Free Heart of the West by Penelope Williamson Page B

swirling cottony flakes. "Oh, look!" she exclaimed. "It's snowing!"
    Gus held out his open palm and laughed. "Darned if it isn't. Fat, wet snow, too. What we cowmen call a grass bringer."
    Nickel Annie belched and gestured with her half-empty cup of whiskey evaporation. "Hell, we're liable to get two or three more blizzards before spring honestly arrives, and even then you ain't safe. That's Montana for you, dearie. Hot as hell one day and snowing to beat the band the next. Why, it snowed just last year on the Fourth of July. Goddamn perverse bitch, is Montana."
    The snow came down heavy and lumpy, like wet oatmeal. Clementine turned her face, flushed and warm from the fire, up to the sky. She stuck out her tongue and laughed as the snow fell cold and wet into her mouth.
    "Clementine..." She turned to find Gus staring at her. There was that tenseness about him, a tautness around his mouth. It wasn't anger; she knew what it was. "Let's go to bed," he said.
    Away from the fire their breath trailed in little white ribbons from their mouths. The snow fell around them in a cloaking silence. Gus hung a lantern from the wagon tongue and unrolled the thick, closely woven quilts called soogans that he had bought before leaving Fort Benton.
    He knelt on the ground, arranging the soogans beneath the wagon's high bed. She looked at his bent back, so strong and wide. "That was wonderful what you did today," she said, "scooping that nickel up off the ground from out of the saddle and without even having to slow down your horse."
    He was quiet a moment, resting his elbow on his bent knee, staring at the ground. He rubbed a hand over his face and looked up at her. "That wasn't the same nickel; that was another one I fetched out of my pocket." In the lantern's feeble light she could see he was smiling. He stood up and wrapped his arms around her waist. "How did you think I was going to spot a thing as small as a nickel in the middle of all that grass and rocks?"
    She leaned back within the circle of his arms and stared up at him. "I guess I think you can do anything."
    He pressed her head against his chest. "Don't... don't ever think that."
    Clementine shivered. She hadn't liked those words or the timbre of worry she heard in his voice. He wasn't supposed to have doubts, only certainties. He was supposed to have enough certainties for both of them.
    Gus blew out the lantern, and they took off their boots and shoes and crawled fully dressed into the soogans. When they had burrowed into the quilted warmth, he enfolded her in his arms, surrounding her with his hard man's body. His breath stirred her hair, blowing hot on her throat; then his lips brushed her cheek, seeking her mouth. His lips slanted back and forth across hers, gently at first, then with more urgency. An odd tenseness began to burn inside her, low in her belly. She squirmed, pressing harder against him.
    His fist gripped her hair, pulling their mouths apart. "Clementine, don't."
    He said it harshly, yet his arms tightened around her, crushing her to his chest. Her cheek rubbed against the rough wool of his coat. It smelled of prairie dust and woodsmoke, and she could feel a trembling deep within him, within the hardness of him.
    He released her, breathing heavily. He turned her around within the circle of his arms so that they lay back to front. He took her hands, rubbing his thumbs over the ridges of scars. "When are you going to tell me how you got these?"
    It was a question he'd asked her at least a dozen times since he'd first seen them. But to tell him about the caning seemed as intimate a thing as standing naked in front of him, and she hadn't done that yet, either.
    She felt his sigh warm against the back of her neck. "How can I get to know you, girl, if you won't talk to me?"
    She didn't want him to get to know her, for she seemed to have brought all her failings along with her into this marriage. Unlike her, Gus McQueen had never pretended to be other than what he was: a