the dresser.

In the box that had held her gold piece lay a small collection of lesser coins, and some greenbacks.  She had counted them often enough to know that she had almost ten dollars, hardly a princely sum, but it was all she had.  It would at least buy her a ticket out of Plato, if nothing else, and perhaps somewhere else she could make a new life.  Hadn't her father done it often enough?

She stuffed the money into a pocket and then placed her ear against the door.

She heard nothing, and so ventured to open the door.  The one advantage to having no lock was that though she could not lock anyone out, neither could they lock her in.

Now the sounds came to her.  Willy
B
she had no idea when he had come home
B
thrashed in his sleep and mumbled something from a dream.  When she whispered his name, he did not answer; she knew he was sound asleep.  From the slightly ajar door to her parents' room filtered Wilhelm's snores and, barely audible, little whimpers from Katharine, as though her headache invaded even her sleep.

Julie paused long enough only to pull off her shoes before she slipped silently down the stairs.  She waited again in the foyer, listening for any sound of stirring from the rooms above, but the family slumbered on as though they had no cares, no worries, no guilts.

The front door had a tiny squeak on occasion, so Julie padded through the dining room and kitchen to the back door.  It opened without a whisper, and she closed it carefully.

Chapter Twenty-six

Tired fingers curled into a loose fist at Julie's side, but she couldn't raise them to the door yet.  The fist, indeed her whole arm, quivered with nerves stretched like the strings of a harp.  She inhaled deeply, smelling the tang of chili that must have been Morgan's supper.  Had he cooked it himself, or had Winnie Upshaw made it for him? Julie's fingers tightened even though she hated the jealousy that flexed its muscles.  Winnie was a friend, yet Julie could find it in her to envy Winnie's closeness to Morgan.

She had seen no lights in any of the windows when she walked down the lane and then around to the back of the adobe house.  No doubt Morgan was already in bed and asleep as anyone in his right mind should be.  And he probably wouldn't hear her even if she did knock.  So she tapped softly, as though to fulfill her own prophecy.

There was no reply.  Julie waited, knowing she could not return whence she had come, and yet not daring to knock again.  With her knuckles still poised an inch or two from the door, she held her breath.

Then a light flared above her, a brief glow that illuminated a thin cigar and a man's dark, brooding face.  He had been on the rooftop patio, probably watching her all the while.  Embarrassed by her boldness and his observance of it, Julie turned to leave before he could reach the stairs and climb down them.

"Wait."

It was a command so soft and gentle that she wouldn't have heard it by daylight, but in the night's quiet, his voice rang clear.

So she waited, as he asked, and in a matter of seconds he was beside her.  His breathing was only slightly hurried, whether from the quick dash from the roof or from something else wasn't readily discernible.  He took the cheroot from between his teeth and held it in his fingers.  The smoke curled up between them, pungent and warm.  The glowing red ash shed no light.

"Julie."

The word caressed her, though he had not touched her, and she felt the brazen warmth of desire surge through her.

"Were you waiting for me?" she dared to ask.

"No."  He could barely see her in the moonless dark.  "Yes.  Yes, I was waiting, or at least hoping."

His voice rose slowly, then sank again on that last word.  He felt as if his breath had been sucked right out of his lungs and his heart had somehow leaped from his chest to his throat.  He wanted to touch her, not as he had so often when they worked together, but as they had touched when they were not working.

"Let's go inside," he whispered.

She wanted him to take her hand or clasp her elbow, but he didn't.  He reached instead for the door handle, then pushed the unlatched oak panel inward, opening the way into the kitchen.  Julie walked ahead of him, pausing after three or four blind steps.  A match scraped on a boot sole, and then Del walked past her to light the lamp on the table.

She almost gasped at what the kerosene glow revealed.  Morgan looked awful, almost like the derelict she had stumbled across in front of McCrory's store all those long weeks ago.  But tonight his face was clean-shaven, his hair looked slightly damp as though from a recent washing, and his shirt was freshly laundered and even ironed.  It was his face that bore the ravages: his cheeks looked sunken, lines etched sharp hollows around his mouth, and exhaustion had painted dark shadows under eyes that never left her for an instant.