Twice Loved (copy2) (15 page)

On his knees, Rye moved close behind her. “Laura, haven’t you ever heard how a woman gets pregnant?”

Her chin was trembling and the tears rolled freely. “No, never before tonight.” Distressed by his thoughtlessness in jeopardizing her, she swung around angrily. “Why didn’t you tell me before we ... I ... we did it?”

“Laura, I promise you you’re not going to get pregnant. You can’t.”

“But ... but ...”

“That stuff’s got to get inside you before you can get pregnant, but I wasn’t inside you, was I?”

“Inside me?” Her puzzled eyes probed his.

“Haven’t you ever seen animals do it, Laura?”

“Animals?”

“A dog or ... or even chickens?” But her confused expression needed no further interpreting. It clearly spoke of ignorance.

“Do what?” No animal could do what they’d just done! They knelt facing each other with their knees almost touching. Dusk had settled, so only the pale outlines of their faces were visible in the dusty old loft. His face wore an expression of deep tenderness.

He reached for her hand and placed it on his brass buttons. “This part of me goes into this part of you.” He pressed his palm into her lap. “Then there are babies.”

Her lips fell open. Her blue eyes were wide with disbelief. Could Rye be right? Her face burned, and she yanked her hand away from his.

“What happened in your hand has to happen inside your body, Laura. That’s how a man gives a woman a baby.” He touched her jaw, but she was too ashamed to look up at him. But he went on earnestly. “I promise I’ll never do that to you, though, until after we’re married.”

Now her eyes flew to his. Her heart beat crazily and a flood of relief surged through her. “M ... married?”

“Don’t you think we should get married, Laura, after ... well ... after this?”

“M ... married?” Her astonishment began to grow. “You want to marry me, Rye, really?”

His astonishment, too, blossomed into manly realization, then a grin. “Why, I can’t imagine marrying anybody besides you, Laura.”

“Oh, Rye!” Suddenly she was up against him, her arms about his neck, her eyes squeezed tightly shut at the thought of it. Until just this minute she hadn’t thought of how awful it might have been 
not
 to marry Rye after what they’d done together. “I can’t imagine marrying anybody besides you, either.”

He held her, and they rocked back and forth while her face remained securely against his neck.

“Do you think that makes it all right ... I mean ... you know?” came her muffled question.

“Touching and stuff, you mean?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“I don’t think husband and wives go to hell for touching.” She released a sigh of relief, then backed away and looked eagerly into his face. “Rye, let’s tell Dan.”

“Tell Dan?”

“That we’re going to get married.”

Rye looked skeptical. “Not yet. We’ll have to wait until my apprenticeship is served, Laura. Then, when I’m a master cooper, we can afford to live in a house of our own. I don’t think we should tell Dan till then.”

Slightly disappointed, she sank back on her heels. “Well ... all right, if you think it’s best.”

***

But it was hard for Laura to keep from telling Dan the very next time they met, for she wanted to share her new joy—after all, the three of them had always shared everything.

It was a week later. An immense storm had blown up, and afterward, Laura and Dan went out together to scour the shingle for driftwood, a precious commodity here on Nantucket, where there was little wood to spare, since most was hauled over from the mainland. The coast along the south side of the island caught the worst of the Atlantic’s wrath and also turned up the greatest rewards after storms. Laura and Dan were working their way eastward when they came upon Rye, standing some twenty yards away, across the wet, hard-packed shingle that was strewn with shells, kelp, and tidepools where small fish had been trapped. The storm itself had passed, but the skies were still low, with scudding gray clouds hemming in the island, making it a world apart.

Rye wore a heavy pea jacket, its collar turned up around the flaxen hair that whipped about his face in the wind. Laura, in a yellow slicker and red bandana, raised her arm to wave as soon as she saw him.

The three of them moved down the beach together after that, their burlap sacks scraping triple tracks as they dragged along. It was the first time Laura had seen Rye since the evening in the boathouse, and she immediately got that curious wanton feeling in the pit of her stomach and wondered how they could get rid of Dan. The natural way was to ask if his mother had anything good to eat, and when the answer was “gingerbread,” they made Dan’s house their first stop back in town.

