Merline Lovelace (10 page)

Maybe, she thought on a wave of pulsing heat, it was time to match deed to word. Prove that she
was
his in the most basic, elemental way.

“Sam,” she whispered again, her voice low and ragged. “I’ve missed you so.”

When he swooped down to cover her mouth with his, Victoria could have sobbed with relief, with joy, with fierce, unrelenting need. Her leaping senses registered the tang of healthy male sweat, the taste of raw hunger, the feel of muscles corded to steel under a thin layer of blue flannel.

Afterward, Victoria could never quite remember how they moved from the sitting room to the bedroom. Nor could she recall how she reached a state of naked, trembling eagerness so swiftly and so efficiently. All she would remember from that hot June night was the feel of Sam’s strong body pressing hers into the bed and her raw, dizzying passion.

It came on her so quickly, like one of the summer storms that raced across Wyoming’s plains and pummeled the prairie grasses to the ground. One moment she was trembling in an agony of embarrassment and uncertainty. The very next it seemed, she was gasping and arching her back and crying out at the rasp of Sam’s tongue and teeth against her nipple.

She’d never imagined, had never
dreamed
she could feel such heat and such indescribable sensations. Fire seemed to streak from her breast to her belly. Her whole body went taut, and her fingers fisted in his hair. Yet when he kneed her thighs apart and slid a finger into her most private of places, Victoria bucked like a wild mare.

“What are you doing?” Frantically, she tried to dislodge his hand.

“Easy, darling. Easy. I’m just making sure you’re ready for me.”

“You shouldn’t— I can’t—”

In an agony of embarrassment, she writhed on the satiny bedcover. She couldn’t believe he was touching her there, couldn’t imagine how his fingers could generate such wild, pulsing pleasure.

Gritting his teeth, Sam stroked her hot, slick flesh. Like every randy young soldier, he’d contributed a good portion of his pay to the whores who serviced the troops at every Eastern military bastion and Western outpost. He’d also dropped more than a few dollars at Cheyenne’s bustling bawdy houses.

He’d never bedded a virgin before, however, and was finding the experience almost more nerve-racking than it was pleasurable. He ached for Victoria so badly he couldn’t straighten the lower half of his body, but the thought of penetrating the shield his probing finger had just encountered raised a cold sweat.

For all his nervousness, though, he had no intention of stopping now. He wanted her too badly. Had to take what she’d offered him for so long. Covering her mouth with his, he pressed his thumb against the hard nub at the juncture of her thighs and began to slide his finger in and out of her tight, narrow channel.

Eyes wide, she endured his touch with flaming cheeks. Suddenly, she arched her back.

“Oh! Oh, my!”

With a strangled cry, she threw her head back on the green-damask duvet. Her young body went taut. Hot, wet liquid gushed onto his hand. Shudders racked her as she cried his name once more.

“Sam!”

His blood pounding, he pried her legs farther apart and positioned himself between her thighs. One swift thrust ripped through her maidenhead.

Her eyes flew open. Surprise glazed their blue depths for a second, maybe two, before giving way to a look of shocked reproach.

“You hurt me!”

“Victoria. Sweetheart.” Feeling like the vilest wretch alive, Sam held himself rigidly still inside her. “The pain will ease.”

Or so he’d been told!

“Let me slide my arm under your hips and lift them a bit so you can move with me.”

She lay stiff as a tent pole in his arms. Torn be
tween fear of hurting her again and his own raging need, he began a slow, careful mating dance.

To his profound relief, the reproach gradually faded from her face. After a moment, she caught his rhythm. Tentatively, her hips canted. Timorously, she wrapped her arms around his neck. When he drew his shaft out and slowly slid in again, she received him with little more than a flinch.

And when he picked up the pace, his breath coming hard and fast, she soon began to flex her muscles. All of them.

With a grunt, Sam went stiff from his neck down. He barely pulled out in time to turn aside and spill himself onto her hip. With another inarticulate sound, he buried his face in the fragrant mass of her hair.

“Sam?”

Victoria shifted under his crushing weight, uncertain and confused. The most incredible pleasure still pinwheeled through her mind and her limbs felt as though they were weighted with lead. If not for the warm liquid trickling down her hip and dripping onto the green damask, she might never have stirred at all.

“Sam? I’m— I’m rather wet. Is that how it’s supposed to, er, end?”

He dragged up his head. A wry smile danced in his brown eyes.

“No, sweetheart, it’s not. But until you’re ready to begin breeding, that’s how it will have to end.”

“Breeding! Good heavens!” She wiggled in alarm. “We can’t make a baby yet. We have to be married first.”

