Free Gold by Jane Toombs

Still the gown wouldn’t come off, so she pushed him away, raised her arms, and then he was able to remove it.
    As she sat facing him, she seemed haloed by the moonlight coming through the curtains and the netting, her full breasts in shadow. He felt de sire rise in him, demandingly, but he held his own urgent need back. He took her in his arms, guiding her down between the sheets with his mouth to hers, his tongue twining with hers, his body to hers—feeling the thrust of her breasts on his chest, her thighs on his legs. One of his hands explored between her legs, caressing her, and she quivered in his arms.
    He kissed her neck, then lowered his head to the swell of her breast, his mouth closed over her nipple and he circled it with his tongue. She moaned. “Oh, King, oh, King,” she said again and again. He slid his knee between her legs, parting them, and suddenly he was inside her, his mouth still at one breast, his hand kneading the other while her body strained to move with his.
    She shuddered, a growing, all-encompassing spasm seeming to rise from her loins to shake her entire body. She shuddered again and again but still he held back, stretched taut yet waiting. Fi nally, after a prolonged, ecstatic gasp, she stilled and lay limp in his arms. He kissed her gently on the lips and eyes.
    “ Oh, King,” she moaned. “I never knew it could be like that.”
    He turned her over. When she was on her stom ach, he knelt, straddling her, his hands at her hips. “King?” He lifted her. “On my hands and knees, King?”
    He spread her legs so his were between hers. His hands felt for her sex, caressing her as he en tered her from behind, one hand on her sex, the other cupping her breast. She groaned, straining back against him.
    “ I can’t again,” she panted. “I can’t, I ... oh, King.” She shuddered beneath him and he felt his response, let himself go at last and moved with her. Released. Fulfilled.
    The netting was thrown aside and Wilkes stood staring down at them, a lamp in his hand. Behind him King had an impression of the dim figure of Dr. Robinson in the bedroom door.
    King swung out of bed on the far side, went to the window, and began dressing. Wilkes stood im mobile, gaping at him. The man seemed to be in total shock.
    “ Wilkes,” King said, “you have the damnedest sense of timing of any man I know. If you were going to ask Dr. Robinson to spend the night, you should have told me.”
    He pulled the window open, stepped out onto the portico, dropped his boots over the side, lowered himself over the edge until he hung by his hands. He let go, landing with a thud on the hard earth. Brushing himself off he found his boots and walked across the lawn toward the woods. He did not look back.
    When three of the Yancey brothers rode up to the Sutton place early the next morning, they found the overseer, Amos Beckworth, in charge and Betsy Sutton confined to her room. King had ridden off hours before. He had taken two slaves, the half-brothers Joshua and Jed. Where they had gone, Amos Beckworth had no idea.
    When, ten days later, Dwight Yancey tracked King to the Charleston townhouse of a Sutton second cousin, he learned that King and his two slaves had been at sea for two days.
    Bound for California.
     
     
    CHAPTER SEVEN
     
     
     
    When the Empire Hotel—W.W. Rhynne and P. Buttle-Jones, Proprietors—opened in Hang town, California in the spring of 1849, one of the greatest mass migrations since the Crusades was underway.
    Over a year before, on January 24, 1848, James Marshall had made his daily inspection of the sawmill he was building for John Sutter on the south fork of the American River. He walked to the race, the channel carrying water to the mill wheel.
    “ I went down as usual,” he told reporters later, “and after shutting off the water from the race I stepped into it, near the lower end, and there upon the rock about six inches beneath the water I discovered the gold. I pick up one or