Page 38 of The Winter Husband
His chest tightened. “What ideas?”
“Leaving the cabin for Trois-Rivières, for one.”
“We’ve talked about this.”
“I thought if I wrapped myself in all my clothes, and the weather held steady, I could somehow cross the frozen river and walk to—”
“Marie.” Was he such a monster? “The journey would kill you.”
“I know.” She pulled out a chair and fell into it sideways. “I saw tracks in the new snow the other day. Paws like that of a huge cat.”
A bobcat. Maybe a mountain lion. He’d seen the trail, too.
“And yet,” she continued, “the threat of lions didn’t scare me half as much as myotheridea.” A tendon flexed in her throat. “Because my other idea involves you.”
A buzzing current rippled through the air.
He braced himself. “Tell me.”
She swallowed. “We’d have to modify our arrangement about keeping away from one another.”
His knuckles went white around the cup. She’d set the rules. He’d accepted them. He’d battled his baser nature every day since.
“I have a good reason to ask this of you.” Her voice tightened with tension. “It might help if I told you a story.”
He summoned patience, emptying the whole damn well.
“My father and I lived by an orchard when I was young. We always had plenty of apples. One year, my father decided to make apple cider, so we mashed the fruit into a pulp and squeezed out the juice.”
What the hell kind of story was this?
“I remember the buzzing of bees and the stickiness on my hands.” She spread her own hands open, as if she could still see the stains. “Together, we strained the juice into bottles and stored them in our root cellar. I checked them every few days, because my father promised that we would see bubbles rising.”
His ribs squeezed as he imagined Marie as a child peering at bottles of brown glass through drooping black curls.
“One night, my father woke up with a shout. At first, I thought it was one of his nightmares…” She swallowed the word and, frowning, buried her hands back in her lap. “But then I heard strange sounds coming from the root cellar. It sounded like gunfire,realgunfire. Papa grabbed his old flintlock. We flung open the root cellar door…to see corks shooting up off the bottles.” She looked down at her lap, her brows high. “There weretoomany bubbles, so they all exploded.”
He waited, grappling for the point.
“Don’t you understand, Lucas? When something is under intense pressure…it explodes. Nothing can stop it.”
The air thickened between them, like the front of an oncoming storm. Why did she always speak in riddles? It couldn’t be that she thoughthewould explode, that he wouldn’t be able to control himself. After all these weeks?
He said, “I’m not an animal.”
“I know. I wouldn’t ask this of you otherwise.”
“Ask me what?”
“To relieve this discomfort between us.” Her gaze wandered the room, alighting anyplace but on him. “So that we’re not suddenly…overcome.”
His whole body pulsed. But it shouldn’t. Because she couldn’t possibly be saying what his body thought she was saying.
“I’m willing to…change our arrangement.” She bobbed her head in a quick little nod. “But the difficult part is up to you.”
“Speak plainly, woman.”
“I’ve been given to understand that a man can control, to some extent, if he’s willing…whether he makes a woman pregnant.”
