Free Dorothy Garlock by Annie Lash Page B

muddy depths of the main stream, there were great catfish weighing up to a hundred pounds. Geese, ducks, brant, tern, and snipe swarmed in incredible numbers above the river and fleets of goslings and ducklings cruised in each backwater.
    Jeff was anxious to get home to Berrywood. He had never uttered the name he had given his holding aloud, but in his thoughts home was Berrywood, where sycamores, walnuts, cottonwood, and willows attained an enormous size. The tallest were crowned by the foliage of huge grapevines that shot upward from stems the thickness of a man’s arm, and beneath the spreading branches were strawberry plants, blackberry and raspberry bushes, as well as grapevines and pawpaw. There was also an abundance of hickory nuts, pecans, and acorns providing food for the forest population of deer, bear, raccoon, turkey, and squirrel.
    A place to call home had taken on a new meaning during the last few months. Jeff wanted some permanence in his life, a strong, calm woman to bear his children. He studied the oval face of the woman sitting across from him. She was lovely. He judged her age to be at least five years less than his twenty-eight. He admired her wide hips, generous bust and her tiny waist. He liked her voice; it was low and soothing. In fact, he liked everything about her from the dark lashes that fringed her remarkable light eyes to the way she tried to suppress laughter by smiling with her mouth closed. He wondered what her laughter would sound like: deep, satisfying gulps or light, high trills. He turned his eyes away from her. Light and Zan were bound to notice how often he looked at her.
    It had been distinctly typical of Jeff to take exception to the rough talk he had overheard in the tavern about the girl. He’d already been irritated by the sour-faced man with the snaky look who was not quite drunk, but nearing it. His talk about the woman he planned to wed and the fact he planned to share her once Zan Thatcher took a boat upriver had brought him up short. Jeff had come out from Virginia with Zan when he was no more than a stripling, and Zan had taught him how to survive on the Trace.
    Jeff’s inquiries led him to the mercantile store and he saw the slender young woman walk away. The reluctant storekeeper had told him where she lived, and while he was on his way there, it occurred to him to offer to take her to Callie. At first his interest in her was merely a means of locating Zan and upsetting the plans of the bully in the tavern, but when he turned and saw her in the soft glow of the lamplight, he had held his breath until his chest hurt, then breathed deeply to ease it, still watching her. A tightness had crept into his throat and he had thought, how foolish. He was a grown man, not a callow youth to spin fancies around a pretty woman. Still, three evenings later, he was sitting across the campfire from her trying to ponder up an excuse to talk to her.
    Jeff’s stomach rumbled with hunger. He got to his feet and went to lean against a young sapling growing near the river. The glow from the campfire the settlers had built downriver caught his eye. He watched it with disinterest. A poignant loneliness possessed him. He was filled with a quiet unrest. He suddenly felt the desire to hold a soft woman in his arms, not any woman,
that
woman, and have her respond to his lovemaking. The thought was so real, that before he could comprehend what was happening, his own body was responding to his thoughts and he turned toward the line of trees fronting the river and moved among them.
    Annie Lash watched Jeff walk away with regret.
    “How long have you known Jeff, Zan?”
    He was whittling on a stick with a long, slim blade, his mouth puckered and twisted to the side.
    “Fer a right smart spell.” He rubbed his foot over the shavings on the ground. “Met up with ’im acomin’ over the mountains. Jist a wet-eared kid astrikin’ out, he was. He done good. Warn’t no time a’tall till he was full