Fire Along the Sky
Page 183

Jennet pushed herself back and away, pulled her knees to her chest and blinked at him. “Luke.”
“What's left of me. You've got teeth like a beaver.”
“Well, why didn't you announce yourself?” Jennet asked, and then, to her horror, she heard herself giggle. The shock, she told herself, and the relief.
“That's it, laugh.” He was trying to look angry, and failing. “First you attack me and then you laugh at me. Call me a fool but I was hoping for a different kind of welcome.”
“I thought you were here to ravish me.” The words were said before she could stop them, and then she really did laugh. “I mean, I thought you were a stranger here to do me harm.”
Luke was busy wrapping his hand with a handkerchief—she had managed to draw blood, it seemed—and Jennet reached out and took it away from him. “Let me do that. And now tell me what you mean by sneaking in here and disturbing my sleep, Luke Bonner.”
“It's good to see you too, girl.”
He grinned this time, his familiar and beloved smile spreading across his face. The cool gray of his eyes grew warmer as they moved down her length. Her breasts pressed against the chemise that was her only nightdress, and he liked that; she watched his eyes go drowsy with arousal. Jennet made herself concentrate on his hand, the three small teeth marks oozing blood.
“Of course I'm glad to see you,” she said, almost prissily.
“How glad?” His free hand was on her arm, pulling her closer.
“As glad as I was to see you the last time you came,” Jennet said. “Until you started in being bothersome.”
“Bothersome, is it?” Luke leaned forward and put his mouth to her ear. “That's a new word for an old business. Come, hen, have you no better way to welcome me after a month of keeping to your lonely bed?”
Jennet let herself go to him then, moving into his arms and against him, her heart racing again but now for a good reason.
She said, “Hannah will be waiting for me in the stockade.”
Luke bore her back down to the pallet, laughing quietly against her mouth. “So she will,” he said. “And all for naught. There's some ravishment needs to be taken care of, first.”
They had such a noble and reasonable agreement: Luke would stay away from Nut Island for everyone's safety, and as soon as Hannah had settled in, Jennet would come to him in Montreal. Except that Hannah's work had never lessened and Jennet could not leave her, and so one day they had come back to the followers' camp in the evening to find him waiting there with Runs-from-Bears, deep in a discussion about how to get the prisoners out of the stockade, off the island, and over the border.
He had looked up at them as they came in and smiled as if it were nothing unusual that he would come to take his tea in this tiny shack. Jennet had been shocked and angry and pleased beyond measure to see him, and that night Hannah had taken her pallet to sleep somewhere else, anywhere else; Jennet had never thought to ask, later, where she had gone. Nor could she find it in herself to be discomfited by that. If anyone understood it must be Hannah.
Luke had come to try to get her to leave, of course. He had some ideas about Father O'Neill that first made Jennet laugh out loud and then made her angry. And wasn't it just like Wee Iona's grandson to see a great conspiracy behind every Roman collar, she asked, and did he hear himself, how he sounded more jealous than worried for her welfare?
But he hadn't risen to her goading. Instead Luke insisted that she write him a report every day on what the priest had said and done and who he had spoken to, and Jennet had asked him if he wanted her to spend more time with the good father, or less?
In the end it turned out that he had risked coming to Nut Island not only because he was worried about the priest, or even because he had letters and medicine and soap and lovely white-flour rolls with fresh butter, but because of a passion he could no longer control. And how could she stay angry at that? He had kept her flat on her back for most of the night, alternately arguing with her and making love to her, sometimes both at once.
In the morning he had slipped away again, never discovered by the guards or anyone else, as he had promised. And left her behind, because she insisted, and when he was gone how she had struggled to hide her disappointment. In him, in herself.
And here he was again, so beautiful that he took her breath away. Already the spring sun had begun to turn his hair lighter and his skin—covered now with a keen, sweet sweat—was darkening.
When she could breathe again, Jennet became aware of the sounds of the camp all around them: women's voices and children, the business of cooking and eating and getting ready for the day. No doubt they had made themselves heard, which should embarrass her unto death but Jennet could find no energy for that particular exercise. Later, of course, the women would want to know which of the men from the fort she had finally let into her bed; that would take a bit of handling, of course.
Luke turned on his side, his great strong hand on her shoulder, dark against light, his thumb stroking. Then he said, “Come with me to Montreal. We'll spend a month in bed. I want to see if I can make you screech like that again.”
She smacked him smartly and then rubbed her cheek against his hand. “You shouldn't ask, and you know it. I canna leave your sister.”
He nodded, as if she had given him the answer he expected and not a word more.
“And I don't screech.”
“Like a panther in the night.”