The Grass Widow (23 page)

“And,” Joss said with a note of finality, her hand hesitating in the box. “Mayhap you’ll think I’m loony for this.” She offered something gleamingly blue-black in the darkness; Aidan accepted leather and wood and cold steel, heavy and solid in her hands, and sucked in a breath of surprise.

“It’s Pa’s,” Joss said. “I had a fellow put new grips on it. Said carve ’em down till they feel a shade small for me an’ they’ll be just right for you. He done a pretty job. That’s cherrywood.”

She had feared it, fired it, depended on its comforting presence by the door—and now it fit her like the handshake of an old friend. “Joss, I can’t—oh, Joss! I can’t take this from you. This was your father’s—”

“I loved Ethan, too. I’ll carry his. Aidan, you ain’t worth sour owl spit with the Winchester. You need a Colt an’ you know this one. I know it’s a odd sort of a thing to give a woman—”

“Oh, Joss,” she murmured, touching the cold security of the gun in her hands. “I’ve turned into an odd woman, compared to who I was when this year started. Will this kill a deer?”

“It’ll kill what you’re close enough to hit true, from here t’ the barn. Mean to kill when you pull the trigger.” She offered a box of Leavenworth bullets and her tobacco pouch. “Might you make me a cigarette?”

She watched Aidan’s concentration, and scratched a match on her boot when Aidan licked the paper; she lit and drew, and smoke leaked slowly from her nostrils. “Before Slade we had a good Captain,” she said at last. “He’d come an’ sit here on the porch an’ talk to me an’ Ethan—Seth was wee, an’ not yet sick; he didn’t have time for the stories of an old man.” She chuckled.

“All o’ thirty, he was when he came here, but to Seth, all o’ six, he looked old, I suppose. To me he looked like Jesus in a short beard. Ethan asked once to see his sabre an’ Cap’n said, ‘What would you have me kill? If I draw it, it must shed blood before it’s sheathed again.’ He said it was a tradition o’ soldiers that a sword never be drawn but for purpose, an’ the only purpose of a weapon is to kill.” Softly, she laughed. “Ethan was about nine.

‘Well, you could kill Joss,’ he says, just all lit up for wantin’ to see that sabre an’ what it could do. Cap’n had quite the talk with Master Ethan that day.”

“From what you say, it sounds as if Ethan did some listening.”

“I’d say he did.” She glanced at Levi, cross-legged by the well, his hands limp in his lap, and knew he was hearing all they said. It wasn’t that he listened; he simply absorbed. She looked back at Aidan. “Know what you’re aimin’ at, when you aim. An’

when you shoot, know you want somethin’ to die by your hand.”

She reached to move the barrel of the pistol; it was pointed at her knee. “An’ no matter what you think you know, it’s always loaded. Unless it’s broke down into parts on the kitchen table, it’s loaded an’ able to kill. It may be your companion, Aidan, but it ain’t your friend. A friend won’t maim you or kill you for one mistake of attention.”

Aidan opened the revolver’s loading-gate; she halfcocked the hammer and spun the cylinder, holding it so the last light showed through its empty chambers. She slipped rounds into

five of six chambers, leaving the hammer resting on the empty one. It was how Joss had carried it, when Harmon Bodett’s pistol had been hers. “Thank you.” She took it into the house and came to sit again. “How does your hand feel?”

“Numb. Better. How are yours?”

“I soaked them in salt water and put balm on them. They stink, but they feel fine.” They were stiff, but not tender to every touch as they had been earlier. “Joss—” She touched a puffy blister with an exploratory fmger. “I see a problem with Levi,”

she said softly. “I—we’ve never had to be concerned with—ears. When we—” She looked up shyly. “In the night. But the way he came in when he thought—”

“Oh.” It was a self-conscious sigh. “I expect you’re right.”

She stood, taking the bucket in her left hand; Aidan watched as she gave it to Levi. He emptied it in a spraying gift to the kitchen garden and made a good hitch with the well rope around the bail. “Levi, I got somethin’ to say like we was one fellow to another—”

Aidan heard no more than that as Joss walked him to the barn, talking quietly, her good hand cupping the place where the masculinity he expected of her might have risen; he appreciated that male gesture, and the frank, gentle confidence she shared with him. He heard her respect for the good lady, and her ungrudging regard for him, and he gave her a bashful grin and a shove on the arm, and pulled the barn doors shut. Joss went back to the house shaking her head, not quite comfortable with what she had said. . but knowing she’d be a damned sight more uncomfortable if the protective Levi burst into their room to save Aidan from her first cries of impending fulfillment. “Lord,” she sighed. “I’m not used to bein’ thought a man, but it’s been my life today. I’m not so sure I’d like livin’ it forever.”

