Heaven in His Arms (29 page)

"I noticed." His fingers moved to her chin. "I've always had my hands full with you, in more ways than one. When would I have time for a concubine?"

"You'd find time. After all, you're a man." She twisted out of his grip. There was too much to absorb and her emotions were tangled like a fishing net. His tenderness only made it worse. There was nowhere to run in the tiny cabin so she stood, rubbing her arms, her back to him, far too conscious of his tall, strong warmth only a footstep behind her. "Men do things like keep one woman in the wilderness and another back at home in the settlements."

"One wife is more than I can handle."

"One wife at a time, perhaps—"

"Genevieve—"

"—one wife a night, or one wife in every port—"

"Stop it."

"Now at least I know why you don't want me."

"I do want you. That's the whole problem."

"There are a thousand Indian women roaming these woods who would do for you what I do," she retorted, "and they would never ask anything in return."

"What other woman could hunt for grouse one day, and the next dress in green velvet and strip like a courtesan for my pleasure?" He stood close enough so she could feel his body heat from the back of her calves to the back of her head. "I couldn't stop wanting you, though I knew it was best for you that I didn't take you to my bed."

"And now you're sorry that you did."

"No."

Her lips parted. Genevieve waited for him to say something. She turned around and faced him. Their gazes met and locked, and she felt the floor drop beneath her feet.

"I don't want any other woman but you,
Taouistaouisse
."

It was too much for her to hope, it was too much for her to believe, but the words hung in the air between them.

"I'll be damned to hell for telling you this," he said, "but I love you."

His arms wound around her. Her doubts and fears and confusion vanished like morning fog beneath a hot summer sun. The bubble of joy reinflated and swelled tautly in her chest.

"Oh, God, Andre ... I love you, too."

And all the world was right again.

***

Andre glared at the fat, furry creature who stood in his path. The yearling beaver sat up on his hind legs, his broad, scaly tail stretched out behind him. Bits of chaff from the poplar branch he had been chewing littered the fur around his mouth. He squinted up at Andre, bared his orange-red incisors, and released a querulous churr.

Genevieve's musical laugh filled the woods. She separated from the cluster of Indian squaws who worked around a maple tree, tapping it in order to collect its sweet sap in a little bark pail. She crossed the damp ground, carpeted with blooming bright red trillium and blue lupine, and covered with a dense, wet blanket of dark green moss. Warblers sang loudly in the budding trees above their heads and drops of the morning's rain pattered to the soft earth. Water darkened the deerskin of her dress at the shoulders, where she had been showered with the rain.

"It's all right, my little protector." She scooped up the indignant beaver and nuzzled her face in his dark brown fur. "Isn't he wonderful? He does that to any man who approaches."

Andre wondered what madness had possessed him to buy the tame yearling for his wife as a pet. She had seen the creature waddling behind one of the bands of Indian traders who arrived weekly at the fort during the late winter. Apparently, those Indians had crushed its lodge and killed its parents a year ago, leaving the kit helpless and its pelt too small to be of any worth. As a result, the squaws had raised the kit and now, a year later, it was as tame as any domesticated dog—at least around women. It hissed and churred at him whenever he approached, and the beaver and his wife were inseparable. Only by locking the creature outside for the night was he ever free of it.

He glared at the beaver with undisguised dislike. "One wrong move and I'm turning him into a hat."

"Hush!" She squeezed the dumpy ball of fur protectively to her chest. "No wonder he growls every time you're around. You look at him as just another pelt."

"He's not just another pelt," Andre explained. "He's the pelt that's been eating up the fur frames and chewing on my snowshoes."

"The snow is gone—you won't be needing them anymore."

"He's also in the process of gnawing a hole in the corner of the cabin."

"You'd better watch out," she murmured, a sparkle in her green eyes. "If he gets into the cabin at night, he might mistake a certain part of your anatomy for a fresh branch of poplar."

"If he does, he'll join his brothers in the storehouse."

"You just don't like him, do you?"

"He'd taste good boiled in his own skin."

"Andre!"

"Jesus, Genevieve, it's a beast, not a human." He felt a strange stab of jealousy. The beaver's eyes were closed and he made a purring sound against her breasts. Lately, that creature got more attention from his wife than he did. "If you can put that ball of fur down for a moment, I need to talk to you."