By the time Laura and Rye left Dan’s house, she felt ready to burst with impatience, yet he seemed calm and unaffected by the last two hours—the last seven days! But when they were moving down the street toward Josiah’s, Rye did something he’d never done before: he took her sack from her and hoisted it over his shoulder with his own, refusing to heed her insistence that she could handle it herself. The waterlogged wood was as heavy as dead weight, and secretly Laura was pleased by Rye’s chivalry. He even managed to open the door of the cooperage for her despite his burden.

Dropping the sacks just inside the door, he looked up when his mother called from overhead.

“Rye, is that you?”

He placed a finger over His lips in warning, and Laura bit off the greeting she’d been preparing to call up.

“It’s me,” he called. “I got some driftwood. Gonna make a fire and lay it around the fireplace to dry out.”

It was Sunday, and the lower level of the cooperage was abandoned. The damp, windy clouds made the room shadowed and secret. As Laura and Rye stood silently staring at each other, they could hear the sounds of his parents moving back and forth above their heads. Then he dragged their two sacks over to the fireplace and began laying a fire. When it was crackling, he methodically began pulling wet driftwood from the sacks and arranging it in a circle on the dirt floor. When the bags were empty, he took them to the far wall and draped them over a tool bench. Returning to Laura, he silently reached for her slicker, and without a word she let him slip it from her shoulders. He pulled up one of the long shaving horses and positioned it near the hearth, where warmth already spread. The bench was four feet long, widened at one end to form a seat, the opposite end rising like a hunter’s bow, forming the wooden clamp for holding the stave in place with a foot pedal. He swung a leg over and sat down at the wide end, then reached up a hand to Laura in invitation. Her gaze, of its own accord, dropped to his lap when he’d spread his knees wide to straddle the bench. Color flared in her face, and she diverted her gaze to his waiting hand, then placed her own in it, and let him pull her down to sit before him, her body at a right angle to his, with both knees touching only one of his thighs. He touched her face with his fingertips, seeming to search it avidly before kissing first one eyelid, then the other.

“I’ve missed you,” he whispered so softly it might have been only the hiss of the fire.

“I’ve missed you, too.” She snuggled against his pea jacket.

“You didn’t tell Dan, did you?”

She shook her head, no.

“When I saw you together, I felt ...” His whisper floundered, but his eyes were stormy, looking down into hers.

“What ... tell me what you felt.” Her hand lay on his chest. She felt his heart driving hard against it.

“Jealous,” he admitted, “for the first time ever.”

“Silly Rye,” she whispered, and kissed his chin. “You never have to be jealous of Dan.”

They kissed then, but in the middle of it the bracings overhead creaked, startling them apart. Their eyes turned toward the dark beamed ceiling, and they held their breaths. But no further sound came, and their eyes moved once again to each other. The fire was warm now, and Laura wondered why Rye hadn’t removed his jacket. But with the next kiss she understood as he led her hand to the warmth between his open legs, hidden in the shadows behind his heavy garment, should anyone intrude.

“Laura ...” he begged in a shaky whisper, “can I touch you again?”

“Not here, Rye. They’ll catch us,” she whispered.

“No they won’t. They don’t know you’re here with me.” He pulled her into his arms and slid her up firmly against his open legs, and she was immediately tempted.

“But what if they come?”

“Shh, just turn around here and lean back against me. We’ll hear them coming, and if they do, go over and sit on the other shaving horse as if we were just warming up by the fire.” He turned her until her back rested against his chest. “Swing your leg over,” he ordered behind her ear.

Her leg went over the shaving horse and his hand up under her skirts, scarcely hesitating at the button before finding her feminine warmth with one hand and her breast with the other. She squirmed back against him, listening to his harsh breathing beside her ear, grasping his knees as the delight of sexuality kindled again at his touch. But when he touched a strangely sensitive spot, she jerked upright and sucked in a breath, trying to escape.

“Laura, don’t pull away.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Shh. Charles told me how to do something to you, but you have to sit still while I try it. ”

“Wh ... what?”

