Maddie shook her head as though to clear it. “I demand that you repeat what you said about…about not touching me.”
“I swore that I’d not touch you under any circumstances. Isn’t that what you were worried about? You did say that you were concerned about what I might do to you, considering that I’m a male and you’re a female. I was merely trying to reassure you.” He looked up at the sky. “You know, I think we might get some rain. If we’re going to stay here, we’d better find shelter and some firewood.”
Maddie was wondering if she was perhaps going a little mad. Had she imagined what he’d said? He started walking and, being chained to him, she had no choice but to follow. “What did you say about…about sleeping together?”
“I said that it’s cold in these mountains and, for warmth, we’d have to sleep together. Look over there, it’s an outcropping of rock. We can make camp there. I think there’s enough room for us and a fire. Now, how do we start a fire? You don’t have matches, do you?”
“No,” she said softly, looking at his back as she followed him, then, abruptly, she stopped. “Stop right there! I demand that you repeat what you said to me, the part about my hair and…and my foot.”
He turned slowly and smiled in a fatherly way. “You have two feet, a left one and a right one, and you have rather nice hair. Anything else?”
Maddie started to say more, but she caught herself. Two could play at this game. Well, maybe she could play. She couldn’t imagine telling him that she wanted to see how his upper lip curved. She walked past him, trying her best to act haughty. “I don’t need matches to start a fire. My father—” She stopped when he didn’t move, the immobility of him jerking her backward.
“Your father,” he said under his breath.
She smiled sweetly. “Yes, my father. My father taught me some survival tricks.”
“Such as starting a fire without matches? Rubbing two sticks together? Do you have any idea how long that takes and how difficult it is to do?”
“I know exactly how long it takes, and if you’d done it as often as I have, you’d find it wasn’t too difficult. I may not carry matches with me, they get wet, but I always carry a fire steel and flint with me. My father said that a man—or woman for that matter—could survive if he had the makings for a fire, a snare, a few fishing hooks, and a knife.”
“And I guess you have all these things with you.”
“Of course,” she said smugly. “Don’t you carry them with you whenever you leave camp? One never knows when one may be separated from one’s horse. Don’t tell me,
Captain Montgomery, that you left everything on your horse.” She wasn’t sure, since he looked away quickly, but she thought he turned a bit red in embarrassment. Now who was feeling uncomfortable?
Her father had taught her what to carry and how to carry it. During the long journey in the rocking stagecoach after she’d left the East, she’d whiled away a few hours by sewing a few pockets on the inside of her voluminous riding skirt. The pockets were as small as she could make them and about halfway down the skirt, so they would not show near the waist.
Now, looking at ’Ring’s back, she knew that she was going to have to lift her skirt to get to the pocket, and she suddenly remembered being in the bedroom of a French soprano. Maddie couldn’t remember the woman’s name, only that her G’s were awful, but that day Maddie had seen the singer’s—if one could call her that—pantaloons draped across a chair. They were made of fine, exquisitely soft Swiss lawn. The fabric was so fine as to be almost transparent, and it was a lovely shade of pink, the color of a girl’s blush. Maddie had laughed at them and said to the singer that they were really quite worthless, that they wouldn’t stand any wear. The singer had looked at Maddie in the mirror and said, “They also tear quite easily.” At the time, Maddie had had no idea what the woman meant.
Now, knowing that she was wearing pantaloons of heavy, serviceable, long-wearing cotton, she wished she were wearing underwear of pink Swiss lawn. ’Ring had said that he’d give ten years of his life to hold her naked body next to his. She might give five years of her life—not the singing years, of course, but the years afterward—to allow him to hold her.
She lifted her skirt and pulled the fire steel and flint from the hidden pocket on the underside of her skirt, but he didn’t look at her.
Then, with ’Ring attached to her, she gathered the dried inner bark of a cedar tree and a bit of cotton fluff from a cottonwood tree near the river. Her father had shown her how to hold the fire steel in one hand and strike it against the flint, and she’d done it very often, but now, with ’Ring so near her, watching her, she couldn’t seem to concentrate.
“Here, gently,” he said, then took the steel and flint from her. “You don’t blow on it like a hurricane at sea, you kiss it. Like this.”
They were so close together that their heads were almost touching and he looked up at her with his lips pursed, as though he meant to kiss her. Softly, with sweet breath, he blew against her lips.
“A gentle kiss,” he said, looking down at the small pile of tinder. “As though you were kissing a virgin.” He looked at her, and the intensity in his eyes made her throat go dry. “Or a kiss to a woman who is very near to being a virgin.”
“How?” she said, and to her horror her voice squeaked.
He looked down at the fluff and shredded wood. “A man, at least a man who is concerned about the outcome, that is, can’t expect a virgin to be like other women. He can’t just one day take her and expect her to want him in return. No, he must first make her aware of what there is to want.”
“Oh?” Maddie said. Her voice didn’t squeak but it was higher than necessary. “What is there to want?”
“Love. Passion. Touching. Feeling. Sometimes virgins are hard to…awaken, so to speak. Sometimes women who have been virgins for a long time have buried their feelings, or have forgotten them and replaced them with other things, and then special things have to be done with those women.”
“Special?” A tiny trickle of perspiration ran down the back of Maddie’s neck.
“They have to be made aware that there is something in…shall we call it life, for them. They have to learn to look at men—or I guess we could be talking about male virgins as well, couldn’t we?”
“Certainly. Of course. What should a woman see in a man?”
“How he makes her feel when he kisses her, touches her, holds her.” His voice lowered and she had to lean forward to hear him. “How she feels when he makes love to her and caresses her. He has to first make her want those things so that she will come to enjoy them. Sometimes virgins don’t even know that love, that kind of love that’s between mature, healthy adults, exists. You know, that sweaty, lusty, hard, pounding kind of love, the kind where, at the end, you think you’re going to die from the release, a release that leaves you limp and fulfilled as nothing else in the world can.”