Aidan breathed a soft sigh, sensing California farther away than it had been last night. “What did you tell him?”

“That’s between us fellers,” Joss teased, sinking to her chair.

“Oh, you—” She leaned to brush her lips against Joss’s, and found a brush wasn’t enough when Joss’s mouth quickened on

hers. “Oh, my,” she breathed at last, the heat stirring deep in her belly, her breasts pressing full and tight against her chemise.

“What did you say to him? Tell me, Joss.”

“Let’s just say he’ll forever believe me to be a man now.”

“All to the best.” She parted her lips under the sweet aggression of Joss’s tongue, to its gentle exploration of the secrets of her mouth. “Take me to bed,” she whispered, when she could; the kiss had deepened until she had to break away, to gasp for breath—and then gasp again in want as Joss’s teeth bruised softly against her throat. “Now, Joss—”

She soothed Joss’s injured hand with kisses before she wrapped it in strips of old sheeting, snug enough to compress but not so tight as to bind. In the bedroom, she let her lips graze across Joss’s throat, tasting dust and sweat. Joss clean from the bath made her gentle, but the smell of a day’s work on that hard body ripened something deeply subliminal in her; it made her remember that first electrifying kiss in the woodshed when Joss had been soaked with sweat and the base, animal smell of blood. Sometimes when she first heard the sound of axe against oak she would go to the door, watching as the sweat started and grew on the back of Joss’s shirt until the cloth stuck to her in the heat, and she would imagine the ripe slickness of that wet body next to her own, her own heat rising until she had to turn away, shivering with the knowing that if she watched any longer she would call her to the house . . . and be naked (or nearly so) in the time it took her lover to come across the yard.

“What,” Joss asked softly, feeling that smile on her lips as Aidan eased her suspenders from her shoulders and her sleeve over the wounded part of her, dropping the shirt to the floor, that tiny, secret smile still touching her. She stroked a finger under Aidan’s chin, bringing her face up so she could kiss that smile.

“What makes you this way?”

“You,” she whispered. “Remembering the first time you kissed me—” That smile was more than reminiscent now; it was almost speculative, almost adventurous.

“An’ what else?” But Aidan only smiled as Joss found the pins

in her hair and loosed them one by one, golden length tumbling over her hand, and she drew Aidan close for a lingering kiss, her wrist at the back of her neck holding her there. Aidan’s mouth was quick and hungry on hers, her nails raking against her ribs as Joss’s left fingers tried to learn about buttons. Her kiss distracted from their clumsiness; by the end of tiny buttons on Aidan’s dress they were deft. Her hand sought skin and found her chemise instead. “How do you stand all these clothes!”

But when Aidan shed the dress she was lovely in the flimsy silk, the soft glow of the lamp coloring her honey and cream; Joss reached to stop her hands on the laces. Slowly, she pulled the bows herself, loosening the cloth that stayed the fullness of her breasts. Aidan’s hands caught hard at her ribs as she bent her head to the exposed rise of that heavy warmth.

Aidan trembled under the touch of lips there, caught her breath when that tongue traced the line of the silk, cried Joss’s name softly when teeth closed lightly on tender skin in a promise of what they might do when they found what was still hidden; she found the buttons of Joss’s jeans and tore them loose, and Joss kicked out of the jeans as Aidan’s nails scratched hard against her back. “Let me—” Aidan’s voice was husky with desire. “Let me, Joss.”

Careful of the hurt, Aidan drew her down to the bed, taking her gently to her back. “Let me, Joss,” she whispered against her lips, her silk-clad breasts a caress against Joss’s bare skin. “If you could know how I need you—”

There could be no refusing the softness of thighs that embraced her hips, or the lips that found her mouth, her throat, the small hardness of her breast; there was no denying the lush hair that swept across her belly, or the hands that took their measure of the slender muscularity of her shoulders, the leanness of her ribs, the slimness of her hips; Aidan’s lips followed her hands, finding the tenderness of a breast, the ticklishness of the bottom rib, the soft hollow inside her hip before her tongue flickered damply back up to Joss’s throat to trace her lips, allowing Joss a momentary capture before Aidan kissed her with a dizzying thoroughness

that left Joss searching for breath, rising to meet the silk-hidden feel of Aidan’s breasts against her own nakedness.