“Exactly.”

Threading his fingers through her sweat-sheened hair, he stilled her with a swift, hard kiss.

“We will be married, Victoria. As soon as I return to Cheyenne, where you’ll be waiting for me.”

“But I—”

“Will you give me your promise that you won’t go roaming about Tampa unescorted?”

Like most males of his times, Sam honestly believed in the right of men to order their women-folk’s lives. He hadn’t imagined that he’d have to exercise such rights over Victoria this soon or this forcefully, but she needed to understand from the start that she wouldn’t get around him as easily as she did her parents.

When she didn’t answer, he shifted. The press of his groin against her soft belly added crude but unmistakable emphasis to the rights he now exercised over her.

“Victoria?”

“All right, I promise.”

“And you’ll board the train for home as soon as I can procure you a ticket?”

“Is that what you want, Sam? Truly?”

“That’s what I want.”

He softened the blow with another kiss, longer this time, and sweeter. She clung to him, returning the kiss with a passion that roused Sam to hardness once more.

He took her again, tutoring her soft, lovely body, awed by its passionate response.

At the peak of their pleasure, a sharp pounding on the door elicited a moan from Victoria and a curse from Sam. He ignored it. When the hammerer refused to go away, he muttered another oath and dragged on his pants. Thinking it was a waiter with the dinner they’d ordered, he pulled out a wad of bills and yanked open the door.

To his astonishment, Quartermaster Sergeant Douthett stood in the hall, quivering with excitement.

“The colonel sent me to fetch you, sir! You have to return to camp at once. We just got word we’re to pack up and be at Port Tampa by daybreak to board our transport.”

W
ith Sergeant Douthett’s urgent message hammering in his head, Sam yanked on his uniform, issued another brusque order to Victoria to get on a train for home the very next day if possible and planted a hard kiss on her mouth. He left her sitting in the middle of the bed with the green coverlet clutched to her breasts and her hair tumbling about her shoulders.

With Sergeant Douthett at his heels, he charged down four flights of stairs and plunged into the lobby. It was already mobbed with staff officers, newsmen and foreign observers, all scurrying to gather their gear and make the exodus to Port Tampa, some nine miles south. Sam joined the flow and had almost made it out the door before being waylaid by Dan Powdry.

“Captain! I just heard the news. You got to get me into the regiment!”

“I’m sorry. We don’t have an empty billet and I’ve no time now to work one.”

“Well, dangnabit!”

Sam turned away, then swung back again. “Will you do me a favor?”

Swallowing his disappointment, the cowboy nodded. “Just name it. I still owe you for standing with me against them railroaders.”

“My fiancée, Miss Parker, arrived in Tampa this afternoon. She’s staying here at the hotel. Will you see that she gets on a train for home, tomorrow morning if possible?”

“Sure, I kin do that.”

Relieved that he’d tied up that loose end, Sam tipped two fingers to his slouch hat. “Thanks.”

“Good luck,” Powdry called after him. “And keep yer head down!”

Sam and Sergeant Douthett arrived back at camp to find it a scene of indescribable turmoil. The war planners knew the number of men and amount of baggage that would have to be transported to the port. They should have issued orders to allow for sequential, orderly movement. Instead, the entire operation turned into a mad scramble.

The First Volunteer Cavalry had been ordered to a specific track at midnight. After a frantic rush, they arrived at the track, but the train didn’t. While the men sat about on the ground, Wood and Roosevelt and the other officers tried in vain to find
someone in authority who could confirm when the train would come.

At three-thirty in the morning, a much-harassed major general ordered them to march to a different track. No transport appeared there, either. Finally, the redoubtable Roosevelt commandeered a coal train coming up from the south and argued vociferously with the engineer until he agreed to back up nine miles to the port. The Rough Riders arrived at the quay covered in coal dust, but with all their baggage.

The confusion at the dock was worse than at the rail yard. The ship transports, anchored in midstream, were being brought one by one to the dock, but no one seemed to have the least idea which regiments were to board which ships. As train after train arrived quayside, a free-for-all ensued. Once again Roosevelt proved his mettle.

Somehow, he secured a promise from the dock-master for the next ship. Leaving Sam and a heavily armed escort to guard the baggage, he ran at full speed back to the regiment and brought the First Volunteer Cavalry up just in time to take possession of the ship before the Second Regulars and the Seventy-first arrived. The Seventy-first went away grumbling, but four companies of the Second managed to wrangle berths with the Rough Riders.

