The Hunger(12)

She came closer to him, her shawl shifting so he could see her collarbone and then the tops of her breasts, flawless and white, pressed tight against the neckline of her dress. “I hope you don’t mind my coming to see you.”

His throat went dry. He had to force himself to look away from her. “Your husband will be back any minute.”

Her mouth quirked to one side. “My husband?” Her voice was easy, like watching a rock bouncing down a hill. “You know George. He’s good at comforting the others. They need him more than I do right now.”

She said it like it was some sort of sacrifice on her part, coming here. Her fingers were cool on his cheek and smelled of a wild perfume he couldn’t name, like crushed flower petals and the wind through the prairie. She collected herbs and, it was said, concocted potions, and people whispered that she was a witch who could make herself irresistible to men. Maybe she was.

He kissed her.

He wasn’t a saint, wasn’t even a good man. He was strong physically but had always suspected that deep down, he was weak. The soft curve of her lips. Weakness. The light touch of her hair grazing against his jaw. Weakness. The smell of her. Weakness.

He felt her cool hands slide under his jacket and seek out his chest, and the heat of realization rose in him. Tamsen Donner had come here with a serious purpose; he saw that now. She knew what she was doing.

Somehow he managed to turn his head away. “You should know better than to tease a man like this, Mrs. Donner.”

She brought her mouth to his ear. “You’re right. I wouldn’t want to cause trouble.” The words tickled his neck.

The invisible thread was unspooling.

They were in his wagon before he knew how they’d gotten there, had somehow climbed over the backboard, slipped under the canopy and hidden in its dim recesses. There was no room in the fully packed wagon, and in the end he pushed her up against a chest of drawers that had been lashed in place, the floor beneath their feet swaying like the deck of a ship as he took her, grasping and gripping, nearly blind in the darkness of the unlit room.

When he finished she let out a sharp cry—practically the only sound she made—and he found in that second not a sense of freedom and release but a sense of falling backward. He had to put his hand through his hair and breathe deeply to steady himself, even as he watched her immediately put herself back together, tuck her breasts into the confines of stays and bodice, smooth her skirts, sweep back stray curls. She was beautiful. Beautiful and remote—she seemed even more a stranger than she had before.

He shook his head. “We shouldn’t have done this.” The weight of it was beginning to sink in. Donner’s wife.

For a second, something flickered across Tamsen’s face, and the closest word he had for it was fear. But the expression was gone so quickly he thought it might have been a trick of the light. She blinked. “There are many things one shouldn’t do, Mr. Stanton.”

He felt stung, struck by the memory of his grandfather telling him, Don’t tempt the devil, boy, as though he could still feel the crack of the old man’s belt buckle in his face after he was caught kissing a neighbor’s daughter out in the churchyard when he was nine years old. How miserable he’d been growing up in his grandfather’s house. And angry at his father, too, for leaving him and his mother there.

He realized now that his head was clearing, that his back was stinging with a high, sharp pain. He reached to the side of his neck and felt blood. “You scratched me?”

She looked at him with eyes so dark they were almost expressionless. Unreadable. She brought a hand to his face almost casually. “I hope there won’t be any trouble.” This time when she said it, it carried a different tone.

“Is that a threat?”

But she didn’t answer him. Instead, she swung gracefully over the backboard. He listened as her light footstep faded away. Too late, he saw that she was one of those temptations better left untried, like a whiskey so potent that it left you blind.

He should try to reason with her. He swung out of the wagon and dropped to the ground, shocked when a teenaged girl startled backward out of the underbrush, looking frightened and lost. Panic seized him. How long had she been standing there?

Before she could bolt, he called out to her. “Wait there. You, girl—who are you? Are you one of the Breens?” There were so many children in the wagon train, it was impossible to keep track.

She stiffened, frozen to the spot as though she’d forgotten how to run away. “No, sir. I’m Elitha Donner.”

Worse and worse. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“I—I was sent out to collect firewood. I was just on my way back to my family, I swear it.” Her face was bright red and shiny and the angle of her lip made her look mulish. More telling, however: There was no wood in her arms.

“Tell me what you saw, Elitha,” he said, and took a step toward her. “Go on. No lies.”

He hadn’t meant to frighten her. But Elitha turned and sprinted back into the woods like a spooked deer. His first urge was to run after her, but he checked himself. It wasn’t right for a grown man to chase a child through the woods, especially not after what they’d found out there tonight.

He turned back to the wagon, intent on finding that bottle of whiskey. He knew what was waiting for him tonight: a visit from Lydia. Between the boy and Tamsen, he now knew it was inevitable. Poor Lydia would appear in his dreams, clothes clinging to her blue-tinged body, asking him to save her. I need you, Charles—words she had never said to him in life but were reflected in her eyes every time she appeared in his dreams. How could he have known her so well and not known the terrible truth?