Aidan felt the appeal of the hand at her breast and loosed the lacings of her chemise, a slow, deliberate exposure in the soft light of the lamp, loving the need in Joss’s eyes. She lowered herself, offering that fullness to the hunger of Joss’s lips, and she had a sudden image of herself swollen with milk, this woman’s mouth tasting her in a thirst that was tonight and the first time and something deeply more, and when Joss’s lips closed on her nipple she could only arch into her touch, holding that closecropped head against her, gasping her name as waves of sensuality shimmered through her like heat over the fields at midday: “Oh Joss, this is so good it feels so—oh Joss please—”

“Come to me,” Joss whispered, her hand gentle against her hip, a promise of knowing their desires. “Let me taste you—”

Aidan could only submit, if submission was what this driving want was; she gave herself to the fingers that eased the silk aside, to subtlety of the mouth against her, the lips that found hers, the tongue that sought and probed and drew from her the gasping moan that would swell to a scream of gratification as she braced into the intimacy of its knowledge of her, a scream she tried to stifle and couldn’t as Joss’s kiss took her to a place where there was no sound or silence, no light or darkness, no memory or future; there was only being, a sinuous tapestry that surrounded and consumed her, a rich cloth woven on the threads of two women’s lives.

And she came back from that place wanting only to take Joss there; it was a trembling moment before she could move, but when she could she found Joss’s lips, shivering at the musky essence of herself there. A part of her was heavy with satiation, but in another part a thirst still burned, and she took her lips to Joss’s ear, tracing it with her tongue. “Let me. Allow me, Joss.”

Her palms sought every curve and hollow, every softness and hardness of her lover as her mouth took a long and wandering way down the spare landscape of her body. She found the soft curls at the tops of her thighs and breathed deep, inhaling her

essence; she drew her cheek across that damp froth of hair. “Oh, my love—” It felt like a prayer as her palms slipped down in slow measure to find Joss’s hips. “Oh, Joss. Let me taste you—”

Joss gasped at her first exquisite touch. Captured by the delicacy of that kiss as it flirted with the limits of her control, she began to understand why Aidan wept and cried and screamed when— “Aidan! don’t stop please don’t stop—oh, Aidan! please, right there—”

The fire could find her just by touching Aidan. When that small hand had found her in their love before, she had thought nothing could ever kindle a higher flame; if Aidan’s fingers against her then had been the hot blaze of tinder, what her mouth did now was the liquid explosion of a flaming pine knot in the place where the fire in her lived, and she let it take her, gave herself to its consuming intensity until that knot burst into a final, searing flame, blazing until it was but a glowing memory of itself. Spent, struggling for breath, she felt Aidan’s lips on her face and caught them with her own, tasting them both in the mingled essence of that kiss until she could only bury her face in thick golden hair and breathe a shuddering sigh of helpless gratitude. “I’ll try to deserve you. God, I’ll try to deserve you—”

Gently, Aidan shushed her; she kissed her lips, murmuring her love as they found the comfort of their fit together. She thought to turn off the lamp, but couldn’t bear to leave their closeness, and sometime in the night a breeze strolled through the room to gutter the flame down and then out, and they slept entwined in the darkness, secure in their love and their lives.

July, 1876

Then I will give you rain in due season, and the land shall yield her increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. And your threshing shall reach unto the vintage, and the vintage shall reach unto the sowing time: and ye shall eat your bread to the full, and dwell in your land safely.
Leviticus 26:4-5

“Come one soldier man come horse!” came Levi’s announcement from the corn; Joss straightened up from the shoulder-wrecking job of bucksawing stove-length blocks from one of the three massive oaks Levi and Doc had felled a week ago. She was ambidextrous enough that lefthanded operation of the saw was possible, but it was awkward and slow. She had been arguing with her pride, trying to convince herself to ask Levi for help with this most difficult part of the wood, when he let out his yell.