“Me … provoke you?”
I stood stock-still for three of those seconds, blood thundering in my ears and pulsing through my fingers. Then I walked toward him.
“Seven,” I said.
“Six,” and I reached for the neck of his shirt.
“Five … Four …” I yanked it down, said, “Three,” rather loudly, leaned forward, and bit his nipple. Not a teasing love-bite, either.
He yelped, jerked back, grabbed me, and with a big hand gripping the back of my head pushed my face into his. Our mouths collided messily, and stayed that way, open, voracious, amorous, seeking as much as kissing, lips, ears, noses, tongues, and teeth, hands groping and snatching and pulling and rubbing. I found his cock and rubbed it hard through his breeches and he made a deep growling sound and grasped my buttocks and then we were in the grass in a tangle of knees and limbs and rumpled clothes and hot flesh bared to the starry sky.
It seemed to last a long time, though it couldn’t have. I came back to myself slowly, reverberations passing through me in a slow, pleasant throb. Provocation. Forsooth.
He was lying on his back next to me, face turned to the moon, eyes closed, and breathing like one rescued from the sea. His right hand was still between my thighs and I was curled beside him, the whorls of his ear, beautiful as a seashell, a few inches from my mouth.
“Have we got that out of our system, do you think?” I said drowsily.
“Our?” His right hand twitched, but he didn’t pull it away.
“Our.”
He sighed deeply and turned his head toward me, opening his eyes.
“We have.” He smiled a little and closed his eyes again, his chest rising and falling under my hand. I could feel his nipple through his shirt, small and still hard against my palm.
“Did I break the skin?”
“Ye do that every time ye touch me, Sassenach. I’m no bleeding, though.”
We lay in silence for some time, and the sounds of crickets and the rustle of leaves flowed over us like water.
He spoke, quietly, and I turned my head, thinking I hadn’t heard him aright, but I had. I just didn’t know what language he was speaking.
“That isn’t Gàidhlig, is it?” I asked dubiously, and he shook his head slowly, eyes still closed.
“Gaeilge,” he said. “Irish. I heard it from Stephen O’Farrell, during the Rising. It just came back to me now.
“My body is out from my control,” he said softly. “She was the half of my body—the very half of my soul.”
38
Grim Reaper
I WAS DIGGING UP a number of four-leaved milkweeds, with the intent of transplanting them to my garden, when I heard the unmistakable bray of an annoyed mule. I’d had enough experience with Clarence and a few of his fellows to tell the difference between a call of greeting and a declaration of hostility. Both earsplitting, but different.
A couple of male voices and another mule now joined the argument. Hastily tucking the uprooted milkweeds into the wet moss in my basket, I picked up said basket and went to see what was happening.
Neither of the voices sounded familiar, and I stopped short of the racket, peering through a screen of silver firs and tall, skinny aspens. Two men, two mules, all right—but one of the mules, a light bay, had turned aside and was browsing on the flowering grass by the trail, while the other, darker mule was fiercely resisting the efforts of the two men to force him—I checked; yes, it was a him—to continue up the narrow, rocky defile.
Frankly, I didn’t blame the mule in the slightest. He and his fellow were both heavily laden, each with a long wooden crate slung on each side and large canvas-covered bundles tied messily to a pack frame on top.
I could guess what had happened. There was a good, wide trail that led up this side of the cove, but it branched at a spot called Wounded Lady, which was a small, brilliantly blue spring with a single aspen on its edge, white-barked and solid, but with trails of blood-red sap trickling slowly from the wounds inflicted by burrowing insects and the woodpeckers hunting them. The main trail made a sharp turn and went on to the east, while a narrower deer path, much obstructed by growth and rolling stones, went straight up the right side of the aspen.
The lead mule had either stumbled on rocks or been caught by the branches of the trees that edged the path. Whatever had caused it, the bindings of his baggage had broken or slipped, and half the load was hanging down over his tail, scattering small boxes and leather bags, with one of the long boxes resting with one end on the ground, the other pointing at the sky, and a fragile strand of rope still anchoring it to the mule.