She did not forgive Damien though. Not until the hour grew late, and she rose, begging that they continue to talk, but forgive her, for she was exhausted. Then she hugged her cousin fiercely, because she was afraid for him.
“Forgive me!” he whispered to her sorrowfully. “We have chosen different paths.” He had never seemed older to her, or more serious or grave.
She said nothing, but turned away, not offering her cheek to her husband. There were no servants about to witness the act.
But when she went upstairs, she did not seek out a separate bed. She lay within the one they shared, and for a long while she remained awake, tormented by all that lay between them. Her eyes closed, and the hour grew very late. The fire dimmed, and she slept.
She awoke slowly, with the feel of his lips against her spine. She did not think at first but rather felt the delicious slow motion of his hands over her hip, stroking down upon her buttocks. His lips and tongue moved with rich and languorous ease over the silky flesh of her shoulders and back. Then she felt his body, bare and heated and rigid, thrust against her own. She started to twist, but he whispered against her ear, “Amanda. I leave with the morning light.”
He drew her against him, kissing her nape, her throat, her shoulders. His hands fondled her breasts while he thrust into her from behind. The urgency touched her. Love was bittersweet, but something she would not deny. She did not want to think of the nights ahead.
“I do not retreat—”
“Nor surrender!” he agreed, but the words were meaningless, for she had given in to him that night, though his fervent words and his fierce cries of pleasure gave her some sense that perhaps she had not lost at all, that indeed perhaps he held the strength, but she held her own curious power.
***
The next morning when Amanda awoke she saw Eric standing before the window while the draperies rustled in the wind. Her muscles constricted tightly for she saw that he was dressed in a buckskin jacket with fringe and rugged leather leggings and high boots. She looked at him with confusion. It was so very early. But then she remembered that it had to be early, he was riding out this morning. He knew that she had awakened; he turned to her and walked back to the bed where she lay, sitting beside her. His gaze fell over her where she lay, and he reached out to touch her cheek. Cascades of her hair fell wildly over his fingers, and he smiled with a touch of bitter irony. “How very hard it is to leave you so. I sit here about to cast all honor and right to the wind and tell Dunmore that I cannot risk my neck for my soul is in chains.”
She flushed, listening to his words. His thumb moved over her cheek and she was tempted to grab hold of his hand and beg him not to leave her, not when he had just taught her so very much about life and…was it love? she wondered. She had hated him so fiercely, feared him, needed him, and now she did not dare judge the seed of emotion that stirred so desperately in her heart. They had lived the days since their marriage in a fantasy, and now the world was intruding upon them. But in those days she had come to find an ever greater fascination in the strong planes and angles of his face, in the curve of his lip, in the light of his eyes. She had lain upon the bed with her lashes low, her eyes half closed, and she had watched the effortless grace of his body as he had dressed or undressed. She had touched the scars upon his shoulders and she had learned which he had sustained in the closing days of the French and Indian Wars, and which he had obtained as a child playing recklessly upon the docks. He did not love her, he had told her once, and she had labeled the emotion as lust. Were that what it was, then the same spellbound fever held her. She wanted to touch him, and so she reached out and laid her palm against his freshly shaven cheek. Then she dropped her covers, rising to kiss him, to breathe into that kiss the truth that she would miss him with all of her heart, that she would pray until the day that he returned that God keep him safe.
His lips parted from hers and he caught her palm, kissing it softly. His brow arched with humor but with tenderness too. “Dare I take this to mean that you will not be too disappointed if the Shawnee leave my scalp intact, despite all that occurred last night?”
She nodded, suddenly afraid to speak. She had loved once and had discovered then that love brought betrayal. Her own father had turned from her.
“Take care, my love. Take the greatest care,” he told her.
“God watch you, Eric,” she whispered.
“Tell me, what are your feelings of this marriage into which you so desperately plunged? Is it better to endure my temper than Lord Hastings’s chins?” he asked, his lips still moving just above her own, the warmth of his words entering into her.
“I am not…displeased,” she said, unable to meet his eyes. “Except upon occasion. What of you?” she demanded, looking at him at last.
“I knew what I wanted, madame, from the very moment that I saw your face,” he told her.
His lips brushed hers. “Betray not my heart, Amanda, that is all that I ask.” He rose and then was gone.
For long moments she lay in the bed, feeling the tingle of his kiss upon her lips. Then she cried out and leapt to her feet, throwing open her armoire to find a heavy white velvet dressing gown. She quickly hooked the garment about her and tore down the stairs. Thom stood in the hallway with a silver tray and a very traditional stirrup cup upon it. “May I?” she begged him, awaiting no answer but running out to the porch steps in her bare feet.
Eric was mounted upon his huge black stallion at the front of a disciplined line of troops. Amanda, her hair like a stream of wildfire against the white velvet, ran down the steps to her husband’s side. The officers who had been shouting out orders fell silent, and Eric turned from his study of the men behind him to see her before him.
That was how he would remember her in the long nights to come. Proud and wild with tousled flaming hair, a soaring spirit with her emerald eyes, pagan with her bare toes showing upon the earth, exquisite as the white velvet outlined her body. She handed him the cup, and a cheer went up that warmed his soul and tore upon his heart.
He drank the whiskey and set the cup upon the tray. “Godspeed to all of you!” she cried, and again a chant rose, a cheer for the lady of Cameron Hall.
And he thought that he just possibly detected tears within the emerald beauty of her eyes.
Eric leaned down and kissed his wife’s lips. Then he rode forward, toward the west.
X
October 1774
Two divisions came against the Shawnee that fall, marching toward the Ohio River. Lord Dunmore led his men from the northern part of the valley. Eric was not with him. It had been decided that he would take a number of his old Indian fighters and accompany General Andrew Lewis, a man Eric highly respected, one of Washington’s stalwart colleagues from the campaign against the Frenchman Duquesne. Lewis led his men by way of Fort Pitt while the governor’s men came through the Great Kanawha Valley.
The Western militia were an interesting breed of men. The majority of the men were clad in doeskin, and many of them had taken or displayed an Indian scalp upon occasion. In the Virginia Valley, life was still raw, and men eked out their livings. The Indians had a name for Lewis’s men; they called them the Long Knives, an acknowledgment of their prowess with the weapons.
But they weren’t after just any Indians. As Eric rode with Lewis, the general explained much of a situation that had not changed. “We encroach upon the land. Hostiles kill white settlers, then the settlers turn around and they don’t seem to know if they’re after a Delaware, or Cherokee, a Shawnee, or another. Inevitably they kill an Indian from a friendly tribe and then that tribe isn’t so friendly anymore. A lot of trouble started with the establishment of trading posts out here—greedy men selling so much liquor that they create a savage out of any man. But now we’re going after Cornstalk, and there ain’t any man alive could call that man anything but a savage when he fights. You mark my words. The Delaware and Cherokees themselves, they tremble at the name Cornstalk.”