By dawn, the men were tired and hungry, but cheerfully went to work loading baggage, food and
ammunition. Sam sweated in the hot sun as he and the ship’s captain worked together to fill the holds. Although the troops of the First Volunteer Cavalry would fight on foot, their officers required mounts to survey the battle scene, carry messages and lead the forays. Accordingly, Sam got the horses aboard a second ship and left them in charge of Roosevelt’s groom, one of the famed Buffalo Soldiers from the Ninth Colored Cavalry.

When the transports finally pulled away from the quay and anchored in midstream, the men were jammed together both below and above decks. Sam had to step carefully over bodies to reach the fore-cabin, where he reported to Roosevelt.

“Everything’s aboard, sir.”

“Including the artillery guns?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Bully!”

“I stored extra rations in the hold to supplement the travel rations the men carry in their packs. Several drums of water, too.”

“Let’s hope the voyage is swift,” Roosevelt commented, polishing his spectacles. “If we have to eat that damned rot the army calls beef, we’ll arrive in Cuba with every man sick as a dingo.”

Sam could only hope so, too. Instead of the traditional canned corned beef, some fool had decided to can fresh, unsalted beef. The stuff was stringy and tasteless and spoiled quickly. Most of the men
tossed it aside. Those who could force it down too often retched it back up.

Yet as he stepped over the hot, tired troops and found a spot for his bedroll alongside those of the other regimental staff officers, he didn’t hear a single Rough Rider complain. To a man, they were excited and eager to be on their way at last.

A little before noon, Victoria drove down to Port Tampa in a hired carriage, escorted by a vigorously protesting Dan Powdry.

“The captain said you was to catch a train home this morning,” the wrangler repeated for at least the tenth time since he’d pounded on her door earlier.

“Yes, I know,” she replied as she edged the carriage in among those holding the tearful, anxious ladies who’d come to see their men off. “Unfortunately, every train has been commandeered to transport troops. It could be days before I’m able to leave Tampa.”

Or so she hoped!

She’d spent hours after Sam dashed out last night writing up her notes from the previous afternoon’s visit to the Rough Riders’ camp. Early this morning, she’d stood in a long line at the hotel’s telegraph office with other eager reporters and wired her first dispatches back to the
Tribune
as a credentialed correspondent. The thrill of that moment still sang in her veins.

“It’ll be days before anyone leaves Tampa,” Powdry muttered, eyeing the thousands of men and mountains of baggage piling up on the dock.

“I think so, too,” Victoria said happily.

Scribbling furiously, she filled page after page with the sights and sounds of an army embarking for war. She didn’t see the Rough Riders in the mass of humanity on the dock, didn’t know if they’d already loaded or not. One of the wives observing the process said she thought they had.

With the sun beating down unmercifully, Victoria moved from carriage to carriage to record the women’s reactions to the stirring sight. She was sure it was a perspective that none of the male reporters would think to capture.

Several rather intrepid wives and daughters hired a fishing boat to take them out to where the loaded transports sat at anchor. They were determined to locate their husbands’ ships for a last farewell. When they invited Victoria to join them, Powdry registered an alarmed protest.

“Here, miss! You ain’t going out among the troop transports, are you? The captain would have my scalp if I let you do something so dangerous.”

Reluctantly, Victoria declined the offer. Not because she was worried Sam might spot her, she informed her self-appointed guardian. Only because she needed to write up the afternoon’s stories and
dispatch them before the telegraph office shut down for the night.

Victoria and Powdry returned to the docks early the next morning. Troop loading continued all that day and into the night. As the hours dragged on, Victoria coaxed stories from the most unlikely sources using a combination of winsome charm and dogged persistence.

She needed both to discover why the naval battleships that had gathered to escort the troop convoy suddenly steamed out of port late on the afternoon of June 11. Apparently, naval intelligence had received reports of Spanish warships just off the coast of the Carolinas. That meant the troop transports would have to sit at anchor in Tampa Bay several more days while the battleships prowled the coast.

After the mad scramble to get aboard, the men crammed like sardines on the troop ships now resorted to gambling, fishing, jumping into the sea to cool off, then joining in with rousing choruses during the evening concerts the regimental bands performed aboard ships. Local merchants did a booming business by loading barrels of beer and various edibles onto boats and making the circuit of the transports. So, Victoria discovered, did a number of rather enterprising prostitutes. She decided not to include that interesting bit of information in the dispatches she cabled back to the
Tribune.

Instead she filed stories describing the doughty spirits of the men left behind to form the second wave. The tremendous logistics involved in resupplying a troop convoy. The support necessary for an invading forces—particularly from medical personnel.

Mary Prendergast supplied the details for that story.

After a diligent search, Victoria located her aboard the army hospital ship
Relief.
The hastily converted passenger ship had just steamed into port and was still tied at the quay, taking on supplies and medical personnel.

