Waltzing In Ragtime Read Online Free Page B

her breath had caught
in her throat because his eyes were so beautiful.
    “Matthew!” she screamed up through the ever-descending sky. “Matthew Hart!”
    She listened. Beneath her feet a stream of water flowed. Below the ice. She forced the blocks that were her feet to follow it.
    A cave’s opening loomed before her. It contained the source of the stream, and another wind, a warmer one, coming from deep inside. Shelter. She entered. The relentless wind still rang in her ears.
    She leaned her back against the wall just inside the cave’s mouth, and tried to fold over the flaps of her riding suit. She couldn’t even raise her arms. It didn’t matter, her collar was frozen open. Where were Matthew Hart’s fingers now, his gentle hands spreading warmth?
    She felt herself sliding down, and knew she wouldn’t be able to get up again. But she couldn’t stop. It didn’t matter, suddenly. Nothing at all mattered. It became an effort to keep her eyes open. In that effort Olana Whittaker was still stubborn, determined to last a little longer. To see what happened next. But what was all the fuss about, she thought vaguely. It wasn’t so difficult to die.
     
     
    Matthew Hart’s eyes seared across the whiteness. “Damned woman,” he said, believing that if he continued to curse her, she’d be alive. His head still told him she couldn’t have gotten as high as seven thousand feet. Once he found her hat in the birch tree, he stopped listening to his head. He let his eyes scan the horizon until he felt a direction. Come on, you’re one of my kind, send out a signal. There. He felt a cold that rattled his teeth. To the northwest. He urged his horse on. Around the next bend he saw the mouth of the cave.
    He stood over her, her bright hat dangling from its netting in his hand. It was there, on her hat that her eyes finally focused, then up at his face.
    Her voice was a thin grate. “Don’t hold it like that,” it demanded, “you’ll rip it worse.”
    He came closer. “Damned woman,” he said, but softly now, like an endearment.
    Her mouth twitched, her eyes closed.
    He wrapped her in his coat and lifted her into his arms, then onto the saddle.

three
    Her muscles were rigid, her breathing shallow. Matthew’s fingers eased her eyelids open. Dilated, no reaction to the lamp. He picked up his long-blade knife, cut away her clothes quickly, precisely, as if he were skinning an animal. The hooks of her corset tried his patience. He growled low and tore open the last of them, then pitched the contraption into the fire, cursing the fashion that decreed her breasts be so vulnerable to the storm.
    Direct contact. It had worked with Klondike miners whose skin had taken on the same waxy sheen. It had worked for some of them, at least. A sickening fear made Matthew shiver as he slipped off his clothes and lay beside her, drawing the soft flannel sheet, then the red wool blanket, then the deer and elk skins over them both.
    The woman moaned softly, pressed closer against his chest. He tried to concentrate on counting her heartbeats, but found himself thinking of the others — of Lottie’s teaching fingers guiding his awkward ones, of Seal Woman’s ebony braids glistening in the moonlight. It had been so long since he’d decided to make himself content with his trees, that his rushing, powerful physical reaction to her was a surprise. He winced, then sighed into her hair. “Well, my proper Miss Whittaker … I’m alive,” he told her.
    His care had not kept his women beside him. Why had this one come, with her proud eyes masking the part of her that attracted him, that troubled innocence behind her airs? Was it his desire alone now? Was that all it took to kill? Cold. He was suddenly, unbearably cold.
    He pulled himself out of the bed and stumbled to the hearth. There he took up the pile of her cut clothing and added it to the flames. The lace of her blouse caught first. It spread the fire through the burnished orange silk