Free Waltzing In Ragtime by Eileen Charbonneau Page B

to tend it yourself. And your medicines are all shattered, ruined.”
    He raked his hand through his hair. “I don’t understand. I thought you wanted to go home.”
    “I do!” She turned away abruptly. “I’ll gather my things.”
    “’Lana?” he called her back. “I didn’t burn everything.” He pulled her green velvet hat from the sleigh’s seat and offered it to her like a truant boy.
    She stared at the remnant of a former life, at the few clumsy stitches he’d made in his effort to repair it. Then she took the hat from his hands.
    “It’s best, ’Lana.”
    She nodded. He wound his arm around her waist, and led her inside his tree.
    For him she had broken her promise to her brother, that she would never let anyone else call her by a pet name. ’Lana. It sounded like another of his whores.
     
     
    The first part of their journey was as quiet as the woods around them. Neither spoke, except for Matthew’s quiet urging of the horses. Even the woodland animals were silent. They traveled the steep, long path he had dug to the high meadow. Once there, the horses paved the way, their hooves crunching through the light-powdered snow into the ice layer beneath. The colors of the blue sky, red bark of the giant sequoias, and glistening white snow were so intense Olana had to rest her eyes with a glance at her lap. What kind of a journalist was she, Olana wondered. No kind. Just a spoiled heiress playing at writer, as everyone already knew. How else could she be only discovering this beauty only now that she was leaving?
    She remembered no landmarks from her blinding journey there until she sighted the cave where Matthew had found her. She saw him again through her slowed, freezing senses, a great swaddled giant with eyes full of hope and her hat in his hands. Why didn’t she know enough to love him then?
    He drew the sleigh to a stop, came to her side. “We’ll rest a
while,” he broke their silence. The worry, exhaustion on his face shocked Olana out of her own self-pity.
    “Shall I —”
    “No. Stay put till I get you.”
    He built a fire inside the cave’s mouth before he allowed her out from beneath a mound of furs. He carried her to his camp. There he set her down on the tarmac, offered her a portion of hard tack, smoked venison, and a mug of the coffee she had made that morning. She ate, but he only swallowed his coffee, his hat low over his eyes.
    Olana watched as the fire illuminated glimpses of the endless reaches of the cave. And she listened.
    “There’s a stream under the ice,” he answered the question she hadn’t voiced. “Listen.” Olana held her breath, smiled slowly. Matthew took out his knife, dug. She leaned over the spot. The white stone veined in black shone up through the running water.
    “The bed’s marble,” he said. Her hands slipped out of the muff he’d fashioned of rabbit fur, but he caught them before they reached the ice.
    “No,” he warned gently. “We worked too hard on those hands.” He pressed her fingers against his beard and breathed, spreading warmth almost to her troublesome feet. Then he slipped her hands back into their covering. He sat closer, yet his deep voice was almost shy.
    “Olana? I hope you’ll come back and see it, the cave, once the ice and snow are gone.” She leaned her head on his shoulder as he bent a twig in his hands until it snapped. He laughed bitterly. “’Course, why should you want to come back, after — everything? Here I am still touting my wilderness over your city when just yesterday, you very nearly, you could have been —” He shivered, making Olana remember the swelling redness around his wounds, and wonder if he’d worried too much about her to dress himself properly. She touched his arm the way she had when she’d played his wife.
    “The actions of men, not your wilderness, Matthew.”
    “I want you safe,” he whispered fiercely.
    At the beginnings of the steep road that clung to the mountainside a twenty-foot