Fire Along the Sky
Page 150

Simon got up gracefully—some part of her noticed that, even now—and he used both hands to wipe his face, advancing on her as he did.
She stepped backward until she came up against the big worktable. To her right was another table, and to her left the reverberating furnace, like a great squat toad.
“You will tease me,” she said, and heard her own tone, half petulant, half laughing. “You know I have a temper.” And, pleading: “It's only rose oil, and the bottle was almost empty.”
“Only rose oil, is it?” He was close enough now for her to see the small crescent-shaped cut between his brows, and the smear of blood.
“Rose oil is good for the skin,” Lily said, leaning back.
“Well, then,” Simon said. “Let me share it with you.”
She flailed at him but he caught up both her wrists in one hand. The reek of the rose oil filled her nose and she coughed.
“Simon,” she said. “Simon, wait. Wait, I have to say something.”
“Go on, then.” He pressed a palm to her cheek and then began to rub the oil in with three fingertips. “What is it you wanted to say? I don't suppose you were about to apologize.”
She tried to lean away from the oily hand, coughing out a sound that was meant to be a “no” but sounded more like a laugh.
“Or maybe you just wanted to point out that you've got the better of me. Come in, you said, and in I came. So go on, then, say it. You got the best of me, Lily, and you always will. What else do you want? A kiss, is it?”
She might have denied it, or tried to. She might have, but Simon had already grabbed her up against him and given her what she hadn't asked for. A kiss saturated in rose oil and a flare of temper that came from them both and ignited where their mouths touched.
“What would my mother say?” Lily said.
He bit her lower lip and kissed her again.
She said, “You're to call on me on Sundays. We're to have a chaperone.”
Between kisses she said, “She might come up the path and see us, just like this. You with your hands on my—”
He groaned against her mouth, wrapped an arm around her waist. Then he stepped backward pulling her with him, kissing her as he went, until he was at the door. With a kick of his heel it slammed shut, and then he leaned back against it with her pressed all along the length of him, in a fog of rose oil and frustration.
“Lily Bonner,” he said, leaning down to look her directly in the eye. “I made a promise and I'll keep it.”
“Which promise are you talking about? The one you made to me, or the one you made to my mother?”
He shut his eyes. “Be sensible.”
She did the only thing she could think of doing: Lily grabbed Simon by the ears and pulled his mouth to hers and kissed him. She kissed him until he began to give in and then she kissed him some more. Then with a great groan he took her shoulders and held her away from him. Breathing as if he had just run a mile uphill, and how that pleased her.
“Come to dinner now,” he said. “And Sunday I'll call on you.”
Then he opened the door and went out, and left Lily in the dim, dusty laboratory.
Noses twitched and brows were raised, but nobody said a word about the fact that Lily came to the dinner table smelling just like Simon did: as if they had been rolling around in Missy Parker's rose garden in the full of the summer.
It was not like Curiosity to let such an opportunity go, but the subject was a somber one: tomorrow was the day that the bodies that had been waiting over the winter would finally be set to proper rest. In the ice shed behind the barn there were three coffins and in the village there were more.
“You going to start today?” Curiosity asked Black Abe.
“I don't know,” he said. “I smell a change in the weather.”
Curiosity looked up at him, her brows pulled down into a sharp vee of disapproval. “Why, Abe, I'm surprised at you. Wouldn't get much done at all if we let a little rain stop us, this time of year. Why, I seen Simon there hauling logs in rain so thick the oxen was almost swimming.”
“I'm a Scot, aye.” Simon grinned at her. “Bred to the rain.”
Lily made a neat pile of her pickled cabbage and then moved it to the other side of her plate, to keep herself from looking up.
Curiosity said, “I'd surely appreciate it if you got started today, Abe. We need to tend to our folks.” She was looking at the girls.
“Why, then,” Abe said. “I'll do just that.”
Suddenly everybody seemed to have something worth saying. They talked among themselves about the weather and graveyards and wasn't this stew tasty, Lucy's dumplings had turned out just right and pass them down, please, there was a little hole in Abe's belly that still needed filling.
Then Callie found her voice all at once. “But what about my pa?” she said. “My pa has to be there too.”
There was a small, shocked silence.
“But of course,” Elizabeth said. “Of course he must. We wouldn't go ahead without him, Callie.”
Tears were streaking over the girl's face. She sobbed, just once, but it was a sound so riddled with pain that Lily's own throat closed in sympathy. Martha looked just as stricken, and for a moment they looked to her like two little glass dolls ready to shatter.
“Callie,” Curiosity said. “I'ma go speak to your pa just as soon as I get up from dinner. You can come with me, if you like.”