OverTime 03: Slipping (First 70 Chapters)

Ch. 22: The Tent (Garrison) - rated M for Mature

  Garrison weren't sure why he took his wife to the tent, instead of merely stepping away from camp for privacy. Could be he reckoned she should be asleep this time of night, after all the fuss she'd made over naps.

Could be he had other, less noble hopes. As long as he'd resolved to make time for her... it had been a long week, lying chastely beside her.

As soon as he handed her into the dog tent, then dropped to his knees and followed, she draped herself across him like she had earlier that night and kissed the life near out of him.

Surprise, more than her slight weight, knocked him back onto his bedroll, near 'bout crushing his hat.

He did not give a fig about the hat.

"You're safe," Elizabeth breathed across his cheek, between kisses. Her earnest concern stirred him, as surely as did the press of her body. "I was so worried, but you're safe."

Did that require some kind of answer? Usually she did. He lay back on the ground and caught her to him with both arms, so her softness wouldn't desert him, and he managed to say, "Yep."

She wove her fingers into his hair on one side of his face, into his beard on the other. "And you saved the herd. And you saved the camp. And you saved me." After which she pressed her mouth across his again, sweet and eager, and then said, "Please allow me to thank you properly?"

Honesty urged him to admit that he'd done nothing single-handed. Propriety insisted that he reject any need for thanks. But he could not have managed clear thought, much less speech. He would rather hear her voice than his own, anyhow. Her womanly scent, mixed with the delicious aroma of horse, intoxicated him. Her warm embrace invited him to places he'd too rarely visited in his life, and where he usually weren't welcome.

In any case, his mouth stayed otherwise occupied. Before Elizabeth, he'd never known why folks valued kissing so highly. Tonight he drank her lips' offerings like a man off an alkali desert would drink lemonade.

Like lemonade, her kisses tasted delicious. But lemonade could only slake thirst, not hunger.

He sternly reminded himself that he could survive this kind of hunger--it never killed nobody. Likely it built character.

Elizabeth, clambering more firmly onto him, reminded him that starvation weren't necessary, neither.

She straddled him in a way that pulled her skirts tight across his legs. Bracing her elbows on his shoulders, she lay over him, her bosom pillowed across his chest, and she kissed him some more. Her hair curtained around their faces, tickling his neck. In only a week, he'd come to connect the scent of her hair with peace, and privacy, and rest.

They were not resting now. What his father had once called the "ravening wolf of sexual desire" clawed for purchase--and Garrison weren't exactly fighting it off. Instead, he found himself pulling her more firmly onto him, her bottom round and supple in his hand. He tried not to buck like a green horse beneath her, but his mate surely did bring out his bestial side. He wanted to taste her, and to feel her bare skin against his. He wanted things that honorable men ought not request from their wives and God-fearing women ought not perform even for their husbands. Then again, he'd been resisting even what behavior honorable men and God-fearing women were allowed, and it had near 'bout drove him crazy.

Could be he'd been overly hasty, forbidding such intimacy. He'd had good reasons for that--he generally did.

Not a one occurred to him just now.

When she sat up--Lordy, her shifting weight felt sinful atop him--he inhaled cooler air while she surprised him by starting to unbutton his shirt.

As if his shirt had anything to do with anything.

Still, as long as she kept rocking on him--yes, like that--and leaning forward to kiss him every few buttons, he meant to let her do whatever she liked for just as long as he could stand it.

Luckily, Garrison prided him on his self-control.

Why had he fought this? She'd convinced him in Ogallala that she could be more than obliging in this matter. Had he wanted to avoid distraction? The distraction of abstinence had near-bout killed him. Did he dislike having privileges the other men, several of 'em married, could not? Yes, but their wives weren't here. There must have been....

She finished unbuttoning his shirt and started on the buttons of his long johns, biting her lower lip in a concentration, in a way that made him want to bite it too. His own bark of laughter surprised him, and he risked filling the tent with his own rasping voice. "What are you after."

"You," she answered simply, and flared her lash-lined eyes toward her own bodice. "Care to help with mine?"

He didn't want to give up his handful of her round bottom, especially since his grip on her seemed to encourage her press and sway atop of him. That left only one hand to brush across the buttons of her yellow frock--the frock he had bought for her in Dodge City, the only woman's dress he'd ever purchased. He could not manage her buttons one-handed, though, not without risk of popping them. Instead, he grazed his fingertips across the material that clung to the curving side of her bosom. Had her bosom... grown?

He tested its round weight, warm and pliant beneath yellow calico, with his palm. When he pictured what she would look like bare to him--

His self-control did not so much waver as shudder under a crash of physical need, like a stall door against a kicking stallion.

She got enough of his undershirt undone to pull it open, then spread her hands across his chest. She seemed to like his plain, hair-covered chest. Could be she did. She liked strange things.

She believed she loved him. At least, she said she did. And he....

Garrison did not know what to think about that. He'd never put much stock in love. But some things required no thought at all. She was his wife. She carried his child. She championed every innocent from his son to a calf to antelope against him--and sometimes had a point. She'd mended his shirt, and tended his wounds, and sung to his dead cowhand.

Now, smiling at his inability to manage her clothes one-handed, she started to unbutton her own frock for him. He could see more and more of her bare throat as the once yellow material parted. He was starting to hear that roaring in his head, loud as any stampede, that warned his restraint might soon falter--more kicks against the stall door that secured his own wildness.

He used the hand that had failed to manage her bodice to start gathering up her skirts in tugs and handfuls. It seemed to go on forever.

Elizabeth opened more buttons, then more, not popping a one. Then she kissed him. She shrugged open the gaping neckline of her frock and shimmied it off her bare shoulders, so that now she wore only a frilly, sleeveless under-thing tied with a pretty bow. Then she kissed him. 'Course he kissed her back each time, marveling in how natural and needy it felt. By now their breathing had grown gasping and loud, though not so loud as the roar in his head.

He'd said they wouldn't behave this way.

He still could not think of a good reason--and he would need a fine reason indeed to stop, now.

He finally gathered up enough of her skirts and petticoats to reach the side of her thigh, over her stockings--how did women make their clothing so delicate? He feared his callouses would destroy the material, just by him touching it. He slid his hand higher, onto soft bare skin, then under the edge of her unmentionables, and she wiggled happily. His needs kicked, and kicked again, and he lurched upward against her each time, hungering for favors more carnal than kissing or touching. And why not?

She wanted this. He wanted this. They were married.

"Yes," she crooned, like her own special song for him, and she bore down on his hand, wet and warm. "Yes, Jacob. Like that...."

She pulled the pretty ribbon bow that held her delicates together, releasing the swell of her bosom. When she leaned forward to kiss him yet again, he caught a glimpse of forbidden darkness toward her breasts' half-hidden peaks, and that undid him.

With something like a growl, he looped his arms around her and rolled her onto her back. Then he fumbled at his trousers, yanked at her unmentionables, and turned bestial.