Her green eyes shuttered. In the passage of a single moment, she withdrew completely behind some kind of invisible door. He frowned and wondered for the hundredth time what had happened between them these past few weeks. Her withdrawal dated from about the time he had purchased the damn yearling for her, or maybe a little before. It had grown worse as the ice cracked into huge floes on the lake and the spring rains began to melt the winter snow. It was as though the more the earth thawed, the colder she grew.

It wasn't as if their lovemaking had waned. It was as hungry and passionate as ever—perhaps even more so, because whenever he got close enough to touch her, he demanded the most intimate contact, the most thorough lovemaking. It was the only time he felt he was reaching her. Inevitably, they shared a moment of hungry intimacy and then she withdrew, far, far into herself, far away from him, and no amount of teasing or kissing could draw her out.

"Let's talk later.'' She gestured to where the Indian squaws worked, pounding a tube into the rind of a maple tree. "We've got six or seven pails full of sap that have to be boiled down before sunset."

"There are other things for you to do. We're leaving for Montreal the day after tomorrow."

"Oh, no!"

The exclamation was so heartfelt, so fearful, that he gazed at his wife with new intensity. She covered her lips with her hand and whirled so her back was to him.

"It's only April." She glanced through the trees at the gleaming surface of Lake Superior. "The ice only just broke up in the bay. There must still be ice somewhere on the lake...."

"The party I sent out to reconnoiter returned today. The shores are free enough to leave."

"I thought we'd wait until it was warmer.'' She bent and released the furball to the ground. "There is still frost on the ground in the mornings, and there's snow on the hills, and the stream just west of here is roaring with the spring outflow. ..."

"We'll be on the lake for at least a week before we hit any rivers. By then, they'll be free of ice."

She pulled an amber-colored rock from the pouch at her waist and began sucking nervously on the chunk of maple sugar. Genevieve had developed a voracious appetite for the hard, sweet chunks in the past weeks. His loins tightened as he remembered an evening when he had softened one of the rocks and rubbed it all over her body, then slowly licked off every drop of the sweet, buttery substance.

"Our leaving so early wouldn't have anything to do with the Sioux, would it?"

He started abruptly out of his wandering thoughts. "What do you know of the Sioux?"

"There are rumors that the Sioux are going to attack and massacre us all. The women told me." She raised a brow at him. "Is it true?"

Andre frowned. He had tried to keep her ignorant of the rumors, but her ability to understand and speak the Ottawa dialect had gotten too good over the winter. It was true. The Sioux were threatening to attack. The threat made him edgy. A wealth of furs lay within the fort, and their powder and shot was almost spent. He and his men had a choice: They had to abandon the fortress or face a war they couldn't win.

Another time, another place, he might have railed against the situation, for he stood to lose a great deal of money because of the threat of the Sioux attack. Right now all that concerned him was getting Genny far, far away from the danger. "The Sioux have been fighting for a long time over the right to harvest wild rice in the marshes south of here. They resent the Huron and Ottawa interlopers who've moved in." He shrugged. "It's just a rumor."

"A strong enough rumor that the Ottawa canoemen aren't going to Montreal with us."

"
Sacrebleu!
Have you been listening at the door of the storehouse?"

"The women know more about this than you think." She removed the gleaming rock of maple sugar from her lips. "I know if the Indians don't join us, then we'll have to leave half the furs here."

"Not half," he said angrily, frustratecd that she knew so much about his arrangements when he had tried to keep them all secret. "Just a portion. I've trusted some Ottawas to come to Montreal later in the season with the remainder of the furs, when the Sioux threat has passed."

"By that time," she mused, "they'll be eaten by moths and mold."

"And we'll all be alive and well to bargain next year." And next year, he vowed, he wouldn't rely on the capricious nature of the natives. He would make arrangements for men from Montreal to come here in the spring with new merchandise and with enough canoes to transfer the furs back to the settlements. This way, he could set up a permanent post in the wilderness—a necessary advancement if he ever intended to stretch the tentacles of the fur trade farther west.

It also meant that if he wanted, he would never, ever have to personally return to the settlements again.

Andre staunched the pain ripping through his heart. He had wanted to speak to her for weeks about his plans, but she had been so distant, and he was loath to push her farther away . . . not before he had to. Now that the reconnoitering party had returned with news, there was no more excuse for delay.

