Winter Rain

Hungrily Jonah licked salty droplets from the crevice at the base of her throat, savoring their musky bitterness on his tongue like a man thirsty too long for the earthy taste of her, the strong womanness that rose to him now, filling not only his nostrils, permeating everything in him to bursting.

Still, somehow he held back, savoring the exquisite pain of waiting. Hook had promised himself that he would not be too anxious this first time back in the shelter of Gritta’s arms. Lying with her at long last, just as he had dreamed so deliciously, for so many lonely nights.

Those nights swam before him the way smarter folks claimed a man’s life swam before his eyes when he was dying. All those nights of bitter reverie—from the first cold morning he had marched out of their valley, taking off to fight for General Sterling Price gone to drive the Yankees out of Missouri. After Confederate blood had flowed freely on the slopes of Pea Ridge down to Arkansas, Jonah had been one of the few who stuck with the barefooted brigades to march behind Price, tramping east to Mississippi where he was wounded and left for dead, left behind in a pell-mell retreat, left for capture by the blue-bellies after the Confederate debacle at Corinth.

All that came bubbling up from his memory, seeping through remembrances of long winter nights suffering with the predead stench of the human sties the Yankees called prison cells at Rock Island in Illinois. Nothing would ever drive from his nostrils the stench of that repugnant offal of human waste: not just the decaying feces, but as well the slowly rotting dead, the moldering flesh, the puffy, gassy, bloating corpses the Yankee guards came to collect of every morning.

Yet this sweet, fleshy, earthy fragrance of Gritta moving beneath him drove that stench of remembrance far, far from his mind now.

How musky was this perfume about her taut, smooth body. Smells of a fresh-scrubbing of lye soap and dashes of lilac water were quickly gone the way of her own heated fragrance as Gritta’s hunger readied her to receive him. That heady smell near drove him crazy with anticipation of just how she would feel around him when at last he sank his own flesh deep inside her.

As if she sensed his very need, Gritta took his rigid weapon in both her hands. It proved more than enough to make him gasp in surprise, shock, wonder at that singular, profound sensation dreamed of timeless nights of the past. He had wondered all those years apart from her on just how it would feel when finally back within the circle of her legs and arms, lying against her with nothing but the cool night air between their naked bodies.

Gently, so very gently, she kneaded his swollen flesh between her two hands, sensing it throb and leap in his growing anticipation. Those woman’s hands coarse and hardened to daily toil, the lot of a settler’s wife, mother to children and the land itself. Yet at this moment Gritta’s hands wrapped him with a touch like the finest of silk gloves, grasping him gently—so gently urging him with a furious insistence of her own.

“You do any more of that,” he rasped at her ear, licking a droplet of sweat from the earlobe, “I can’t save myself for you.”

Gritta immediately guided him toward her waiting moistness. With him started within, she urgently clawed at the small of his back, fervently pulling him to her—burying him firmly.

Jonah groaned at the sweet ecstasy of that first full thrust, at long last feeling the heated liquid fire of her engulfing all of him as her legs drew up, encircling his hips, allowing Jonah to sink within her as far as a man dared go. It seemed as if he filled her like never before.

Gritta’s head sank back, her eyes rolling in her own private, savage fury. And from somewhere down deep in her throat, a rumbling growl freed itself—a low, primitive coursing of bestial release like nothing he could remember hearing from her before.

Perhaps it was as he had feared. His wife was now a changed woman. Those years with the Mormon zealot had scarred her soul, taken their toll. This animal hunger in her now confirmed it: what the time apart from Jonah had done to her… what Jubilee Usher had wrought to change Gritta.

For a moment Jonah slowed his own fury, in a way wanting his old Gritta back now. Then as quickly he realized he did have her, telling himself there was nothing changed about her as he put his mind to think on it. This was the same woman, the same passion, the same furious swallowing of him that she had thrown herself into that second time their wedding night, not long after their first painful, hurried coupling. And then a third—and every time since.

How she murmured now in his ear—those secret, provocative things that drove him crazy atop her. Gritta clearly sensed what effect she had on him. And she brazenly used that power to her advantage. Seeking her own private brand of pleasure from the man who drove himself in and out of her now with an increasingly fevered pace.