AT FIRST SIGHT: A Novella(25)
He grabbed his saddlebags and hefted them over one shoulder. He took his dirk and severed the reins of both horses, then smacked their rumps, sending them both plunging through the brush.
Startled, her glance flew up to his.
“They’re spent.
“Me, too,” she muttered.
“We’re on our own now, milady.” With that, he flung her over his other shoulder and began plowing between the trees.
“Stop,” she panted. “This. Is. Hurting. Me.”
Her remorseless captor continued onward, climbing, if judging by the pitch of her body, gradually but steadily.
Occasionally, a branch wacked her backside, but her ‘ouches’ did not slow him down. Even his labored breathing did not deter his climbing progress. Then, once he breached the tree line, gusts of cold, brisk wind laden with snowflakes whipped her hair loose and pelted her face. He floundered along the ridge. One time, he laboriously backtracked his steps. Next, he was stooping, and a half-darkness swallowed them.
He lowered her to the comfort of soft ground. She lay there, inert. Vaguely, she was aware of thudding and clinking somewhere near.
Mercifully, he soon abandoned her. She was miserable. Every of inch of her body hurt and shook with bone-chilling cold. Her lashes were sealed with ice crystals. If his desertion was what he had meant by his earlier cryptic remark that what he had to do later would be made easier, then she considered it a boon.
But such was not her luck. She heard his returning footsteps. Forcefully, she peeled open first one ice-sealed lid, then the other. She perceived she was lying in what appeared to be a musty cavity in the side of a cliff. He hunkered on his haunches beside her. Weary, she closed her eyes against his criminally charming grin. “Uww-uww, spare me your at-attention, prithee” she begged.
“Aww, milady,” he said, pushing aside her blanket’s folds, “you prick my ego.” Before, her numbed lips could form a retort, he tossed back the flaps of her saturated woolen cloak, and rolled her onto her stomach.
She groaned a hearty protest, but his hands deftly loosed her dress’s tiny buttons aligning her spine. With a practiced hand and uncharacteristic gentleness, he peeled first her dress, with its bodice’s myriad buttons, over her shoulders and down her torso and limbs. Corset unlaced, pockets and chemise’s ribbons untied, pantalettes removed – off they all came.
With no strength to resist, she lay face down, naked to his eyes and sniveling with embarrassment, rage, and agony.
But the worst was still to come. Directly, in front of her face his saddlebags were propped against the rock wall. He reached inside one bag and withdrew first one handful of snow, then another. He pressed the snow onto the backs of both of her limp arms.
She screeched and went rigid, but he continued rubbing the melting snow up and down her arms’ length vigorously.
“Tit for tat,” he said. “I do recall your less-than-tender ministrations with snow upon my poor self.”
Each muscle his long fingers kneaded, almost punishingly, it seemed to her. “Take your pistol – and just shoot me now.”
He repeated his freezing applications on her shoulder blades. “I will admit I have had you in my sights for a long time now.”
“And ye-yet,” her teeth jittered, “you pro-prolonged my misery.”
Laughing, he went to work on her spine, and her buttocks.
She should have died of shame. “Cru-cruel,” she got out.
“I know, I know. But if you hope to keep your tresses out of range of Catamount’s knife, tis important you be ready to run come daybreak.”
That reminder was enough to compel her to comply to his outrageous abuse of her muscle-cramped body
“We have to keep ahead of them.” His thumbs were digging into the arches of her cramped feet, and she moaned rebelliously. “You have done better than I expected.”
His approval was unexpected. She knew he was right, that what he was doing was the best remedy for inflammation and bruises, but never could she remember her body suffering so wretchedly. Dressed or undressed, she no longer cared. She gave unto his hands, which with almost tender caresses relieved her of her pain.
Nigh paralyzed, she was his problem.
She must have dozed off because next, he was flipping her onto her back, and sharp pains stabbed her every muscle. Annoyed that he had disrupted her blessed numbness, her lids snapped open. He was straddling her, leaning over her, his loose hair, the dark brown of burnt oak, curtaining them. His icy fingers dug into the striated muscles of her shoulders. Her alarmed gaze clashed with his amused one.
“I trust this is pleasuring you,” she got out between chattering teeth, “because it most certainly is not pleasuring me.”
“I most likely enjoyed more pleasuring myself as a youth behind the outhouse, Evangeline, than I am with you now. So, cease your worrying that I shall violate you.”
She did. When a few moments later, she opened her eyes, the thin sunlight had deserted the cavern. At the cavern’s entrance, the snow was mounding in a mixture of sleet and slush. Her cold flesh was quivering. She couldn’t see him, but sensed him crouching over her. He had taken up the horse blanket. Now, he chaffed her arms, her calves, her breasts and shoulders with caressing strokes of the blanket that generated warmth into her shuddering limbs.
A short time later, arms around her, he enfolded them both within the blanket. His heat thawed her frozen body and gradually, insistently, warmed it back to life. It seemed to her, he smelled of tropical sunshine and bonfires and heat lightning – ironically, making her feel secure, safe – and warm. Smiling, she fell back asleep.