Page 49 of The Winter Husband
“No.”Yes.“Stealth wins over speed in hunting.”
Her face bloomed. It warmed him like a brazier.
Damn, he was lost.
An hour later, he followed deer tracks southwest into the pine woods, with Marie trailing behind. He kept to the shadows to avoid the glare of open fields, blinding this time of year with the sun so low. While Marie learned to slide her snowshoes across the surface, he crouched now and again to seek sign and scat. He’d long lost the trail of the original buck, but he discovered a new set of tracks farther along. He showed her where bark had been worn off trees from the scraping of antlers. Once, he heard her humming and didn’t have the heart to shush her. He enjoyed the journey as he eyed new tracks leading toward an area where the brambles grew thick.
Too thick for them to get through without hacking.
She came up beside him, whispering, “Did we lose him?”
“He’s hiding in there somewhere. He may come out the other side.”
“Oh.” She planted her hands on her hips, looking around, her breath a pure white cloud of mist. “Are we still on your land, Lucas?”
“I’d say yes.” He resisted an urge to warm her chill-kissed face with his hands, or to kiss the little freckle on her cheekbone.
“How far does it go?”
“Miles in every direction.” He wasn’t sure exactly how far south they’d drifted in their westerly wandering. He’d never marked the boundaries of the landholding. He never intended to. Once you drew boundaries, men took it in their heads to cross them and churn up conflict. He didn’t want this world to become the old world, where new boundary lines were painted with the blood of soldiers.
And innocents.
“So much land.” She tilted her head back, closing her eyes against the blinding sky. “Such an endless forest. I have no sense of where we are.”
“I’ll teach you to orient by landmarks, the sun, and the horizon.”
“It’s so easy to get lost in this.”
Exactly.“Let’s take a break.”
He reached out and drew her close. A knowing laugh rippled out of her, muffled against his coat of leather and fur. He led her toward a towering pine and the circle of almost-bare ground at the base of the trunk.
Swinging her up in his arms, he sank down with the bark at his back and settled her across his lap. She lay against his chest, one soft hip canted between his thighs. A sigh escaped her as she let the backs of her snowshoes sink into a drift.
Biting the end of a glove, he yanked it off and spit it onto the snow beside him. In search of the waistband of her breeches, he slid his bare hand under her coat.
“Lucas…” She adjusted her position to give him greater access. “What wicked thing do you have in mind?”
He found the belt holding up her moose-skin breeches, loosened it, and slipped his hand just beneath. The cambric of her shift bunched against his palm.
In a breathless voice, she murmured, “And I thought we were hunting a stag.”
“I hunt what I can catch.” He ran his lips against her temple as he gathered up folds of cambric, the moose-skin tightening across the back of his knuckles. “I just found a pretty doe.”
“Are you suggesting, Captain Girard,” she said, arching her back, “that you’ve been stalking me the whole time?”
“I can’t fool you.”
She looked at him through half-lidded eyes. “I feel the bore of your gun against my hip.”
“It’s loaded.”
“Can I help you shoot it?”
“It may go off all by itself,” he murmured, “if you keep talking like that.”
“If it doesn’t,” she said, shifting her hips against him in a way that made his loins heavy, “I promise to make it go off later.”