He stepped toward her and ran a hand over her hair, warmed by the spring sunshine. Encouraged by her stillness, he said, "I've been wanting to talk to you, but you've been acting so strangely. What is it,
Taouistaouisse?
''

"It's nothing." She gathered her wits and returned the sticky rock to her pouch. "I just didn't think we'd leave so soon."

"We've been preparing to leave for weeks."

She tossed her plait over her shoulder. "I try not to stay inside the stockade. It's too crowded, with the canoes scattered all over the place. And the stench of heated pitch makes me sick."

"I thought you were avoiding me."

"Don't be silly."

"Am I,
Taouistaouisse?
" He nodded to the beaver who waddled his way over to a sapling. "Sometimes I think you'd rather spend time with that yearling than with me."

"You can't possibly be jealous of a beaver."

"You were once jealous of a squirrel."

"That squirrel wore a dress. This is just a pet."

"I'm jealous of anything," he added, leaning close enough to smell the maple sugar on her lips, "that gets to nuzzle your breasts."

She looked directly at him. "Does that include babies?"

"Babies?"

"According to the squaws," she said, placing her hand on her abdomen, "I'm going to have one before the first snows of winter."

The air rushed out of his lungs, and his gaze dropped to her splayed hand. He had taken four trips into the interior over the winter, each about ten days to two weeks in length, and although as soon as they were reunited they spent every day and every night making love, Andre had somehow thought the long weeks of frustrating celibacy would somehow prevent his seed from taking root in her womb. He always knew in the back of his mind what they were risking, but he'd convinced himself never to think more than a few hours ahead, never beyond the taste of her next kiss.

Her fingers splayed over the deerskin, and he noticed for the first time the slight, almost imperceptible fullness to her belly. A powerful sensation rippled through his veins, his chest inflating as he took a deep breath and felt himself charged with some sort of primal, elemental pride. He had marked his woman in the most basic, natural way. He had taken Genny and filled her with his child.

"I didn't realize it would come as such a shock," she said dryly. "This is what usually happens when a man and a woman marry—and you certainly haven't done anything to prevent it."

Andre reached out and removed her hand, covering the gentle swell of her abdomen with his own. He felt her muscles contract beneath the deerskin at his touch. This was the result of all those long nights and slow, lazy days of lovemaking. This was the product of the love he felt for this maddening, exciting, sensuous woman. He marveled that in her small body, nestled somewhere deep in the warmth of her womb, beneath his hand, lay the beginnings of his son or daughter.

Their child. His and Genevieve's. An entirely new life.
Life.

"
Sacre chien
!" She covered his hand with hers and pressed it close to her belly. "Say something, Andre. Don't stand there like a mute."

He glanced at her face. Though her voice was hard, her eyes searched his with an intensity that bordered on desperation.

Inanely, he said, "We're going to have a child."

"Well, it's not going to be a beaver. Are you happy or not?"

"Ah, Genny ..." His fingers dug gently into her abdomen. He felt it again, the thrill of wonder, the rush of male pride, and it left him without words. "How long have you known?"

"I've been sure for about two, three weeks."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"You were so involved with the preparations for returning to the settlements—"

"Not so involved," he argued, "that we couldn't make love every single night."

"I thought you'd be angry."

"For filling you with my child?"

She looked at him mutely, but her eyes betrayed her. They were so full of uncertainty that he let go of her abdomen, stepped closer, and framed her face with his hands. He kissed her gently, for suddenly she seemed like a fragile little bird in his arms, trembling and small.

"How could I be angry at you," he murmured, deep in the silken threads of her hair, "for something neither you nor I had the power to prevent?"

"Tiny told me..." Her breath trembled. "He told me . . . about Rose-Marie. About... the babe."

His hands stilled in her hair as his thoughts darkened. Yes, there'd been a baby once before. Unborn. His and Rose-Marie's. Strange, but he'd never really thought about it too much, never really allowed himself to acknowledge it. He'd not known about the babe until he saw Rose-Marie throw herself off the canoe, killing herself and the child in her womb. The babe was gone before it had ever been real.

Now, feeling the soft swell of Genny's belly, Andre felt a spurt of anger at his late wife, for selfishly taking that child with her, for not being strong enough to survive at any cost.

"You want this baby?" she asked.

"Of course I do."

"I thought you'd be angry. You seemed so anxious to go back to the settlements, and now we'll have to stay here."