Page 56 of The Winter Husband
“It’s sap, not sugar,Anentaks.” He set his foot on the path. “And the trees are only magical in Huron tales.”
“Nonsense.” She squinted up at the drifting clouds. “Remember those green lights we saw weaving in the night sky last month? Or the two red foxes yesterday, frolicking like something out ofAesop’s Fables? This place is full of magic, and you know it.”
She smiled at him, leaning in. A blessed saint couldn’t resist what she offered. He dipped his head and kissed her as if she would always be his, as if the river that led back to Quebec didn’t rush and gurgle louder than ever before. When he pulled away, the smolder of her evening-blue gaze turned his insides out.
Ah, Marie.
I want so much more than your body.
“We’ve got work to do.” He gently pinched her chin. “Come, I’ll show you the magic trees.”
She all but skipped, peppering him with questions about the names of other trees, of the birds singing in the boughs, and whether he’d seen the doe and two fawns she’d glimpsed yesterday drinking by the river’s edge. He answered her questions when he could, but talk of the river put a boulder in his gullet.
“Here we are.” He halted by a maple where he’d left a pile of buckets. “We’ll start with this one.”
“It doesn’t look magical.” She frowned up at the plain, leafless tree. “How do you know it’s a maple?”
“I marked it in autumn, when it still had leaves.” He tugged on a tattered ribbon around the lower trunk, caked with wet mud. “The leaves of sugar maples turn many colors.”
“Ah, yes. I think I saw them among the pines when I first sailed into Quebec.”
“Even if I hadn’t marked the tree,” he continued, dodging talk about Quebec, or ships, or sailing away, “I could still recognize a maple.” He pulled down a branch to show her one of the dried buds and droned on about maples until his throat tired of talking.
“Here.” He pulled a carved chute out of his satchel. “Hold this.”
As she held it, he took a mallet and nail from his sack of tools. Setting the sharp end at an angle against the trunk, he tapped a hole into the tree. Retrieving the chute from her hand, he shoved it into the angled hole. A drip soon formed and ran down the chute’s center furrow.
“That’s the syrup?” she said, a little ridge rising between her brows. “It looks like water.”
“It’ll thicken when it’s boiled.” He scooped a translucent drop and held out his finger. “Taste it.”
Her hot mouth slid down over his knuckle. His body pulsed while her lips pulled back, tight on his skin.
My body is yours, yours is mine.
But will you ever give me your heart?
“There are sixty more trees to tap,” he warned, retrieving his finger from her mouth. “You’ll be picking mud out of your hair for the rest of the morning if you don’t stop teasing.”
Her eyes gleamed with mischief. “It’s not very sweet, that syrup.”
“It will be, after it’s boiled down.”
He pounded another nail into the tree, above the chute, from which to hang a pail. Melting snow kept dripping from the bare branches, leaving little holes in the ice-crust all around them. Deeper in the woods, clods of wet snow slid from the upper boughs of pines and splattered to the ground.
How much longer could he pretend spring wasn’t coming?
“Teach me, Lucas.”
He breathed in the scent of her, warm woman, wet moose leather. “Teach you what? How to tap a tree?”
“How to make the syrup.”
“It’s a boring job.”Though I’d like to see you stirring the pot, Anentaks, with the spring sun shining on your hair.“You have to keep an eye on the mess so as not to over-boil.”
“Boring is fine. I’d like to see this maple-sugar thing through to the end.”
He shoved his hand in the satchel and gripped a chute tight. A splinter pierced his hand. She didn’t know what she was asking. Making syrup meant waiting until they’d collected enough sap to fill a pot. That could take weeks, perhaps a whole month beyond the coming of spring, depending on the trees and the caprices of weather.