Equipped with wards, operating rooms and one of the astounding new X ray machines, the hospital ship was attracting considerable attention from newsmen, photographers and sketch artists. As Victoria understood it, personnel from various field hospitals as far away as Georgia and Alabama would deploy with the ship, then disembark in Cuba to set up their tents within close proximity to the battlefields.

When she learned that personnel from the Seventh Corps hospital north of Tampa had just boarded the
Relief,
she left Powdry in charge of the hired carriage, flashed her credentials and her most beguiling smile at the sentry manning the gangplank, and secured permission for a quick visit. A
matron with a starched cap pinned atop her iron-gray curls, a red cross on her armband and a pristine apron covering her gray gown directed Victoria belowdecks. She found Mary with a contingent of nurses from the Seventh Corps field hospital taking a tour of the wardroom that stretched from bow to stern.

“Only look at the bunks!” one of the nurses exclaimed as Victoria stepped into a scrubbed and tiled bay. “They’re stacked three high. And made up with rubber sheets! How I wish we had some of those to take with us when we set up our field hospital in Cuba. Think of all the hours we wouldn’t have to spend boiling linens.”

“We’ll be lucky if we have bandages enough for the wounded, let alone rubber sheets,” Mary murmured.

Victoria swallowed a sudden lump in her throat. Until now, the massive troop embarkation had evoked stirring sentiments and an almost buoyant, holiday air. The long racks of empty bunks waiting to be filled gave another perspective entirely. She stood quietly beside the bulkhead until one of the nurses noticed her.

“May we help you?”

“I’d like to speak to Mrs. Prendergast when she’s free.”

At the sound of her name, Mary turned. Sheer surprise blanked her face.

“It’s Victoria Parker, Mrs. Prendergast. We met last February, at Elise Sloan’s birthday party.”

“Yes, of course.” With a little shake of her head, the widow detached herself from the group. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you immediately. I was just so surprised to see you. Whatever are you doing here?”

“In Tampa, or aboard ship?” Victoria returned with a smile.

“Either. Both. Good heavens, have you volunteered for the nursing corps?”

“Unfortunately, I have neither the training nor the skill to qualify. No, I’m here as a reporter for the Cheyenne
Tribune.
I’ve been credentialed,” she added with a note of shy pride.

“Well, for heaven’s sake! I can’t imagine why Sam didn’t tell me you were coming to Tampa.”

Resolutely, Victoria ignored a tiny pinprick of jealousy at the easy familiarity between Sam and this woman. “Most likely because he wasn’t aware of my plans until after I arrived.”

“Wasn’t he?” Laughter sprang into the widow’s dark eyes. “Oh, my.”

A defensive note crept into Victoria’s voice. “Yes, well, you’re probably thinking it was foolish of me not to wire him ahead of time.”

“On the contrary, I find myself admiring your intelligence and foresight. Why don’t we go above deck and see if we can catch a breeze?” Laughter
still sparkling in her eyes, she led the way. “I can’t wait to hear what Sam had to say when you arrived. I’d guess it was along the lines of not wanting you to be exposed to all manner of discomforts and rough, crude troops.”

“How did you know?”

“Because he said the same to me.”

As she followed the slender, dark-haired widow up the narrow stairs, the jealousy Victoria had experienced a few moments ago blossomed into hurt. And anger.

Really, she shouldn’t care that Sam had voiced the same concern for Mary’s welfare as he had for hers. Or that he’d administered the same lecture.

She shouldn’t care, but she did.

Obviously, Mary hadn’t paid the least attention to Sam’s strictures. But then Mary was a nurse, as he had so bluntly pointed out. She was needed here. Victoria, on the other hand, wasn’t. She’d come merely to write about the war, not participate in it.

Resentment simmered as she came topside and stepped out into the blinding sunshine. It irritated her now to remember how meekly she’d accepted Sam’s strictures, how quickly she’d acceded to his demand that she return home. It irritated her even more to recall how submissively she’d surrendered her body as well as her will.

Not that she remained submissive for long. Heat singed her cheeks as she remembered how she’d
progressed from timid virgin to near wanton within the space of mere hours. Even then, even after proving herself a woman in every sense of the word, she’d been prepared to pack her bag and head home like a good little girl. And would have, if Sam hadn’t had to rush back to his company.

“Shall we sit here?”

With a stiff nod, Victoria joined Mary on a hatch cover shaded by the ship’s forward funnel.

“Now, tell me all about your time here in Tampa,” the widow begged with a smile. “I’d imagine it’s been rather exciting.”