“Shh ...” he soothed, and again she settled back against him, but stiffly. He murmured softly in her ear, “Be still, Laura-love. Charles says you’ll like it.”

“No... no, stop, Rye, it ... it ...”

But her objections died aborning, and she leaned her head back against his shoulder as his touch seemed to rob her of the will to move or speak. Her breasts rose and fell deeply as his caress worked some sort of magic. And in a few short minutes she felt her body quicken with the same sort of rhythmic quaking Rye’s had. Something tightened the tips of her toes, worked its way up the backs of her legs like creeping fire, and a minute later her body was convulsed by a series of inner explosions that stunned her, shook her, and brought a groan to her lips. Then Rye was clamping his free hand over her mouth to stifle the sound while, in the throes of ecstasy, she gripped his knees with her finger.

She tried to speak his name behind his palm, but he held her prisoner in a world so exquisite, her body was shattered with delight. The undulations grew, peaked, and were suddenly stilled.

She became foggily aware of a dim pain and realized Rye’s teeth had clamped on her shoulder. She fell back into a panting near swoon, her limbs overcome by a tiredness such as she’d never imagined.

“Rye ...” But his hand was still over her mouth. She reached to free her lips and whispered, “Rye ... oh, Rye, what did you do?”

His voice shook. “Charles says ...” He swallowed. “Charles says that’s what you do if you don’t want to have babies. Did you like it?”

“At first no, but then ...” She pressed a kiss on his callused fingers. “Oh, then,” she crooned, quite unable to express her new, soaring discovery.

“What was it like?”

“Like ... like I was in both heaven and hell at once.” But at the mention of hell, Laura sobered and straightened. Her voice became edged with guilt. “It’s a sin, though, Rye. It’s ... it’s what they call fornication, isn’t it? I never knew what it meant before when—”

“Laura—” He swung her around by the shoulders, taking her jaw in both hands, rubbing her cheeks with his thumbs. “Laura, we have to wait three years before we can get married.”

Her brown eyes met his blue ones with a new understanding. “Yes, I know.”

She knew also that morality weighed little against this newfound heaven-hell, for they had found a way ... together. And they would be man and wife, just as they had pretended to be as children, when Rye had stalked off to sea with a kiss good-bye. Only there would be no good-byes after they were married, just hellos each morning, noon, and night.

And so they told themselves as they bounded through that wild, wicked, wonderful spring, pleasuring each other countless times without fulfilling the act of love. In the old boathouse, out in the dory, on the borders of Gibbs Pond within sweet groves of Virginia creeper, and in the stands of beech trees that grew in the protected shallows of the hilly heath-lands, which became their playground.

They fled to privacy each chance they got, scattering herds of grazing sheep as they raced, laughing, across hilly pastures—carefree nymphs learning more and more about love as each day passed, running through the salt air of summer, bound for more of each other, yet never quite getting enough.

Chapter 7

THE SAME MEMORIES 
had been plaguing Rye Dalton in the cooperage on Water Street; Laura was rarely absent from his thoughts. After the meeting with her in the orchard, he threw himself into his work with reckless zeal, pressing his body to limits he had no right to expect of it as two weeks passed, and then three, and he heard nothing from her.

But she was there before him even while he shaved away with a drawknife or hunched his shoulders over the howel or cranked the windlass about the resisting staves of a barrel to draw them in tight. She was there before him, her face beckoning, body bending. He saw her features in the grain of wood, imagined the outline of her breasts as he ran his fingers delicately along the bowed edge of a stave. When he wound the ropes of the windlass around the flaring barrel staves to cinch them together for banding with a hoop, he imagined her waist being tightly cinched by lacings, knowing it was Dan who did that daily.

And it was all he could do to keep from flinging the windlass aside and marching up the hill to claim her. But she had asked him for time, and though he wondered how much she would need, he’d do her bidding in the hope that she’d eventually come to a decision in his favor.

There was, for Rye, a modicum of contentment in being back at the cooperage again, toiling beside his father, bending to labor in the sweet-scented confines of the place where he’d grown up.